The further I get away from L.A. the more I realize it's just a pit of despair, soured dreams, lost hope.
I am sitting in a coffee shop in Berkeley and this guy is playing Tracey Chapman-esque guitar, and he introduces his song by saying, "This is a song about what I believe... I believe that people should be good to each other, and not mean to each other." People break out in hoots and applause. If this guy advanced this opinion in L.A., he would be spitting his broken teeth into the gutter. Why?
People in L.A. believe in being mean. As mean as possible. Mean is the only way. If you want to get somewhere, get your Benz or (preferably) your Bentley, be respected, you HAVE to be the biggest cocksucker in town. All the success stories read exactly like this. Who are you looking up to? All the Weinsteins and the Mark Burnetts, and all the other petty dictators. If you can't hack it, you're gone. If you are just a senseless sheep to the assholery, you will be stuck in a PA, or post-production coordinator job where you kill yourself to make douchebags like New York famous. You have be truly demonic to get anywhere in that town.
The thing about Berkeley though, is it turns contrarians like myself into Nazis. I went to college in Santa Cruz, and the politically correct Intro to Culture (tm) class that every freshman was forced to take, was all about how "dead white men" were keeping everyone down. Everyone started statements with things like, "Well, I'm a lesbian, and I believe..." or "I'm half black, and I think..." Because that was the only way that you could justify your touchyfeely jargonistic rant about how the man was keeping you down. After this crap, I decided to major in Philosophy because goddammit, I wanted to know who these dead white men were, and to learn how they kept people down so effectively.
I loved Philosophy. Debating some retarded Occam's razor theory all night with my similarly Jr. Nazi compadres while drinking espresso was the best. Everyone else was out in the meadow under the full moon, doing that annoying spinning dance to Phish or the Grateful Dead, their bare monkey toes digging into Mother Earth. Yucky.
Being back in Berkeley reminds me of this repulsion for all the mushy touchy feely stuff, but all I have to do is recall L.A., in it's racist, sexist, aggressive power-hungry Satanism, and I'm all about the hugs, man. Right on bro.
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