Things I’ll Miss About Westwood

Today I am moving out of my apartment in Westwood and to a new place in Whittier—30 miles east of here (to be closer to my job at Biola University). It’s exciting to move but also bittersweet. I really enjoyed my two-year stint here while attending UCLA. Westwood is a really great section of Los Angeles, with loads of history and culture. I’d highly recommend living here if anyone ever gets a chance.

Here are just a few things I’ll miss about this place:

• Tons of great, unique restaurants and hardly any chains. There are chains galore where I am moving (not to knock chains or anything…).
• The fact that I was within a ten-minute walk of a bus that could take me most any place in L.A. (this is totally a rare luxury in Southern “we drive” California).
• Being ten minutes away from the Getty Center. It’s definitely my favorite place in L.A. I enjoyed going there to study in the gardens and get lost in the overwhelmingly zen peacefulness of that place.
• The diversity. There is every ethnicity and income range imaginable on a city block in Westwood. I can walk three blocks up my street and see ridiculously luxurious condos or walk a block and find a homeless person living in a bus shelter. Not that this is a good thing…
• Diddy Riese Cookies. The best little cookie shop in the world.
• Being able to walk to an AMC 15 complex in Century City and being a five-minute drive from L.A. nicest arts theater—Landmark Westside Pavilion. And having historic old Hollywood theaters just blocks away (like the Majestic Crest, pictured above). It’s movie heaven in Westwood!
• The cemetery in my neighborhood where Marilyn Monroe’s is buried (and Natalie Wood, Truman Capote, and countless other famous people).
• The enormous numbers of naturally occurring hipsters.
• The cool temperatures. Westwood is about 5 miles from the Pacific Ocean, which means we never really get too hot or too cold. Inland (where I’m moving), the temps are a bit more extreme.
• The huge, daunting, slightly creepy Mormon temple that loomed large in my backyard (literally).
• My insane landlady. She was a very scary person and reminded me a lot of Ma Fratelli, but, God bless her, I will miss the excitement of always fearing her wrath.

Putting on a Front for the World

Much has been made of how important these Beijing Olympics are for China—not for their economy (which hardly needs a boost) or for their patriotic morale, but for their PR on the world stage. Quite simply, the Chinese have an image problem, and they’re fiercely committed to spinning themselves in a better light.

But spin is increasingly easy to detect, and China—God bless her—is not doing a very good job of rebranding itself as a country of freedom-loving citizens of a democratic world.Rather, China comes across as a top-down, control-obsessed behemoth willing to do whatever it takes to present its ideal image to the world. Take a few of the examples from the opening week of the Olympic games:

• Opening ceremony deceptions: First came the news that some of the more elaborate fireworks we saw on TV were merely CGI effects, then came the juicier scandal that the cute pigtailed girl in the red dress who serenaded the worldwide audience was lipsyncing "Ode to the Motherland” because the actual singing girl (performing from somewhere off stage) was deemed too ugly (crooked teeth!) to be the “face of China.”
• Mysteriously teensy Chinese gymnasts: Suspicions abound about the ages of two of team China’s most talented female gymnasts, He Kexin and Jiang Yuyuan. Various recent press reports have placed the ages of the diminutive stars as low as 13 or 14, but the Chinese government has since submitted passports that “prove” their ages to be 16, making them eligible competitors. We can’t say for sure, but the obvious conclusion from this is that the government was more than willing to “adjust” the official ages of these young athletes whose participation in the gymnastics competition was integral to that ever-important gold medal.
• Suppression of protests: Don’t the Chinese know that the best thing they could do for themselves would be to allow very public protests to occur? An Olympic games is just not right without them. Everyone knows about the Chinese abuses of human rights, the Tibet debacle, etc. Thus, we all know that there should be throngs of protesters at these games. That there are not very many (at least visible to the outside observer) shows that China is up to its freedom-suppressing old tricks. Numerous reports have demonstrated that China will stop at nothing to keep news coverage of protests or dissenters from reaching the outside world.

Alas, the Chinese are not the smoothest operators when it comes to slyly manufacturing a skewed image of themselves. We can make fun of them for this, and be outraged, but the truth is they are not much different than any of us. Anyone with a Facebook page, blog, or Flickr account cannot really critique China for their heavy-handed image maintenance. We live in a day and age where the image or presentation of reality is more important than the reality itself (thank you Baudrillard), and China is just the largest and perhaps most clumsy offender.

All of this makes me reflect on reason #187 why The Dark Knight is the most relevant film of the decade thus far. It is all about this “truth distortion” spin zone—the civil importance of telling the public only so much truth and lying about certain things “for their sake.” Problem is, when you can see through these intricate PR spin maneuvers (as we can with China’s Olympics), the result is that we trust the spinner even less. Hopefully Batman will be a better spin doctor than Beijing is.

The Communion of Saints

Tragically, the 2008 Oxbridge conference is concluded, and on Sunday I'll be back home in the pseudo-reality that is Los Angeles. It's been a wonderful two weeks though, and as usual the greatness and brevity of it leaves me longing for much much more. It is during conferences like this (and I'm sure most of you can relate) that I can most feel the divine discontent that C.S. Lewis and Chesterton and Augustine and many others articulate--the feeling that we are made for another world, that earth "is but a shadow of Heaven" as Milton writes in Paradise Lost.

The feeling comes, I think, mostly because of the people I meet and interact with, whether a bartender I befriended at the Lamb and Flag in Oxford or an 85 year old man taking his first vacation after the death of his wife. Who are these people in the crowd from all over the globe who I worship with? What are their stories? Their faces are so beautifully indeterminate. It is the great tragedy (and yet, perhaps it isn't a tragedy at all) of an event like this that I can only get to know some people, and then only briefly before it is time to say goodbye. These are fleeting yet profound connections, and yet--to be sure--they are only connections, not community. Community is more long-term, more involved, more real, or so it would seem. And yet at times this week I think I've glimpsed pure, holy community in ways that are far, far too rare in our daily lives.

Last night was the closing service of the Oxbridge conference, a gorgeous Eucharist service in St. Mary the Virgin church in downtown Cambridge. The 300 conferees gathered here and took the Lord's Supper, and what a symbol of community it was. Communion is about communing, after all, both with each other as the body of Christ and with Christ himself, and with the saints of bygone eras.

Speaking of that... You cannot help but feel the presence of long-dead saints, and poets, here in Cambridge. Two nights ago a bunch of us went punting at midnight down the Cam River, drifting past the ancient colleges (Trinity, St. John's, King's, Queen's, Clare, etc) shrouded in darkness where so many minds have been formed and souls saved over the centuries. It made me think: at a conference on the theme of "The Self and the Search for Meaning," I wonder if it is not crucial to our understanding of ourselves to have an understanding of history--of precedent, of examples set forth by those who've trod these paths before.

But it's also about my Self in relation to others here and now--the unlikely meanings that crystallize in the vaporous space between two souls in communication, the fleeting encounters on boats at midnight or bars at 1am. I don't know if I'll see them again, or if I'll even remember them (or them me), but I do know that to commune with another person in the transcendent sense that Buber and Lewis mean (as more than mere mortals or objectified "it"s...) is to experience something of the future life, the full communion of saints which will occur after the dead in Christ rise, the world is restored, and all is put to rights.

Here at the Oxbridge conference we like to sing Doxology anthems, particular the one that goes Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow... But the lesser known (in Protestant circles, at least) "Gloria Patri" is particularly apt for what I'm writing about here: a simple and yet declarative articulation of our communion in Christ, throughout time and space: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and always shall be, world without end. Amen.

Such words are an immense comfort at times like this.

Talking Singularity at Cambridge

So the Cambridge week of the Oxbridge 2008 conference is underway (since Saturday), and it has been a marvelous experience thus far. The weather is cool and rainy (in a British sort of way) but the energy is high and all of our heads are spinning from the various lectures and stimuli being thrown at us.

A few highlights of Cambridge thus far include a stunning Evensong service at Ely Cathedral on Sunday, a dinner/dance at Chilford Hall (basically a barn-like structure in Kansas-like wheat fields), and some great lectures from the likes of Colleen Carroll Campbell, Bill Romanowski, and Nigel Cameron, the latter of which I found particularly provocative.

Cameron, Director of the Center on Nanotechnology and Society and Research Professor of Bioethics and Associate Dean at Chicago-Kent College of Law in the Illinois Institute of Technology, gave a talk entitled "Stewarding the Self: A Human Future for Humans?" Essentially the talk asked the question, "what does it mean to be human?" in an age (the 21st century) when all efforts seem to be moving toward a reinvention of the human project itself. He talked about three ways in which the human as we know it is being redefined: 1) taking life (abortion, euthanasia, stem cells, etc), 2) making life (test tube babies, cloning, etc), and 3) faking life (cyborgs, chips in human brains, robots, etc).

It's interesting because just about a month ago I wrote a blog post about many of the things Cameron talked about. Actually, my review of Bigger, Stronger, Faster also fits into the discussion, as does my post about Iron Man. In each of these pieces I point out the increasing sense in our culture that the human being is becoming more machine-like... We conceive of our bodies not as carriers of a transcendent soul but as a material objects which can be manipulated, botoxed, pumped up, and enhanced in whatever way that pleases us. Cameron pointed out various technologies being developed that will make this sort of "faking life" all the more prevalent... such as BMI (Brain Machine Interface) which will allow our brains to work with embedded computer chips in them... so we can just think a webpage or some digital computation rather than go to the trouble of using a computer hardware external to our body.

He mentioned that the computing power in the world will likely increase by a factor of a million within a generation, which means we have no concept now of just what the future will look like. He pointed to a government study released in 2007 entitled "Nanotechnology: The Future is Coming Sooner Than You Think," which featured some pretty remarkable assessments from noted futurists and nanotech scholars about what the future might hold. For a government study, it's pretty sci-fi. Take this section which poses the potential of "The Singularity" happening within a generation or two (and for those unfamiliar with "The Singularity," read about it here)...

Every exponential curve eventually reaches a point where the growth rate becomes almost infinite. This point is often called the Singularity. If technology continues to advance at exponential rates, what happens after 2020? Technology is likely to continue, but at this stage some observers forecast a period at which scientific advances aggressively assume their own momentum and accelerate at unprecedented levels, enabling products that today seem like science fiction. Beyond the Singularity, human society is incomparably different from what it is today. Several assumptions seem to drive predictions of a Singularity. The first is that continued material demands and competitive pressures will continue to drive technology forward. Second, at some point artificial intelligence advances to a point where computers enhance and accelerate scientific discovery and technological change. In other words, intelligent machines start to produce discoveries that are too complex for humans. Finally, there is an assumption that solutions to most of today’s problems including material scarcity, human health, and environmental degradation can be solved by technology, if not by us, then by the computers we eventually develop.

Pretty crazy stuff, eh? Who knew the government actually thought that The Terminator was going to come true? As Cameron pointed out, it's as if the forecasts of Mary Shelley, Aldous Huxley, and C.S. Lewis (in The Abolition of Man) were all coming true. It means that Christians will need to address science and technology along with theology and postmodernism in the coming decades, raising questions that perhaps no one else will, such as: how do we reconcile a theology of suffering with a world that is trying its hardest, through technology, to rid us of all suffering?

Update from Oxford: Part 2

Things are going extremely well here at Oxbridge, as the Oxford portion of the conference comes to an end tomorrow (Cambridge starts on Sunday). A few highlights and thoughts from the last few days:

• Dr. Francis Collins, the Director of the National Human Genome Project and author of The Language of God, spoke in a plenary address on Wednesday. If you haven't heard of him or read his book, you should check him out. He presents a convincing case for why evolution and Christian faith are NOT incompatible, and how an appreciation for science does not mean we have to check religion (or theism) at the door. Collins is also a great musician and led the whole group in singing hymns and Christian folk songs. How great it was to sing such songs as "Hallelujah, the Great Storm is Over" with one of the world's most preeminent geneticists. Oh, and during his address he showed a clip from when he was on the Colbert Report. Totally awesome.
• Thursday night, at Great St. Mary the Virgin church in Oxford (the ancient church where Thomas Cranmer was tried as a martyr), there was a fantastic "evening of poetry and song" which featured poetry recited by Dana Gioia (the current Chairman for the National Endowment for the Arts), piano played by Paul Barnes (including amazing Liszt and Philip Glass pieces), and poems sung by mezzo-soprano Kate Butler. One of the highlights, however, was an emotional reading of the poem "As the Ruin Falls" by C.S. Lewis. Lewis, of course, was never hailed as a great poet, but this poem--which he wrote after the death of his beloved wife Joy Davidman--is achingly beautiful:

All this is flashy rhetoric about loving you. I never had a selfless thought since I was born. I am mercenary and self-seeking through and through: I want God, you, all friends, merely to serve my turn.

Peace, re-assurance, pleasure, are the goals I seek, I cannot crawl one inch outside my proper skin: I talk of love --a scholar's parrot may talk Greek-- But, self-imprisoned, always end where I begin.

Only that now you have taught me (but how late) my lack. I see the chasm. And everything you are was making My heart into a bridge by which I might get back From exile, and grow man. And now the bridge is breaking.

For this I bless you as the ruin falls. The pains You give me are more precious than all other gains.

• Today's plenary address from Dana Gioia was absolutely wonderful. It was provocative and beautiful and challening, posing the rather large question: What is the human purpose of beauty? Of art? What are the existential purposes of art? Gioia proposed that art is crucial to existence because it shows us what is truly human; beauty synthesizes the unknowable truths and transcendent complexities of the world. It's not just about pretty decor but rather about seeing into the nature of reality and seeing the order of things, the terrifying and dizzying sublime of which art is uniquely capable of distilling. Gioia made statements like this, which doubtless ruffled some feathers: "Michelangelo, Mozart, and Dante have brought more souls to Christ than any minister." Of course he IS the head of an arts endowment, so of course he should say things like this. But I actually might agree with him. "Art," says Gioia, "awakes us to the full potential of humanity. It leads us to truth, the secrets of being." In this way you might see it as the ultimate evangelism--though I think Gioia would point out that we don't use art and beauty as much as it uses us. Beauty is not something we make, it's something we participate in. For Gioia (a very Catholic aesthetician), beauty is bound up in the world already in its materials and forms and presences. We only need to thoughtfully re-connect with it and frame it to become artists. As Psalm 19 reminds us, "The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands." Beauty is out there--we just have to find it and make it more manageable (whether on a canvas, in a sonnet or a story, etc).

More updates to come from Cambridge next week!

Update From Oxford

I arrived in Oxford on Saturday afternoon for the 2008 Oxbridge conference, and things have been great so far! Saturday night I attended a small dinner/reception at The Kilns, the lovely home of C.S. Lewis which is now owned and maintained by the C.S. Lewis Foundation.  There's something truly magical about being in this place--the gardens and study where Lewis found his inspiration to write such classics as The Chronicles of Narnia among most of his other pivotal books. Its a comfortable place, quiet and stately, very English but not at all pretentious. You can almost feel his presence here.

Other highlights of the conference so far include:

• A beautiful opening worship service at St. Mary's the Virgin Church in Oxford, in which the preacher, Derick Bingham (of Christ Church, Belfast) quoted a glorious passage from C.S. Lewis' famous sermon, "The Weight of Glory," which Lewis delivered in the same pulpit 67 years earlier.
• A plenary address by Richard Mouw (president of Fuller Seminary) which included him joking about being happily Calvinist and yet deeply respecting the ideas of Lewis (who tended toward Arminian thought).  Mouw also showed a clip of Mick Jagger and made references to Derrida, Gergen, and other "postmoderns" in a way that was suprisingly not so tiresome.
• An amazing theater performance in which the famous "Addison's Walk" conversation between C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Hugo Dyson was reenacted. This was the walk (in the gardens of Magdalen College) where Lewis supposedly was convinced that not only was there a God, but that Jesus very likely was his true son.  Lots of great, theological dialogue inspired by Tolkien's notions that in ancient myths we see the divine preparation for the one True Myth (Christ's death and resurrection)... a sort of working-out through the arts of God's mystical revelation and incarnation.

Overall the conference is just as magical as it always is, what with the towering spires of this ancient land and the spirit of Lewis hovering over it all... But most of all his legacy, which includes such great ideas and articulations of the Christian (nay, human) experience. Take this quote from "The Weight of Glory":

"Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward and the staggering nature of the rewards promised by the Gospels, it would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased."

It's nice to be reminded that as dire as our human condition is and as corrupted as our desires may be, there is still a spark within us--a longing--that pushes us towards a higher satisfaction. You can feel glimpses of that here at this conference, and as such it's an event that beautifully embodies Lewis' legacy.

Many more great things to come in the next 10 days, doubtless. I'll try to post another update soon!

What is America, Anyway?

Every Fourth of July I get a little nostalgic. I also get patriotic, but mostly it’s just nostalgic. Can you relate? I think most of us can. This grand holiday is at once a momentous celebration of American independence, a celebration of American history and culture, but also a day of memories. In fact I’d say that more than 50% of my day this Fourth of July will be spent thinking fondly back to the various Independence Days of my youth, and this is not in the least a sad or pathetic thing.

I’ll be thinking back to the summers in Oklahoma when the neighborhood kids would get together and set off fireworks on someone’s driveway, when we’d prance around under the humid summer moon, sparkler in one hand and melting popsicle in the other.

Or I might recall the various summers I spent at Grandma and Grandpa’s house in Colorado, when the whole family was there, eating homemade vanilla ice cream and apple pie, waiting for me and my cousins to perform Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to Be An American” (complete with hand motions!).

Then there was the Fourth of July my family and I spent in San Francisco, watching fireworks explode over the Golden Gate bridge, or the year I was in Boston, watching fireworks on the banks of the Charles River, Boston Pops playing in the background. Or the insanely hot Fourth of July my family and I spent in New York City, watching an afternoon ballgame at Yankees Stadium, baking in the upper deck as peanuts and hot dogs and beer sizzled in the July heat.

And I remember one time, the summer after the Persian Gulf War (I think it was 1991), we neighborhood kids in Broken Arrow (Oklahoma) marveled as a local war veteran shot off some special “scud missile” firework. That was such a quick, clean, wonderful war. It was one we could name fireworks for.

I’m not sure Fourth of Julys are ever really about patriotism, at least not as much as they are about family, and the glory of summer, and the making of memories. And perhaps above all it is a holiday about time… It’s a day that celebrates America’s past, which is a rarity for a country that so thrills in the future. But it’s also a day that lets us stop what we’re doing and sink into the present, losing ourselves in the mesmerizing flashes in the sky, the Sousa marches, the barbecues.

It’s a day that captures what is ineffably American, and it has nothing to do with trite slogans (“United We Stand!”) or Gap flag shirts. It has much more to do with the sorts of complexities pointed out by people like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who described in The Great Gatsby how the “fresh, green breast of the new world … pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the first time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”

It has to do with Melville’s whale, or Hawthorne’s letter “A,” or Bob Dylan’s harmonica. It is crystallized in Citizen Kane’s Rosebud sled, or the moment in Badlands when Sissy Spacek and Martin Sheen dance in the cold prairie darkness to Nat King Cole’s “A Blossom Fell.”

It has to do with loss, and grace, and all that is good and bad about man’s ambition in the world. And perhaps Jack Kerouac captures it most clearly in his drug-addled prose in On the Road:

“So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old…”

I’m not really sure what any of this means, just like I’m not really sure what America means—especially these days. But I do know that things don’t have to be crystal clear or black and white (or red, white and blue) in order to be beautiful. We can and should be thankful for this country, for our place in it, even if we don’t always understand it.

Notes on Japan

Last week I returned from a fantastic 11 day adventure in Japan--a country I had not previously been to and which I can now say is the most unique nation I've ever visited. In some ways Japan is like the U.S. or other hyper-developed nations (i.e. very modern, very tech-happy, very indulgent), but in other ways it is very, very different. My mind is full of interesting observations and tales of cross-cultural confusion from my trip, but rather than re-hash our itinerary (which was rigorous, to say the least), I'll just randomly pontificate about some of the things I found most interesting.

I. Japanese Hipsters If you've read my blog over the past few weeks, you know how fascinated I am with hipster culture. Thus, a trip to Japan was a dream come true for hipster-watching. If you ever go to Tokyo, a must-stop area is Harajuku (immortalized in the Gwen Stefani song, "Harajuku Girls"). Here, on a bridge near the train station, is the mecca for underground fringe fashion that might be described as anime-infused Mary Poppins-meets-Marilyn Manson milkmaid couture (see pictures). But these kids are more "freak" than hipster; it’s more like a Halloween party in Harajuku than it is a fashion show. Then who are the real hipsters? The answer, as I found out, is 90% of all Japanese kids age 15-25. What is "hip" in America now is the norm for all kids in Japan. The "emo" look is worn by even the most traditional-minded youths in this country. The ragged Kate Moss heroin look is even more ubiquitous. What has happened in this uber-prosperous nation is that "cool" has become the regular, the mundane, the mainstream. Walking down Takeshita street (the under-21 Melrose Avenue of Tokyo), pretty much every kid I passed was way cooler looking than anyone I know in the States. But they probably aren't REALLY that cool; and they probably wouldn't say they are any hipper than any other wealthy young Tokyo-ite. How could they be? They look just as hip as everyone else in Tokyo! It's just the way they dress. It's just the way it is. Cool is the new mainstream in Japan. Perhaps afashionable nerds will become the next superstars.

II. The Salaryman When I first got off the subway in Akihabara on my first night in Tokyo, the streets were swarming with black-suited, white-shirted clones with briefcases: better known as "salarymen." Tokyo, and most of the urban areas in Japan, is obsessed with work. I suspect this country relates more to the whole "live to work" motto as opposed to "work to live." Thousands of salarymen crowd the streets and subways after work (which they sometimes stay at until very, very late at night). They then "unwind" by putting money in Pachinko machines, or drinking the night away in some bar, or just smoking up a storm in some restaurant (you can smoke and drink ANYWHERE in Tokyo... there are beer and cigarette vending machines on every block). Some salarymen venture to the seedier streets to meet a "companion" for the night, or they just find a "love hotel" (which are ubiquitous in Japan). To finish the night, many go to public baths or "Onsen" (hot spring spas), or just take a soak in the tub back home. All the money they make is strictly controlled by their wife back home (the women handle all money transactions in Japan), who keeps a tight watch over her husband's gambling habit.

III. Have a nice day! Lest the above descriptions paint Japan in a negative light, I have to say that first among my impressions of this country is that the people are, by-and-large, the nicest people of any country I've ever been to. Whenever I had any inkling of a confused expression on my white face, it wasn't long before someone appeared out of the blue to ask if I needed help (you can set your watch by it... like most everything in Japan). And if you’re lucky enough to be invited in to a Japanese home for a meal (as I was on two separate occasions), you experience off-the-chart levels of hospitality. They throw unholy portions of food at you during meals, as well as dangerous amounts of sake and Suntory (whiskey), all the while practicing their English on you and looking intensely delighted by everything you say or do (“Oh rearry?” they say, even when they might not completely understand what you’re saying). The effect of the overwhelming displays of hospitality and kindness I experienced in Japan has left me truly embarrassed for my own failings in this area. How odd that I have to go halfway around the globe—to a nation where Christianity is almost as foreign as soap in bathrooms (yeah, they don’t use it)—to see a superior display of “Christian” virtues like charity, humility, and hospitality. If only for that, the trip was well worth it.

Los Angeles the Cinematic Muse

To honor my one year anniversary of living in Los Angeles full-time, I thought I would do what I usually do in circumstances like this: compile a top ten film list!

What are the top ten films that capture the strange soul of this city? Los Angeles is certainly a singular municipality, and to live here is both enthralling and frustrating, for many of the same reasons. There is a definite beauty to the geography here (beaches everywhere, mountains, hills, palm trees, exotic flowers, purple trees, unnaturally-colored nighttime skies, etc), and an odd charm to its uncontrollable sprawl. It’s strangely comforting to know that I can drive fifty miles in every direction (except west!) and still be in greater L.A.

Anyway, as the birthplace of the modern cinema (and the entertainment capital of the world), L.A. has probably been the most represented city in film and television. As such, we all have our glamorous visions of this “tinsel” town. But some films have been better than others at capturing the real mood and spirit of Los Angeles—from the glittery sidewalks of Hollywood to the starmap stands in Bel Air, all the way to the homeless mini-city of Skid Row. It’s a complicated, almost unfathomable city, but its multifarious personality certainly makes for some interesting cinema.

The Big Lebowski (1998): The Coen Bros’ ridiculously funny cult film is an ode to the polygot mishmash that is Los Angeles—a city almost comically diverse. The film takes us from Venice to the Valley, Malibu to the Hollywood Star Lanes, and introduces us to a bowling bum slacker (The Dude), an avant-garde artist (Maude Lebowski), a trash-talking Latino named Jesus, a trio of German nihilists, and a porn star/trophy wife (Bunny Lebowski). Just another day in L.A.

Bread and Roses (2000): Though directed by a Brit (Ken Loach), this film about the struggle of non-union janitors (mostly Mexicans) in an L.A. highrise is a sobering, realistic look at two big issues in this town: immigrant labor and socio-economic disparity. The film is based on the 1990 Justice for Janitors strike in Century City (incidentally, the section of L.A. I currently call home).

Chinatown (1974): Roman Polanski’s classic noir drama is a 1930s-set story about greed and corruption in L.A. city government, and the dangerous game of unraveling the scandal that one private eye (Jack Nicholson) undertakes. The dark underbelly of this town is on full display, as one of L.A.’s most persistent problems (water, or lack thereof) proves the catalyst for crime.

Collateral (2004): Michael Mann does L.A. well (see Heat), but his 2004 film Collateral captures the seedy after-dark feel of the City of Angels better than anything I’ve ever seen. From the cinematography (lots of fluorescent light and yellow/grey skies) to small touches like coyotes crossing the street at three in the morning (I’ve seen this happen!), Mann gets it right.

Double Indemnity (1944): Billy Wilder’s adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novella still stands as one of the great classics of film noir. Featuring Barbara Stanwyck as a malevolent blonde temptress, the film features exquisite urban detail in its Hollywood setting, and has been called the “first film in which Los Angeles is a character unto itself.”

Falling Down (1993): Shot during the 1992 L.A. riots, this Joel Schumacher film is the ultimate embodiment of the rage that the City of Angels sometimes conjures up when the traffic, isolation, and hyperdiversity are just too overbearing. Michael Douglas excels at capturing the pent-up anger of a laid-off loner who lashes out during one of the hottest days of the year.

Full Frontal (2002): Steven Soderbergh’s low-budget “experiment” didn’t go over well with most moviegoers (or critics), but I found it spellbinding and amazingly perceptive of life in the Hollywood film industry. Whether you’re an actor, screenwriter, producer, or director (and who in L.A. isn’t one of these?), the film business is mostly stress, strain, and little reward.

L.A. Confidential (1997): This amazing film by director Curtis Hanson brings to life the novel by James Ellroy (who I’ve randomly bumped into several times at a Beverly Hills café) about a 1950s gangland murder mystery in Los Angeles. The film is a great homage to film noir, blonde dames (Kim Basinger is fantastic), and the LAPD.

Magnolia (1999): What a daring move to make a film about the much-maligned San Fernando Valley! Of course, P.T. Anderson’s film is about more than just “the Valley” (in which Magnolia Blvd is a major thoroughfare), but the isolated characters and overwrought emotional drama of this stylish epic definitely capture something of the experience of living here.

Mulholland Drive (2001): David Lynch is intrigued by the character of Los Angeles, “the city of dreams.” His latest, Inland Empire, is all about L.A., but not as coherently so as the masterwork, Mulholland Drive, which revels in the surrealist specters of Old Hollywood. I don’t think “Club Silencio” exists, but it captures the moonlit mystique of L.A. in a nutshell.