ENTER The Gus Guide to LA
A City Guide That Became an Obituary
02/02/2022
The last entry in this guide was made in about February of 2020. Perhaps a month before the plague transfigured the world. This guide now remembers a city that is gone. “Evolved” would obviously be a more accurate word than “gone”, but I would argue that a city is not just some permanence of space and geography - no mere coordinates on a map - but it is a permanence of time. This guide really describes the city of Los Angeles as it existed between the very start of 2014 and the beginning of 2020.
Last week I had someone contact me regarding this guide and one of its destinations, and I was frankly surprised that it remains relevant. But of course the topology of place persists, and there are venues in this guide that are truly antique, and that have been through other changes at least as big as Covid. But the city that I described has passed. Like Paris in the ‘20s, London in the ‘60s, New York in the ‘80s - there are epochs, fuzzily defined and fragile to describe - where through flukes of people, economy, and landscape, the very flavor of a time condenses into a single place. Into an unhinged, unlidded melting pot of extreme eccentricity and unrivalled creativity.
So this guide is now an artefact and an obituary. An obituary evokes grief, and I and many others did grieve for what was lost.
I had my last true “LA night” in March of 2020. The night before a (fairly reckless) holiday to London on the wings of impending catastrophe. When I returned the supermarket shelves were bare and the city was changed forever. My last was a truly consummate experience - encapsulating much of the opulence / vanity / grit / high culture / low culture / sheer preposterousness that defined the “LA night”.
The highest aspiration of this guide was always to facilitate an experience of the city like an LA night. I believe the essential conditions for those experiences had their source in the three cardinal facts that actually created the truly remarkable decade that LA owned: Ubers opened up the city; New York priced itself out of the market; the landscape of the city perfectly enabled and accentuated the Vanity Age.
To be sure my experience was concentrated and skewed by being an Editor of Flaunt. But travelling the world during that time whenever I said I lived in LA, eyes would sparkle and ignite - LA was the place where everyone I met wanted to be.
The magic of the city was an emergent property of its complete unpredictability. Every time you stepped out the door, even on a Tuesday at 10am, you never had the faintest hint of where you might end up. An LA night was a whirlpool of the unexpected, the ridiculous, the erotic, the glamorous, the ugly, and the obscene.
My last night stretched from a large (but soon to be enormous) homeless encampment below the Miracle Mile, to a vast bucolic estate in the Palisades, to a brand new, drag queen roller disco bar in Koreatown, entered through an ATM (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, check it out). We danced until 2am and then the night continued into hazier mischief before evaporating in a whisky vapor dawn, as LA nights usually did…
I often reflect on a truism I once heard:
English people are cheerful pessimists; Americans are miserable optimists.
In 2020 I saw Americans become miserable pessimists, and the magic of that city in that epoch was broken. I think for almost all of us 2020 was the start of an entirely new chapter. I close the Gus Guide to LA with this missive as its last entry. Not to be pessimistic. Nor to denounce the city that I love very much.
The one absolute truism of my life is that the worst experiences always become - with time - the very best. I say that without embellishment and with absolute belief. I say that as one who shattered his spine at the age of 20. When a door closes several windows open. And while the loss of a loved one is the singular time when wounds are carved that no carpentry can mend, I don’t think of LA as a lost loved one. It has not died, and it will grow back stronger. Just in to a different time.