You’re a Beautiful Boy and That’s All That Matters

Why don’t we just open the door?

It’s right there in front of us. We know there’s something behind it. We all want to open it.

And yet we don’t. We blink. We wait.

Is it an L.A. thing?

Los Angeles is wide open, they say, it recedes and fades, the horizon never quite finds itself. They, of course, also say it’s… what? Vapid, fake, toxic… Cue the Carrie Bradshaw voice: Behind that smile they were leering at me… I was sure of it… And then I realized it was actually far, far worse: Behind that smile they weren’t even looking at me.

That’s Los Angeles, or at least that’s what they say. I disagree, though. I don’t think it’s so much better anywhere else – the status-seeking, the emptiness. Which maybe makes me a sucker. Or maybe I need to channel my inner-trad… move to a city like Denver with gentle people and gentler mores. Or maybe I’m just not in enough, so I don’t get to see the vampiric neon demons up close.

Gosh if I could just be in. Then I’d know.

I don’t really see L.A. as “wide open,” either. To the naked eye, sure, but if we’re talking psycho-geography, I’d say it’s pretty claustrophobic. Especially at the moment. And far more rigid than we’d like to admit. So it’s really more like that hallway in The Castle with all those doors and officials and everyone just fucking about and not really responding to a thing. But, unlike The Castle, which just has one wandering man, our protagonist is many. Many, many wandering souls.

… wandering is the wrong word. An affected wandering?... No, that’s more like, there go the cool kids doing nitrous again. It’s… yeah… more of a blinking, really, like I said before. Blinking souls. No. Flickering. That’s it. Like tired lights… Looking at the door. Wanting to open it. Choosing not to.

This whole thing could be a playground of ideas, but right now it’s at best a locus of strike, and at worst a tangle of feigned compliance.

So, we’re disengaging and the question is why. And the answer has nothing to do with LA’s archetypal witlessness or some sort of ignoble stasis. In fact, the opposite. We’re not opening the door because we know better. We already know what’s behind it: “meaning.” Too much meaning. Meaning so impossibly bloated that we recognize it solely by name, and even then only when we’re told. And we already know who’s behind it: middle management, associates, admins. Only now they’re in different clothes… They walk among us… They just left Taix, I swear, I saw them! They’re the many purveyors of meaning in the pedantic sense, in the now-more-than-ever sense, in the marketing sense. In the sense that we can recognize meaning’s source not as something sublime, but as consensus.

We know that if we open that door, we will, once again, be met with a room brimful of this stuff and little else. So, instead, we wait. We do nothing.

Žižek used to say that “sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” In this case, I’m not too sure if he’s right. All this meaning won’t go away on its own.

Why don’t we just open the door?

It’s right there in front of us. We know there’s something behind it. We all want to open it.

And yet we don’t. We blink. We wait.

Is it an L.A. thing?

Los Angeles is wide open, they say, it recedes and fades, the horizon never quite finds itself. They, of course, also say it’s… what? Vapid, fake, toxic… Cue the Carrie Bradshaw voice: Behind that smile they were leering at me… I was sure of it… And then I realized it was actually far, far worse: Behind that smile they weren’t even looking at me.

That’s Los Angeles, or at least that’s what they say. I disagree, though. I don’t think it’s so much better anywhere else – the status-seeking, the emptiness. Which maybe makes me a sucker. Or maybe I need to channel my inner-trad… move to a city like Denver with gentle people and gentler mores. Or maybe I’m just not in enough, so I don’t see the vampiric neon demons up close.

Gosh if I could just be in. Then I’d know.

I don’t really see L.A. as “wide open,” either. To the naked eye, sure, but if we’re talking psycho-geography, I’d say it’s pretty claustrophobic. Especially at the moment. And far more rigid than we’d like to admit. So it’s really more like that hallway in The Castle with all those doors and officials and everyone just fucking about and not really responding to a thing. (Ugh, I know: *Kafka*). But unlike The Castle, which just has one wandering man, our protagonist is many. Many, many wandering souls.

… wandering is the wrong word. An affected wandering?... No, that’s more like, there go the cool kids doing nitrous again. It’s… yeah… more of a blinking, really, like I said before. Blinking souls. No. Flickering. That’s it. Like tired lights… Looking at the door. Wanting to open it. Choosing not to.

So, there’s a decision being made to disengage and the question is why. And the answer has nothing to do with LA’s archetypal witlessness or some sort of ignoble stasis. In fact, the opposite. We’re not opening the door because we know better. We already know what’s behind it: “meaning.” Meaning so impossibly bloated that we recognize it solely by name, and even then only when we’re told. And we already know who’s behind it: middle management, associates, cogs. Only now they’re in different clothes… They walk among us… They just left Taix, I swear, I saw them! They’re the many purveyors of meaning in the pedantic sense, in the now-more-than-ever sense, in the marketing sense. In the sense that we can recognize meaning’s source not as something sublime, but as consensus.

We know that if we open that door, we will, once again, be met with a room brimful of this stuff and little else. So, instead, we wait. We do nothing.

Our North Star and patron saint Žižek used to say that “sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing to do.” In this case, I’m not too sure if he’s right. All this meaning won’t go away on its own.