Los Angeles has long been an urban dialectic par excellence, with its discordant melodies and apparent contradictions; its extreme polarities of nature, of culture, of economics, of politics. The metaphors come easily—the tropical flower abloom in a desert basin, the city of illusions, etc.—and Bertolt Brecht employed them acidly and exactingly in the poems he wrote during his LA exile in the 1940s.

I'm lying in a waterbed. On the glass-topped table next to me: the journal of Alix Roubaud and a gun. I haven't touched the gun, I haven't read the book. I'm listening to "Roses" by White Ring. I feel like I'm overdosing on Nicorette. I spit the gum into a champagne flute and pick up Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Ellis. I read 3 pages, and then I read 3 pages from Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion, and then I wander the apartment, kind of dazed, and put in a DVD of Dawn of the Dead.