The Sophist 9: The one about love in Los Angeles
The one about love in Los Angeles.
Once again, this month, I am a Brit visiting Los Angeles, the city where I lived from about 2008 to 2011, before I went back to London and had a kid. We come back here every year, my daughter and I, but this year things seem to have changed. I have been interrogating my friends here about love. Something is up. Something is very up.
1) Everyone in LA is now going poly, open relationship, non-monogamous, uncommitted, and this means that when you walk into a party, or a bar, or just sit somewhere in public looking around, even glancing at your own friends, you no longer have to wonder if somebody who catches your eye is already in a relationship. Even if they’re married with a ring on their finger they could also still be with you! They could still legitimately add another person to the mix; nothing is ruled out, nothing is impossible, anything is everything, and this great rolling ball of freedom in which marriage has been replaced with an iPhone is definitely going to kill us all in the end. It is intrinsically linked to quick hit chemicals, endorphins, which are intrinsically linked to the mobile phone, which is intrinsically linked to capitalism, in ways I haven’t yet been clever enough to theorise about because of the heat, oh god the heat of Southern California in July, I want to drown myself.
When I am colder and cleverer I will think up a great governing theory of how a false sense of personal ownership of the self has something to do with it. Owning your own copyright. Holding onto the intellectual property rights to your own sex drive. But wait, copyright is actually the great destroyer of creativity - remember how much better culture was before we had it? Mozart! Beethoven! All jamming along the same themes. Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm took their stories from common tales that used to roam around the culture, told and retold by anyone at the campfire. We used to share the load of invention. Open source. Well I suppose love is going open source now - we are sharing the load of love and getting into an Uber to reach the booty call rather than owning our own car to drive there. Fluid motion. The campfire is an app. And our beds are quietly burning. There is a beautiful billboard in Silver Lake, just down the road from me right now on Hyperion Avenue, that projects into the sky with a gorgeous Japanese painting of a wave. It looks like a Hokkusai. And printed on top of this lovely wave are the words TSUNAMI OF SYPHILLIS: GET TESTED.
2) My friend X has been married all her adult life, so she’s never received a dick pic. Having said that, I’ve been unmarried all my adult life and I’ve never had one either, apart from the man who sent me one of the groin of a marble statue in his castle, which was nice. (Life is long. Life is marvellous.) Anyway, now that things have changed and everyone’s gone poly, X recently hooked up with a randy young thing via an app and began to see him biblically. She was in the back seat of her friend’s car when she received one of these fabled photographs from him. “Oh my god he’s sent me a DICK PIC” she grunted in deep ghostly shock to her friend. And then she looked at her phone again and wondered why it said it said ‘message sending’. It turned out that she had accidentally hit the voice message button and it had recorded her deep ghostly grunting “Oh my god he’s sent me a DICK PIC” and sent it to him. So that was a nice way to discover the wonderful world of dating that she’s been missing out on for the past fifteen years.
3) Okay it’s not true about everyone going poly. Some couples still move in together, monogamously! It’s a kink, I know. I went to a dinner in a restaurant in West Hollywood last night, organised by a friend to introduce a group of interesting women to each other. We didn’t all know each other so I was happily surprised to discover that the comedian Kathy Griffin was one of us. “Sophie, you came to dinner in your pyjamas,” she said, as we were being introduced, and my protests that yes they were silk pyjamas but sold as proper clothes fell on deaf ears. “Hey PJs,” she would say, when talking to me later on. “The thing is, PJs,” she’d add. “No that dessert isn’t for me, it’s for PJs,” she’d tell the waiter. So I’ve now been roasted by Kathy Griffin and I can confirm that I enjoyed it 100% more than Donald Trump did.
Anyway, the conversation turned to living with your boyfriend and why would you do that? Some of us were unkeen. Kathy was evangelical about it - she lives with hers and apparently it’s great because if you’re on the toilet and a UPS delivery guy comes then he can get the door while you stay pooping. (They call it pooping over here - when I am queen, everybody will say poo, until then I nobly endure the poop.) But then another woman at the table, a younger Hollywood actress, said that she has moved in with her boyfriend and it’s hard, the pooping thing, and that it was the worst when they first went on holiday together and stayed in a place that was so small you could hear and smell each other, so she only did it twice in seven days. Kathy says that when they stay in hotels her boyfriend sometimes says he’s going for a Lobby Poop. This is when you know it’s going to be a stinker so you don’t use the loo in your hotel room, you go down the corridor to the public one in the lobby. Then all these women started nodding about the concept of the lobby poop.
“LOBBY JOBBY!” I kept shrieking, to my own delirious hysteria, but nobody heard, nobody cared. I suppose it’s only funny if you’re Scottish.
4) The whole dating thing is sending me slightly mental in its surface shallowness, its curious gender rules, its regulated gender bending, its cheap sex and expensive phones. It doesn't feel right. So I have decided to transition - to Judaism. “Mazel tov,” says my friend Loulou, who adds that she will take a nice photo of me for my J-Date profile. I can’t help but feel that Loulou is not taking my transition seriously. There is some discussion of us heading to Canters Deli on Fairfax, home of Jewish food in LA, so I can be photographed waving some pretzels aloft. I try to make her see that it is the deeply religious aspect that appeals to my inner soul, and that this came about “let me guess,” she says, “because you saw a nice Jewish boy on Tinder.” Okay so yes INITIALLY it came about because I saw a nice Jewish boy on Tinder, I admit, but then I read this article he linked to, about him and this documentary he made about his family’s Jewish past, his grandfather’s work as a rabbi in Los Angeles, and the culture and the synagogue and the scriptures and family and dinners and how this unites all my own ancient religious feelings in the most vibrant, contemporary way, because I have tried to return to the Christianity of my childhood but the Church of England doesn’t really do it for me anymore, and how, by the end of the amazing article, I was basically Jewish myself, I say. “Mmm,” says Loulou. Later she sends me a one word text. Shalom.
5) There is this other thing I have learned about modern dating and that is when somebody’s profile says ‘JUST HERE FOR FRIENDS’, this means they are absolutely definitely at it like rabbits, and will be the one person who definitely messages you back, possibly even with a dick pic. It’s just they’re so non-commital that they can’t even commit to being uncommitted, because it would take too much typing and also breathing to talk about that, so they pretend they’re on a dating app looking for people who match their sexual preference to be a pen pal.
This was part one. Perhaps there will be a part 2 of Love in Los Angeles when I find a freezer to store my brain in.
The illustrations are by my beautiful friend Louise Androlia who might paint a picture for you if you’re bloody lucky.
Also did I tell you that I am writing a book for Jonathan Cape at Penguin Random House? It won’t be out until 2019 though. Make me type faster!
xx