Los Angeles
At a party in the Hollywood Hills the other day, I noticed that a big-time California journalist was wearing sparkles on her neck and chest, and I couldn’t help thinking: Why did I just waste a week of my life in Philadelphia when I could have been out here?
In Philadelphia women don’t wear sparkles on their chests; they wear Mentholatum. Philadelphia doesn’t encourage that kind of joie de vivre; it encourages conservative investment strategies. In Philadelphia they actually seemed excited to be hosting a political convention, because there the arrival of 15,000 Republican account executives actually made the town livelier. Here in Los Angeles the locals seem eager to have us leave because the presence of so many Democrats and journalists has caused a spike in metro-area fat-to-body-mass ratios.
The fact is, Los Angeles is a much better place to hold a political convention than Philadelphia. And predictably so. The best cities for conventions are dumb and sinful. By common estimate, the best convention in recent times was held by the GOP in 1988 in New Orleans, a city rich in both vapidity and vice. New York and San Francisco, hosts of recent conventions, are sinful enough, but not stupid enough. Four years ago, San Diego and Chicago held adequate conventions because they were stupid, but not so sinful.
But here in L.A. you can really let your inner idiot run wild. In L.A., the people who host the morning news programs make the East Coast morning hosts look like the Harvard faculty. And yet, slipping into the local culture, you find yourself watching them, segment after segment, marveling at the achievements of American orthodontia, and never feeling the urge to switch to C-SPAN to see whether there might be a panel on the art of biography.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD is staying at a hotel called the Avalon in Beverly Hills. The Democratic National Committee tried to assign us to one of those behemoth airport hotels, but the Democrats are using only unionized hotels, and someone in our office had the brainwave to call around to the smaller, hipper, non-unionized hotels that dot the city. The Avalon is one of those Ian Schrager-type hotels that are relentlessly fashion forward. I’ve stayed at such places in New York. I hate them.
These hotels don’t have normal sinks, because that would be too boring and mainstream. Instead they’ll have a shallow Japanese bowl so shaped that when you turn on the water it splashes you across your shirt. They can’t have normal showers, so they’ll have a slate shower area with a sliding glass wall, except you can’t reach the controls to adjust the temperature unless you are standing directly under the nozzle. After about ten minutes, you realize that mainstream furnishings evolved the way they did for a reason, and any deviation for the sake of style causes problems.
Here in L.A., the moral atmosphere is somehow such that being hip is worth the inconvenience. Here, I love the Avalon, which is designed in a Rat Pack mid-century-modern style and decorated in pale yellows and greens to look like one of those pre-Castro Cuban casinos where Frank Sinatra might have played. “High style meets a zen vibe at this urban hotel,” reads the brochure. Here, I’m happy to wait 55 minutes for the waiter to deliver my strawberry smoothie poolside, because out here it’s okay to get in touch with the shallow person within. Here, I’m thrilled to have a room that doesn’t stoop to anything so prosaic as a desk (I’m typing this crouched on a fetsons-era footrest). I’m thrilled to learn that Shalom Harlow, the supermodel, stays here, whereas in Philadelphia it would have been Shalom Safarti, the mohel.
Back in Philadelphia, they had lovely buildings but ugly people, while here they have ugly buildings and beautiful people. And the only disadvantage of the Southern Cal atmosphere is that some chemical in the air makes it physically impossible to care about politics.
People in my profession had better think that politics is vital and interesting. But seen through the lens of the L.A. zeitgeist, politics seems sad, especially that portion of the convention center known as Democracy Row. It’s just off the media work area, and dozens of good-government foundations have little booths there, manned mostly by insanely bored interns staring into space. Something called You-Think is there, “integrating social sciences with visual arts,” along with the California Voter Foundation, the National Issues Forum, and the Institute for Global Ethics.
In Philadelphia, you could pay attention to these little platoons of civic participation. Here they’re a downer. Talk, talk, talk. A few nights ago, by contrast, some colleagues got together out by the pool at the Avalon, and we found ourselves discussing how Bush will fare among Capricorns.
It’s great to go native.
DAVID BROOKS
