Los Angeles: Not a Wasteland

Contrary to popular opinion, Los Angeles is not the cultural wasteland it is rumored to be. Rather, it is a strangely fractured conglomeration of high and low intellectual pursuits. For instance, as I pass my local coffee shop on the way to the subway each morning, I can’t help but chuckle at the aspiring screenwriters hunched over their computers, toiling (quite admirably) away at something that surely means so little. There are other types of artists here as well, like poets and painters and those clever mimes who paint themselves silver and gold and pop to music on the street corner. And models! Surely they are some type of postmodern-performance artists, contorting their bodies into wisps of nothing for our public entertainment. Amazing!

But aside from trivial creative pursuits (like entertainment or extreme sportz or craft fairs), there are pockets of scientists and historians pursuing their own sorts of creative endeavors (present company included). I’ve attended several fascinating lectures already, and I had nearly secured a place on a panel taking place in a few months. Unfortunately, plans to include the seminar Revelations of a Crypto-Anthropoid Race: The Tzombi and Their Hidden Roles in Civilization in the Getty Series of Distinguished Speakers have fallen through -- no doubt due to the controversial nature of the topic. The letter I received today was not unkind, but carried with it a palpable air of terror. I am certain there are some on the board who are afraid funding will be cut it anything too jarring is presented to the bluehairs and businessmen.

I am still awaiting a response from the Dorothy Chandler lecture series, which I understand to be more accommodating to risky projects. Yet this is indicative of the difficulty of the task I have set for myself—to bring the plight of the Tzombi to the attention of a wider audience.