Ali Binazir

Last night I attended a reading of an avant garde-ish book called Pills, Chills, Thrills and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person
at Book Soup, the rather eclectic bookstore on Sunset Boulevard in West
Hollywood, right across from Tower Records. After the event, which
primarily made me wonder whether terminal hipness can only be achieved
through large-scale consumption of drugs, I took a walk on Sunset, just
to observe, and perhaps to see. In the unwritten code of LA cool, it is
clearly not permissible to ambulate on the trottoir for more than a
block, since that would clearly be the domain of the disenfranchised
and Hummer-less — in this town, you only walk if you have to. But from
the ground, outside of the wheeled cage of steel and glass, you
perceive things that others can’t: the soundless repartee of a first
date through the restaurant window; the extra time in front of a
billboard, allowing the initial desire and excitement incited (’Wow,
that leggy model in the Gucci dress sure is hot’) to be nullified by
second order thoughts and emotions about the initial impression (’Is
there not something patently absurd about an anorexic woman lying down
in the desert sand and others wanting to emulate that by spending
hard-loaned bucks on a dress of 2-month fashionability lifespan’);
seeing faces, reflections of your face in those faces, and the
reflection back; the man holding the ‘Hungry- spare some change sign’
directly across the street from the fancy hotel where something
happening is clearly happening, as indicated by the police detail and
the phalanx of limousines, Hummers and Mercedes rolling into the valet
court. On the side of a full-size black SUV (mind you, not
‘jumbo-mega-ostentatious waste of steel and fuel to prop and protect my
ego’ — just ‘full-size’), the words ‘Vanity Fair Campaign’ in red
calligraphy partially gave away what may be going on. Although I
believe Vanity Fair refers to
a certain magazine, the words ‘vanity fair campaign’ in lower-case,
explain wholly the spectacle with more irony than any act of deliberate
design. And so it was — flashes flashing, celebrities being celebrated
in a celebration of themselves by themselves, consumption occurring
conspicuously, import being laid upon the event by the self-appointed
arbiters of such. A robust sense of irony becomes useful to thrive in
this town, for once you buy into the notion that you want (and
eventually need) that dress, that car, that home, that invitation, that
entr