Is Tech Really Killing Culture?

A detective story, complete with psychopaths and secret dreams, set in the haunted, rain-soaked hills of L.A. in winter.

Even as the phantom it now is of the California that once was, Los Angeles, still whispering its secret language, lures and claims innumerable lives, their minor details accumulating into a trajectory of acquiescence that, in hindsight, too late, may well have been there all along, subtly, insistently, in hiding, crying out. Just making it through the day, not least one so perfectly Mediterranean that everything around you feels like a mirage, requires a familiarity with the forever alien -- the unraveling glitz, the sheer immensity, the promise of it all that still hangs over everything, daring you -- and a bizarrely affectless kind of exertion, a disorienting, hard-to-articulate effort that leaves you, occasionally well before lunch, totally drained -- desertified, dry, on empty. But in the rain, L.A. is unbearable. Suddenly, the mystique disappears that had kept the trance alive, threatening, in a moment that keeps expanding, to throw the entire course of your life into question. Is this when the full scope of my mistake steps nakedly into view? Is this when I learn what I knew all along? How do I cheat my own choices? How do I slip the trap?

Even for those not "in the industry" these are standard thoughts beneath the oppressively featureless gray of the low ceiling and the sheets of rain that start menacing the instant they hit the ground, becoming sickly rivers clotted with mounds of trash from the homeless camps, slicks of flat mud smearing dead leaves and detritus across roads, channeling acid troughs around the old concrete steps that riddle every neighborhood in the hills and bringing down trees, power lines, poles, bashing in cars, crushing confused, terrified pets, or simply carrying them away. Once -- an image I captured on iPhone and lost -- a palm tree, struck by lightning in Echo Park, caught fire and burned until its blackened top twisted smoke. In the chill of advancing night the rain pools in black or blue tarpaulins, weighted with sodden sandbags placed almost at random, sagging downslope from the exposed foundations of suddenly once more at-risk homes with "jetliner" views that command six or even seven additional figures of market value. Spontaneously, yet inevitably, the sky is falling, and the attitude lurches anxiously to anything to stop the crumbling: the washing away of the hillside, the creak and crack and rush of timbers and pylons and foliage and furniture down into the dripping thickets crammed at the bottom of the canyons and ravines. Anything -- even ugliness...