Battle for L.A.: Cheeseburgers, Frappuccinos, and Strawberry Donuts

I have lived in the Los Angeles metropolitan area for 20 years now, and until this week I hade never seen a strawberry donut.

I did not even know they existed.

And yet that very concoction from a store called The Donut Man was recently elected "L.A.'s Iconic Dish."

This made me think about the meaning of the word "icon."  The word gets used many times to mean something more like "famous" or "important" rather than its truer definition, at least in this situation.  "Icon" is derived from a Greek word meaning "likeness, image, portrait, semblance."  The Oxford English Dictionary states that an "icon" is a "person or thing regarded as a representative symbol."

For an icon to function as a symbol in this way, it must resemble the thing it refers to.  And in its function as an icon, it must signal something much larger than itself.  No food literally resembles a city, but we can think of city/food combinations.  San Francisco and sourdough bread.  Kansas City and barbecue ribs. Philadelphia and a cheese steak sandwich.  New York City and a slice of pizza on the sidewalk with a cigarette ground into it.

These foods "resemble" those cities because they are found so commonly there that they have become closely associated with those cities.  This is especially true when the food indicates a lifestyle or a particular culture or region.

When one sees that particular dish, one thinks of the city and a host of other associations.

Not a donut.

I think if we traveled around the United States, we would find no one who thinks of strawberry donuts when they think of L.A. This is because strawberry donuts are not seen on every street corner. They are not featured in song nor film. James Cagney did not rub one into Mae Clarke's face in Public Enemy. Randy Newman did not praise them in "I Love L.A."  They do not "resemble" Los Angeles because when you look around the city you do not see them.

If any donut is famously associated with Los Angeles, it is one you cannot eat -- the giant one atop Randy's Donuts, not far from Los Angeles International Airport.

I should not be upset about this.  The  process by which strawberry donuts were selected was not

Now that's a donut.

scientific.  It was bound to be skewed.  It was the result of a poll taken by public television station KCET, which provided its audience with an NCAA-style bracket of culinary options.  As the votes came in, various foods were eliminated.

I doubt the number of voters would be impressive or very representative of the region.  I think if the voting had gone beyond KCET's fairly limited demographic, Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles would have made it to the final round -- and a burger from In-n-Out would definitely have been on the charts.  Roscoe's is perhaps peculiar to Los Angeles, and even those people who have not eaten at one know about them.

Meanwhile, In-n-Out Burger restaurants ARE ubiquitous in L.A., and people who eat at them can be

Los Angeles: Burgers, palm trees,
 and smog-enhanced sunsets

rather zealous in their devotion.

One reason the strawberry donut cannot be an L.A. icon: They are not associated with cars.

Los Angeles is a city built for cars more than people.  It is impossible to imagine the city without them.  Remember Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons telling us that  "Only a nobody walks in L.A."?  I do not know whether Donut Man has a drive-thru window, but I do not think anyone tries to eat a strawberry donut while driving. Meanwhile, one of the main appeals of In-n-Out for Angelenos is the ability to order and eat without leaving one's vehicle.

In fact, In-n-Out is just as famous for the long lines of cars waiting to reach the drive-thru window and the clerks with their white paper hats and headphones taking orders from the drivers in line.  Indeed, some franchises do not have inside seating available.

Honestly, I think the Final Round in the competition should have been between an In-n-Out cheeseburger and something that may not technically be food: an iced coffee drink from Starbucks (especially in a plastic cup).

Mocha-Britney-ccino

My last nominee manages to mix L.A.'s car culture with Hollywood (both in terms of famous celebrities and its fakeness).  Think about how many times you have seen images of a celebrity with a plastic Starbucks cup in hand? This seems part of a TMZ ritual.  When a Hollywood starlet wants to show herself to the common people, she rides to a Starbucks in her Bentley or Escalade and runs inside for a dozen ounces of hyper-sugary caffeine, even though a personal assistant could have done this with more ease -- the paparazzi do not swarm PAs.  But, of course, getting swarmed is the point of going.

Can you get more L.A. than that?

At the corner of Hollywood Boulevard & Death Drive

John Cusack was running for his life, and I was laughing.

Buildings very familiar to me were collapsing like giant, fainting robots.  Freeways and boulevards I drive on regularly were crumbling.  Finally, as Cusack and his family escaped in a plane, the entire city of Los Angeles fell into a crack in the Earth or slid into the Pacific Ocean. 

This was the opening of Roland Emmerich's 2012, and I was watching the apocalypse with delight.  For some reason, it was great fun to see things I was familiar with get trashed.  Apocaslapstick.

I love apocalyptic films, movies that show the end of civilization, that destroy man's monuments in a beautiful spectacle.  So, when I saw trailers for Battle: Los Angeles, I knew I had to see the movie.  The City of Angels was going to take in the shorts again!

It's not that I hate Los Angeles.  It's just that I love any movie about the apocalypse.  The apocalypter the better.  But my desire to see LA's latest flogging made me think about how often this happens.  Is there any city that has imagined its own destruction more often?

In 2012, natural disasters destroyed it.  In The Day After Tomorrow (2004), tornados tore the town a new one.  Earthquake (1974) and Volcano (1997) sort of explain themselves.  In films such as Battle: Los Angeles, aliens did it, as they did in the 1953 version of War of the Worlds. 

But this masochistic mayhem was going on in novels before it hit the big screen.  For instance, in The Flutter of an Eyelid from 1933, Myron Brinig has Southern California slide off into the ocean after an earthquake.  In that book, that fate somehow seems like a justified punishment for the vain and dissolute characters he depicted living there.

More famously, Nathaniel West's The Day of the Locust (1939) includes someone creating an epic painting called "The Burning of Los Angeles" and the novel ends with an extended description of a riot destroying parts of the town and sweeping away West's characters.

Why would a city that includes Hollywood, also known as The Dream Factory, be so fascinated with these nightmare scenarios?

The city brings the nation cinema and television filled with beauty and sex and dreams of perfection.  Perhaps there is some psychic need to balance that with death and dismemberment.

It might make sense from a Freudian perspective.  Sigmund Freud speculated that humans possessed something called "the death drive."  This was like the flip-side of his thoughts on "Eros," which was related to the biological instinct for procreation and the pleasurable experiences of living.

He was trying to understand why people's behavior often contradicted his notion of "the pleasure principle."  People were often times attracted to things that were scary to them or even had threatened their existence.  For instance, soldiers back from World War I kept reliving their traumatic experiences, rather than repressing them or avoiding them.

For Freud, dreams and the unconscious worked toward wish fulfillment.  So he had a hard time understanding an unconscious or compulsive attraction to fear or pain.  Why would people keep imagining their own deaths?

Kind of like Los Angeles does.  Mike Davis, in The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster, counts more than 150 short stories, novels, and films that imagine the city's destruction.

One possible motivation for repeatedly imagining a deadly or traumatic event is the desire to overcome it, to rewrite the story.  Los Angeles has lived through many traumas -- mud slides, earthquakes, wildfires, riots, Charlie Sheen.  It is a city founded upon trauma: the Spanish dispossession of its indigenous inhabitants, and their double dispossession by the arrival of the United States.  In most of the stories and films, the city survives.  We could see the destructive narratives as the city working out its traumatic experiences in symbolic terms.

In some instances, the city's death has been imagined by artists who were angry at Los Angeles.  Brinig was from Montana and didn't like Southern California during his brief stay.  Imagining it sliding into the ocean might have been his way of saying, "This is what you degenerates deserve."  Or he might have been imagining its disappearance so he would never be able to return.

West was probably bitter that he had not found wealth and fame as a writer in Hollywood.  So The Day of the Locust becomes a kind of revenge fantasy.

Sodom and Gomorrah

This "mysterious masochistic trend," to borrow Freud's description of the death drive, could be as simple as a love-hate relationship.  Sure, Los Angeles has sunny skies and warm weather just about every day of the year.  But we also have oppressive smog on some days, ubiquitous, ugly strip malls, oceans of concrete -- and did I mention Charlie Sheen?  We have beautiful men and women, but we also have botox zombies and the insufferably shallow.  We have every culture in the world rubbing shoulders, but we spend so much time trapped in our cars that we never get to meet each other.  So perhaps it is no wonder that we sometimes want the whole frackin' thing to fall into the sea.  I am sure even some of the folks in Sodom and Gomorrah were relieved to see the fire and brimstone headed their way -- "Anything to get out of this traffic!"

Or imagining our own immolation may be driven by guilt.  Look at what we have done to paradise.

So, do you hear that Hollywood?  We've been a bad, bad city and deserve to be punished.  But next time, do it in 3D.


(Please see the comments for a postscript about the recent Japanese earthquake and tsunami.)