I’ve lived in Los Angeles for a little over three years.
In that time, I’ve paid almost $1,000 in parking tickets.

Once upon a time a city was erected, and when the neon lights were turned on, the people came in droves. Their dreams were advertised to them wholesale and everyone clamored over each other to buy them. When they realized these were not the dreams they wanted, the people turned to each other for meaning. But before they could embrace, fault-lines in the earth tore apart, separating them, and these chasms were filled-in with highways roaring with traffic. Alas, the people found themselves isolated on concrete islands with no way to reach each other. They now make up the permanent and wounded infrastructure of this city. They had loved and destroyed Los Angeles. . . and Los Angeles had returned the favor.

There is a Band-Aid for the love-impoverished, but it costs about $36 and it doesn’t include a martini. Our quick-fixing society has found yet another way to cut the bullshit to under five minutes with the advent of speed dating. But while the bandage may stick at first, it ends up just sliding off with nothing much to hold on to. We either need better adhesives or we will just have to keep dating the old fashioned way. I vote for Velcro: it sticks but there’s no commitment, and it’s flexible enough for a fickle city like LA.

It’s a beautiful Thursday afternoon in the Brentwood hills, peaceful and quiet as though I’m no longer in L.A. The Southwest-style clubhouse of the Riviera Country Club stands gallant and vast, like the home of a Columbian drug lord, and I’m here for the quarterly luncheon of the Saint John’s Retired Physician’s Association. In spite of my shadowy past as an amateur surgeon and street pharmacist, I am in fact here to interview the former Los Angeles District Attorney and now prominent photographer Gil Garcetti, who is today’s main speaker. But I’m sweating in the sun while taking these notes and must move toward the clubhouse. Suddenly, I wonder if there’s a no-denim policy here, as is customary among country clubs. I’m wearing blue jeans. The sign just outside the main entrance reads Proper Attire Required… Not sure exactly what that means.

Following the puzzlingly successful Christie’s New York sale of postwar and contemporary art on November 13th, where Rothko’s “Untitled: Red, Blue, Orange” fetched a hefty $34.2 million alone, I was trying to reconcile the strained economic climate of the local art community in Los Angeles with the heavy hitters in New York. Although the last several years have been an economic nightmare for most Americans, at what point does the idea of a recession become bigger than the recession itself? What effect is the economic downturn having on the L.A. art scene, and is the success of the Christie’s auction a sign of recovery, or more of the same price inflation of modern art that we were seeing before the recession? I also thought about the old adage that creativity and poverty go together like peanut butter and jelly—well, maybe not in those exact words. To put it bluntly, is the recession good for art?