“Everything in Los Angeles is too large, too loud and usually banal in concept…The plastic asshole of the world.” — William Faulkner

Fuck William Faulkner.

All Faulkner ever had to do was stroll the 2009 Brewery ArtWalk to understand that this town is more than just silicon breasts and sticky casting couches. The Brewery, a 22-building complex sitting on 23 acres, comprises a variety of structures, some dating back to 1888 and is acknowledged as the world’s largest live-work art colony, attracting nearly 15,000 art-loving Southern California residents, tourists, collectors, curators, dealers, educators, and students each year. The Brewery includes a combination of the former Eastside and Pabst Blue Ribbon Breweries, from which the community derives its name, and one of Los Angeles’ first power plants, Edison Power Station #3. Once a year, over 170 private studios in the 300-studio complex throw open their doors to the public, giving them a rarely-seen glimpse of the artists’ diverse creations and loft-dwelling lifestyle.

The alarm blares talk-radio.You fumble and turn it off , your blurry eyes adjust and see red digits floating in darkness… 3:45. No amount of money seems worth this suffering, but you dutifully dump coffee down your throat and shower and dress. Sunset Blvd. rolls out before you, empty and peaceful.

Washington is chock-full of sociopaths, thieves, and drunks—and certainly mutant combinations of all three. But you probably wouldn’t know it by the looks of the well-dressed, old men, chatting and smiling in Statuary Hall just hours after the Inauguration. The Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies has hosted the post-inauguration luncheon for more than a century, and by the general jolly ambiance of the crowd here at noon on a Tuesday, you’d think at the very worst you were at some two-faced, slightly twisted Bradbury-manifested carnival in rural Illinois. The truth of the matter is that most of Washington is so far removed from the common folk, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to bleed. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not an anti-statesman—not officially anyway. I love this country and consider myself a true, blue-blood patriot. But when the nation is led into a war for no good damn reason that actually exists, and when bank reps hustle people into signing loans worth less than the ink of their signatures, and when some schmuck in New York with ties to the highest levels of the SEC steals 50 billion and no one bats an eye for ten years, I start to wonder about the fortitude of our free world. Perhaps that’s why I’ve bought into the crude national conception that our new Head of the Union can bring some “change” to the Capitol. It’s a long shot, but a real and decent American hope… Or maybe I’m fooling myself into some new national pipe dream after a long and wretched double-term fuck up. God knows anything seems better than the last eight years. I figured the only way to find out was to get a private moment with the newly elected president, maybe shake his and ask him a question or two, and see what sort of energy I get in person, what his eyes tell me, what his three-piece, million-dollar smile has to say up close.