August 11, 2014 |
Editors’s Letter
LA-LA LAND
I have to start my letter with a little explanation, a justification of my total obsession that reached such a point that I felt compelled to dedicate an entire issue to the place, devote it to my quest to uncover not the superficial, predictable, sunny happiness that the place generates, but to explore and indulge in the side that makes you shift in your seat a little, makes you feel uneasy. As Glenn O’Brien so eloquently puts it, what I am searching to find and identify, unearth – expose, as it were – is the “recklessness at the heart of LA”.
Alex Petridis, too, has expressed and identified what most hypnotises and fascinates me about the place, what I strive to discuss – the sense that “lurking behind the sunny, glamorous facade” is a sort of infection of “overwhelming weirdness”, where one is “simultaneously dazzled and slightly uneasy, beset by the creeping, ineffable sense that something is not quite right”.
The combination of these things makes LA simultaneously “relentlessly unpleasant and compelling”.
Why then, even after completing my LA issue, do I feel there is still so much to say, to discover, to unearth? From all the deep, dark crevices of this world people who are not the predictable candidates have gathered here like Quatermass to find a common place of exploration, of expression – a place of worship for the nonconformists who want to do things their own way.
Rick Owens, Jeremy Scott, Kate and Laura Mulleavy of Rodarte all create their own expression in a “like it or lump it” world that sometimes challenges on so many levels yet feels honest, filled with integrity and, for me, represents a gathering of pioneers of their own specific creative dialogue that is exhilarating in so many ways.
Artists thrive here, too. Free expression is cultivated and celebrated, and the need to conform is hurled out of the window and buried by this group of individuals. I feel like a social archaeologist, scratching at the surface to find the guts of the place, the darkness that is so mesmerising that haunts LA, intangible but still omnipresent.
It is, in fact, a place that is populated by social and creative anarchists, who I want meet and discover every single time I set foot in the place.
This is the land of the brave and the good – well, in my world anyway. I hope you enjoy our findings, our photographically documented adventures looking forward, and all the amazing writers, too, who have earnestly relayed their experiences of the place.
Goodbye, dear La-La Land and all who inhabit her every dark corner.
Sophia Neophitou-Apostolou
Editor-in-Chief
