The landscape, like Los Angeles itself, is transitional. Impermanence haunts the city, with its mushroom industries–the aircraft perpetually becoming obsolete, the oil which must one day be exhausted, the movies which fill America’s theatres for six months and are forgotten. Many of its houses–especially the grander ones–have a curiously disturbing atmosphere, a kind of psychological dankness which smells of anxiety, overdrafts, uneasy lust, whisky, divorce and lies.
