The Body Beautiful
Where abs are the new clothes.
A popular T-shirt slogan that I have seen worn into cliché around The City of Angels is the “Too Stupid for New York. Too Ugly for LA.” one. Whilst contrary to stereotypes, there are plenty of very intelligent people here, it is also true that LA is full of some of the most startlingly attractive people that I have ever seen.
In London, people’s shape and appearance is often a sort of body clock indicating how long they’ve lived “The London Lifestyle” (American readers: a sort of combination of alcoholism, long commutes, indentured labour, exhaustion and repressed rage, not entirely dissimilar to the ‘New York Lifestyle’). If someone’s thin, that probably just means that they’re either young, take a lot of coke, or they haven’t been in London for that long.
In Los Angeles, health is a form of wealth — being beautiful is the preoccupation of many, the obsession of a few, and the employment of even fewer. There is a (sigh) organic supermarket up the road from my house where I have gotten into the habit of taking my dog for coffee on a Saturday morning simply to observe the procession of actresses and supermodels that congregate there around 8 am to buy breakfast before they embark on the busy schedule of whatever very beautiful people do for a living.
I come away feeling that I have seen something close to a factory farm of beauty, but also with an invigorating sense of Catholic shame for my hangover, pasty skin, yellowing British teeth, and the fact that my muscles don’t appear to have been sculpted using a diamond-tipped machine-tool.
It is hard, sometimes, as is often the case in LA, not to check and make sure that you are not being filmed, either because you have stumbled onto the set of some large-scale production, or because you are part of a reality TV show. It feels, occasionally, like the city is a test-tube or experiment for a future where being unattractive is a choice forced on you by lack of money, and sometimes when I’m out at dinner and look around, I feel the urge to go and chat to the people sitting at nearby tables just to ask them what it is that they do to remain quite so well-preserved.
Angelenos, trapped between the twin pressures of Hollywood and beach culture, take their health very seriously. This is partly accountable for the city’s unique attitude to dress — coming from London, a city where, to understate it, the way you dress is pretty important, to Los Angeles was something of an adjustment. In LA, particularly the closer you live to the beach, clothes are simply something that inconveniently hides the body that you have worked so hard to make worth exhibiting. It appears totally acceptable to wear tracksuit bottoms and gym clothes everywhere, and it has been quite some time since I’ve seen anyone wearing a suit.
The idea of “lifestyle experiments” is increasingly popular here, and it seems that proximity to Silicon Valley means that people have started to view their body as a machine to be tinkered with and hacked, rather than an organism some distance beyond our understanding that probably shouldn’t be fucked around with.
Food isn’t just food, it’s medicine and religion. All the food I buy here appears to promise not just to be tasty or wholesome or not bad for you, but to come with a range of health, religious and physiological benefits, and every month or so I encounter a new health fad which seems, to put it bluntly, like a piss-take by someone testing the limits of what people will pay extra for if you tell them it’s good for them: Bone Broth for collagen and the immune system, Kombucha for digestive health, Bulletproof Coffee (for the uninitiated: coffee with a spoonful of butter and coconut oil in it) for weight loss and mental clarity.
My wife was somewhat amused to walk into an organic supermarket recently and be offered ‘a low-GI Brazilian superfood’ for a small fortune, only to discover that it was the unrefined cane sugar eaten in blocks by builders in Brazil when they’re trying not to collapse from exhaustion in the mid-day heat.
For all the liberal horror at the post-truth fake news ecosystem and the alt-right’s frequent abuse of the truth & love of pseudo-science, it’s hard not to see the same tendencies in the Angeleno desperation for the food they eat to be something more than healthy, more spiritually loaded than communion wafer — when I look down the aisles of over-priced organic food loaded with promises of health and happiness, I often see nothing more than snake-oil.
I have been to dinner with people whose relationship with food seems so clenched and dominated by guilt that it has sucked all of the pleasure clean out of eating for them, and I have also had extensive conversations with people who have swapped lunch for Soylent, a beige slop that ‘contains all the essential nutrients a body needs’ but precisely zero pleasure or flavour.
The upshot of all of this is that people’s preoccupation with being healthy feels a little unhealthy.
When I first arrived here, I got into the habit of running to Venice Beach in the morning to attempt a workout at Muscle Beach — it felt a little like being in some bizarre distortion of a prison yard, where there is clearly a hierarchy at work that should not be violated, but it is based on what absurd shape you’re in, the obscene contortions you’re capable of performing using just a pull up or dip bar, whether you can perform a handstand pull-up with balletic grace, rather than how many people you’ve killed and how dangerous your crew are.
In Los Angeles (full disclosure: mostly on Venice Beach), I have seen the human body chiseled into forms that seem impossible.
A Few of The Notable Specimens & Genus of The Body Beautiful This Amateur Naturalist has Observed Amongst the Native Species of Southern California:
“The Balloon Animal” — in which the person’s muscles are so engorged that they appear in danger of ripping through the skin. Also pretty popular in prison, and gangs in general.
“The Neo-Classical Statue” — a species in which someone’s form appears to have been modeled on the greats of classical sculpting, but with added tattoos and sunburn.
“The Neo-Classical Ruin”- someone upwards of 50 who can’t quite let go of the idea of their body as a temple rather than a ruin — Dylan Thomas’ “rage against the dying of the light” in physical form.
“The Broga Body” — Someone who has ascended beyond the outer desire for muscles to achieve a flexibility and stillness beyond the grasp of normal human beings.
“The Leatherette Mannequin” — a creature whose addiction to both Vitamin D and plastic surgery have combined to give them waxen, formaldehyde-preserved skin that looks entirely un-natural. For the prime viewing opportunity for such creatures, I have found the Beverly Hills Hotel Brasserie around any weekday lunchtime to be particularly fallow hunting-ground.
The Hunger Striker — People whose translucent, pellucid skin and emaciated body is indicative that they are undergoing a period of forced starvation or juice cleansing, and who give off the Christlike glow of imminent martyrdom for the cause of good health.
This obsession has its plus-sides, from a health perspective: I probably drink less and at a slower pace here than I did in London, something that I am reminded of every time I return to London and am mid-way into my second pint whilst my friends are polishing off their sixth.
But even so, it’s enough to make you want to decline into a bloated wreck, to want to surrender and turn your body into a piece of fatty performance art just to offend people and kick against the culture.
But of course, instead, I find myself exercising more, eating more moderately, drinking less, thinking more carefully about my health - in short, giving in.
Everything in moderation, including moderation.
