Going back the conference “Myths of L.A.,” I remember some of the speakers talked about how Jung had the realization of the city as the self. Think about it.

Los Angeles, perched on a far cliff of western civilization… personal myth can emerge… or be crushed. In many ways, California is an imaginary place. It exists in the mind first… the dream of the West, movie stars, freeways, fast cars, the epicenter of noir, gangs, and polarized racial communities.

There’s something altogether unbalanced, even distorted about it. The atmosphere is magical, yet tricky, deceptive. There’s a collision of angles.

L.A. romanticizes and defies any understanding of what a city can be. At once liberated, on the edge of our changing consciousness, with its ravishingly beautiful flora and fauna, larger-than-life celebrity sex — then, alongside that — hell, earthquakes, fires, frightening neighborhoods in a vacuous, shallow cultural wasteland.

Add the military-trained gladiators of the LAPD cutting a swath through a “The Day of the Locust” potential for riots and destruction. And hovering over all of it, a beautiful blond woman’s red botox-lips, the smog her delicate eye-shadow. And any moment perfect white teeth will gnaw the Pacific plate.

I love L.A.

http://www.junginla.org/t/publicprograms/2011/summer/month/june/

When I had first decided to write a Jungian Thriller set in Los Angeles, I remember attending a weekend conference called “Myths of L.A.” It featured many wonderful speakers and the overriding theme was the collective “shadow” of the city of  L.A., it’s underbelly.

One speaker said she imagined L.A. as the Hindu Goddess Kali with the freeways her circulatory system. What a great image. Here is a passage I finally cut from my manuscript where the main character of the book, Animus, imagines that:

He seemed to enter a dream-state, imagining the Goddess Kali, mistress of death and destruction, her dark skin lounging across L.A. County, 50 miles tall, the freeways her veins and arteries, the fingers of two of her right hands dipped in cool ocean water, the other two arms flailing to the East, scratching high desert sand. He thought about Los Angeles perched on the edge of the Western world. A city of binary differences. Sunshine and noir. And yearly fires threatening destruction and purity.

Only in L.A.