The Curious Cult of the New

The chief religion practiced in greater Los Angeles is not, as you may have been led to believe, the worship of money. Mere greed certainly prevailed some years back, when we first carved the freeways and laid out the tract homes, when we cashed in on Garbo and Monroe, and the oil rigs were still pumping along Wilshire Boulevard.

But a couple of decades ago--about the time Franco-Chinese cuisine first appeared on large, shiny black plates, just after Hockney was doing his best work, and just before the sails of our new concert hall were sketched on a proverbial napkin--a subtle shift occurred. The chief religion of our city finally became, in fact, what our leaders had long pretended it to be in fiction.

I mean, of course, originality. At some point, we became the world’s Mecca of Originality: food, architecture, music, relationships. I do my part. Each morning, before my day job kicks in, I work on my novel. Like many in the city, I long for this “creative time” and resent every moment of “drudgery.”

But even the most pious have moments of doubt, nights of uncertainty.

Take this warm Sunday evening, when I find myself at a fine postmodern home in the hills of La Canada Flintridge. Curvilinear, with surprising peaks and windows, it’s a true original. But I am not here to admire the architecture or the canapes. A private concert has been arranged for sunset--chairs are set up on a back lawn, and an outer wall of the brightly lit library has been rolled open to reveal a string trio. Quiet falls as the violinist--a friend of mine, and a heroic figure we shall meet shortly--leans into the opening phrases of a piece Franz Joseph Haydn wrote more than two centuries ago. It’s exquisite, but for some reason, I find myself unable to concentrate on the music. Instead, I continue thinking about that very important word, “original,” about how it sometimes means “new” and sometimes means “old.” The meditation takes me right through Haydn’s Opus 53 No. 1 in G major.

I look up at the house, designed and built by the owner, an architect with a taste for smooth white undulations and these walls that open to make whole rooms suddenly part of the cattailed garden. Each fixture, each stainless-steel inlay in the wooden floor, each clever finial and unexpected baluster, is intended as a coinage, a new thought in the world.

During the wine-and-cheese hour, before we were called to our folding chairs, I sought out the man himself. “I’ve never seen anything quite like this place,” I said. It was a sincere compliment. The house is beautiful, and like most Angelenos, I put great store in new thoughts. The only criticism one hears of our new, even more curvilinear Walt Disney Concert Hall, after all, is that it was not an entirely new thought; that architect Frank Gehry might have thought it somewhere else before.

The criticism is telling, for none of us escape this burden of the new. Along Hollywood Boulevard and Venice Beach, the young pursue not just acting careers, but original lifestyles. In Bel-Air, their more mature cousins pursue groundbreaking lawsuits on weekdays and novel window treatments on weekends. The board members of our museums go to Holland in desperate search of pioneering architects; our chefs struggle to get beyond Franco-Chinese and create something really fresh with pumpkin; our citizen-politicians dream up distressingly inventive ballot initiatives; our commissioners imagine “community policing,” our schoolteachers debate “highly accountable models of innovation.” In 2002, film director Steven Soderbergh felt he had to make “Full Frontal.”

And I admit that I have sometimes jeopardized my own career by thinking: If only once, just once, I could create something truly original, I might find contentment.

But relentless creativity exacts a price, I think, as the musicians reach confidently into the final phrases of Haydn’s allegretto. In a place where newness is everything, nothing can ever be good enough, and no one can ever be completely content. That includes me and just about everyone I know: sleepless with uncertainty and creative juices, in a city that reinvents itself every night, how could we even consider contentment?

Which brings us, at last, to the true hero of this essay, because all the while, beneath the vaulted, 22-foot ceilings of the library, three diligent men have been working not to create something original, but to reproduce faithfully an “original score”--a thought from 220 years before. This thought has stood the test of time, and they hold on to it. The viola dances, the cello rumbles, and polished wood flashes beneath the lights. To my friend Endre Balogh, the concert violinist I promised to introduce--a man born of a classical musician, wedded to the classics and often reluctant to play modernist works--”original” really does mean “old.” True, he adds gorgeous, laughing personality to the Haydn, and may even, for all I know, have taken small liberties with the rhythm. But fundamentally, friend Endre is reenacting beauty.

The rest of us, architect and would-be novelist alike, are asked briefly and blessedly not to create, but simply to listen.

I have been to Endre’s house, and as I listen to him head into the presto, I find myself picturing his place in some detail. It is richly paneled and Oriental-carpeted, filled with antiques and old French and German woodcuts of musicians. It includes no “postmodern gestures.” Even though the violinist’s family home is just a few miles down the road, to step into the door is to leave the restless city behind.

I watch him close his eyes in concentration, and I’m convinced that my friend maintains the very ideas of order and harmony that keep the rest of us sane. Shouldn’t we be thankful that one can find those who discover their art in the continuity of civilization rather than the wanton creation of the new? Shouldn’t we celebrate not just those who want to walk out to the edge of the wing but also those who insist on staying at the controls--folks who may even annoy the acrobats with shouted warnings?

Monday morning, I sit at my keyboard and work again on my clever and improbable novel. It’s set in the mean streets of the Big Orange--but I swear, it’s something entirely new. All over town, others take up the burden. Artists in downtown lofts pour themselves coffee and stare at gaudy assemblages of painted cloth and old boots. Financiers in Century City high-rises gather in conference rooms to plot previously unimagined commercial maneuvers. White-coated researchers at Caltech compile shocking data for Scientific American. Screenwriters crawl to desks at the windows of West Hollywood apartments, ready to weave fantasies out of the bright haze creeping over Melrose.

Each of us, today, will struggle to achieve “originality.” Few will be listening to Haydn.