Everything Now: An Author Talk with Rosecrans Baldwin

From President Greg Salyer: I happened to be lecturing on the mythological and imaginary aspects of Los Angeles when I read Rosecrans Baldwin's "My Life Cleanse: One Month Inside L.A.'s Cult of Betterness." Here, I thought, was a new voice in the myriad of voices offering interpretations of the uninterpretable city. The typical and fatal mistake of most writers is to try to reduce Los Angeles to an easy formula, which is an exercise in frustration for both the author and the reader. Rosecrans took the better approach—to reflect Los Angeles rather than capture it.

Join us as we explore the city-state through Baldwin's eyes and see what he saw and we Angelenos know: "It took me three and a half years to figure out one thing, perhaps the only thing I know for certain about L.A.: Anything can happen at any second. Which provokes a sense of doom or wild hope, depending on the day."

About Everything Now: Lessons from the City-State of Los Angeles:

A provocative, exhilaratingly new understanding of the United States’ most confounding metropolis―not just a great city, but a full-blown modern city-state America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. (It has its own dreams.) Not just the vanishing point of America’s western drive. (It has its own compass.) Functionally, aesthetically, mythologically, even technologically, an independent territory, defined less by distinct borders than by an aura of autonomy and a sense of unfurling destiny―this is the city-state of Los Angeles.

Deeply reported and researched, provocatively argued, and eloquently written, Rosecrans Baldwin's Everything Now approaches the metropolis from unexpected angles, nimbly interleaving his own voice with a chorus of others, from canonical L.A. literature to everyday citizens. Here, Octavia E. Butler and Joan Didion are in conversation with activists and astronauts, vampires and veterans. Baldwin records the stories of countless Angelenos, discovering people both upended and reborn: by disasters natural and economic, following gospels of wealth or self-help or personal destiny. The result is a story of a kaleidoscopic, vibrant nation unto itself―vastly more than its many, many parts.

Baldwin’s concept of the city-state allows us, finally, to grasp a place―Los Angeles―whose idiosyncrasies both magnify those of America, and are so fully its own. Here, space and time don’t quite work the same as they do elsewhere, and contradictions are as stark as southern California’s natural environment. Perhaps no better place exists to watch the United States’s past, and its possible futures, play themselves out.

Welcome to Los Angeles, the Great American City-State.

About the author:

Rosecrans Baldwin is the author of The Last Kid Left, You Lost Me There, and Paris, I Love You but You're Bringing Me Down. He is a frequent contributor to GQ, and co-founded the online zine The Morning News. He lives in Los Angeles.

“Full of surprising facts and anecdotes, this is a compelling, thoroughly researched, and lovingly crafted chronicle of how Los Angeles came to be.”

―Booklist

“Rosecrans Baldwin has created a sharp, convincing work of acute observation. It is as clearheaded and nuanced as it is timely.”

―Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

"In brisk and graceful style Rosecrans Baldwin has produced a new and necessary guidebook for contemporary Los Angeles, one that captures the elusive and bewildering qualities of the beautiful sprawling nightmare so many of us call home. Everything Now should be handed out to everyone who gets off a plane at LAX. "

―Jim Gavin, author of Middle Men and creator of Lodge 49

“Los Angeles invites extreme forms of correspondence, love letters and hate mail, and Rosecrans Baldwin’s Everything Now is a lush amalgam of both. In beautiful and concise prose, he maps a sun-drenched geography that we love to hate and hate to love. With this book, Baldwin cements his status as one of California’s finest literary cartographers.”

―Myriam Gurba, author of Mean

“All the research, all the thinking and wandering and interviewing that Baldwin did to get head and heart, arms and eyes around greater Los Angeles sits barely beyond the sightlines of the beautiful storytelling, the unpacking of myth and memory, the narrative wrestling match with a place that has crushed so many other would-be interpreters. Rosecrans Baldwin tackles a city-state’s sprawling past and present across great chunks of chronology and culture, and does it with grace and imagination. This book is a revelation.”

―William Deverell, Director, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West

"With a novelist's eye and a searching curiosity, Rosecrans Baldwin has created a sprawling work that explores a place and its people, as well as culture, history, geography and ecology. A feat of imagination that fed my mind, heart and soul."

―Charles Yu, winner of the National Book Award for Interior Chinatown

“I was born in Los Angeles and intend to die here―there’s no place in the world I love more. I'm also constantly furious about the many ways it falls short of its promise. Rosecrans Baldwin has taken on the unwieldy task of portraying this unique, enormous city in all its overlapping, contradictory layers, and incredibly, he succeeds. With vivid stories and a ready knowledge of local literature and history, he captures the sunshine and noir of 21st Century L.A.: both the multitudinous roar of life and the untenable, unconscionable inequality.”

―Steph Cha, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Your House Will Pay

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