Supporting the Homeless: How We Made L.A. Safe for Art, 1984-1994 (ePub)

In the tradition of satires like "Slaves of New York" and "The Serial", "Supporting the Homeless" reveals an exclusive club in Los Angeles: the Art Scene, where the price of admission is mere attitude, but hanging around can cost your soul. Through the Downtown underground of Los Angeles to Bel Air mansions, this novel describes the "endless party" as the author experienced it between 1984 and 1994, when grunge became gentrification.
The narrator of the story is a photographer who leaves his native Bakersfield for San Francisco, full of dreams of artistic fame. After college he wakes up back in Bakersfield, working for a small-town newspaper and living with a waitress above a bar. As much as this life appeals to him, he still aspires to the limelight and abandons this future, running off to San Diego to join friends Craig Andersen and Benjamin Smart in an art gallery venture. But San Diego is also too small and the photographer abandons Craig and Ben for Los Angeles.
At first the life of the photographer is a long series of jaded parties, one after the other, and the story remains in Los Angeles, with the exception of minor forays to New York City. But through these parties the relentless social gamesmanship of the Art Scene stimulates and then numbs. The photographer befriends the stars of the Art Scene, innovative dealers Tony Picapedrero and Smith Michaels, who reunite him with Ben Smart and Ben's new critic partner Rachel Richard, who have all come to Los Angeles to find their fortune. As their careers soar, many other friends crash from the heights, destroyed by drugs, drink and their own lack of ruthlessness. The photographer begins a personal campaign to discredit the huckster dealers and inept artists he believes have given art a bad name, but instead he finds himself being forced out by his own friends, who understand life better.
As in other coming-of-age stories, the photographer moves along once more, this time to New Orleans, where he can disappear into his own obscurity and addiction. Instead of becoming a serious artist, he accepts the surface of the Art World of California as its substance. Along the way he has watched enormous changes in Los Angeles itself, awakening from the urbane dreams of the early 1980s to the gritty reality of the 1990s, through fires, floods, riots and earthquake, with every corner filled by homeless people from across the country. And although the names have been changed, every event in this book happened right before this author's eyes.