Having watched each of Woody Allen’s films at least once and many of them too many times (except for Radio Days, in Allen’s oeuvre it is the heaven amongst his many spiritual hells) Vicky Cristina Barcelona does not do much to stretch one of his most basic and redundant themes: the quest for meaning in a bourgeois American landscape of too much money and not enough authenticity.

The main characters in these particular Woody Allen films – Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Match Point, Deconstructing Harry, Husbands and Wives, Shadows and Fog, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Hannah and Her Sisters, et al. – all have one basic problem: money. After you get over the bleak tidal wave of an Allen chamber drama and have time to reflect, you quickly realize that his character’s problems and existential quandaries typically boil down to the fact that they have too much time to sit around and think about shit.

Which is not to say that Allen doesn’t make superb films. He’s a modern master of a particular kind of film that is rarely attempted let alone pulled off nowadays: the drama. However, the more he runs the needle through the groove of existential quandaries as a theme the more redundant and derivative his films become. People have been behaving badly and selfishly for centuries, that’s a given, and people with money do it better than anyone.

If you read the general criticism of Woody Allen’s work these types of observations come up regularly, in fact they’re fairly pedestrian. Additionally, if you read his 1995 book of interviews Woody Allen on Woody Allen you’ll quickly realize that he doesn’t care very much. He likes making movies and makes a lot of them and can’t or won’t quit scratching that same thematic itch. Speculation in this realm is futile. Do an internet search for Soon-Yi Previn and Woody Allen – the man has too much baggage.

Woody Guthrie dying in a Brooklyn hospital inspired Bob Dylan to write these words about hope: “Cause you can’t find it on a dollar bill, and it ain’t on Macy’s window sill, and it ain’t on no rich kid’s road map, and it ain’t in no fat kid’s fraternity house, and it ain’t made in no Hollywood wheat germ…” So where do you find hope today? Woody Guthrie’s dead, Dylan’s about to be, the good poets are all gone (or perhaps our language is dead), post-1920 art sucks, modern philosophy is meaningless and inapplicable, fashion is eating itself, and good music is awash in depression or cynicism.

Or is it? In many of Woody Allen’s films he sets up a counterpoint to the privileged class, the working class characters romanticized because of their ignorance to the “larger” issues in life. They just want to live, dance and have a good time and don’t understand why someone would spend all their time being so miserable. Work is a necessary evil for these characters, love is a pleasure, God is a given and heaven is the inevitable result. And, there’s a lot of singing.

Buyepongo is that kind of band and in Los Angeles provides that kind of hope to small audiences in almost anonymous coffee shops at the almost anonymous hours approaching midnight. If you miss your 9pm train out of L.A.’s Union Station and have to wait until the 11:30pm train then perhaps you’ll make your way across the street, literally, to Olvera Street’s best coffee shop, Casa De Sousa. There you’ll find the sometimes six, sometimes eight, piece band playing Central American dance music – Cumbia – and getting down in a serious way.

The band consists of no one over the age of 21, some of them barely speak English, and they hail from regions in South America, Central America and Mexico – some are first generation native born, some are not. It’s a strange sight to watch, it’s like punk rock in Spanish with accordions and bongo drums, but everyone dances and yells and has something typically lacking at most music shows: fun.

Buyepongo might sit at the crest of a coming wave, of which there is no real proof, only conjecture. Whites have recently become the minority in the State of California and by 2042 will be in the United States in general. In Los Angeles that change occurred some time ago; by 2006 71 per cent of Los Angeles County’s population was considered minority (all of which opens up larger questions than this article can cover).

What we’re seeing happening in Los Angeles will soon be what’s happening in the United States: a traditionally marginalized group harnessing the DIY power of their adopted and sometimes native country’s punk and hipster heritage, combining it with the newer tools of MySpace and YouTube and coming out with a mixture fraught with energy, emotion and spirit.

Perhaps it is here that we’ll begin to find that regeneration of the U.S.’s own dying culture; a culture choked by money, a dead spiritual life and fear. Let’s just pray that as these coming generations mature they don’t settle for the given, and continually reach back into their histories for the possible. Let’s just hope it’s fun.

August 9, 2008 Los Angeles, CA -

Ride the San Bernardino to Los Angeles Metrolink line someday. Get a cup of coffee. Sit at the top of one of the cars and look out the window. Don’t read your book or use your laptop or cell phone or whatever you brought. Just look out the window.

What you see might startle you. Perhaps your reaction will be to quickly forget about it, think about nicer things. Ride the same stretch of the Metrolink a few more times – etch the images in your memory. Then, ride other Metrolink routes. Riverside to Orange County, Orange County to Los Angeles, and when you think you’re ready go Los Angeles to Lancaster on the Antelope Valley line.

What you’ll find is this: The United States is dead. The dream, the thought, the promise, they are all dead. There is no longer any shred of reality in the U.S. to match the idea of the U.S. If you operate under the premise that ours was founded as a land of ideas, of responsibility, of beauty, of dreams, then you’ll have to admit that those things no longer exist. They’ve been slowly replaced by new ideals: cheap, fast, hugely profitable and then abandoned.

Riding the Metrolink around Southern California gives you the ability to see a lot of territory at once and so be able to make some good generalizations. It’s not like riding in your car down the freeway. There you’re hemmed in by the freeway’s walls. On the train you can sit up high and see everything up close. It enables you to see quickly the many fads that have rolled over America like a wave.

The first thing that jumps out is the swimming pools. Everyone has one and none of them seem to be used, many of them are empty. Fifteen to twenty years ago some marketing genius created the need, hucksters sold people on them (”Your property values will double!”) and they were installed.

That’s just the surface though. And you can see a lot of surface as you ride the Metrolink: destroyed suburbs, dead farmland (the small amount left), jails, landfills, boarded-up businesses, and a lot trash, everywhere you look the detritus of people’s daily lives piles up.

It’s funny. As you ride around you can’t shake the feeling that you’re riding through some other country after a decade or two of war has ravaged the population. Eastern Europe looks better than this – that is not hyperbole.

After the Metrolink trip take a day or so and drive around Orange County and Los Angeles County. Look for redemption, something in the surrounding culture that will make the desolation you’ve just witnessed seem justified, or at least explainable.

Once you’re done looking at the regular malls, the strip malls, the chain restaurants and grocery stores, the liquor stores and convenience stores, the cul-de-sacs and suburban developments, the beach developments, the dirty pollution-tainted beaches, the non-existent park system, the un-ending concrete and asphalt you’ll quickly realize that what you saw on the Metrolink wasn’t an anomaly. It was the truth. And it was it staring you right in the eyes, pleading.