“My body is a map of L.A.,” sings the poet of “Arcadia,” but she is no Virgil, and these are no Eclogues:
My chest, the Sierra Madre
My hips, every high and byway
That you trace with your fingertips like a Toyota
Run your hands over me like a Land Rover
. . .
My curves, San Gabriel all day
And my lips like the fire licks the bay
. . .
In Arcadia, Arcadia
All roads that lead to you as integral to me as arteries
That get the blood flowing straight to the heart of me
America, I need a miracle
I can’t sleep at home tonight, send me a Hilton Hotel
Or a cross on the hill, I’m a lost little girl
Findin’ my way to ya
Home of Pan, god of the pastoral and wild, the satyric and impromptu, Arcadia is the Hellenic equivalent to the biblical Garden of Eden, a bucolic highland in the Peloponnese untainted by the corruption of man and yet named for Arcas, its king. Arcas is the son of Zeus, who raped Callisto while disguised as his own daughter before Hera, jealous as always of her husband’s victim, transformed the young mother into a bear nearly killed, much later, by the arrow of her unknowing spawn—a hunter, of course—upon which the boy’s father sent them both to the sky, where they abide as Ursa Major and Minor, celestial Madonna and child.
But the Arcadia in question is a suburb of fifty-five thousand, thirteen miles northeast of downtown Los Angeles, and is, like its namesake, perilously associated with bears. In dry spells, sleuths routinely descend from the hills to roam its streets in search of food, an increasingly recurrent omen of certain and imminent climate apocalypse. Something more and less than a paradise lost, a fool’s goldmine off the last exit of the air-conditioned nightmare, this ambitiously dubbed prefab idyll is one among many signposts that populate the second-largest megalopolis in the United States, encompassing Santa Barbara to the north, Las Vegas to the east, and crossing the Tijuana border to the south:…
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