The last outpost of the West, Los Angeles might be described as the culmination of U.S. cultural history. The L.A. of The Ecology of Dreams is not that of ‘Tinseltown’, sun and surf, as it is commonly (mis)understood, but that of a 21st Century megalopolis after forty years of neoliberal capitalism: a city of corporate empires and militarised police forces, gated communities and environmental catastrophe. L.A. is also a city of deep mystery and strange beauty.