If Los Angeles is the city that taught us how to be postmodern, might it also be the place where we begin to imagine what comes after? For well over 30 years, the architecture, demographics, lifestyles, and indus tries of Southern California have inspired countless essays and books on the nature and significance of postmodernity. Hollywood, Disneyland, the elevators at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the futuristic cityscapes of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, freeways, suburbs, shopping malls: these have become touchstones for some of the most influential reflections on the subject of American-and often global-postmodernism. 1 Thomas Pynchon wrote of the alienating, dystopian elements of postmodern California in his 1966 The Crying of Lot 49, where he described the road as a" hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of the freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner LA, keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain"(15). In the paranoid imaginings of his protagonist Oedipa Maas, traffic is an endless automated flow; the freeway exists less to facilitate human movement than to feed a city that craves only numbing, drug-induced happiness. Oedipa is little more than a pawn in a system too vast to be fully perceived or understood. Fast forward 30 years to Tropic of Orange by Karen TeiYamashita, where the Los Angeles freeways are described by Manzanar, a man who gave up his home and his career as a surgeon to become a" conductor" of the vast symphony of urban life. As he stands on an overpass," the great flow of humanity [runs] below and beyond his feet in every direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great heartbeat of a great city"(35). Like Pynchon, Yamashita uses meta