The following line of the St. Vincent’s song with which I opened this chapter goes like this:

In Los Ageless, the waves they never break

They build and build until you don’t have no escape

But how can I leave?

I just follow my hood to the sea, go to sleep

Los Ageless, a parody of Los Angeles as a worldwide entertainment center, lies outside time. The waves never break at its shores, they continue to grow and grow, inflating and swallowing anyone who happens to fall into them. In Los Ageless winter never comes, mothers milk their children, and no one grows old; it is a non-place that subverts the natural order of things. The center from which most of our popular culture emanates bears the essence of the terrible place. As Ubu Roi’s Poland (1.18) or the timeless landscapes of J.G. Ballard (4.11), Los Ageless is a threshold, a zone of indistinction between fiction and reality (2.2, 2.7, 4.5).