But perhaps most disheartening to me, a man who adores women, is the daily LA visual horror show of how they are discarded there, no matter how desperately they try to cling to youth.

LA hates and fears aging, and especially despises the revolting notion of women aging. And in LA, more than anywhere I know, women of a certain age, who should know better, are complicit in their own degradation, going to desperate lengths to dodge what should be taken for granted. No actress would dare present herself as proudly and as honestly as Simone Signoret, would they? No. Women should hate LA, and I will never understand why they endure it all. Why? If I were a woman, I would burn LA to the ground, and spread salt on the earth where the men all gathered. (I may do that anyway.)

We too have increasingly felt that ours is a city that caters exclusively to the young and the pulled, the spotting of a natural-looking woman over 60 in the area having become almost as rare as finding a Major League power-hitter with normal-sized testicles and a lack of puncture wounds on his ass. Still, there must be a less extreme and destructive solution than Baitz's suggestion of burning the entire city to the ground and rubbing salt on the charred ruins of the Spearmint Rhino. Perhaps instead Gov. Schwarzenegger might consider offering tax incentives to women who abstain from plastic surgery after the age of 45, throwing in carpool-lane privileges if they put yellow "Access OK: California Untouched Female" stickers on the sides of their unaltered breasts.

• Leaving Los Angeles (Part Two: Love) [HuffPo]

Here's the actual burn:

Mr. Isherwood, as a critic, will never be noted for his generosity of spirit. He is not Harold Clurman. He tends to be waspish, dismissive, cool, and brittle - as a writer. He can be gratuitously insulting, and his reputation is marred by the general consensus that a good mind is not matched by a particularly big heart. There is a whiff of Grinch in his criticism. Mr. Brantley, more and more seems like a breathless writer of gossip and gush for fan mags, and his intelligence - which again is not in question - seems to fail when it comes down to the big picture. The Times critics present themselves as advocates for consumers, and not as advocates for the theater itself. Unlike Clurman,
Ken Tynan, say, or even Frank Rich, who could be withering but always managed to let it be known that he was passionate for new voices, passionate for promise, and uncompromisingly rigorous, as he is as an op-ed writer on Sundays. Speaking of Sundays, the Times used to have a Sunday critic, but have dropped that, thereby handing a monopoly of opinion to Isherwood and Brantley....

I suggest that the Times critics re-read Tynan, for instance, who was funny and could be ruthless, but was always on the side of the artist, and never innocently hid behind the pretense of being in the hire of the cultural wing of Consumer Reports. All things are connected, Charles (and Ben). Reading your essay yesterday, it occurred to me that you are suffering from that most modern of diseases - a soul-deep isolation, and a growing dislocation — a place from which being a critic of the theater, is dangerous, given how communal the art is.