Los Angeles is a city of appearances but there is another LA beneath the sunny facade — a darker, more ominous city where racial segregation and extremes of wealth and poverty show the grimy underside of the American dream. LA is the birthplace of noir and gangsta rap, as well as of Hollywood musicals.
What will this almost apocalyptic moment in US history mean for the rich and the poor in the City of Angels? We set out on our trip across America beneath grim headlines forecasting financial disaster. But in the swank hotels and restaurants of Beverly Hills, you'd never know that the economy was on the edge of an abyss.
The rich bankers are retiring to their bars after another day of plunging markets downing their martinis in an atmosphere reminiscent of the gilded 1920s.
"You have to remember," says Mike Davis, who wrote City of Quartz, a seminal book about the real Los Angeles, "middle-class Californians live in a bubble, immune from problems." But it's all there, just beyond the glitz and below the surface. The other LA is a multicultural city where more than 200 languages are spoken, and communities of color struggle against high odds to maintain their vibrancy - and just to survive.
But there are signs that the bubble may soon burst. It is a state where the foreclosure rate is second in the nation, and where budget cuts have reduced middle-class families in places like placid Riverside to eating beans and peanut butter sandwiches.
This is the starting point for our trip across America. Setting off from the Santa Monica pier, which juts out into the Pacific Ocean, we'll be traveling east, in true American style, in two RVs. Comedian and Air America Media host Marc Maron.
With him are the team of film makers headed by Patrick Farrelly and Kate O'Callaghan who will be producing daily short videos from the cities and farms, truck stops and mega-churches, country clubs and soup kitchens of the United States. Veteran investigative journalist James Ridgeway blogs from the road.
We'll be joined by Guardian correspondents, politicians, and assorted opinion-makers as we try to understand the forces shaping the US vote in 2008. From Los Angeles to Washington DC - via the battleground states of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia - we'll be looking at the key issues and inviting ordinary citizens into our Truth Booth to tell us which candidate can snatch a divided and demoralized nation back from the jaws of disaster.
