LA JOURNAL

 

 

                                                 GET AROUND, GET AROUND, I GET AROUND. 

“Do you know where you are?” Bill asks. We’re on our way back from a club when Bill suddenly hangs a left and we’re headed uphill through the narrow streets that wind past the homes that cling precariously to the hillsides.

It’s always a lesson going places in LA with Bill. He’s a veritable Rand McNally, a living breathing road atlas. Indeed, on our way out this evening we’d a “watch this” moment during which he taught me a short cut only a real Angelino would know.

“We’re on top of the hill between Griffith Park Boulevard and the actual Silver Lake. We're on Micheltorena Street. If we continue downhill we’ll come out by the school on Sunset,” says I, the proud ardent student.

 

Silver Lake

 

But really, it’s getting harder for me to get lost here. I pretty much know my way around Silver Lake (our neighborhood as opposed to the former reservoir now repurposed as a decorative water feature after which our neighborhood is named) and Los Feliz, the next neighborhood over. I can get downtown; I can cruise Hollywood. I can meet a high school friend for a beer way out in the San Fernando Valley. I know which freeways to take and even better I know which “surface” streets to take to avoid the freeways.

Let me not get too ahead of myself. There’s lots of this five hundred square mile city (by comparison, Buffalo is forty square miles) and its huge attendant sprawl that remain a complete mystery to me. Then again, strictly by accident, or so it seems, I left Garminella at home in a box on a shelf in a closet. I imagine her muttering to herself, “recalculating, recalculating.” That was an error but nowhere near as egregious as it would have been in previous times here. Sooner or later, the training wheels must come off.

 DRIVING

 

 It’s just not possible to write about Los Angeles and avoid writing about driving here. As I’ve noted in previous posts, LA traffic has only gotten worse in the years since we’ve been wintering here. Its by now pretty extensive public transit system doesn’t really help much. In fact, faced with a 13% decline in ridership, the authorities commissioned a study to account for it. Their conclusion: the problem stems from low interest rates. No really! Low rates have allowed more folks who might otherwise rides the buses or the Metro to buy cars and join the stop and go, mostly stop, jams on the freeways. Making matter worse, I suspect, is prosperity. Southern California is now experiencing the lowest unemployment rate ever in the history of keeping track. More folks are on their way to work in the morning and irascibly heading home again in the evening. It’s almost enough to make one wish for the return of hard times.  

LA Pt. 1: Lights

Of course the sun is shining.

Of course flowers bloom everywhere.

We’re in LA.

We’re invited to Molly and Heather’s house to view the sunset from their patio. The house is about half way up the side of a hill above Silver Lake, the actual lake (Soon to be drained we’re told. Wouldn’t that be awful.) not the neighborhood although it’s in the neighborhood which extends to include our apartment which isn’t near the lake at all. Got that?

It’s a lovely home built in the California cottage style in 1927. The first homeowners here worked at the Disney studios. They could take the stairs that climb the hillside down to the trolley line that delivered them to the studio doors.

Bill and Alvaro are with us. Mark Weinstein stops by. Glasses are filled and refiled. Molly proposes a toast, “To Kenmore.” Indeed five seventh of us are from there, none regretting not being anywhere near there now.

Reaching the patio involves climbing a coupla short flights of stairs up from the backyard. The patio is built into the hillside above the house. No, really, the patio is higher than the roof of the house. The view is fabulous, down the valley, west over Hollywood, down and out over the LA basin.

The sun does its firey ball dropping below the horizon thing. Colors emerge in the southwestern sunset style. It’s all so beautiful. As the colors fade away, Venus emerges, brighter than the lights of the helicopters, two or three of which seem always to be airborne over Los Angeles.

Lights go on all around us. I’m in mind of those iconic pictures of LA at night, the foothills all around the basin set alight by houselights from the homes that cling, often precariously, to the hillsides. We are, it occurs to me, one of those lights.