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.  

MEDITERRANEAN

 

“Do you notice anything different here from what you’re used to at home?” Bill asks. 

 

We’re in line for tickets to see John Wick, Chapter 2…which turned out to be just as much fun as the first one and even better on a huge screen with pumped up sound and the comfy seats that the Arclight in Hollywood features. But I digress...

“Yeah,” I reply, “this line is glacial.” 

That was it alright. The line although short was poking along. It was my introduction to the pace of LA. I’m telling ya, things go slowly here. Movie lines, supermarket lines, get in any line and expect to wait a while, a long while, before you get to the front. 

That's when I began to notice more examples of an absence of urgency. 

There are two major residential construction projects underway in our immediate neighborhood. I pass them just about every day. I’m a guy who knows a thing or two about construction and these projects are construction at a snail’s pace. 

On a beautiful day in LA, Sandi Amtraks up from Rancho Magnifico. After a leisurely lunch we walk to the Geffen Contemporary where a guard opens a door to tell us it’s closed until April while they mount a new exhibit.

“But the website says the new exhibit opens today,” we protest.

“They really should change that,” says the guard. “The MOCA on Grand is open”

We set out for there.

“We’re partially closed while we mount new exhibits,” we’re told. “Only the permanent collection is on view. We’ll compensate you with a voucher for a free admission when the new exhibits open in April.” Late in the game, this, so we opt in although we’ll be long gone before the vouchers are any use to us. We give two vouchers to Alvaro, two to Sandi. We head inside.

The permanent collection is small but mighty, a room fulla Rothkos, lotsa Pop and a fine Pollock. We’ve just enough time to toss it. Then it’s time for Sandi to catch her train home.

And that’s it. Or should be. But heading back to Silver Lake it occurred to me that it’s all part of a piece. Once again we’d encountered that Los Angeles dearth of determination to get things done quickly.

You know who is in a hurry here? Nobody. Why, I wondered. I suspect it’s climate related. Look up SoCal climate and you’ll find it described as Mediterranean, typified by relatively mild winters, warm summers and lotsa sunshine. The old adage, “Make hay while the sun shines,” doesn’t really apply here. When there’s one nice day after another, there’s really no need to hurry to get things done.

Not that I’m complaining exactly. It’s just that I’ve had to gear down my expectations. That's proven to be easier than I would have thought. It’s not a matter of patience, one of the few virtues I try to practice. Instead, it’s more of fitting in and going along with the slow, slow flow. Hustle and hassle? Forget it, Jack, it’s Mediterranean.

CODA

Mediterranean is not about traffic. For all the years I’ve been coming here I’ve defended LA traffic as heavy at times but bareable because it rolls along. However, during this visit and my last one a year or so ago, I’ve been forced to rethink this, mostly while stuck in interminable bumper to bumper, stop and go, mostly stop, traffic. Clearly, traffic’s gotten worse. I suspect it's got something to do with LA’s quite low for a large city density. It's the  source of so much of the city's charm. But it also means putting everybody out on the road for everything. More and more.

Way back in this blog at the conclusion of a driving in LA piece, I copied in a poem by Bill. This visit I learned he’s written a second stanza:

 

                 

    Getting There

                            by William Tutton

 

Cars

cars  cars

cars cars, cars

cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars

cars cars cars cars cars cars cars

plus a bus

Back to LA, Pt. 2

It’s hardly possible to consider Los Angeles, indeed pretty much all of that huge hunk of territory known as Southern California, without confronting traffic. LA is, after all, the city that grew from a pleasant place under the warm California sun to a megalopolis after the introduction of the automobile. It must have seemed so simple back then: put anything any place. It won’t matter because all you have to do to get there is climb in your car and drive off. Fair enough, but as the city sprawled in the post war years, despite the broad streets that wound through it for astonishingly long distances, getting about by auto became more and more difficult. The ingenious solution was freeways. Limited access multi-lane highways weaving through the city to move traffic along swiftly.

And as has been known forever, make something easier, more convenient and folks will flock to it. Soon enough the freeways jammed up. The solution: more of the same. Now flyovers fly over ten lane with an additional four commuter lanes roads. And of course, that’s where all the drivers head.

SoCal freeways are never not busy, not day, not night, not in the still hours before dawn. The speed limit may be sixty-five but don’t expect to drive that speed for long. Cruise control is useless. Drive, just drive. Speed up, slow down, change lanes, and stay alert. Watch out for those motorcycles that ride the white lines between the lanes.

Throw that many drivers zipping around as fast as they can go and inevitably accidents will occur. Lots of accidents. The first thing to do when heading out on the freeways is to tune the car radio to the news station: traffic and weather together every ten minutes. And accident updates because there’s always accidents somewhere on the system. The traffic reports may, if there are any, suggest alternate routes. Take the advice and you find yourself driving the “surface” streets along with everyone else who has harkened to the same advice plus the locals who are there anyway. Stop at traffic signals and deal with unfamiliar traffic patterns. Better yet, just stay on the freeway and crawl along bumper to bumper. It may seem eternal but nothing ever is.

So I found myself on the most notorious of all, I-5, headed south from LA to visit my friend Jim in San Marcos. Five lanes abreast we’re moving slower than the tides. The news radio clues me into to the neigh apocalyptic reason, a car on fire further on down the road. Looks as though this particular jam is gonna last a long time.

And I reflect. A few weeks back Dale and I were among the dozen or so who turned out to hear singer songwriter Ray Bonneville at the Sportsmens. Ray talks up the audience between numbers and always has something amusing and thought-provoking to say. This night he reflected, “People complain about the airlines. But they fly me at three hundred miles per hour and get where I want to go in hours rather than days.” So it is. We’re all out here jammed up, creeping along because we can be. It’s no great fun but it’s better than it might be.