For The Love Of LA

Thoughts On The Indefinable City, And Its Challenges

After that rocky first full day in LA (read previous post here!), the idea of the city started to lose whatever gloss I might’ve placed over my thoughts of it. After my surfboard broke, the trip sort of began to meander. Dereck, my friend who I was staying with in Studio City, was not feeling the place. What I heard from him and many friends who move there (but are not from there) is how closed off it is, how isolating it can be.

I spent much of my days driving, and alone. It didn’t help that I was staying in Studio City and that much of what I wanted to do and write about required me to drive to the coast. So, I was placed into my car for a couple hours at a time as I sped around the whole city nearly everyday. There wasn’t much insane traffic where I went, so I count myself lucky it only took an hour and a half to get to the coast versus the usual three, or so I heard.

If I wasn’t heading to the coast, I was attempting to visit art galleries. I wanted to see what the art world, specifically the one beyond the international arts community, was like. It turns out art galleries across the state, and over on the other coast of this continent, are seldom very distinct from one another. Most of them are in the business of making money but attempting to do so without wanting to be up front about what the business of the gallery actually is. I found the experience of talking to gallerists, who were selling their art while pretending to not sell it, a draining mask to humor. It didn’t take away from the art. In fact I saw two shows, one at Chris Sharp Gallery showing Hastings-based painter Sophie Barber, and the other the photo show of Ed Tempelton’s at Long Beach Museum of Art, both of which I want to write more about. 

But besides viewing shows, I just wandered around from strange place to strange place. I found myself in all sorts of odd places with not much understanding of what those places actually were. This was intentional. I wanted to wander the city, to go into areas I’d never been to before with the explicit purpose of getting to see and understand more about the city. That wasn’t quite what happened though, mostly because I couldn’t really get out and walk around. So, stuck in my little Ford Ranger, I just looked at the sights of billboards, pavement, innumerable mom and pop restaurants I wanted to try, tents on the sidewalks, and bright, but sometimes hazy, skies, with the odd Hollywood sign sometimes peeking out from behind buildings and signs.

This is a city built around the movie industry, around entertainment itself. This is not a city for leisure, but for work. This is an industry city, whether we accept entertainment as an industry or not. And entertainment, by the purveyors and the makers of it alike, do not really want their creativity to be inherently tied with money. And yet, we all need some bread. So many go to Los Angeles as it is the epicenter of this world. If you want to try to make money out of your love for some form of creativity, it’s not a bad place to try. It’s the place where many really do go in order to strike gold, to get out there, to see how far their talent goes. And because of this, it is a rough and challenging place.

My last night in Los Angeles I had drinks with my friend Dylan, and he said that, yes, you can’t really wander around LA. It’s not a city made for that. And in fact, it can be a fairly rough spot for many people—we were even sitting in a bar only a mile or so away from Skid Row. 

To Dylan, LA, at least when he’s not feeling too great about living there, is like living within some sort of hellscape, separated by giant highways, where you drop off into your small little spaces between so many rough edges. And that seemed to confirm my experience of the city. I drove over some famously violent neighborhoods but didn’t see them. I passed by mega mansions but had no way to walk around their streets, many of them just not having sidewalks. The roads bisected neighborhoods and cut up urban areas that did once have the potential to be small walkable places of their own

And while I’ve said all of this, I don’t actually hate LA. For one, because of much of what I’ve said, it’s a little too easy to hate, leaving many of us unable to understand why some people truly love it there. And also, because much of what we think of as LA is made up from the movies that we see LA portrayed as. It is a wild and ambitious city full of eclectic people with eclectic ambitions. It really is hardly one thing. Sure, the main defining characteristic of the place could be the driving. But beyond that, what can you really define LA as? Yes, I’ve never lived there, and yes, almost every time I’ve been I’ve found some sort of trouble, but I’ve also found incredible food and coffee, strange people with odd but still interesting ideas, beautiful architecture and art, and a weird but admirable clinging to hope from those attempting to change their lives. 

I don’t love LA. It’s not the kind of city for someone like me who’d rather get lost in some dunes, or find beaver ponds. I like a city close to nonhuman places. But I do love all that is so raw and human about the city, everyone attempting to live and live well, even as our world makes that dream ever more impossible. I’ll never fully understand this place, because it really is ever evolving. And because of that, I’ll always go back, excited to witness whatever peculiarity this place wants to show me the next time.