the affair to which there will be no end

There was this one time, not so long ago, I mentioned to a friend that what I was really looking for in a relationship was peace and quiet. Nonsense, he said. You like the dramatics. Apparently, for never have I felt so strongly about a city as I do about Los Angeles. Never has a place been able to make me angry one minute and ecstatic the next. After three years, the relationship hasn’t cooled at all. It’s just getting going. This trip was half nightmare, half spiritual experience. Now that’s what I call keeping it interesting. I’m headed back in September.

LOS ANGELES - There are many ways to re-introduce oneself into the experience that is L.A. -- this time, it was the light rail. Turned out to be a fine way of doing things. Emerging into the sunlight at the Hollywood and Vine station of the Red Line was rather bizarre. I’d gotten all the way here from the airport, never setting foot in a car, not to mention getting behind the wheel. The cliché about needing a car to go anywhere is fast becoming a lie.

This time, the lessons of journeys past were well remembered -- there is no reason to go west of La Cienega except to see friends or lovers. So to celebrate my allegiance to the Eastside, the trip began in MacArthur Park, a neighborhood that's not exactly on the tourist maps.

Getting there from Hollywood takes you through some interesting territory, such as the hilly stretch east of Vermont and west of the 101. Predominantly Latino and as charming as Silver Lake, but with rents at least halved. Up and down the hills, little bungalows and a few condo complexes, in the afternoon light, everything’s got a little haze around it, and it looks idyllic, with the antique LA Unified school buses stopping every so often, crossing guards waving their hands and lots of giggling children.

How many times have I driven past the Park Plaza Hotel, unforgettable as it looms over the expanse of MacArthur Park. It’ beige deco exterior makes it easily one of Los Angeles’ most beautiful buildings, and the interior is dark, cool and majestic beyond just about anything you’ll find on the West Coast. For proof, I duck my head in and climb the grand staircase, a thing of epic proportions, high up to the ball rooms, which are open to visitors – wood paneling, lots of natural light, unbelievably beautiful. The tower is undergoing a gut renovation, and the hotel will reopen shortly, but for now it’s strictly events and movie shoots. The latter happen here quite often, as evidenced by the posters hanging on the walls everywhere.

Outside, leaning against the car, I notice for the first time that inscribed above the hotel door are the words “All things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so unto them.”

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It’s good to be back in the mountains, where as per usual, everyone is friendly, and the marine layer means that the air is better and the sun is less intense. Up top, everyone is stretching.

Down the mountain, the sun is trying to penetrate the marine layer, bathing the valley in a white glow. A Chinese girl, tall, slender and elegant, strikes a pose against the fence, the halo effect is out in full force, and she looks like a goddess as she purposefully applies her makeup, case held high, brush in broad, deliberate strokes. Her red car doors are open, classical music floats out into the chilly morning.

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Young anglos in Los Angeles are ridiculously bitter. It shows whenever you come face to face with them. They all look fabulous, they all drive nice cars, and probably they all have a lot of credit card debt too.

But then again, these people move here for all the wrong reasons. What is fame if not a farce? What is it if not a cry for help? Those who want to be famous need therapy.

Fine things to ponder on a drive through Montecito Heights, which looks like the village of Montecito somewhere in Sonora instead of a dirt poor mostly Mexican neighborhood clustered on a dusty hillside just east of Downtown Los Angeles and the wasteland surrounding the LA River that’s dotted with worthwhile destinations such as the Brewery Art Colony and the San Antonio Winery. Alameda leads to Fifth Street, a great way to come to downtown, beginning in Skid Row, and letting the Bunker Hill skyline pull you out of the sadness and toward the beauty of the Gas Company Tower, which must be one of America’s most beautiful skyscrapers, making its neighbor, the Library Tower, look dull.

But nothing outshines the Central Library itself, with the attendant gardens to the west. If you park in the garage and take the elevator upstairs, you emerge into that sea of green and burbling fountains, watching the lunch crowd dining al fresco at Café Pinot. It’s in places like these that one easily believes in Downtown’s future. Lunch is at Ciudad with an work aquaintance, and it consists of virgin mojitos and flatbread with olive tapanade followed by a superb tapas platter I’ll order again and again, along with a cuban sandwich I’m not hungry for but can’t help but eat it’s so tasty. My companion is in good spirits, pregnant even, and it’s fun to sit out on the patio and take in the early afternoon.

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Late afternoon finds me in the San Gabriel Valley, taking the never ending Valley Boulevard through the industrial east side, through Alhambra, which itself is heavily asian although at heart, still a dusty suburb with little to recommend it. But crossing the line into the small town of San Gabriel, passersby can see a sign in Chinese lettering that announces the opening of a new Hilton Hotel, with a rendering of an ultramodern building on it. Across the busy avenue behind a million trees, the San Gabriel Square hides like a best kept secret, sort of the prototypical California shopping mall, stacked three levels high, but all open to the elements, a Calabasas Commons for the wealthy Asian community.

Patrons at the mall are 100% Asian, but there’s a wealth of restaurants and cafes, not to mention the gigantic Ranch 99 market, part of a chain of asian markets sprinkled across the Southland. Young and old, rich and working class mingle, tourists snap pictures of each other in front of the lovely fountain in the front courtyard, and I feel oddly out of place, as if I’ve stumbled into a foreign country. Apparently, everyone else is aware of this too.

Across the street the Norm’s coffee shop has a big banner up encouraging it’s patrons to come celebrate “Dia de las Madres.” Sometimes the multi-culti gets a bit much - there’s the gargantuan Hawaii Supermarket across Del Mar Avenue to consider. I don’t, instead heading past the Ban Gout Coffee shop (A Vietnamese Cafe) turning north toward the mountains, which are splendid in afternoon light, and more visible than is the usual in this oft smog-choked inland valley.

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There is so much going on. A fashion show at the Los Altos Apartments on a side street somewhere off of Wilshire Boulevard. An art walk at an old warehouse turned artists community on Santa Fe Avenue out where its all railroad tracks and wholesalers. A block party and design showcase on Traction Avenue beyond the domain of the toy dealers and the heroin addicts that clog the streets of Skid Row. Los Angeles’ fringes are alive with creativity, artistic vision amid the pastelerias, joyerias, zapaterias and taquerias, the noodle shops and the Armenian groceries, the swap meets and the iglesias pentecostales, trash strewn lots and weed choked sidewalks, that glaring sun and the roar of traffic as it rushes from light to light, headed nowhere fast but waiting for the day when it just might make it across town in half an hour.

Nobody is meant for this, so all I can do is drive to quiet neighborhoods like San Marino and embrace the shaded streets where haciendas hide near tudor manses and georgian marvels with white pillars near the palatial old-Cali Ritz, and I want to breathe, but I can’t.

Mind in overdrive, senses assaulted, eyes and feet are begging for mercy, never again to stare at traffic lights, to brake then accelerate, braking, braking, accelerating and the people, their hearts smaller than needles eyes, so lonely they all are. Everywhere, people hate each other with their eyes, nobody has enough love here, for themselves or each other. LA is one big secondary school, cliques in procession, cars in a long line down Fairfax waiting to park at Canters because that’s where everybody goes late at night.

I love Los Angeles, but love, as they say, is hell. Minute to minute, hour to hour, explosive, complex and bizarre and wonderful and a pleasure to embrace but some days you wish it was dead. Brown fields of dying grass, peach colored bungalows with their windows fenced in by elaborate grillwork painted white, colored dresses hanging in the windows where curtains could be, and it seems to me that if Los Angeles is the future of this country, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry, to rejoice or flee in terror, because this awe-inspiring, horror show of a city is just too much to ignore, but at the same time, too much to take in.

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The afternoon irritated enough to push me into ditching the car at the hotel for a walk down of Hollywood Boulevard to La Brea Avenue, where the only refuge is at the cavernous cyber café where you have to leave a picture ID at the counter before logging on in case you commit any crimes in the process.

Hollywood Boulevard on foot, after dark, is a depressing affair. It’s where LA is at its most pathetic, not called the boulevard of broken dreams for nothing. The cleanest sidewalks in town, to be sure, with those endless streams of stars, shimmering in the blackness of the evening, but the strip reminds me of my own neighborhood, except that’s not famous. The same greasy pizza joints, discount stores and people hanging out on the corners, a low-grade monotony punctuated by the occasional bright spark of revitalization.

Book City, beckoning by day, now looks forgotten and sad, it’s once again to go out of business but they say that’s just part of its charm. The acres of metal grating over the lingerie displays and the neon glow of the adult bookstores, the sad groups at bus stops going who knows where, home maybe, or trying to get out of the neighborhood for the evening.

And the worst part about it is, the supposedly revitalized strip near Highland comes off cheap and unlovable, the glittering monstrosity on the corner offering little more than a few run of the mill chain stores, the design of the beast completely uninspirational. Tourists wander up and down the steps and in the courtyard of the mall, but nobody is really doing anything except looking, looking for something more than what’s there. Security guards stand everywhere, eyeing the crowd, trying to keep the Boulevard out, the so-called Grand Entrance to the Kodak Theatre is lined with duty free shops, everything has this sort of pathetic demeanor to it, look, love us, but there’s absolutely zilch to love.

Midwestern couples drag their children through the souvenir shops, everyone is a little bewildered, in front of the newly remodeled Chinese (now with six additional theatres!) there are less tourists than usual, and there’s a line of the Star Wars freaks lined up for next week’s premiere, with a particularly grotesque Elvis impersonator frightening the pedestrians.

A marquee on the mall is a non stop promo for Entertainment Tonight, and the celebrity gossip and scandal that blazes across the electronic board underneath an ad for frozen Wolfgang Puck pizzas seems appropriate. Here we are, at the heart of the entertainment industry, and it’s all rotten and over-marketed and sad.

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Today is Friday, and it’s all about the San Fernando Valley. I’m about ready to secede from LA myself, so I figured I’d be in good company.

The first time visit to the little Tujunga Avenue shopping district in Studio City was when I went looking for Vitello’s which is where Robert Blake allegedly shot his wife, Bonny Lee Bakely. Vitello’s is there, but it’s somewhat of an afterthought to the strip that leads Tujunga up to Moorpark, one of the typical Valley thoroughfares that span it end to end, strip malls and ‘luxury’ apartment complexes that look more like housing projects.

At the heart of the strip is the unique little Aroma Coffee and Tea shop, a slice of civilization more advanced than so much on the other side of the hill. Stepping into the tiny building covered in vines and bougainvillea one enters something akin to the world’s most comforting kitchen and dining room. A counter, tables, espresso machines spitting, lovely but challenged housewives, yoga mats rolled up under their arms, pondering the menu, which includes a full selection of breakfast, lunch and dinner, and judging by what people are eating, it looks pretty good. But the front room is just the beginning – off to the right, stone floored patio under an arbor of green is filled with people reading and talking and drinking the excellent coffee, to the left, a covered porch looks like something from a Merchant-Ivory film. Beyond, a library themed room and behind that, a bookstore with a small selection of general interest titles.

A Seattle micro-roaster supplies the shop, patronized by plenty of sunglass wearing types that look like somebody, but of course in LA, everyone spends a lot of time trying to look like somebody, even if they’re mostly nobody. Ladies are eating pancake breakfasts near a television that shows yet another car chase in progress, this time, it’s already at standoff phase, on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach, very far away from this charmed little corner of the world, even if Vitello’s stands like an undesirable memory across the street, near A La Vie (Home and Garden) and a passel of attractive little home design stores and boutiques. Caioti Pizza Café is an industrial rustic space that smells like Brooklyn, which is where Mark Blanchard, owner of the Power Yoga Studio next door is from, which is where the ladies with the mats must have been before they wandered into Aroma.

Nobody comes to the Valley unless they have to, and that’s a shame, I think, pulling over on the banks of the Tujunga Wash just a few blocks to the north and west, where The Great Wall of Los Angeles is actually the western wall of the nearly dry drainage ditch that forms the eastern boundary of a high school campus where a cop car keeps the watch. On this side, however, a pleasant park has been created along the boulevard, with a winding path underneath old trees perfect for a stroll with your dog, or alone.

The oldest murals of the “Great Wall” date from the mid-70’s, when the city funded an artistic venture that involved a portrayal of California’s multi-tiered past, from prehistoric times to the present, which, for the purposes of the mural, was somewhere in the early 80’s. The portrayals and what was chosen to represent certain time periods reflects fairly accurately California’s leftist leanings, and there are a fair few little slips of the tongue, i.e., “Tomas” Alva Edison. The Roaring Twenties here are called “An Illusion of Prosperity,” “The Development of Suburbia” which is illustrated by a truck labeled “White’s Moving,” etcetera, etcetera. “The Red Scare” features Sen. McCarthy wrapped in an American flag, there’s an homage to “The Birth of Rock and Roll,” “Origins of Gay Rights”, and a lot of other stuff.

Basically, it's the “People’s History of the United States” painted on a wall, and it’s not that ideologically I’m at odds, but the onesidedness is kind of annoying.

Near the Oxnard Street bridge in the little porta san, a guerrilla poet slash perv has taken the time to write on just about every spare bit of wall, elaborate erotica that invariably includes a recount of a fantasy where “My mom wears Leggs Sheer to Waist Pantyhose, she lets me watch her put them on.” Or, “My mom is an LAPD Detective and she wears Sheer to Waist Pantyhose..” I smile and remember that we’re in the land of fetishes gone to orbit. Vivid Video’s inauspicious home office is just a few blocks over on Califa Street, but who knows what evil lurks behind the ranch home facades across the boulevard?

Burbank Boulevard is a a blur of signage. Passage to India Restaurant, Tacos Michoacan, an Eagle Lodge post with a gigantic American flag painted on its cinder-block front, Langano Ethiopian Food, Valley Hye Armenian Market (Imported Foods). Across the 405, suddenly, the multi-culti monotony gives way to endless fields, as if the valley were over, even though it’s only been momentarily interrupted. The towers of Sherman Oaks rise in the shadow of the Santa Monicas, looking almost lovely beyond these fields of grass. I turn into the wildlife preserve that comprises the eastern portion of the Sepulveda Dam parklands, driving past cricket fields and a water reclamation plant, where much of the land has been given over to a calming Japanese garden.

In the preserve parking lot, a handful of cars are parked, most of them occupied, the secluded space perfect for bus drivers who are napping, or the couple in the pickup truck exchanging heated words in Spanish, then quieting down, taking a softer approach to whatever it is they’re discussing.

There’s not much wildlife, but the cacophony of birds singing is a constant, other sightings include teenagers smoking and flirting with each other near the restrooms, but its pleasant weather for a walk across the field, out to where the trail starts in earnest. Along the way, there’s little to see, except for the abuelito out for a stroll with his binoculars, on the prowl in the silence framed by the low roar of freeway traffic over the embankment.

At the park entrance, across from the lush golf course, a latina in a Tampa Bay t-shirt sells flowers on the street corner across from the packs of polo-shirt wearing men tee-ing off inside the fence, and the assault begins again, this time on Reseda Boulevard. Kebab House, Thai Pot, French Bakery and Patisserie, Se Habla Espanol, Pho 999, Showgirls, Iglesia La Nueva Jerusalem, Home Plate Burgers (“Home of the Foot Long Hot Dog, Where 12 Inches Is Just Average”), New Horizon (“A perfect church for those who aren’t”), Video El Nile Egyptian, Afghan Market, Fosters Donuts, Thai BBQ, Skirmish Paint Ball Supplies, Bombay Spiceland, QT Chicago Dogs, and then Joyce’s Coffee Shop in what must be the old center of the auspicious Northridge district, best known for an earthquake that near did in a lot of Los Angeles back in 1994, almost as well known for the conglomerate of porn studios within its borders, not to mention the much-sniffed at campus of Cal State University.

There’s no parking troubles in this corner of the world – I enter what seems to be the late 50’s, probably, red nauga booths and flagstone on one wall, a low counter with little round stools rising out of the floor, glass installers and ne’er do-wells alike stopping in for coffee in scuffed up mugs that advertise plumbing services and the like. The pretty latina waitress swoops in, with her finely tuned, completely Midwestern “Coffee, Honey?”

She pours, then moves on to the glass installers, launching into rapid-fire Spanish, letting me settle for the $3.95 breakfast special served all day, which includes pancakes, eggs, sausage, bacon and hash browns. Such a deal. I pretend to read the Los Angeles Times, but its more fun watching the goings on, which mostly involve the shy busboy making the rounds, a blonde chick with what must be a boobjob cracking smiles for all and sundry, and men shouting to Rudy the fry cook, “Take the rest of the day off!” as they tighten their belts and head for the exits.” It’s superb and not at all like Los Angeles, which can be a blessing sometimes.

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Canoga Park is where the Valley gets ugly. Canoga Park is, politely, hell on God’s earth. Not so much because it looks bad, but for how it feels. They’ve done a terrific job of sprucing up the central district, painting the storefronts yellow, red, purple and powder blue. The Madrid Theatre is housed in a nice modern structure done up in corrugated metal, sort of a dome thing, Target Department Stores is sponsoring a concert series which brings ballet and symphony orchestra concerts to a rather downmarket section of the world. Across the street the psychic “solves love and family problems”, the First Baptist probably purports to do the same for less money if you don’t count passing the collection plate, but the sex shop on the block gives no such promises, vowing instead to have you locked up if you engage in “oral copulation” on the premises. Its not even this sort of thing that lends Canoga Park its ugliness, it’s more a vibe. And the air. It’s particularly foul at this hour, sort of grimy as the afternoon light flattens out, leaving everything dull at the edges, flat and uninteresting, as if light is too much for this brooding little burg to handle.

Across Topanga Canyon Boulevard, which leads to a much less dreary part of the city, there’s the Scotland Yard Pub all done up as if it were ripped from England. Next door the façade of the Cobalt Café looks promising, burnished metal signage and a tinted glass front, but a look through the doors reveals the most dowdy of rec room décor, a forlorn bar toward the back and a stage rising not a foot off the floor. A schedule on the door announces tonight’s $7 Punks Against Prohibition jam, Open Mic Nights are earlier in the week. The place won’t open until seven.

A good deal more uplifting is the smell emenating from the doors opening and closing that lead to Edie’s Bakery on Topanga, a splash of good cheer in this dour little pocket. Lavish fruit tarts tempt from behind the glass, fresh baked challah loaves are heaped high on the shelves, cookies on platters wait to be taken home, and I buy a few because I am so glad to have found something loveable in this misery of a place.

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Exiting the Ventura Freeway onto Van Nuys Boulevard, one comes to “Auto Row.” This is “Auto Row” because a beautiful civic-sponsored sign announces that this is the beginning of “Auto Row.” Also helping with the announcement are hundreds of colorful aquamarine banners on three-pronged light poles that stand near an endless line of palm trees. Add to that a well-watered median strip, and it’s worthy of the driveway to a resort hotel, except all you see along here are Pontiac and Ford Dealers, VW and other places you can buy cars.

How fitting, that one of the nicest streetscapes in the Valley is where the Valley comes to buy their cars. You’d think this was the gateway to nirvana, but Van Nuys has rarely been called that, even if it’s not at all boring, the harbinger of things to come northward being the collection of state and city buildings which aren’t as ugly as you’d think they might be, being government buildings and all, but it’s directly after the place where you do jury duty, where you go to settle your traffic tickets and where you go to get your passport redone that you come to Van Nuys proper, where the boulevard intersects another boulevard, Victory, which isn’t much to celebrate, even though the name implies something hard fought and won.

Wandering through the swap meets where one can buy cheap bras and panties should one need them, luggage, tacos and lots more basic items, it's hard to understand why people keep falling away to form little splinter communities, the latest being Lake Balboa, which is a joke because there’s no Lake Balboa in Lake Balboa – it just so happens that this neck of the woods is near the forced lake at the Sepulveda Dam, which is purely an act of civil engineering, and nowhere you’d build a second home, that’s for damn sure.

And besides, nothing in Lake Balboa is quite as interesting as the culinary tour through Latin America (Menudo! Weekends Only!) that hides in the storefronts all up and down Victory and Van Nuys. Or the Ritmo Latino store, outside of which strolls a woman you might call Crazy Parrot Lady, mostly because she was all done up in leopard prints she may or may not have painted on to her overtanned body, not to mention the parrot she was shouting at, who was in turn clutching the lady’s rather ample but tired bosoms. She may have been white once, it’s difficult to tell now, but still, she’s the closest thing to it on this busy and nearly 100% latino shopping district.

I tear through the racks at Ritmo in vain for new rock en espanol discs that might make for a superb soundtrack for sitting in traffic, only later noticing the little door in the back that leads into a blacklit cave glowing with fluorescent lights, looking very college town in 1985. Ritmo Rock, announces the sign above the cave entrance. Inside, Salvador helps me locate Aterciopelados’ Gozo Pederoso disc, which is supposed to be good.

Out on the corner, a harassed bus driver is screaming at would-be passengers, a mammoth crowd of shoppers trying to head home, except that the bus is already packed. And they say nobody rides public transport in this town.

So she’s screaming, the bus driver is. “STOP CLIMBING IN THE BACK DOOR! STOP IT!”

She might do well to learn Spanish. Nobody’s listening.

On the stereo, the whole world is gone as the vocalist wails the sad-sung but hopeful refrain….the sky is blue, the space is full of light…life is the color of a rose….

Thanks for the reminder.

 

Email: davidr@lifeingotham.com

Next Update: July 1

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