Almighty Automobiles, Bizarre Fashion, Covid-19, and Other Reflections on a Visit to Los Angeles (Feb. 29-Mar. 6, 2020)
ALMIGHTY AUTOMOBILES. Angelinos adore their automobiles – that is what the landscape tells me. Everywhere I turn public space bows down to the automobile; wide, fast-moving city streets and plentiful parking, connecting to colossal freeways slashing through neighborhoods; pushing walkers and bicyclists to the narrow periphery.
BIZARRE. My seat inside Bottega Louie Patisserie provides a fashion show of the bizarre. A young woman strolls in wearing a mud-brown, sack-shaped dress with the enormous letters G-U-C-C-I sprawled across the back. Matching knee-high socks (á la 1980) and sneakers complete her look. Sneakers. I see sneakers matched with every imaginable outfit. Sneakers with mom jeans. Sneakers with tailored suits. Later I pass a grown man wearing a track suit with a cartoon character – and of course sneakers. Do I betray having already lived through the fashion disasters of the 1980s?
COVID-19. The Corona virus outbreak – soon to be pandemic – prompts Governor Gavin Newsom to declare a state of emergency in California on Wednesday, March 4th, 2020. A disheveled man in line at CVS remarks that hand sanitizer has sold out everywhere. In public restrooms I marvel that other women are finally taking the time to properly wash their hands, while talking with one another about how they are taking the time to properly wash their hands.
“DUDE??? DUDE!” Said one dude to another dude at their chance encounter on a street in DTLA (the trendy label for downtown LA). Each intonation of this one word covering an extended sentence worth of information. Having returned to the Midwest, I miss this efficient Californian use of language. Dude.
E-SCOOTERS careening the wrong way down bike paths, tearing down the sidewalk. Even in our permitted peripheral space we pedestrians aren’t safe. After a few near misses, I start to wonder: Is this how people are run out of a western town these days, by e-scooters?
FREEWAYS lure cars via entrance ramps with promises of faster speeds, but ensnare them in a web of tail-lights and exhaust. From my hotel room I watch cars creep along The 110, a freeway, full at all hours. Just a couple of weeks later, after Gov. Newsom issues a stay-at-home directive, I see images of the same freeway with a mere scattering of cars and a backdrop of blue sky. (And yes, it is ‘The 110′ in LA. In northern California this highway – if it existed – would go by the more modest name of “110.”)
GETTY CENTER. High on a hill above Brentwood, the travertine temple shines in the warm winter sun. The surrounding gardens captivate me. On the southeastern promontory a garden celebrates the cactus: giant pincushions of golden barrel cacti, spikes of candelabra tree succulents, stacked coins of silver dollar prickly pear cacti, and knife blades emerging from agave rosettes. Hummingbirds dance through the Central Garden with its magenta bougainvillea bound in treelike trellises, carefully manicured but currently leafless trees, dry tall grasses, and a stream flowing down over precisely placed stones.
HOLLYWOOD. From my hotel room I see the iconic Hollywood sign atop Griffith Park in the distance. Through this smoggy, sprawling urban landscape, the sign appears weathered. This image is definitely not on-brand.
ICONIC IMAGES. Palm trees. Tanned, toned bodies. Skateboards. Wide, sandy beaches. See also H above, M below.
JOY! Unburdened by a winter coat, hat, and mittens, I gleefully float down the street. Early March in Los Angeles prompts the joyful feelings of late April in Minneapolis, when we finally shed our heavy layers. The light is wrong though, the sun sits too low in the sky, and the palm trees are frankly foreign, but oh the joy of warm sun on bare skin on a winter’s day.
KOBE BRYANT. His likeness greets you everywhere you turn. Murals cover building walls. “RIP Black Mamba.” Street vendors sell Kobe memorabilia – t-shirts, sweatshirts, pins, posters. His recent passing in a helicopter accident draws my attention to the bountiful helipads atop DTLA buildings, visible in satellite imagery by their encircled fifteens, twelves, elevens, and tens, which designate a building’s weight limit in thousands of pounds.
LEGALIZED MARIJUANA. Riding on light rail I pass LitCo Dispensary, one of many stores from which to purchase ‘legalized’ marijuana and then get ‘lit.’ That grassy, earthy smell wafts down streets, alleys, beaches, as if Angelinos perfume the city with weed.
MALLS. In DTLA the subterranean mall dominates. Start your shopping at the street-level and then ride the escalator down into more decadence. In oceanfront Santa Monica shopping remains above ground, along the Third Street Promenade or at the open-air Santa Monica Place.
NOSE JOB? I notice a bandaged nose on a petite young woman. Was her original nose not as acceptably petite as the rest of her body? Was this an attempt to better conform to a specific ideal of beauty and finally land her big role? But what is beauty and will this actually make her happier?
OCEAN. The mighty Pacific Ocean extends west to the horizon. I stroll across the broad, sandy Santa Monica beach and settle in at the shoreline. I soak up the warm sun and sway in the forceful onshore breeze. When the sizable swells dump on the shore, I am refreshed by the ocean’s spray. The Marbled Godwits, delicate shorebirds with skinny, elongated beaks, scurry along, plucking unseen morsels from the sand, while a few smaller Sanderlings scramble along the constantly shifting water’s edge.
PROPER PRIUSES and trendy Teslas but also ebony Escalades and loud Lamborghinis, beat-up Buicks and low-rider Chevrolets. A non-stop parade.
¿QUÉ PASA? As the bus travels through Westlake, Spanish surrounds me. The students on the bus speak muy rápido! My attempt to eavesdrop on their quotidian dramas thwarted, I spend my time daydreaming about the delicious delights inside the panaderías and taquerías we pass. ¡Qué rica!
RAINDROPS. I feel three, maybe four, extraordinary raindrops. I recall the “wacky weekend weather forecast” in the movie LA Story. Wasn’t I promised sunny and 70 degrees? But really, where is the rain in this rainy season? The media report a rainless February up north in San Francisco, foretelling another summer of widespread wildfires.
SMOG sneaks around me unnoticed until I gain some elevation. I look down from the Getty Center and (barely) see downtown LA 15 miles away, trapped in a grubby layer of smog, sandwiched between broad bands of verdant vegetation and robin’s egg blue sky. An LA basin Jello mold. As I travel to LAX the next day, the Flyaway bus cuts through smudge. Air quality in the gray Jello on this day qualifies as only ‘moderate’ pollution. With fine particulate matter levels at 37.25 µg/m3, this exceeds any value I noted in over six months monitoring air quality in Minneapolis.
TAR. At the La Brea Tar Pits I am alerted to an oozing patch of tar in the grass by a neon green cone labeled ‘gooey.’ The curious little girl in me picks up a stick and pokes the tar. Sticky! Sticky enough to trap saber-toothed cats, Columbian mammoths, American lions, Harlan’s ground sloths, and Dire wolves. Sticky enough to catch a ride on the soles of my sneakers, all of the way back to Minnesota.
UNDERPASS. Overpass. Underpass. Overpass. Riding on the light rail we pass spaghetti: a multi-level, tangled junction of highways. Did a child design this perilous construction with their erector set? My mind calls up images – courtesy of the evening news – of collapsed roadways, damaged during earthquakes. Is this new light rail line any safer?
VOTERS. For Bernie. For Warren. Energized bodies carrying campaign posters stream out of rallies and onto the streets near the convention center in the days before the presidential primary election. Energy builds up to the primary, but is quickly deflated when the Governor declares a state of emergency the following day.
WILLOWBROOK/ROSA PARKS STATION. We transfer from the Metro Green Line to the Blue Line (aka the A-line), completing the first segment of a daring trip using public transit from LAX to DTLA. Nobody uses public transit from the airport, I was told. Miraculously, we are surrounded by other people: BIPOC Angelinos and a few European tourists. As we pull into the Watts Tower/103rd Street Station, I reflect on the lasting association of “Watts” with “riots,” riots that occurred over half a century ago.
X. A giant X of airplane contrails marks the sky, perhaps painted by LAX departures and arrivals. Or perhaps those from BUR (Bob Hope/Burbank), LBG (Long Beach), SNA (John Wayne/Orange County), or ONT (Ontario). Or – albeit unlikely – from a tiny airport, like Hawthorne Municipal Airport, its runway nearly swallowed by urban sprawl, visible from the Metro Green Line.
YOUTH. The attempt to stay – or at least appear – young sets the vibe of this city. Fitness centers. Face lifts. Whole Foods. Salads. Plant-based meats. But what about the polluted air? And the time spent immobile in cars?
ZOOOOM! The Uber driver punches the gas to move us forward two car lengths, then slams on his brakes. He repeats this Zoom-and-Stop cycle, whenever the mass of cars creeps forward. “We are used to the traffic. Always carry a snack with you and you will be fine,” a museum employee shared earlier. With this driver’s surging and braking, eating seemed likely to result in undesired regurgitation. I climbed out of the Uber at the light rail station, stuffed myself into a full train, and relaxed for the rest of my journey.
(You thought I was referring to video conferencing, didn’t you? But this was before all that.)
Postscript: From Z back to A…
ABSURD Times. My reflections as a visitor to Los Angeles occurred two years ago as the Covid-19 pandemic arrived on the scene and just days before a lockdown radically altered life in LA – as across the entire world. Many Angelinos briefly experienced a new reality: their neighborhoods with less traffic, noise, and smog. Might this crisis provoke more people to demand safer streets for pedestrians and bicyclists and cleaner air for all? Might the increasing density in Central LA and near light rail stations and an expanding network of light rail lines be joined by miles of protected bike lanes, wider sidewalks, narrower streets, and lower speed limits? I hope to delight in these absurdities on future visits.
© 2022, Kelsey McDonald. All rights reserved.
out exploring back soon 