Richard Flynn :: no comment

My time in Southern California was certainly too short: there was a lot more which I could have seen. What I did see and do, though, I enjoyed; this was due in large part, I’m sure, to the beautiful weather. It was not nearly as stiflingly hot as it had been in Texas and Tucson, but instead temperatures got to about 85ºF absolutely maximum on the days I was there, which was mitigated by cooling oceanic breezes. The days in Los Angeles were bright and clear, with none of the infamous smog trapped in by the Hollywood Hills.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles should perhaps really be called the ‘town of Our Lady, Queen of the angels’¹, but now of course Our Lady has been largely written out of the town’s nomenclature and this massive city—the epitome of massive urban sprawl—now just bears the end of its original Spanish name.

At the risk of sounding too negative, here is a list of the things I didn’t do when in Los Angeles:

1. See any movie-stars or other celebrities;
2. Go to anywhere with ‘Hollywood’ in its name;
3. Go on a tour of any of the movie studios (which for a long time have mostly been in Burbank, rather than the inner-L.A. suburb of Hollywood);
4. Go on a bus tour looking at Hollywood stars’ homes;
5. In short, do anything to do with the movie industry;
6. Travel on buses by night (from what I saw on the buses during the day, I could easily imagine that all the horror-stories I’d heard about late-night buses in L.A. were true);
7. Go to the Getty Center (which is something which I did rather want to do, but I’d planned to go on a Monday. The Getty Center is closed on Mondays. Just my luck. So, instead, I went to the beach. What a compromise.)

Instead I was able to wander around downtown Los Angeles on the Sunday, poking around some of the principal downtown neighbourhoods. I suppose, in retrospect, I didn’t really ‘do’ very much, but nevertheless I feel like I got a feel for the place. The photos show much of what I saw downtown, but I feel that the photos don’t quite ‘capture’ L.A. as I experienced it. It was certainly extraordinary (and entirely unplanned) to be able to see the sparsely-attended parade in commemoration of the 200th anniversary of Ecuadorian independence, and to see the subsequent celebrations in the old town.

I had always heard that, contrary to the common idealized misconceptions about Los Angeles as the glitzy city of the movies, it is in fact an awful city to visit, an endless sea of concrete where the car is king. When I flew from Sydney to Austin via LAX on 30th July, the arrival at LAX supported this view of the city: as we descended, I saw a city that was endless grey and brown, whereas 14 hours earlier we had climbed over a city that was remarkably blue and green. When I got properly downtown in L.A., though, I was pleasantly surprised to find a town which is quite easy to walk around, peppered with trees and benches and green spaces: so much nicer, in short, than disappointing Austin.

What’s more, while it’s true that many Victorian buildings were pulled down en masse in the middle of the 20th century to make way for numerous concrete monstrosities, this didn’t happen universally. Dotted around the downtown area there are some fine buildings of the late-ninteenth and early-twentieth centuries, many retaining traces of advertising slogans painted up in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s. This is a city which isn’t completely devoid of character.

One thing which I had been told and which did ring true was that the Metro underground railway system is massively underused. Someone—I forget who—suggested once that most Angelenos² don’t even know that there even is such a system! It’s not very extensive, with only three lines covering the inner suburbs, and at present there isn’t even a ticket barrier system! The tickets I bought had no magnetic stripe or any other machine-readable marking. I did however see signs at the Union Station Metro station saying that ticket barriers would be coming into service in the next few months.

At the beach

Those who haven’t got a car are left to taking buses to get anywhere beyond the limits of the Metro. The bus system is extensive, and seems pretty efficient. It was when I was on the bus to Santa Monica, though, that I came to realize the full extent of Los Angeles’ choked-up sprawl. The trip, about ten miles, took 90 minutes. During that time I was able to watch the mostly Hispanic corpus of passengers come and go.

I know that in the strictest terms places like Santa Monica are separate cities, but I find it difficult to think of them as little more than ‘suburbs’ of Los Angeles. Of course, this all really boils down to a question of terminology. Santa Monica has a pretty Pacific beach, and a famous pier. According to my Rough Guide, there is a large ex-pat English population in Santa Monica; I certainly encountered one English family, parents in their thirties bringing their five- or six-year-old son to have lunch with his benevolent American uncle (‘Aw, gee, yes, pull your pants up. I learnt at an early age that it’s good to keep your pants pulled up. Well, I learnt it a coupla weeks ago, really.’, said the uncle to the child as the latter stopped running to hug him, worried by the downwards creep of his waistband.)

After a very nice lunch (lobster sandwich, root beer float) I was walking back along the beach when I was accosted by a girl arranging subscriptions for a charity. I have always found this concept very difficult to deal with. (‘Oh yes, stranger I’ve just met, let me give you my bank details so that I can give money regularly to some cause that I heard about thirty seconds ago. That sounds like a perfect idea!’—does anyone seriously think like this?) Anyway, I knew she was just doing her job, so I responded appropriately to her limp handshake and her request for my name, and waited patiently for her spiel—about sponsoring poor Mexican children—to finish before saying that, really, I couldn’t… ‘You can’t, or you won’t?’ She spat out the last word. At this point I was angry with this girl. I had so far been a paragon of politesse. ‘A little bit of both, in fact.’, came my reply, as I tried to be rid of her in the swiftest way possible. ‘Well, have a nice day.’ Little did I know that those four words—so harmless, almost pleasant, on the page—could harbour so much venom. I don’t remember her name, but I do remember that she had a front tooth which was badly chipped: had she been so rude to some previous victim as to have driven him to violence? The experience certainly soured the rest of my afternoon.³

I then spent most of the afternoon making the pleasant walk of about three miles south along the coast to Venice Beach. Where Santa Monica is quite gentrified, Venice Beach is unashamedly hippy. The boardwalk was packed with people come to see the stalls, and to be seen themselves. The most frequently seen businesses—right on the boardwalk—were those whose sole purpose is to demonstrate that you suffer from one of the limited number of medical conditions (including ‘stress’ and ‘migraine’) for which marijuana can legally be prescribed in California, and then to supply it. I believe that when the law came into effect in the last few years, the federal government tried to overturn it, but of course was not able to interfere in the state’s affairs. It was fun to watch some of the people at Venice Beach with an outsider’s perspective, but I wasn’t sorry to leave to take the bus back downtown. I certainly wouldn’t want to have been there after sunset, when surely the crazies would really have come out of the woodwork.

San Diego

For all that I enjoyed spending time in Greater L.A., and that it didn’t feel nearly as ‘unreal’ as many people had said, when I arrived in San Diego for the day I felt like I was in a really ‘real’ city. It struck me during the day how much like Sydney San Diego is: Sydney is at latitude 33º51’S, while San Diego is at 32º43’N. They have very similar climates, although it doesn’t get as cold in winter in San Diego as Sydney does,⁴—my inner amateur meteorologist suspects that it gets warming winds both coming north from Mexico and points south, and across the Mojave desert, from which it is barely separated (unlike Sydney and the Blue Mountains). Another link between San Diego and Sydney is that they are on the Pacific coast—what an experience, academically at least, for me to look across the Pacific from the east. Finally, both cities have a proliferation of Westfield shopping centres. It appears that this Australian retail giant owns three locations in San Diego (as well as tens of other malls throughout the U.S.A., including a large city-centre mall in San Francisco).

The three-hour railway journey south to San Diego was itself highly enjoyable, closely following the coast line: at some points it felt like the railway was only about ten yards from the shore. The journey afforded me the opportunity to place various SoCal towns which previously I had known by name only—Anaheim, Orange County, Oceanside, Mission Viejo, etc.

After the train arrived, I went to the William Heath Davis house, which is in the historic Gaslamp District (which has apparently been cleaned up in recent years, having previously been a somewhat seedy neighbourhood). Davis is seen as the father of modern San Diego, having been involved in the planning of the city in the nineteenth century, and his house was subsequently used for various purposes, and was even moved around the city. The museum is very well presented, with the different rooms laid out according to the different ways they were used throughout the years.

That afternoon I had wanted to go to Balboa Park, which is where there is a huge number of diverse museums. I purchased a day pass for the buses, and took a bus north to the park. Looking at the map, I saw a huge expanse of green representing the park, so I got off the bus at the park’s northwest corner (opposite the entrance to the zoo), thinking that it would be a pleasant walk to the museums from there. Boy was I wrong. I ended up having to scrabble down a steep dust bank before walking through a rather hot sandy valley. Eventually I got to a pavementless road: I followed it for a while, went past the naval hospital, but before too long the road turned into a proper highway, which I definitely couldn’t walk along. I crossed at a pedestrian crossing, and my trusty phone showed that I should just walk in some direction to meet an ordinary city street. Well, I ended up having to scrabble up another steep dusty bank, avoiding the numerous broken bottles in the process, my bag on my back, sweat on my brow, pain in my feet.

Eventually, after a bit more walking (this time in properly paved streets) I caught the same bus and got off at the stop I should have used in the first place. By this time I was too exhausted, I didn’t have the energy to take in any museums properly, and anyway the ones I wanted to go to were closing since it was now 5pm. I wandered along the Prado, the path past the museums, and eventually got another couple of buses right down to the shore.

There I was able to buy a return ticket for the ferry across the little bay to Coronado, which runs once an hour in either direction. At this point I direct you to my photos of San Diego from the boats, and from Coronado itself.

After a light supper in Coronado I caught the ferry back in order to get my return train to L.A. It was on that journey that I was amused to overhear a phone conversation from the seat behind mine. The train arrived soon after 11pm, and I still had to pack all my stuff to be ready to leave fairly early the following morning to take the train north to Oakland and San Francisco.