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February 22, 2007
TT: This isn’t the city
I’m sitting in a room on the fourteenth floor of a boutique hotel in Brentwood, looking at a deceptively familiar skyline and seeing…nothing. I’ve only been in Los Angeles for one day, not nearly long enough to pierce the haze of half a lifetime’s worth of representation. The Long Goodbye, Chinatown, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, L.A. Confidential, L.A. Story, even Dragnet: all these fictional portayals of the Unreal City stand between me and the thing itself, preventing me from seeing what I’m seeing.Not that I’ve seen all that much. I arrived at noon yesterday, picked up my rental car, and went straight from LAX to the Hotel Angeleno, a short, anonymously ugly drive. “Did you know that O.J. in the Bronco exited at Sunset and the 405 and made a left past your hotel?” a local friend e-mailed me when I told him where I was staying. “It was a Holiday Inn until its recent refurbishment. You can catch a quick glimpse of it in Godfrey Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi.” That’s Hollywood for you—if it’s been in a movie, it’s real.
I’d already been struck by how flat and uninviting Los Angeles looks when viewed from the window of an airplane, but I’m hoping that my tour guide will help me see the beauty of this strange place. Stephanie Steward is a California girl who came east to college, took a course in criticism from me, worked as a research assistant on my Louis Armstrong biography, and in due course became a close friend. She loves Los Angeles and wants me to love it, too:
LA is a great town and has a very different beauty than San Fran. When traveling between the two cities I always think back to something I read in an interview with The Doors. I think it was Ray Manzarek talking but I can't remember exactly since I read it so long ago. The point is that he was talking about how the band was lumped in with the whole 1960s psychedelic rock scene and that, while this was probably the best way to categorize their music, they were very different from the flower-power bands from the SF Bay area. The Doors, coming from Venice Beach and Sunset Strip, were darker and grittier than, say, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, Jefferson Airplane, and that "Aquarius" sound. Anyway, I've been mulling over that contrast all day while thinking of you flying in this morning….
Steph and I launched my visit to the City of Angels by dining at the Westwood In-N-Out Burger (mmmm!) and seeing the Geffen Playhouse’s revival of Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet’s ferociously satirical play about the movie business, in which Alicia Silverstone has been cast in the role created on Broadway in 1988 by Madonna. I’d say that was a real Los Angeles evening, wouldn’t you?
Now I’m headed for bed. I’ve been waking up at five-thirty every morning since arriving in San Francisco, not because I want to but because my body still thinks it’s eight-thirty. Today I swore off alcohol, which tends to keep me awake, and my eyelids are drooping. Here’s hoping they’ll stay that way for the next eight hours. I’m eager to see more of Los Angeles, but it can wait a little longer.
Posted February 22, 2007 12:00 PM
