Los Angeles and Me
LA has always felt small to me, maybe because I was born there in 1950.
It’s still small to me, a rancho just east of the date palm trees presided over by a kind and open-hearted Mexican man, Don Sepulveda. It seems I’m still partial to my original feeling about LA along with a kind of footnote new to me— that LA is a city founded on the sands of irony is how I now see it, but I’m being ironic.
And so the other day when I felt like seeing it all over again I wandered around LA, through the city’s garden of the past, present and future where the temperature is always 98.6.
I walked without my car, I walked all the way down Fairfax to Farmer’s Market for coffee and a newspaper. There was coffee but no newspaper.
I sipped my coffee at the counter of Du-Pars, that legendary restaurant. The fundamentals were always in place here, I mused—the Mojave desert and the Pacific ocean. What more could we possibly need as a civilization? Only outer space could contain us, only LA is big enough and half-conscious enough to hold all our hopes and dreams, the blow-up dolls, the poetry of the streets, the high school my father attended in Hollywood, the Jewish delicatessen open all day and night.
The new museum on Wilshire would open at 10am. Only LA, I thought, with a brand new museum on every corner.
Post coffee I keep walking down Fairfax—I think I can, I think I can—past the Writer’s Guild, turn left at the corner of Wilshire, and head east, stopping briefly to look in the windows of the headquarters of The Academy of Motion Pictures.
Certainly I thought, if I played it right, I’d be the first person in line to see the new wing of the museum—a concrete slab with windows perched atop another new concrete slab—to arrive before the doors are open at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).
Indeed I am the first person admitted to the museum, riding the escalator to the top level, having the museum to myself for :30 seconds. Every continent is represented, from antiquity to post-modernity, the collection of a very wealthy person with astronautical deep pockets. Gallery after galley of art treasures, the keepsakes of a mogul of a man devoted to acquisition for whom this new architectural masterpiece is named.
The art experience at LACMA itself is overwhelming, newer than new, a tribute, it seems, to the wonderful irony that is Los Angeles—that somehow LA shouldn’t be here in the middle of the desert, more or less on the shores of boundless salt water, that LA has no right to exist.
Los Angeles as it should be, I think, must remain as it is right now, a kind of forever land of pretty people and unsolved mysteries, the kind of place, as Frost put it, “that will always take you in.”
LA can’t help but be itself. Whether it knows it or not LA celebrates the heights and depths of the improbable. It seems to have been born in that exact moment of history when liminality and actual consciousness see the world exactly as it is, that sliver of time when we are not yet quite awake or dead asleep. We’re the little people down here on earth, still believing in the possibility of space ships and happy endings, of wide limitless avenues that stretch from downtown to the sea.