"L.A.'s Essence": Coda

IF WE WERE having class this week, I would have pointed your attention to a dust up that's occurring in real time out here in the journo-world. The New York Times has been publishing a series of pieces by Verilyn Klinkenborg about Los Angeles, many of which haven't been sitting well with us "laid back" folks.

It's not so much what he is saying in these delicately appointed pieces about L.A. -- it's what he isn't saying, and the tone. There's always the tone.

Last Sunday, the Times published an editorial "Haunting Los Angeles" in which Klinkenborg explains that he is at a loss to understand Los Angeles' essenece: "The iconic glimpses don't help me in my quest -- not the sudden view of the Hollywood sign I get from the Hollywood Freeway, not the view of downtown almost floating in the sunset from Pasadena. Every now and then, I turn a corner and think that something essential is about to be revealed. The feeling intensifies all the way up Venice Boulvard into Culver City, and then I'm on National taking one of those curious hidden freeway entrances and suddenly the feeling vanishes"

Vanishes.

Klinkenborg, for all of his hesitation in his impossible quest for Los Angeles' essence concludes:

"If I had an extra lifetime to live, I'd live it here. I don't mean one lifetime lived, in the usual way. I mean a lifetime living within a block or two of the insurance shop on Venice Boulevard with the wrap-around neon facade. Another watching cars turn off National onto the 10 . . . . Perhaps then I could grasp what always escapes me here. Then I'd know whether it was worth looking for in the first place."

It's the final line that has created the dust up -- "worth looking for in the first place..." that has set off bells and has become an impetus for posts, tweets and columns this week (see Hector Tobar's piece in this week's L.A. Times.)

What it all said to me was exactly what we've been trying to move toward in this class. Many of you know the essence already and can articulate your corner, your street, the intersections, the essence -- without qualification or apology.

Go forward.

You know what you're looking for. And it doesn't escape you. It's in you.

-- L.G.

(photo credit: Robert Adams, courtesy the Getty website)

"We Tell Stories . . ." : Norman Klein

"In 1974, when I first moved to the neighborhoods west of downtown Los Angeles, I was soured by the omens I sensed there. One vacant store had been a kosher butcher shop in the fifties now with a rusted sign, but very similar to the dismal store my father had run in Brooklyn for thirty years. In an utter reversal of Proust sipping tea, I remembered the smell of raw meat in the sawdust on the floors, the armies of cockroaches under the display cases, the look of chicken guts stuck to the sides of garbage pails out back.

I learned that across the street from my apartment on Glendale Boulevard, Tom Mix used to ride a horse to work from his ranch in Mixville (now a Hughes market shopping Center). But no recognition could be found anywhere that the entire film industry had once been centered there (1912-192). It was clear that the city of Los Angeles would never announce formally that the movie business had started in what was now, forgettably a "Mexican" neighborhood. At first, the sheer neglect left me dreary, reminding me of family repression during my own childhood. It took at least a year for me to realize how much vitality existed west of downtown."

-- Norman Klein
-- from The History of Forgetting



(photo captions: edendale and mixxville
photo credit: lapl archives)

"We Tell Stories . . . :" Jean Baudrillard

WE'VE ALL SEEN it from above but what do you see when you look down at the maze of light?

"There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks of the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch's hell can match this inferno effect. The muted fluorescent of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already, flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But, once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will never have encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it, since it is not divided up geometrically . . . . Mulholland Drive by night is an extraterrestrials vantage point on earth, or conversely, an earth dweller's vantage point on the galactic metropolis."

What do you see when you gaze down at Los Angeles?

(photo: los angeles at night; credit, b.mune flickr creative commons)

"We Tell Stories . . . ": Richard Reeves

MANY DISCUSSIONS about Los Angeles revolve around the elements -- fire, water, the land itself. Disaster is a big subject as well. Earthquakes and floods and fire. The following segment is from an essay written by Richard Reeves, who describes a series of events that force him to ponder why he ever came to Los Angeles. Look carefully at how he "paints" the fire, how he evokes the very feeling of the earthquake. He's not just "telling" us, he's allowing us to experience it too -- with all the wonder and terror.

"It was midafternoon when I arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on October 23, 1978, but the sky was already dark. Driving home along the Pacific ocean, I could see black to north and west -- boiling clouds of smoke coming off the Santa Monica Mountains. By six o'clock, I was standing in from of my house, in Pacific Palisades, watching waves of orange flame break over the mountains. Houses in the path of the waves exploded silently just before the flames reached them. I counted eight -- puffs of bright gas, and then the houses were gone. By seven o'clock I was packing the car -- family photograph albums and insurance policies first -- and listening to a radio report of tires melting as people tried to escape the fire in automobiles . . . .
My first earthquake was on New year's Day of 1979. A friend and I were having a late lunch in a little place called the Inn of the Seventh Ray, in Topanga Canyon. There was a heavy jolt, and the floor vibrated. I thought a truck had hit the building. But the floor did not sop vibrating, as it would have if the building had been struck. I was confused. Actions seemed to be taking place in slow motion. People pushed chairs and tables aside, stood up, and began running toward the door. I realized that there was a sound -- a steady roaring, as if a freight train were coming into the room. Outside I still heard the sound and felt the vibration. Stones were clattering down a hillside into the roadway. The next day's Los Angeles Times reported that the quake was 'small' -- 4.6 on the Richter scale. It had lasted less than ten seconds, and there were twenty smaller aftershocks. While it was happening there was no way of knowing that this thing would be judged small by the instruments at the California Institute of Technology.
I had already begun to wonder whether God intended for people to live in Los Angeles."

from "Vulnerable" by Richard Reeves, taken from Unknown California

-- L.G.

(photo credit: Atwater Village Newbie, flickr creative commons)

"We Tell Stories . . . " : Joan Didion

PUBLISHED IN 1970, Joan Didion's,The White Album, is a scrapbook of the political/pop culture landscape of California of the late 60s and 70s. California, and Los Angeles in particular, was lucky to have such an eye turned on the length of its expanse. Deeply reported and even more deeply felt, Didion is able to convey not just political climate, social disarray and personal upheaval but the very texture of the era's tensions, fears, confusion and sense of possibility. As a journalist and essayist, Didion set not just a tone but presented a different template. She was a model for many aspiring reporters and writers who wanted to dig deeper and peer behind perception. Her stories had more than resonance they left an afterimage.

As we turn the corner and begin to contemplate your final pieces -- writing the Los Angeles you see into being, we'll be looking at different writers -- journalists, essayists -- who have left indelible impressions about their Los Angeles. As you think about putting together your reported observations, think about creative ways to weave the facts with observations. Details, very simply set down, are often key in writing prose that draws you in with its careful rhythms.

Here is a sample from The White Album in which Didion recollects the night that the Manson Family murders were set in motion:

"We put 'Lay Lady Lay' on the record player, and 'Suzanne.' We went down to Melrose Avenue to see the Flying Burritos. There was a jasmine vine grown over the verandah of the big house on Franklin Avenue, and in the evenings the smell of jasmine came in through all the open doors and windows. I made bouillabaisse for people who did not eat meat. I imagined that my own life was simple and sweet, and sometimes it was, but there were odd things going around town. There were rumors. There were stories. Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of 'sin' -- this sense that it was possible to go 'too far,' and that many people were doing it -- was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in. I recall a time when the dogs barked every night and the moon was always full. On August 9, 1969, I was sitting in the shallow end of my sister-in-law's swimming pool in Beverly Hills when she received a telephone call from a friend who had just heard about the murders at Sharon Tate Polanski's house on Cielo Drive. The phone rang many times during the next hour. These early reports were garbled and contradictory. One caller would say hoods, the next would say chains. There were twenty dead, no twelve, ten, eighteen. Black masses were imagined, band bad trips blamed. I remember all of the day's misinformation very clearly, and I also remember this, and wish I did not: I remember that no one was surprised."

-- L.G.

photo credit: academy of achievement