The LA Dude-Picayune
by Corey on 2006年09月04日 08:23 AM
@ Home / HelloWorldProject / ENTRY26 (edit, history)
Dear my dudes,
What it is? You know it’s the LA Dude-Picayune, journalizin’ at cha straight off the 405. Indeed, you would be correct if your analysis of speech patterns contemporaneous to my geography indicated a Western migration.
Well, the life is easeful in the city of angels. To understand why so, employ the following pedagogy. Think of your favorite place in the world, then your least favorite place in the world. Chop them coarsely, mix and toss. LA is a casserole: everything you want, everything you don’t want, easily located and within driving distance. It is the long, paved suburb of the American imagination: gleaming plastic and heterogeneity.
Don’t believe what this might imply: LA isn’t “soulless.” It’s just well-marketed. It has to be. LA has no manifest history or culture, in the sense of old institutions establishing norms that guide its path even today. Today, its path is the highway. Today, its norm is what sells. This attracts the pejorative “superficial,” but to call LA superficial is to misunderstand its essential essencelessness. It’s to take issue with sugar substitutes. It’s to call video games a distraction. LA *is* its own marketing. You need the billboards here the same way a priest needs his chasuble. How else do you tell what things are?
They say truth is inward beauty, and beauty outward truth. Similarly, LA is outward advertising, and advertising is inward LA. Just accept it and move on. Oh other places, New York City places, may seem deep, but this is a pretension as often as it is not; New York’s deepness is often enslavement to its past. New York is superficially deep. LA in contrast is deeply superficial. You won’t discover anything in LA by wandering off the beaten path, looking under rocks and venturing to places unmarked. The beaten path here is beaten because it leads to the interesting things already. If you venture off it, you’re by definition going somewhere dull.
The beaten path here is called a “highway”. Those who have only driven on girly, two-lane, East Coast highways have experienced but an indistinct shadow of true Highwayness. The dominant form of life here is the personal automobile, and they have constructed systematic cathedals to their god of transit. Driving on them gives you the sense of being on some great engineer’s masterwork. They are everywhere designed to smooth the flow of traffic and never to set up obstacles. Off-ramps split off the main lanes and disappear to their destination. On-ramps have stoplights to prevent the right lane merge from clogging the main flow. Junctions and forks don’t have exits, rather, the highway splits in half according to which direction you want to go. I’ve driven in major cities before, but never effortlessly. Yes, you can easily and horribly get lost, but only if you lose track of where you’re going. The signs are posted and the directions natural. (For reasons personal, political and now financial, I avoid driving.)
But where do you go on the highways? Depends on what you’re looking for. Consult the nearest billboard, or Google Maps. There is no main place “to go” in LA; it’s an endless densely developed suburb of nowhere in particular. Therefore LA is the American dream, a land with no history, all possibilities open. It is high bourgeois heaven. It has all the qualities and flaws inhering to its concept, and chief among both of them is that LA has no general qualities or flaws inhering to any concept. It is a mishmash of cooked-to-order neighborhoods, all of them in flux depending on the whim of local tastes. LA’s motto is, “Very functional, and open late.” Its districts each have something special to offer, though never is the speciality developed at the expense of those chains all Angelinos expect. For instance In-N-Out burger, a veritable social institution (and a meal for $3.00!). Because it has no specialty but many generalities, LA is the physical manifestation of a liberal arts education. LA looks like your soul.
Good neighborhoods are: Venice, Los Feliz, Westwood, and the shopping district near downtown. Bad neighborhoods are south…ish? We don’t go there.
And the weather. Or should I say, the absence of weather. When I got here a month ago it was 77 and sunny. It was a sweet, sunny 77 today. I haven’t seen clouds in weeks. There’s just no point having a weather page in the newspaper here. Really it’s printed just for completeness. Really, it belongs in the “Nation” section because it reports on events happening elsewhere. Rain? Elsewhere. Partly cloudy? Elsewhere. Highs above 80, lows below 75? Elsewhere, elsewhere. LA weather, like everything in LA, is an aspect of the eternal now.
Is there a downside? Only insofar as there is no upside. I guess the downside is that many neighborhoods, especially southish as mentioned, have as their speciality bullet holes. But if you don’t go there, you’ll never see it. (Though if you do go there, you can expect In-N-Out burger. Even crime doesn’t stand in the way of chain capitalism. Ah, LA.) Maybe the downside is that your neighborhood is in general no different from other neighborhoods; it has no essential quality that separates it from any other part of LA, or any dense suburb of any city anywhere. You won’t find Greenwich Village here, which is an affectation requiring far too much time and energy from an Angelino. Even Little Tokyo here isn’t really that Japanese, unless you’re buying something, in which case it is very, very Japanese.
Maybe this is good. Maybe it’s good that people don’t construct an identity around their hood; then they have to be individuals. Hmm! On the other hand, people are usually more interesting if they come from somewhere with a history and a culture. Which is better? Discuss.
Me, I live in Westwood, which is west of Hollywood. It has a “village,” which is LA-speak for a downtown-looking retail area with rowhouses holding small shops. Small boulevards, lots of palm trees. It feels like an outdoor mall, which is a feeling you never really can escape in LA; this is perhaps its true downside. There aren’t any nice cafes or hangout places, but there are three Starbucks; again, functional; again, open late. Again, like most of LA, strangely empty of the local touch. Californians are so mobile that the village attracts as many foreign Angelinos as locals, so it has to be well-marketed. So, accept it and move on. How American.
I live just west of the village, which is itself south of campus. My apartments are called Weyburn Terrace, and they resemble most of the architecture in LA: round clay terra cotta roofing and stucco walls. The style is called “California Spanish.” The trees are mostly deciduous around here. The effect does look… vaguely Spanish… I guess? Well, I prefer it to siding and pine trees.
The campus is really, really beautiful. It centers around Royce Hall. (Josiah Royce is a major minor philosopher who worked at UCLA actually. I had to read an article by him back in the day.) Royce Hall is built in the Spanish federal style. The campus mimics it, and so it looks brownish red and has the terra cotta roofing and oversized brick walls. Reminds me a bit of Flagler College in St. Augustine, but bigger and with people playing frisbee everywhere. The campus is obviously wealthy, as it hires immigrants everywhere to cut the ample grass and tend the fountains and statue gardens and things. It leases space to stores on the first floors of its buildings, a trend my alma mater Carolina was thankfully slow to pick up on. Gives the college the feel of, well, a shopping mall. But on the plus side, a lot of these stores are internet coffee shops with rather expensive furniture!
So, life is easeful. So, studies begin Sept. 15, but I’ve been spending a few hours every day reviewing my differential equations and nonlinear programming. Isn’t that impressive sounding? I hope you all are well and keep in touch.
Me, I like this place. You, you write me some sugar. You know you got to help me out.
COREY