Coda: The Nature of Los Angeles

EARLIER THIS week, one of my reporter colleagues was on Facebook grousing, in that way people do there,  about the gray skies over  Los Angeles.  He took his mini-vent one step further to say that there was something about a cloudy day in Los Angeles that was worse than a cloudy day somewhere else.  There were a smattering of comments following up that mildly agreed or disagreed. I thought about adding my two cents, but it seemed beside the point.

I realized that this writer was suggesting something that we've been talking about from different angles in our class all semester: The ways in which the ante is upped here in Los Angeles, that even less-than stellar weather (!) can be a grounds for deep disappointment.  This seemed unfair, of course, as it was still in the 70s and  it was hardly an inconvenience. Simply, if you think about it, a day off for the sun.

Why such the high standard of subjective perfection?  He's a transplant from thousands of miles elsewhere,  which got me thinking.  I realized again, the perspective difference. For me, as a native, gray skies offer an alternative, a different way to see Los Angeles; it's a break from being "on," a different mood from that megawatt smile.  I see the city in a different way on days like that. The sky might look like steel-wool, the mountains with the snow on the peaks, jut out against it, the green of the trees look that much more vibrant. It's still stunning and textured, but you see a different side -- something more layered, contemplative.

On the same theme,  this week The New Yorker put up an engaging short interview with the photographer Bruce Davidson talking about photographing nature in Los Angeles.  In a way, if he were in our class, his final piece would have been Arcadia/Utopia. He literally is looking for the places in L.A. where nature and man-made urban life intersect.  "I had a vision of the superhighways intermingling with the trees," says Davidson early in the interview. "Nature has this way of commingling, of living with the city itself. Nature clings, nature will adapt. Nature will find a way to live even under concrete. Nature is there surrounding the grid of the city itself. I was drawn to this challenge."

Watching the images and Davidson speaking about his process a second time,  I realized that what he's observing about the Southland's nature -- flora and fauna -- is true about us --  humans.   Angelenos, those who are drawn to Los Angeles, compelled to stay, find themselves figuring out ways to adapt to what it the city is -- the broken dream or promise,  the "dingbat" apartment instead of the sprawling ranch-style home -- in other words,  the reality check, or better, the compromise.

Los Angeles, in its postcard moments -- the first hours after a storm has scrubbed the basin, or an aggressive but not violent Santa Ana gusts through -- flaunts its otherworldly moutains-to-the-sea beauty. But as most of us know, rarely does it look like this everyday. The Los Angeles that we come to love, hate, feel ambivalence about is something that goes deeper than what's at face.

For me, it's always been those small stories at the edges of the postcard, the things that get cropped away from the official picture that I "cling" to.  The stories that "commingle" as Davidson puts it, with the forward-rush of the city. As a reporter, I've always loved to talk to people about their dreams, their plans, their past, their goals, their disappointments, their joy, and how place has tied itself up in those stories. We fall in love with places we say, but really when we say that we mean that we've fallen in love with a confluence of things: a quality of a life -- some of which is the backdrop and the rhythms of a place, but much of which we've constructed through our choices.

 The "nature" of Los Angeles that Davidson speaks of and is documenting is a Los Angeles of persistence and resilience and adaptation.  But instead of it being  read as "survival of the fittest" it could be read as  the persistence of the imaginative.

Thank you all for being contemplative, imaginative Angelenos this semester and for bringing the more nuanced, complex story  of the city forward. Your persistence and imagination, will help to shape and shade the official story.

L.G.
top photo: Bruce Davidson via The New Yorker
bottom photo: L.G.

Read L.A.

I OFTEN SHRUG out of being pinned down on what L.A. books are my favorites. So this list merely represents books that, to me, nail some aspect of Los Angeles that I find evocative or resonant.

A few of them I have returned to time and again ("Day of the Locust" "Hope of Heaven.") The titles are nonfiction and fiction. photography, poetry etc.

Here they are, in no particular order:

Hope of Heaven -- John O'Hara

The White Album -- Joan Didion
What Makes Sammy Run? -- Budd Schulberg
Mildred Pierce -- James M. Cain
Day of the Locust -- Nathaniel West


Imagoes -- Wanda Coleman

Dreams from Bunker Hill -- John Fante
Playback -- Raymond Chandler
Chavez Ravine 1949 -- Don Normark
Days Without Weather -- Cecil Brown
 Devil in a Blue Dress -- Walter Mosley
The Other Side -- Ruben Martinez
A Single Man -- Christopher Isherwood
Low Down -- A.J. Albany

Out With the Stars -- Jim Heimann
Tapping the Source -- Kem Nunn
The History of Forgetting -- Norman Klein
The Nowhere City -- Alison Lurie

Days Between Stations -- Steve Erickson
In a Lonely Place -- Dorothy B. Hughes

Genius Loci: Temporary/Transitional

 SINCE I was a kid, I've always been fascinated with these cracker-box apartment buildings with these fanciful names that end with"Terrace" or "Gardens" or  "Courts"  Often they didn't offer any of those things, and even a strong imagination wouldn't quite will it into being.

These were the sorts of building that were supposed to be "starter-places" for your arrival here in the City of Angels ... of course we know the real story.  Sometimes they were the only chapter -- before one hightailed it out of town.

They are known as "dingbats"  We see rows and rows and rows of them all over the city proper and the bedroom communities adjacent to it -- particularly the Valley, the South Bay and Pasadena.

Here's a snip from a piece called "Dingbat Living." 

"...  I am less intrigued with the builders of the dingbats than with the people who eventually moved into these beauties. These were the people who truly made Los Angeles what it is today — the recent transplants, the surfers, the starving actors, the people who were willing to suffer their surroundings because they felt they were destined for something better, something that only Los Angeles could offer."

They are all over, so ubiquitous that you probably don't even quite notice them.  However, when I returned from living in the Bay Area I realized how prevalent -- and unique -- that they were -- and began to pay more attention to what they meant to L.A. and how they had come to define our environment.

 As Reyner Banham wrote in his seminal work on the architecture of the Southland, "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, the dingbat  "is the true symptom of Los Angeles' urban Id ."

Writer Gary Indiana goes several steps further, calling the dingbat,  "A bad idea run amok, these one- or two- (sometimes three-) story stucco shoeboxes that nearly everyone lives in at one time or another in L.A. have an existential emptiness that can be gussied up and dissembled by track lighting  nd the right sort of throw pillows and furniture but the spatial insipidity of the dingbat eventually defeats most efforts to turn a 'unit' into 'home,' even when little enliven the façade."



During and after college, friends of mine would find their way into one of these, and, as Indiana suggests, try to brighten them up with plants and throw pillows and beads and "mood lighting."
Nothing doing.  But it was home and it was "transitional" and often the first articulation of "self-hood" so in many ways it is an important part of the life in L.A. narrative -- trying to define (and individualize) yourself within the busy sprawl of an anonymous place.

"Desiree"

"breezeway w/ pool"

"Terrace"

Here at least, a little truth in advertising. simply put. 

Hidden L.A. Visits Telling L.A.'s Story

ON WEDNESDAY night, we will be lucky to have with us, W. Lynn Garrett, the curator of Hidden L.A., a website/Facebook page dedicated to not skimming the surface but "looking deeper"  Take a spin through her website and check in over at the Hidden L.A. Facebook page to see what sorts of discussions have taken place on the site and on her wall.

Remember: L.A. is a difficult place to define in a few words and people have such personal and passionate opinions about the which makes Garrett's task, at times, feel enormous as the city's end-to-end expanse. She's used to managing complex, thorny discussions as many of us get about threading through nasty traffic. It's part of life here -- and the destination is worth the trip.

Come in and be prepared to chat with her about what it's been life to create a "virtual" conversation with Angelenos spread out around the globe. She's ready to field your questions.

-- L.G.

Scribes and Saints: J. Michael Walker Visits Telling L.A.'s Story

 

THE ARTIST, J. Michael Walker spoke to "Telling L.A's Story" on Wednesday night. He brought along with him  two of his long-term projects. "All the Saints of the City of Angels" and his literary map of Los Angeles: "Lyrical Map of the Concept of Los Angeles.

  Here are a few pictures from the evening

The Map and its Legend

Scene/Set Change

Some of "All the Saints"

J. Michael Walker

photo credit: L.G.

The Making of El Chavez Ravine

LAST NIGHT, we watched and listened to people talk about various places in Los Angeles that no longer exist quite in the way that they once remembered them.

One of the enduring stories of "erased" Los Angeles is the story of the old neighborhood of Chavez Ravine.  Earlier this semester, I passed out a profile I wrote about a young artist, Vincent Valdez, who had the task of reconstructing the saga of the old neighborhood on the body of an ice cream truck -- a low rider ice cream truck. Yes, that's right.  Upon completion, Vincent named the truck: El Chavez Ravine.

Below is a mini-doc of Valdez at work. Remember when we saw the image of the woman being dragged out of her house last night? This little piece starts with a reenactment of the event that Valdez is filming so that he can better reproduce the action on the side of the truck.

The truck was commissioned by musician Ry Cooder, for his album Chavez Ravine, that told the story of the old neighborhood in 360 -- taking the listener from it's days as a "poor man's shangri-la" to the green turf and bright lights of night baseball, but told from the perspective of a fan whose family lived just about where third base is.
 Here are a couple of pieces that take us down the trail of the story....

The photos you see are by Don Normark who documented the old neighborhood on film. 

"Poor Man's Shangri-La"

"Three Cool Cats"

"Third Base, Dodger Stadium"

-- L.G.
image: Chavez Ravine cover via Wikipedia

Echo Park Goes To Hollywood, Sort of ....

ACCORDING TO an exclusive on the site Deadline Hollywood, Brando Skyhorse's (yes, that's right) novel, The Madonnas of Echo Park is making its way to HBO. It involves Echo Park gentrification which we will be talking more about tonight. From Deadline Hollywood:

 The project, to be written by award-winning playwright Julia Cho, takes a look at the lives of a community in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Los Angeles. It explores the relationships -– romantic, professional, familial –- of the Latinos that have built the community over the years, and the hipsters who’re making their way in now, examining the complicated dynamic between the two as they struggle to build new lives for themselves in pursuit of the American dream.

You can read the whole story here.

I have it on my book pile, but have yet to crack it. I too, a former Echo Park resident, watched first-hand as the neighborhood began to shape-shift -- a very awkward dance. It will be interesting to see how this very uncomfortable story of money and land that is happening in real time, gets interpreted for your home flatscreen.

To be continued...


-- L.G.

J. Michael Walker: Saints and Scribes of the City of Angels

WHEN WE reconvene in April, our guest that night will be the artist J. Michael Walker. He will be in class to speak about his various L.A.-rooted projects, among them "All the Saints of Los Angeles" and "City in Mind" his literary map of Los Angeles.  Please do a little research on him and be prepared to ask questions about his project. I will be calling on everyone to participate in the evening's discussion. He will be traveling from Highland Park to speak about his work as an artist and poet/essayist.  His website is here.

I think you'll enjoy his take on the city.

The photo above is from a studio visit I made a little earlier in the semester to see the map. He's pointing to Chavez Ravine now the home of Dodger Stadium, but we'll talk l more about that complicated history tonight in class.

Coordinates: 3400 Wilshire Boulveard

Way Back When: 3400 Wilshire Boulevard

BACK IN the 90s, if you motored along the easterly stretches of the Wilshire corridor, at its 3400 address, you would happen upon a uniquely L.A. curiosity. Pushed back dramatically from the noisy boulevard, the remains of an expansive terracotta-roofed building had the distinct feel of a  suddenly abandoned story, or more precisely -- a vast encyclopedia of them.

 Even if you knew nothing about the building's past, its many former lives, just the expanse of the lot, the formal elegance of what remained of the structure, you knew there was a reason it stood there so long -- waiting.  For what? It wasn't certain at first. 

Another piece of L.A. history on the guillotine. I'd grown up seeing this cycle time and again; the past leveled, turned to sand, a new future imagined in its spot.  This one felt different though.

The Ambassador Hotel, which once stood imposingly at 3400 Wilshire Boulevard, was built in 1921  designed by Pasadena architect Myron Hunt, and owned and operated by the Schine family for 50 years. The architect, Paul Revere Williams, made the 1949 additions to the property which included renovations to the interior, adjacent private bungalows and a facelift for the famous hotspot, the nightclub known as the Cocoanut Grove.

 The hotel attracted dignitaries from around the world, royalty, businessmen, film stars, presidents. It its heyday, it was glamourous and looked something like this:









But by the early 70s, the hotel had become an anachronism, and even more complicated, an end-of-the-golden dream symbol. Los Angeles' "center" -- always a point of debate -- had been pressing westward for sometime. What cast the most pernicious shadow, however, was that the hotel was the site of then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 assassination. From that moment on the Ambassador would not ever shake the taint.  The hotel eventually closed in 1989 and was vacant until demolished in 2006.

In the hotel's waning years, as a kid, I would find myself on occasion sitting at vast, ciruclar banquet tables at the Ambassador, attending  my mother's various "club" luncheons -- fashion shows, educators' meetings and the like. At first I wasn't interested. At all.  Listless, I'd tune in and out of the  program of speeches and presentations (there was even a woman who would "preform" bird calls) and eat dainty finger sandwiches and sip Shirley Temples. What I most remember is staring at the designs in the ornate ballroom carpet and getting lost in them like a maze.

It wasn't until much later that I began to appreciate the history, the layers of history whispering around me on those Saturday afternoons. I was a voracious reader and on the latter-end of those journeys to the hotel had discovered F. Scott Fitzgerald and was particularly fascinated with his difficult Los Angeles years -- when he'd arrived in Los Angeles to work, not so happily, as a screenwriter.  According to lore, Fitzgerald and his wife Zelda stayed for a bit  at the Ambassador in one of those Williams designed bungalows.  During their stay, the couple met a young actress named Lois Moran.  Zelda was miffed at the attention her husband beamed upon the young woman, apparently so enraged after their quarrel that she threw her own clothes into bungalow bathtub and lit them on fire.

By the 80s, the Ambassador resembled  something that had been put into storage for too long. In the closed-off floors and rooms,  it gave off that odor too.  It had also acquired a deeper patina of sadness. Strangely though, my high school prom was held here, at the Grove, that by this time had been renovated once more and had a strange sort of disco-70s-glass-and-mylar-red-carpet feel to it. It was like a variety show set, you expected to see entertainers of that vintage, say Cher or Sammy Davis Jr., walk out on stage. For a time,  they did.  I opted out of going and instead wandered out with a tribe of friends to the beach that night -- a sort of anti-prom nonevent. It was a choice I didn't regret for years, until it looked as if the down-at-the-heels building would come down for sure.   

During the early 90s, the owners opened the grounds and invited  visitors to come in and pay their last respects. Although, the property had been used for movie and television shoots, the general public hadn't been allowed on the grounds for years. By this time, I was working as a journalist, so I, along with a photographer friend of mine, descended on the property to take photos and interview  people who lingered in the musty hallways or had a grilled cheese at the soon-to-be-shuttered coffee shop. Some of the visitors had married there, some had honeymooned, others, like me, had spent Saturdays with their moms at long Saturday luncheons.  After awhile, the stories began to feel like one large public collage, linking together the hotel's story past and present. In a few more months, a public sale of the contents was held: I purchased salad plates and a sliver casserole dish even stationery and cocktail napkins embossed with the Ambassador logo.

 After a decades-long,  bitter fight between residents, conservationists and the school board, the Los Angeles Unified School District erected a state of the art educational complex  on the old site. As a tribute to the fallen politician, it's been named,  The Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools. 

In recent years, I haven't been able to drive past the building -- or where the building should be.  Even growing up where I know things very seldom stay the same, I knew seeing this huge block of memory vanished would break my heart.

One of the last evenings I set foot inside the hotel, when it was still a going concern, some other reporter friends of mine decided to meet up after work.  We were looking for a place that wasn't a scene. The Ambassador hadn't fit that description for more than four decades. Even still, there was an elegant lounge off the lobby, that opened out into a vibrant rose garden; The Palm Bar, it was called. By then,  the mix of clientele reflected the neighborhood's evolved new mix --  Korean businessmen, Silver Lake night crawlers and of course, some remnants from the old days -- couples who used to live just down the street in one of the high rise hotels topped with those elegant  signs that, after dusk, spelled out each building's name in cool neon script. They ordered their Manhattans and Martinis.  On demand, they happily regaled us with stories about the Academy Award events once held at the Grove, the dignitaries who once stayed there, and too, their memories of RFK's last night on the campaign trail.

I sat with my friends, near open doors that framed the fragrant garden and for once, instead of  trying to time-travel, instead of chasing antique ghosts, I made note of the soon-to-be vanished details before us -- the image of us arranged in those high-backed chairs, the rise and fall of excited voices telling and listening to Los Angeles stories, the sharp scent of the night-blooms on a eve-of-Spring night, I was aware that I would be both making and  then embroidering memory. I knew, this little moment too would be gone soon enough -- and yet until all of us ourselves were ghosts --  not the memory of it.



(For an detailed visual past to present timeline of the site in recent years you can click here.)

Today: 3400 Wilshire Blvd: Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools

-- L.G

City of Sunlight: L.A. Through the Prism

SOMEHOW, I ended up with the film Cyrus, staring John C. Reilly, in my Netflix queue. It was suggested for one reason or another -- one that I'm still not quite clear about. It's a romantic comedy with a tilt, I guess you could say.  Once I began watching it, however, I found myself more interested in not what was going on plot wise, but what was going on in the background --  literally.  The backdrop of the film is Los Angeles.

The architecture, the slope of the hills, the quality of sunlight: Much of it looked as if it was shot in Northeast L.A. -- Silver Lake, Echo Park -- or was meant to be translated as such.  The houses the characters inhabited were California Bungalows or modest stucco domiciles surrounded by vibrant  tangles of bougainvillaea and agave. It was Paradise enclosed and protected by a picket fence or a brief retaining wall. For each character, that plot of land was the postage stamp of Los Angeles' promise -- despite the mayhem exploding in their personal lives. 

This on-screen glimpse, through a filmmaker's eye made me think about how enchanting this Los Angeles looked through the camera and about other films that have chosen to focus as well that quiet natural beauty -- that Arcadia, we've been talking about --  rather than the forced Hollywood plastic glam Los Angeles often seems to be defined by.

Have any of you seen Steve Martin's Shop Girl? I remember watching this film and also making an mental note that Steve Martin really does see the beauty of Los Angeles alongside the complicated lives we work through. Light too plays an important part, as well as the architecture (and the defining characteristics of neighborhoods) that help to delineate  communities and sketch characters.

So, I thought I'd put together a brief list of films that show off Los Angeles' nuanced beauty -- the light, the flora, the sense of personal space and the freedom that comes with that.




Here's the trailer for Cyrus:

This film, Quincinera, also set in Echo Park, feels very much like a walk through the city during a very particular time in L.A. -- the early to mid 90s as the neighborhood began to gentrify.

Check out the Lincoln Lawyer for views of Highland Park and georgeous Echo Park sunset-to-twilight. 

What are some of your favorites? Images of L.A. on film that stick with you?

The Riots: Charles Bukowski

the riots

I’ve watched this city burn twice
in my lifetime
and the most notable thing
was the arrival of the
politicians in the
aftermath
proclaiming the wrongs of
the system
and demanding new
policies toward and for the
poor.

nothing was corrected last
time.
nothing will be corrected this
time.

the poor will remain poor.
the unemployed will remain
so.
the homeless will remain
homeless

and the politicians,
fat upon the land, will live
very well.

5 May 1992

- charles bukowski

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: us mcmillian

(repost)

Dreams From Bunker Hill

Millard Sheets’ Angel’s Flight (1931) 

  

WE TALKED a little bit the other night about Bunker Hill and what's left of it We will look more at the neighborhood in the coming weeks,  but I wanted to share some images of Angel's Flight.


Remember in Criss Cross when Anna was listening in the as Steve and Slim made plans for the big heist? As she was pacing, in the window behind her you could catch a glimpse of the Angel's Flight Railway, a  funicular that, even today, makes the trip up the steep hill connecting Hill Street to Grand Avenue at Third. 

Anna (Yvonne DiCarlo)  in Criss Cross, 1948 image via "Angel's Flight Goes to the Movies"

The Railway has had a complicated history -- you can go here to read more about its  ups and downs, both literally and figuratively -- it has had its own set of tragic noir-esque tales.

Angel's Flight Today Image via Wikipedia

"I walked down the street to­wards An­gel's Flight, won­der­ing what I would do that day. But there was noth­ing to do, and so I de­cid­ed to walk around the town."

                                      -- John Fante  from Ask the Dust

 I'll leave you with a little slice of Bunker Hill from Criss Cross . . . .

L.G.
         

Coordinates: Unearthing Vanished L.A.

SURFING THE internet a couple weeks back, I happened upon a website selling handmade trinkets -- mostly charms for bracelets, unusual earrings or cufflinks. They were conversation pieces; items that  commemorated buildings, streetcars, supermarkets, bakeries and beer-brands that hailed from New Orleans,  Louisiana  yet were physically no longer in existence. The webmaster had titled the page  -- "Ain't There No More" -- and I could hear that sentence delivered rapid-fire in one of my friend's or relative's idiosyncratic Louisiana Creole accents.

I have to say though, I thought, immediately, that the other L.A. -- our Los Angeles -- could have not occupied just a page, but an entire other city dedicated to what isn't here any longer.

Often, you'll hear Angelenos dolling out directions by referencing markers that were once in its place. It's a strange way to live in the present.  Our memories are cluttered with such locations. Some addresses have had multiple identities and lives within one building -- like a brick-and-mortar nesting doll;  others sites continue to be razed entirely and built up over and over again and so often, Angelenos really have to force  the recollection, because even the landmarks nearby have been "updated," "renovated," "retrofitted."

We live in a place filled with the promise of new beginnings and the impatient expectation of them. We want Los Angeles to be "the fix," the geographical solution to our problems. That's a lot to heap on a city's shoulders.

Above, you'll see a charming building, one that when I look at it conjures F. Scott Fitzgerald short stories or the beautiful black-and-white movies I would stay up at night to bathe in the blue glow of   on the old Channel 11-KTTV (decades before it was known as Fox). This was once the old  Hollywood Hotel and it stood  at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, which many of you know now looks - sigh -- like this below. 

As if we needed another mall, really.

In the next few weeks under the tag  "Coordinates" you'll be reading  posts from a couple of guest bloggers weighing in on various spots on L.A.'s vast grid  --   former empty lots, college hangouts, late-night watering holes,  down-at-the-heels  hotels  -- now turned into McMansions or coffee chains or any number of   mixed-use playgrounds.  What sort of memories and histories do these re-imagined spots hold or trigger? What old boundary lines did they once draw? What community did they once host?   

The above images come from the wonderful Facebook page, Vintage Los Angeles. Check it out for a mind-blowing compare and contrast of then-and-now L.A.

And below, check out the trailer for the film "Hollywood Hotel" in its black and white glory.

-- L.G.

Getting Lost: The Connective Tissue

I HAVE always been interested in intersections -- literally and metaphorically. One of my fascinations about L.A. has been how the city "connects up" and which throughfares are the ones that can lead you through many different faces of the city: It's many moods, rhythms and preoccupations.  When I was a kid,  many of our family Sundays incorporated a late-afternoon, stress-free leisurely drive (unheard of nowadays!) down one of the major throughfares.
 
Back then, my favorite journey was along Wilshire Boulevard as it wound all the way from downtown Los Angeles to the sea.  Moving gently along its curves was like watching a movie montage through the window: architecture, signage, colors,  traffic, churches, museums, department stores, apartment buildings, boxy steel and glass office highrises, then the colorful divey beach motels, the fancy hotels and finally it all petered out -- you'd reached the end of it all  -- the ocean unfolding endlessly before you.

This morning, I did a mini drive north/south exploration down San Gabriel Boulevard as it connects Altadena to Pasadena to San Marino to San Gabriel to Alhambra to Rosemead and so on and so on ... This is some of what I saw along the way:

What I kept thinking about this morning, as I moved through this "collage of place", was that you see old and new San Gabriel Valley the "new" bowling lanes, which aren't, but the telephone pole with it's pull tab phone numbers tells you so much about how a place like Los Angeles swiftly and radically changes: the many languages spoken, the many stories waiting there, unfolding.

-- L.G.

(Photo: San Gabriel Boulevard

Credit: L.G. )

Untangling L.A.

I KNOW you're all blissfully decompressing on Spring Break, but I wanted to let you know that your blog got a mention on the KCET blog by writer D. J. Waldie (about whom I've spoken about  in class).

Here's a little snip:

Whatever the reasons, Los Angeles has resisted embracing its "vast accumulation of individual stories" in favor of a small store of familiar tropes: noir city, La La Land, fifty suburbs in search of a city, city of broken dreams, and the best worst place in the world.

These pages - UpDaily, 1st and Spring, Departures, SoCal, and The Back Forty among them - have been finding and telling other stories of Los Angeles since 2008. And their "vast accumulation" is only a part of what a lengthening roll of online storytellers bring to readers every day. So many storytellers, that it would be an almost impossible task even to survey them all.

And here's your closeup:

But I'd like to offer you one more - the students in Loyola Marymount University's journalism course, Telling L.A.'s Story.

Their encounters with Los Angeles (and the problems of story telling here) have the uneasy shock of first discovery. Their stories also have some of the rough edges expected of student writers. Their sympathies are not yet fully given, as they and the city continue a romance that could end badly.

A blog of million stories - including theirs - is not a mere accumulation, however.

Stories are the measure of a city's grandeur, the nerve fibers of its being, and its memories. The more stories we have and from as many tellers as can be recruited, the more we will redress this city's greatest lack: its failure to know itself.

 Keep digging, keep looking, keep thinking, keep writing.

Kudos to you all!
Onward.

-- L.G. 

photos: Union Station Passenger Terminal, Downtown
credit: L.G.

The "Other" End of Sunset Boulevard

HERE'S SOME  CRAZY L.A. history...along a gently curving stretch of Sunset Boulevard on its far east leg as it bends from Silver Lake into Echo Park...

-- L.G.

Motel/Moytel

A "Moytel?"
Well, can someone explain?
Chinatown, 2012

L.G.
photo: L.G.

At the Tone the Time Will Be . . .

FOR THOSE of you looking for a little blog post inspiration, you might want to dip into the schedule for Pacific Standard Time. Linking art institutions across Los Angeles, the multidisciplinary/multimedia exposition explore the art scene in Los Angeles from 1945 to 1983.

Click here for the website and listings of panels, exhibits and performances that are part of the exhbition.

Just a week ago, I went to the Norton Simon and saw "Proof: The Rise of Printmaking in Southern California. It includes work by artist's Ed Moses, Ken Price,  Larry Rivers, Ed Ruscha, (yes, Michael F. Ed, Ruscha).

 I was particularly interested in learning about the artists who came out of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Hollywood run by a woman named June Wayne who just passed away last year at 93.

The workshop's goal was to revive the art of lithography by creating "a pool of master artisan-printers in the U.S."  What it ultiamtely did was both create a community and spark a renaissance.

Check it out if you make your way to the San Gabriel Valley.

-- L.G.
image via hangout.artsounds

The Exiles

THIS JUST IN. I just saw on the Los Angeles Public Library's  Aloud public event Facebook Page that they had an event discussing the artists in exile we read about in class a few weeks back.  The event sounded great and the book sounds fascinating.

 Here's the post:  "From Exile to Home: LA Literary Life," Lawrence Weschler walked us through a fascinating 'writers map' of Los Angeles in this book last night- a map that tracks the residences of literary and cultural greats like Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Shoenberg, Christopher Isherwood.

 Here's the link to the page. http://www.facebook.com/ALOUDla

You might want to "Like" "Aloud to get updates on events that are happening there. They could offer blog-worthy topics for you all.

-- L.G.