One-Way Street

When Everything Now Is Exactly Enough

After dinner we drove the short distance from Urban Belly to the United Center for the Arcade Fire concert.

First I should say that my wife and I are not regular concert attendees. We had conceded that form of entertainment to the young. We didn’t want to appear to be middle-aged adults trying to be cool by attending a concert by a band that had performed at Lollapalooza last summer. History works one way in popular music. Vinyl records may be cool to the young, but that doesn't mean that cool extends to people who grew up with vinyl. Past musical styles regularly serve as source material for new music, but audiences are not expected to be so free-ranging in their tastes. More freedom is given to objects than to subjects—a cultural condition of our time.

As it turned out, however, we were far from the oldest people in attendance that night. Some people even brought their children, opening up the horizon of age. Why not teach children how to listen to music? If you don’t, the culture industry will do it for you.

The opening act that night was The Breeders, a band from Dayton, Ohio, my wife’s home town. The band had its creative and popular peak in the 1990’s when they were known for their restless approach to the pop-inflected music of the time. They performed perched on the very edge of the stage, crowded out by the headliner’s equipment. The space was so crowded that when Sarah Nuefeld, Arcade Fire’s violinist, joined them onstage for one song, Kelley Deal had to play her guitar crouched miserably against an amplifier.

The Breeders seemed anxious and overwhelmed by the space. Either self-consciousness at being literally and figuratively on the fringes of rock stardom or simply because she had a cold, Kim Deal, the lead singer, made several awkward attempts to connect to the crowd. “Are you doing okay?” She asked after every song, as if she expected them to wander off at any minute to the vendors selling Arcade Fire tee shirts in the concourses. They played a forty-five minute set before announcing, with evident relief, that this was their last show with Arcade Fire.

Black-clad stage hands moved in sweep away the Breeders' equipment and to construct the spell that would be Arcade Fire's Everything Now live show. As they worked images from the album's controlling metaphor flashed on the screens. The United Center is a hockey and basketball arena, so it offers a lot of pixels for information and promotion. The arena's monitors were busy with phony commercials, currency symbols and other images from an imaginary consumer culture--perhaps North Korea's a few years after the fall of the Kim regime. The question, of course, arose: Where to place Arcade Fire in this image flow? Inside it? Beside it? Trying to escape from it?

A simpler and easier to read metaphor was taking shape on the arena floor. The stage hands were setting up a boxing ring in the center. The stagecraft was a conceit to transport the band members through the crowd to the stage. The band was introduced like boxers (“Weighing in collectively at two thousand one hundred pounds.”) and once on stage, they pulled off their robes. (A few songs into the set, the stage hands discreetly ripped the ropes away, dematerializing the boxing ring metaphor.) The band opened with the title song  and thematic centerpiece of their new album. Before settling into the music, I wanted to capture the freshness of the spectacle with a video.

The Breeders had constructed an audience in their own anxious image ("Are you doing okay?"), and so Arcade Fire constructed their audience as a collective that gazed upon itself as much as the band.

The Breeders dressed like the audience in the United Center--blue jeans and ugly sweaters. Unlike rappers, who generally embrace theatricality, alternative rock band members prefer illegible styles, rarely straying far from the stylistic template of the record store clerk. Rock bands don’t have foundational myths any more (“four lads from Liverpool”). Instead, they have genealogies of working relationships. The Breeders started as a side project for Kim Deal, who played for the Pixies. Rock musicians choose anonymity because they may find themselves in another band at any time.

Arcade Fire has had some lineup changes, but they present themselves as a collective. Their sound is de-centered, with no instrument dominating over the others. They avoid solos. For the Everything Now tour the stage was designed so that the musicians were distributed evenly around the stage so that each band member staged their own more or less self-contained performance.

Like any collective, Arcade Fire has a lot of resources, but in the vastness of the arena there was a disconnect between sound and presence. Arcade Fire is known for their diverse instrumentation, but, in the United Center at least, the band’s music came across as an undifferentiated wall of sound. Sounds from individual instruments—a short melodic line here, an exotic instrument there—burbled up from the mix, then disappeared back into it. The band’s presentation strategy meant that Win Butler didn’t function as a normal front man, as the visual and sonic focal points of the band. He can be an expressive singer in the studio, but on stage his vocals were another element in the band’s wall of sound. He played mostly to a quarter of the audience, stepping onto a pair of amplifiers on the southwest side of the stage, rooted in place by the prolixity of the lyrics and the fragility of the stage conception. From where we were sitting his presence had to be tracked by his wide-brimmed hat and orange boots.

In their best songs Arcade Fire have found room in their big sound for intimacy. “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” from Funeral, their first album, evokes a shared experience that’s clearly adolescent while trying to imagine the forms of adult experience. It begins with a lovers’ escape fantasy.

You climb out the chimney,
And meet me in the middle, the middle of the town.
And since there's no one else around,
We let our hair grow long,
And forget all we used to know.

Then the song worms its way back to home and an unexpected (for a rock song) place.

But sometimes, we remember our bedrooms,
And our parents' bedrooms,
And the bedrooms of our friends.
Then we think of our parents,
Well what ever happened to them?!

By their most recent album, however, the singer, now an isolated"I," restages a return home. What had been an imaginative space in their first album is now filled with commodities. Instead of an escape into (and from) possibility, "Everything Now" is empty repetition. 

Every inch of road's got a sign
And every boy uses the same line
I pledge allegiance to everything now
Every song that I've ever heard
Is playing at the same time, it's absurd

A few verses later we find out what happened to the parents in “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)."

Every ancient road's got a town
Daddy, how come you're never around?
I miss you, like everything now
Mama, leave the food on the stove
Leave your car in the middle of the road
This happy family with everything now

This constricted, despairing vision rests within a studio production drawing extensively from disco and new wave--musical forms dedicated to the pleasures of repetition. Those forms are logical choices for the band's big sounds, but they're an uneasy fit with the band's thematic obsessions. Every time they performed a song from their latest album the disco balls would drop from the ceiling, visually reducing the size of the United Center while referencing the dance hall experience of being a single body in a crowd.

Arcade Fire has been roundly criticized for Everything Now album and tour, suggesting that the band embraces the cynicism of the larger culture. It doesn't help that arcadefire.com now redirects to everythingnow.com. 

But for me and my wife, the Arcade Fire concert in the United Center was both pleasurable and familiar. In other words, it was rock and roll. We had seen this show many times before: a rock band with a deep emotional connection to its audience daring to venture into new artistic territory only to find themselves in a land of dead signifiers. Win Butler's curled-lip delivery of the lyrics in the "Everything Now" video enacts the semiological dead end not just of the band's music, but rock in general.

 

For all its promise of escape and rebellion, rock music has long been about regression and return. Arcade Fire has understood this from the beginning. Their debut album was called Funeral and it featured not one but three songs called "Neighborhood."  Despite the motor revving of "Born to Run," Bruce Springsteen has never left New Jersey. Tom Petty's whole career was a shuttle between LA and Gainesville, FL. Bob Dylan moved on stylistically a few times in his career, but the transitions weren't always smooth, and for a long time he was just as prickly and remote as Win Butler is now. The only rock star who ever successfully dropped one style for another was David Bowie. He pulled off multiple changes because he was a solo act and therefore more in control of himself as a brand. He also dared to fully embrace even the silliest of his personas, i.e., Ziggy Stardust. But his real secret was that he never wore blue jeans, never anchoring himself even for a moment in rock authenticity. 

When the ringside handlers reappeared to escort Arcade Fire from their stage at the end of the show, my wife and I, clad in blue jeans, left the arena before the encore. We had enjoyed every moment of the show and we had had exactly enough. We found our car and drove home.

 

A Species of Hunger Native to the City

One night not long ago my wife and I attended an Arcade Fire concert at the United Center in the West Loop neighborhood of Chicago. I will have more on the concert itself in a separate post. Today I want to take a look around the restaurant at which my wife and I met for dinner before the concert.

We chose a restaurant near the United Center in a former warehouse district on Randolph Street in the West Loop. The bars and restaurants along this street are mostly large establishments, many of them located in converted warehouses and factories.  Urban Belly, the place at which we agreed to meet for dinner, was the quick service side of a restaurant with the rather inscrutable name of BellyQ, as if there is a species of hunger native to the city.

Urban Belly offers a “tour of the world” consisting of “the radically delicious and the curiously familiar.” The “delicious” part of the equation rests in the Asian dishes on the menu, centered around dumplings and bowls, while “familiar” refers to the borrowing of service concepts of casual fast food chains like Chipotle. To avoid Chipotle’s mass-market cultural appropriation, Urban Belly’s website features a narrative of its chef, Bill Kim.

Kim’s story is a quintessentially American one that dives into the melting pot of cultures and experiences to create an identity that is uniquely his own. He started urbanbelly in 2008 to bring together his wide-ranging passions. Asian + American. Fine-dining techniques + neighborhood comfort. Classic dishes + joyous creativity.

The sudden hastening of language toward the end of the narrative, with text-like plus signs reconciling opposites, hints at a structure of feeling experienced by young urbanites. It is globalist, hybrid, and aspirational, but also anxious to move on to the next experience. The general vibe is cool and a little harassed.

The structure of feeling hinted at on the website is expressed most fully in the dining area of Urban Belly. The quick-service Urban Belly space is differentiated by a transparent partition from the full-service BellyQ, which has conventional booths and four-place tables. The Urban Belly space was dimly-lit, with exposed brick and concrete floors. You sat at long, shared tables fashioned from massive pieces of wood-like material. You sat on heavy wooden blocks of similarly indeterminate manufacture. They weren’t chairs. They weren’t stools. The dining area was arranged like a grade-school cafeteria situated in a gymnasium—exertion and replenishment in the same place. Like a cafeteria, the Urban Belly space is convivial but the clock is ticking. There’s no escape from the schedule.

It was a chilly night, the first truly cold night of the season. We ate pork and cilantro dumplings, ramen and pho using disposable wooden chopsticks. The soups were warming and the dim lights soothing. Still, the experience didn’t feel very intimate, and not just because two men were sitting on the not-quite stools next to us. The open spaces, high ceilings and concrete floors made it seem like customers were being warehoused themselves. Just like a grade school cafeteria will revert back to a gymnasium after lunch, after dinner Urban Belly looks like it’s designed to be an easy-to-clean industrial space. I don't think they actually do this, but the space could have been hosed down every night after closing.

The Wicker Park Urban Belly is actually in a residential neighborhood, but on Randolph Street you don’t disappear into the fabric of a neighborhood. It’s a warehouse district, close to highways and rail lines. The few residences in the area are also carved out of industrial spaces. After dinner in the West Loop you get into your car or an Uber and head someplace else. Despite its urban trappings, the West Loop is a transactional space like any commercial strip in the suburbs.

We walked around the corner in the biting wind to our car to hurry to the United Center for the concert. More on that here.

Looking at Your City Like a Tourist

Today may be one of the last nice days before chilly weather sets in, so I got up from my desk and took a morning walk. I work a block from Calder's Flamingo and I totally forgot it was there.

In "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" Walter Benjamin noted that people who live and work in buildings experience them in a distracted manner. You pass through your workplace every day. You know the touch of the elevator buttons, the feel of the door handles, the sounds in the lobby. You don't give much thought to these sensations. Why would you?

A tourist, on the other hand, contemplates a building like it's a work of art. I sat for five minutes in the Federal Building Plaza and saw five or six groups of tourists photographing the sculpture. I took the shot above from the place where moments before a pair of French (or maybe just French-speaking) tourists had taken pictures.  This photograph looks like thousands of other photos of the Calder, but that doesn't matter. It's my photograph, taken on a pleasant morning in October.

Sometimes it's good to look at your city like a tourist.

Barthes on Barthes' Scarf

Christy Wampole ventures a reading of Roland Barthes' scarf à la Barthes.

The Barthes scarf is a particularly readable and mythological object: fragile, expensive, and thus to be handled with care, as he handled all of his objects of study. Perhaps silk is the best material with which to honor Barthes. It is a natural fiber, exuded by a living thing and thus containing something of this life within it; its history represents the encounter between East and West; and its invitation to touch puts it in the same category as human skin. The scarf holds its own significance. As a tool for veiling, it floats somewhere between the necessary and the ornamental, and it might remind us of the forgotten link between “text” and “textile.” The author’s text becomes textile, now meant to adorn a throat, to cloak a woman’s hair, to waft in the wind—in short, to become unreadable. The irony of all of this would surely not have been lost on Barthes.

via www.newyorker.com

I highly recommend you read the Barthesian texts Wampole mentions. You will have the same reactions. I did, at least. My dissertation title Second Empire of Signs: Modernism and the Arcades Project was a play on a Barthes book.

My 2014

This isn’t a best of list so much as a list of texts and experiences that are still with me at the end of the year. I've linked to the entries if I've discussed the text in this space; if not, I've provided the easiest way to get to it.

A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James. This novel could also be called A Field Guide to Jamaican Cursing. Pretty much everyone in James’ long and uneven novel wants to kill somebody. The characters voice their threats and gripes in dense Jamaican dialect. I usually find dialect narratives to be tedious to read, but once you figure out the speech patterns and decode the colorful curse words (I liked “fuckery” in particular), the action really comes alive. James is as good as anyone writing now in creating distinct characters through voice. The first two-thirds of the novel, which relates the events surrounding the assassination attempt on Bob Marley in 1976, is better than the last third, when a new set of somewhat lackluster characters is introduced and the novel loses its focus and energy. James’ novel is the most original I’ve read from a major publisher in a long time. 

My Struggle: Book 1, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Opinion about Knausgaard’s six-volume project is divided, to say the least. His story is a lot of the same thing, yet the novel works. Knausgaard is a sort of miserablist Proust. He remembers every beer he’s consumed since the age of twelve. There’s a theory--initiated by Sartre, I think--that says art advances by incorporating new kinds of experiences into itself. Knausgaard has us watch his hero wash dishes, walk to the drug store, and prepare instant coffee. It’s all weirdly fascinating, like watching a bedraggled Scandinavian family living in an Ikea store display. Knausgaard is overconfident about his skills as a writer, yet that’s precisely what makes the novel work. He believes in his material so deeply he's willing to stumble over his own awkward sentences to push it forward. My first thought after completing book one was, that was amazing. My second thought: Oh no, there are five more books of this stuff.

Redeployment, Phil Klay. It’ll be interesting to see what Klay does next. Will he move on to other subjects and settings? His mastery over his small but highly fraught world of US Marines in Iraq is so complete it’s hard to imagine him working with any other material. 

Boyhood, Richard Linklater. Linklater’s big gamble is paying off in end of the year awards, which it richly deserves even if the attention is spoiling the film’s outsider vibe. I haven’t been astonished by a film to this degree since I was a graduate student in film studies, plowing through the backlog of great world cinema.

Ida, Pawel Pawlikowski. This film sprang out of nowhere during a Netflix session one Saturday night last month. Pawlikowski shoots it in an austere, precisely framed style, like Ingmar Bergman without the melodrama simmering beneath the surface. Agata Trzebuchowska plays the title character in a beatific deadpan. Agata Kulesza plays the aunt determined to disrupt Ida’s peace of mind. They trundle around Communist-era Poland in an incredibly flimsy car digging up secrets from the past. It’s hard to describe the film without making it seem slow and depressing—what could be drearier than the Holocaust and the Iron Curtain together in the same film?  Actually, it’s very much the opposite of that.

Middlemarch, George Eliot. I’ll dispense with the excuses about my I’m only now getting around to reading it all the way through. Suffice it to say I was too young to read it before. Virginia Woolf once said Middlemarch was the only novel ever written for adults, and she’s right. Eliot begins where ordinary novels of the period would end: with a betrothal.  Dorothea Brooke is young and smart, but this is England in 1832, so her prospects for happiness are narrow. To make matters worse, she seems to court misery by marrying Edward Casaubon, the most tedious man in England. (The marriage was supposedly based on a couple Eliot knew.) The novel follows Dorothea and her fellow villagers as they try to extricate themselves from their own bad choices.  It’s a great novel, maybe the greatest English novel of the century.  The distance between our time and 1869, when Eliot started composing the novel, can be measured in her starchy tone and occasionally lugubrious sentence structure. She's not humorless, though, and the novel gains power as you get caught up in the power of Eliot’s depiction of sensitive, intelligent people trying to right their lives.

Luftwerk show at Marina City. This was a slow year for architecture in Chicago.  Plans for new projects have been announced—some interesting, others worrisome—but I didn't see any built projects worth mentioning. However, one pleasant night in August Iker Gil and MAS Context hosted a show staged by Luftwerk on the roof deck of Marina City. It was a great example of how architecture can frame an experience and change how you see the familiar. Speaking of MAS Context, check out the latest issue, ORDINARY. The highlights are an essay by Deborah Fausch, a project by Michael Hirschbichler, and a look at the Dingbats of Los Angeles by Joshua G. Stein. And Ordinary Architecture, a partnership of Elly Ward and Charles Holland, taught me “shonky,” an actual word. 

Derrida: A Biography, Benoit Peeters. Does anyone still read Jacques Derrida? Probably not. Nevertheless, his central idea has become a verb in common parlance. Derrida would be horrified to hear people use the term “deconstruct” to apply to everything from a skyscraper to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He was famous (or notorious) for resisting all summaries and simplifications of his work. Reading his biography I could better understand why. Derrida was an extremely hard worker. His dense, difficult prose was the product of intense and nuanced intellectual labor. When he left his desk Derrida was a generous and, occasionally, insufferable man. By his own admission he was a poor father. He was a serial adulterer. He picked more fights with colleagues than he needed to. Like a lot of philosophers, he didn’t live the most eventful life. If you read Peeters’ biography, be prepared for a lot of conferences. Whatever your opinion of Derrida’s philosophy, he must be recognized as one of the keenest minds of the twentieth century. 

The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson. The best film Anderson has made so far, it’s replete with off-the-wall period details like the coat check chit handed to a passenger after his cat was flung from the train. (Such Old World manners!) The plot isn’t worth summarizing; it’s really a vehicle for Anderson to link actions in amusing ways. Anderson keeps his customary whimsy at bay under the sobering influences of Stefan Zweig and Ernst Lubitsch. Ralph Fiennes is uncharacteristically sprightly as the busybody concierge, M. Gustave. The lobby boy Zero is exactly the kind of small canvas character Anderson excels in creating. With the exception of Bottle Rocket, the worlds of Anderson’s films are generally sealed off places where everyone speaks in the same punchy ironies. In this film you get the sense that just beyond the hills in Anderson’s imaginary Republic of Zubrowka some really awful things are happening. 

David Bowie Is, Museum of Contemporary Arts, Chicago. The last days of this remarkable exhibition are at hand, so go revisit a time when it seemed like rock and roll really would never die.

Literature As a Genre

Tim Parks tries to debunk the myth, to which I’ve always subscribed, that genre fiction can serve as a ramp to reading literary fiction—the “I don’t care if they’re reading Harry Potter so long as they’re reading something, and maybe it'll lead to reading something better” argument.

Parks admits that he only has anecdotal evidence to work with, but his experience indicates that the myth is, in fact, a myth. People will read genre fiction and literary fiction interchangeably, without drawing any clear difference between the two. W.H. Auden, for example, admitted he was addicted to detective fiction. (Walter Benjamin had the same addiction.) More commonly, though, people will read only genre fiction, and once they discover their genre, they stick with it, rarely if ever venturing into another genre. Parks concludes, “narratives do not form a continuum such that one is naturally led from the simpler to the more complex, but offer quite different experiences that mesh with readers’ psyches and requirements in quite different ways.” The reason why the myth endures, he says, is because teachers of literature want to believe that peoples’ reading habits can be improved.

Parks claims that “no one has ever spoken to me of making [the] progression” from low to high literature. But surely he has—and so has pretty much anyone who reads literature for leisure reading. For most people—or maybe I’m only speaking for myself—the taste for serious literature comes after one has developed the habit of leisure reading. I didn’t start reading literary fiction until high school. Before then I read a lot, but indiscriminately. I read a lot of stuff well below Harry Potter in quality. It wasn’t that I longed for more elevated reading; I just wanted to know what to read. Once I discovered it, literature focussed my reading. In effect, it became my genre.

Writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Saul Bellow I probably would have encountered on my own eventually. The first two are famous beyond literary culture, and to grow up in Chicago in the 1970’s was to know who Saul Bellow was. However, there comes a time when some professional guidance becomes necessary. How else does one learn the name D.H. Lawrence—or W.H. Auden, for that matter? To come across them on one’s own suggests that one is already wading into literary culture. 

While I think Parks is correct that people’s reading habits are set early in life, I don’t think that they appear fully formed. Nor do they develop in isolation from other modes of cultural practice. I’ve noticed that people who have broad and sophisticated tastes in music also tend to appreciate literature. Adventurousness in music is easily carried over into reading. While still in my teens I learned that oftentimes the most rewarding and meaningful listening experiences were the ones I had sought out. I applied the same approach in my reading. Who wants to read the same story over and over again? 

New LA Times Site and Your Next Newspaper

The new LA Times website went live today at 2 AM Chicago time. I managed the project team that built it. It's been a very long and difficult road to launch. Within minutes of going live we got negative feedback, but as more and more people have seen the site the comments have been generally positive, which is gratifying. We're scrambling to fix some small issues; overall, though, the site is performing a bit better than we expected. 

The new site has lots of bells and whistles, in particular the infinite scroll, an exclusive to the site. The most significant change is the least noticeable: the mobile and desktop versions of the site have been merged. The previous version of the LATimes.com offered up separate sites for desktop and mobile devices. The new site serves up the same content for all devices, although the content will lay out differently according to screen size. (In web development parlance, it's known as a responsive site.) Having one site for all devices--a highly complex technical task--is significant because at some point this year mobile device traffic will overtake desktop traffic.

This change, in turn, points to an even more profound change coming: devices themselves will disappear. We will access the Internet through screens only. Data and computation will occur in the cloud. Your access point will be an ordinary piece of glass illuminated by a light bulb that projects. Or your access point will be your kitchen countertop, your glasses, the palm of your hand. This is not a far-fetched prospect. The technologies already exist. They just need economies of scale to make them practical. The next LATimes.com redesign could appear on your bathroom mirror, or even a piece of paper.

In the meantime, I'm going to get some sleep. It's been a long day. 

Gabriel García Márquez

Last week the whole world mournrd the death of Gabriel García Márquez, even Mia Farrow, so I'll add my own reflections.

I did my Master's thesis on William Faulker's influence on García Márquez, which was a crazy topic for an English major. I read all of García Márquez's work translated into Spanish at the point, starting with "A Chronicle of a Death Foretold," which impressed me with its treatment of time more deeply than anything I'd encountered in Faulkner's works. 

The big one was One Hundred Years of Solitude with its famous opening line: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Solitude was the first novel I really studied. I'd been taught novels before, and had read plenty, but I really broke down Solitude to find out how it worked. Everybody talks about the fantastic events of the novel; for me, the source of the novel's beguilement was García Márquez's sentences. They were one long exhaled breath long: "The men on the expedition felt overwhelmed by their most ancient memories in that paradise of dampness and silence, going back to before original sin, as their boots sank into pools of steaming oil and their machetes destroyed bloody lilies and golden salamanders." He slips in golden salamanders just as you're starting to get a little light-headed. 

I never really liked the term Magic Realist. It sounded like the literary equivalent of a Volkswagen Bus decorated with flowers. Even as I was reading Solitude I kept fearing the spell would break and the novel's humid phantasmagoria would suddely appear dated. That never happened. Besides, isn't magical realism the act of reading any novel in this hyper-realist age?

García Márquez was also classified as a Latin American Boom writer, another bad term, as if the proliferation of Latin American writers after 1960 was a hatching of spiders. My thesis argued that García Márquez was a late Modernist and that, because poetry was the dominant literary form in Latin America until World War II, the novelists had to discover their own origins. William Faulkner was only one of the elective affinities for García Márquez and his contemporaries. Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Kafka--the entire Modernist canon was their starting point.

For a young graduate student still trying to find his way in the crowded landscape of literary studies, García Márquez and his fellow Latin American novelists were fresh territory, which I had to myself. I learned some Spanish to read García Márquez in the original, but never got to be fluent enough to appreciate his prose style any more than I would in translations. Besides, somehow translations added to the mystique. His translators--chiefly Gregory Rabassa and Edith Grossman--were like monks preserving and transmissing knowledge from a vanished world. Later, when I heard García Márquez speak, I was a little surprised to hear that he spoke Spanish. All this time I though he wrote in a language entirely of his own invention.

Notes on Los Angeles

A couple of weeks ago I was in Los Angeles. Because I was there for business I didn't get to see much of the city, just a few blocks of downtown and Little Tokyo. So while I can't pretend to have a comprehensive view of the city, I'd still like to share a few notes on the small segment of the city I observed. There is a Los Angeles of the mind, of the image store of American popular culture. The portion of LA I experienced, however, had few recognizable landmarks, just City Hall and a tunnel made famous by car commercials. So my frame of reference wasn't Hollywood, which felt very far away. Instead, my points of comparison were other cities, particularly Midwestern cities. In other words, Los Angeles, to me, seemed like just another city.

* * *

Most grid cities are oriented strictly along compass lines. Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia all have streets that run true north. LA's downtown grid system tilts northwest for no apparent reason. That makes it difficult to navigate if you're a pedestrian like I was. I'm walking on a perfectly straight street, but I can't tell if I'm walking south or east. When walking down the street in Manhattan the question is always, what's next? In LA, it's where does the street lead to, if it leads to anywhere? The grid system makes the streets seem emptier than they really are. Not only is the layout disorienting, it also makes the city seem as if it developed by happenstance. Great cities, of course, can develop this way, but in LA it leads to some curious planning decisions. Who decided to put the downtown in well inland and the airport next to the ocean?

Update one, Wednesday, November 13: See the comments from John Hupp below. The odd grid layout of LA is a feature of Spanish cities. John speculates downtown LA developed inland because of the rail lines in the area, which makes sense. 

Update two, Thursday, November 14: See comments from Erik Mar below. He says the Spanish grid rotation allowed for more sunlight to fall on the streets during winter. 

It was 47 degrees Fahrenheit in Chicago when I took this photograph. I spent most of the week in conference rooms, so when I was outside it was either foggy like in the photo at top, or it was dark. But one day I was able to slip out and snap this picture. It was 75 degrees and sunny, my first experience of California weather. The building is LA's City Hall, famous from a number of detective movies. The photograph, however, is more about weather than a building.

LA is famous for sprawl, but its downtown is compact. Skyscrapers are clustered together on Bunker Hill, as if on a stage. The buildings are packed together, but they don't convey a sense of density because there are so few pedestrians, especially after dark. Where are the urban masses?

The only people who were concerned about how I saw LA --the only ones who asked, "What do you think of LA?"--were transplants, people from elsewhere, usually the Midwest, who were still trying understand what they were seeing. The views they conveyed mapped the city into three zones: places worth seeing (Santa Monica, Pasadena) and places that were illegible, not worth seeing at all (most everywhere else, including downtown where we were). One place straddled the two zones: Hollywood.

In the courtyard of the MOCA Grand Avenue is a sculptor by Nancy Rubins called "Airplane Parts" consisting of scraps of old airplanes wired together into a large, bird-like object. The scraps come from airplanes that couldn't be any more than thirty or forty years old. In LA, even the refuse, the junk, is new. Go to downtown Detroit, where I was recently, or downtown Milwaukee, or the downtown of most any other Midwestern city and an entirely different historical structure is visible. Midwestern cities are haunted by the traces of nineteenth-century industrialization. This whole era, part of the bedrock of Midwestern cities, is missing in LA. There are buildings from the industrial era in downtown LA, but they seem like seem like preludes to a different city than the one that actually developed there.

On our last night in LA we walked to Little Tokyo to have dinner at the very excellent Sushi Gen, a recommendation from the transplants. We crossed broad streets, then had to back track to find the restaurant, which was located in a mall meant to evoke Shinjuku Golden Gai. Inside we sat at the sushi counter. There was no menu, so we had to point at each unlabeled fish. We were too tired to make any more than a few choices on our own, so after a while we asked the chefs behind the counter to choose for us. This was a relief from the usual formulation. All week week we had been deciding between utterly familiar choices. The chefs didn't speak much English, but if they did, we would have said to them: We're exhausted from making so many decisions. Guide us through this experience, show us something new so we can finally become travelers.

Be Back Shortly

This space has been quiet the past few weeks, but I should be able to start posting again this week. I've been crazy busy with a new project--the biggest I've ever managed--so I haven't been reading let alone writing lately. But I expect to start blogging again this week.

Thanks for reading.