Drive west on Sunset to the see
Turn that jungle music down
Just before we're out of town.
~Babylon Sisters, Steely Dan
Just northwest of Chinatown, immediately adjacent to where the Harbor and Hollywood freeways become a Gordian knot, Cesar Chavez Avenue quietly becomes Sunset Boulevard, one of LA’s most famed arteries. Traveling northward from this transition point, Sunset passes through the neighborhoods of Angeleno Heights, Echo Park, Silver Lake, and Thai Town before crossing the Hollywood Freeway and piercing the heart of Tinsel Town. If you keep driving west, this windy strip of asphalt will take you through gay West Hollywood, the posh Holmby Hills, the UCLA campus in leafy Westwood, and finally to the Pacific Palisades where the blue Pacific ocean crashes against the continent behind Gladstones restaurant.
At the corner of Sunset and Silver Lake Boulevard, a bright lavender building houses Café Tropical, a Cuban café and bakery. I pull onto a side street, stop in for a Café Helado and a couple of pastelitos, and sit at a sidewalk table in the morning sun to enjoy the slight hipster vibe of the place. The iced coffee is strong and slightly sweet. The pastelitos are flakey and lightly glazed providing the perfect balance between savory and sweet. If there is a better morning combination than caffeine and meat pastries, I’m not aware of it.
Next door to the café is a pediatrician’s office, a pottery studio, and a small night club that features live music. Across the street there is an izakaya, a ramen house, and a vegan restaurant. A stone’s throw south you’ll find several Italian joints, a Vietnamese café, a Thai restaurant, and a bodega. The only thing missing is a good taco shop, but those are prolific in this city with a Mexican heritage. There are literally thousands of taquerias to choose from. There are also armies of Spanish-speaking sidewalk vendors hawking milky Horchata and delicious vasos de fruita sprinkled with spicy chile-lime seasoning. A gastronomic epiphany for the uninitiated.
This is the scene all up and down Sunset Boulevard. It’s also the scene up and down every major and minor thoroughfare in Los Angeles. Because every ethnic group imaginable is present and represented here. And they have brought their culture, food, music, style, and vibrant traditions to various ethnic hubs throughout the city. There’s Boyles Heights (a center of Chicano culture), Chinatown, Koreatown, Little Tokyo, Thai Town, Little Armenia, Filipinotown, Leimert Park (a hive of Black culture), Little Ethiopia, and Pico-Robertson (a center of Jewish culture). You’ll also find Central American, South American, Middle Eastern, African, Eastern European, and Russian diaspora scattered about in the various nooks and crannies of this unimaginable metropolis. It’s quite a mélange of humanity.
Long before I arrived in the Southland, I was programmed to hate all of this. First, by the incessant drumbeat of both the mainstream media and the prevailing culture. Then later in life by northern California elitists who all seem to carry the burden of an undeserved superiority complex. The message from both camps was that Los Angeles was an abhorrent place. The freeways were a mess. The air and streets were dirty. Downtown was sterile and uninviting. Crime was rampant. Filthy homeless people were defecating on the sidewalks everywhere. And the salt in the wound was that you had to pay a significant premium to experience all of these wonderful things.
As an ignorant outsider, I lapped it all up. Loathing Los Angeles was de rigueur so without any objectively valid reason to do so, loath I did. I also stayed away as much as possible.
The problem is that when you live in close proximity to the City of Angels, it’s virtually impossible to avoid it. If you intend to fly somewhere, you will be forced to experience the utter misery of LAX. Going to a concert will invariably place you at the Hollywood Bowl, Staples, the Greek Theater, or any one of the thousand other venues that dot the Los Angeles map. If you’re interested in seeing a major league baseball game (or even if you’re not interested, but get invited), you’ll end up at Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine near downtown. If you’re a practicing attorney, more than one time in your career you will have a case venued downtown at either the Stanley Mosk Courthouse or the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building. You will naturally be forced into Los Angeles for a number of other reasons including doctor’s appointments, meetings, events, friends, dining, drinking, carousing, shopping, and just plain old exploring. There is no way to avoid it.
So over time I found myself visiting and flirting a bit with El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles. Initially, my amorous overtures were on the sly. A coy glance over the shoulder here, a subtle wink there. I didn’t quite know what I might be getting myself into even though I did understand that I was probably in dangerous territory. Los Angeles was a harlot and courting her was a like repudiating God or voting Democrat for the first time. It was a frightening, heretical act, a blatant repudiation of everything I’d been told was good and honest and true. So even though the pursuit was exhilarating, I really wasn’t looking for committed relationship. Lady Los Angeles wasn’t the marrying type. I just wanted to escort her to one of the motels along Sunset Boulevard that advertise hourly rates and adult movies for a late-afternoon quickie.
To my surprise, Los Angeles took no offense to my boorish behavior and selfish motivations. Instead, she licked her pouty red lips, fluttered her long black eyelashes, and seductively lifted her skirt to show me her brown thighs. It was all quite alluring. And strangely endearing. Suddenly, I began to view this much maligned city through a very different set of eyes. I realized that Los Angeles was desirable and beautiful even if she was a courtesan. I found myself wanting to spend much more time in her presence even though she didn’t seem to care one way or another.
With a megalopolis like Los Angeles, you can never really experience it all unless you’ve lived there a lifetime. Even then, you may not have sufficient bandwidth to absorb it all. You need an eternity. That’s because the city is incomprehensible in its enormity. It overwhelms you with its shape-shifting madness and unending sprawl. The best you can do is jump in without either fear or any preconceived ideas about what you’ll find and whether you’ll like it or not.
Employing that approach, I finally took the plunge and found Los Angeles to be everything. From the bustle of the Fashion District with its heavy Latino influence to the crowded sidewalks of Little Tokyo to the graffitied alleys of the Art District to the funky enclave of Studio City to quickly gentrifying East Hollywood to depressing Skid Row, Los Angeles is every adjective ever invented. Some of those adjectives are not flattering. Los Angeles, like every major city in the United States has its problems. The traffic is horrendous. Parking is a nightmare. The city is not immune to crime. Raggedy homeless shelters do line sidewalks, underpasses, freeway exits, and river bottoms. But those warts and blemishes are the focus of haters with inflexible minds and an agenda. The yapping voices that neither know nor care to know Los Angeles.
Negatives don’t define a place. They certainly don’t define Los Angeles. Because perhaps like no other place I’ve even been, Los Angeles defies easy definitions. Its size, complexity, energy, and sheer power won’t permit it to be restrained in that way. What then can be said about the place Mike Davis referred to as the City of Quartz? The obvious answer to that rhetorical question is “quite a lot.” Much ink has been spilled over the decades on that very subject. For me, however, it is no longer complicated even though it is still complex. Los Angeles is the fabulous, thrilling, eclectic, provocative, chaotic, frenetic, dirty, dangerous, crowded, glorious thing that happens when folks from all over the whole world come together in one place to hold hands.
Comments
Post a Comment