I grew up in LA, all over LA from South Central out to Northridge, wondering into near downtown, and out to near West LA toward Venice, back when Venice was still a faded and dreary absurdity with fake canals, and bogus Arabesque or 1920s Spanish facades. I went to thirteen elementary schools in the LA School district and only remember one of them. Union Avenue, back when it was also a faded run down inner city school, with the best teachers I ever had. I suspect it was a target school of some sort where the district sent teachers who wanted to experiment in saving kids. It certainly worked for me. I loved it. From the old hard core, Anacartha M. Standard and bright eyed, wiley Miss Jackson, to the soft hearted Mister Mendenhall. Yes they were exactly who and what their names implied.
LA is like that. My parents specialized in finding cool places in the urban sprawl, and just for a moment, while we lived in a strange fourplex old house like affair on top of a hill overlying Lucas and Beverely, I lived almost everyday in joy. I marched up crowded, scary Beverely passed the old Belmont High School, passed the busy dinners and quick-stop coffee places up toward Union, and turned right, to enter a huge playground asphalt yard and stall waiting for the teacher-drill sargents to line us up and march us into the back door of the main building. This was done with whistles and those strange colored cardboard conical things that coaches used to use. The playground had more different kinds of kids than I could keep track of. Some where from places I never heard of, like Lithuania.
It was there that I first learned the lesson of anonymity. The standard class room was 36. I hid for days before Miss Jackson spotted me, lurking in the back. Her sharp dark eyes and linear jaw, made her look Egyptian. She would look at her chart, and then call me by name. Oh, god. Kids went to the black board usually in small groups of ten.
To my horror, Mister Mendenhall liked my watercolor painting of Christopher Columbus's ship the Santa Maria---which I also built as model from a kit I got hiking up Lucas to 3rd where there used to be a small hobby store. I was star for a day (a horrible experience), and the principle hung the painting in his office. I spent hours on it.
That's LA. Nothing, then wonderful, then back to nothing.
I have a love hate thing about LA. I love all the part I loved, and hate all the part I hated. I hated the Valley where we ended up in the very heyday of the place, circa 1958. Mile after mile after mile. Long open blouvards stretching into the night horizon. It always took hours to get anywhere. All my favorite dates involved long drives. Linda whose father was a reed play for Nelson Riddle lived nearby in Northridge, but we would drive to some place in Hollywood or West LA where a movie house was showing a Euro flick of the era (circa late 50s to early 60s). We always dressed up to look older. It did get us passed a waiter's scrutiny on Ventura Blvd's fancy steak resturant, and a glass of wine. I once blew fifty bucks (earned as a pizza cook on Van Owen) in the eleventh grade on a single date. Linda put her hair in a Euro bun, wore silver earings, and pearls, black low cut dress. I tried to pretend she was Claudia Cardinelli. I was in my dark suit, tie, white shirt, pointy Euro shoes, we were driving my mother's aquamarine Cadillac convertible. Man that was some date. We ate at a French resturant somewhere on Melrose and then drove up to Hollywood Blvd at the Egyptian Theatre to see `On the Beach'. Very fucking cool, especially the winding drive back over Laurel Canynon and then along Mulholland. Other cool dates, me and Stephanie who lived in Canoga Park, went to Pickwick Books on Hollywood Blvd, bought a couple of things (Christmas presents), then drove down to Carolina Pines for coffee and desert. We were beatniks by then, and dressed in all black. Or there was Stevie and her leftwing radical father who lived in Laurel Canyon, a photographer and cameraman for some studio. LA is arty and full of money. You just have to look around.
LA is cinascope. The scale is vast, especially at night. The secrete is to learn the grid.
The geographical perspective on LA is the grid itself. These are the old major blouvards that traverse the city and have since before there were freeways. I remember them from childhood to young adult as the signature of the place. The names just roll around in my mind in no particular order: Crenshaw, Western, Hoover, Figerora, Slauson, Vermount, Sunset, Hollywood, Santa Monica, La Cienega, Olympic, Melrose, Wilshire, Alvarado....
Get a car, a car you love, because you are going to spend a lot time in it. What I wanted was something sporty, but I couldn't afford it so I got weirdos European cars and repaired them from the truly awesome junkyards out along Tujunga or Lankershim.
You need somebody who knows the place like the back of their hand to pick a cool area that hasn't been discovered yet.
Maybe Dennis Claxton or Marta Russell. Somebody who has kicked around LA a lot. Whole nieghborhoods are wiped off the map on a routine basis. The LA from my era doesn't exist anymore, except in my mind.
And yet, it always felt as if I was living in the future. How is that possible? It was as if, the future place that all cities would descend to was Los Angeles.
Fredrick Jameson did a lot of writing about Postmodernity, but what he was really writing about was Los Angeles. It was postmodern, before there was a postmodern to write about.
The trick is to find one of those arty neighborhoods, a few weird people living in a cul du sac with too many trees. You just never know where that is. Could be anywhere maybe surrounded by barrio noise, or just off some main drag everybody hates. Deleuze and Guttari trajectories on the Oedipal plane---strickly horizonal chaos.
Manaugh's Culver City sucks. There is nothing there. You gotta go deep into the beast and look around the old lost parts of the city. They must be everywhere. I imagine lost streets where old ladies still serve tea on silver platers as if they were the grandmothers to Nathaniel West, quoting the bible and have no idea there is a new freeway, five blocks away. Blocks in LA are about a 1/4 mile long. That's why we could almost drag race between stop lights.
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/03/thousand-mile-colosseum.html