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All the concrete big structures have expansion joints. If you look under the overpasses, you'll see these retro-fitted steel brackets. They are designed to slide on their mounts a certain amount.This means they move in response to the wave like quakes. There are other kinds like what I call the hardknock. Boom, its over. Their are rolling ones that build up. You expect them to be over, but they are getting worse. 1989 one was a building up series of waves.
The Japanese one in March was a huge wave or roller. People were tossed off their feet. I watched as much video as I could find of the tsunami. It was just epic scale. It was so huge and fast, it was very difficult to judge the scale. It was much better than the movies could produce. You could watch cars racing on the road to get out of the way and they could drive fast enough on an elevated road on top of a levee. The estimates were 300-500 mph. That's passenger jet speed.
My first and biggest one was the1952 Techachapi 7.7 monster. I was out in the Valley staying with my father. My bed was sliding out away from the window and then slamming back, while the blinds were going wild. I jumped out of bed wide awake, and watched the kicthen doors opening, dumping plates and glasses on the floor then closing again and opening again to dump more, like a weird machine. My stepmother was running around trying to keep the doors closed.
I didn't know any better and started to giggle covering my mouth with my hand. There was my stepmother, usually a very cool, reserved character running around in a panic.My father managed to drag himself out of a gin stupor to survey the damage, and then go back to bed. My stepmother, told me to put on some shoes and help her, so I did.
I went out the back portch and saw neighbors on both sides out looking around, as if looking for flying saucers. The utter strangeness of it went right to the core of my weird kid imagination, so when I watched War of the Worlds, it seem to have somekind of reality correlate.
Now of course I realize that yes physical reality is far stranger than we might imagine. If science tells us to figure out the wave particle duality, then figure it out. If Einstein says gravitation is the geometry of space, then figure it out... If Darwin tells of the descent, then figure it out. And, if Spinoza tells us to create our own ethical and moral life, well figure it out. Marx tells us to watch the factory-machine, with us as the energy supply, so I watch that too. I look at my body which has been constructed to work, and now my machine is broken and getting old, headed for the dump. But thank Allah, not just yet. I've got plans for tomorrow. I am driving out to nowhere to see a free 10 inch table saw by another old dude who wants it to go to a good home. Buddy. I know what you want, I can tell you, you old union carpenter, I've got the perfect home.
There is another weird link that puts certain kinds of modern art with science fiction and modern physics in a free association mind. It's a little like staying ten, much longer than appropriate.
You want to reach into 400 Blows and give it another twist, an LA twist of Modernity...
CG