I’ve now been on three trips in this quasi-After, having spent the better part of two years avoiding air travel like the plague since that’s where the plague was. I’ve never particularly liked flying – I’m the type that as soon as the plane takes to the sky it occurs to me that humans were never meant to fly. It’s foolish and unnatural, but I generally like going places and hate driving, so what are you going to do, take the train? This isn’t Almost Literally Every Other Country. So I suck it up and get on planes, and in the past four months I’ve done that three (well, six, since I came back too) times.
If you haven’t yet gotten back to air travel or travel in general, I can assure you that it has not improved because why would it? Are you new here? That’s not how we do things. It’s the same soul-sucking cattle drive it has been for most of our lives, just now with haphazardly-worn masks, flight attendants who have had just about enough of your shit, and reductions in service being blamed on Covid when in reality the blame should be put on good old-fashioned corporate greed. THAT BEING SAID: I have learned, once and forever, that if you’re going to put yourself through the sadomasochism of air travel, you can do a lot worse than PDX. It’s a generally lovely airport, and with their “street pricing” policy they won’t gouge you at the Starbucks. Being that I spent the last 25 years of my life in Los Angeles, I think you know where this comparison is going.
But it’s not! In this post I will not be slagging off on LAX, not solely because that horse has been beaten into glue, but because I didn’t go there. Our trip first took us to San Diego International Airport (née Lindbergh Field, since oops Charles Lindbergh was probably a Nazi maybe we shouldn’t have lionized him), which is an airport that I had never been to. It’s an airport that’s very much like any airport. It’s the San Diego of airports. It’s fine, just fine.
The first few days of the trip took us to a family wedding, a timeshare resort that looks like a Cheesecake Factory, the safari park, In-n-Out, and, unfortunately, Escondido. Yada yada yada, you don’t care, and this isn’t a travelogue anyway. The meat of the matter is that this was the first time for us back in Southern California since we left last year. It was a time for deep thoughts and reflection and navel-gazing and all that shit. Also for being tourists in our own city, even though it’s not our city anymore.
We drove up to LA on a Sunday morning, and got to experience that rarest and scariest of Southern California events: 80mph speeds across a seven-lane freeway. I had forgotten just how Thunderdome it can get out there when there’s not enough traffic to slow everyone down, but enough to constantly expect to be involved in a 12-car accident. Jockeying for position just to reach your destination a minute and a half sooner than the other guy: that’s how they teach you to drive in California. Oh well, I’d still rather have those heart-dropping flashes of impending death every couple of minutes than to sit in traffic, and we did make it from Oceanside to the west side of LA in about two hours so I’ll take the win.
Los Angeles was gross that day, my friends. That haze where you can’t tell whether it’s just ordinary old smog (I’m sorry that’s “marine coastal ozone layer”, or whatever such nonsense your Fritz Colemans and Johnny Mountains have added to our vocabulary), or whether the apocalyptic hellfire of the month is happening nearby. Either way, it had that Beijing-after-the-Olympics-left-town feel, or more appropriately, an LA in the 1970’s feel. I didn’t live there then, so just trust me that the air quality was not good at all.
Our one day in LA took us first to a familiar playground, then back to our former part of town, and finally to downtown LA, with cameos from various guest stars along the way. Culver City, where we lived prior to moving to Portland, doesn’t look that different from when we left it, but its progression into techity tech town looks complete. Amazon and Apple are up and running, Salt & Straw, Philz Coffee, and Mendocino Farms are open, and pretty people trying hard to not look like they’re trying hard are all over the place, putting too much money and effort into Instagramming their way toward their purported best lives. This is more or less how we left it, but now the transformation seems complete. Culver City, which rightfully prides itself on its illustrious movie history, has adapted to this current age of Hollywood, which takes a brief nod at it’s own past before shoving it into the background to make way for something worse. Like this architectural calamity:
Which they put in front of this:
Showbiz has always been an illusion (Michael) with art and commerce coexisting semi-peacefully, and plenty of guardians who knew that without art there is no money. Art seems to be getting farther from the equation, and those guardians are being replaced by algorithms. Both of those buildings above are being used by Amazon (Amazon Studios, more specifically)- a company that makes entertainment that I pay to watch, but whose primary business is everything but entertainment.
Being that this would be the first time I’ve stayed in a hotel in LA, we opted for the Millennium Biltmore downtown, which is a very old hotel with some vaunted movie history of its own. It was also the cheapest real hotel downtown. Aside from hosting the Oscars a bunch of times in the 1930s and 40s, it has played itself or a different hotel in countless productions. The hotel Axel Foley scams his way into and snakes some bananas for the tailpipe was most definitely not in Beverly Hills. The Ghostbusters caught their Class Five Free-Roaming Vapor not in New York. There was also this unfortunate event. It also has this lobby bar and let me tell you my friends, I do love a great lobby bar:
Harry Bosch has seen some shit go down there.
The hotel has seen better days, but it’s still absolutely gorgeous and I recommend it. If not for it being such a frequent filming location it’s likely they would have turned the lobby into a Jersey Mike’s by now, and the rooms would be 300 sq ft studio apartments renting for something too much. I’m sure they’d leave a plaque somewhere to commemorate the history. This is often the case in LA: history might only get preserved due to whatever non-core revenue stream the business has coming in that prevents its doors from closing. I’m reasonably confident that’s true for the Grauman’s Chinese (I know it’s not called that anymore, don’t care) and Westwood Village theaters, who host enough premieres to cover for the lack of people buying movie tickets the rest of the time. Everyone’s got to have a side hustle these days.
Los Angeles has always had an identity crisis of that sort. Who is it for, why is it there, and what is it trying to be? You can get some semblance of an answer to those questions in regards to most major cities. The easiest answer is that LA is not for anyone, it’s simply a place where people live and do their thing. There is plenty of history there, but you’d be hard-pressed to find examples of it being honored beyond small tokens and platitudes. Maybe it’s just too difficult in a city as sprawling and fragmented as it is. It’s simpler to keep it on the surface and swell up about some vague notion of a “California dream” or let Randy Newman write some dumb song about it.
My LA exists more in the in-between spaces than in any tangible form. There’s cruising down Sunset until you see the ocean, a summer night at the Hollywood Bowl, movies in a very empty Westwood Village theater, impromptu road trips to Vegas, or (gasp) twilight at Dodger Stadium. These are more in the memory/feeling bucket than the activity bucket, as actual events (how long did it take to get the car out of the parking lot? Did I really just pay $22 for a drink?) may differ from remembrance of said events, but ain’t that just what LA is all about.
My time in LA also got me a marriage, child, great career, bunch of money, and lifelong friends, but I’m trying to keep this melancholy since I suffer from the crutch of only being happy when I’m not happy. I returned to LA not thinking I was going home, because I wasn’t. Truthfully, I spent 25 years in a place that generally felt comfortable and that I enjoyed much of the time, but it never felt like home, and from day one I always thought of it as temporary. It just took longer to leave than I had thought it would, and took about a minute to shake it off. If I was going back to get some kind of closure – after all, we basically fled town when we moved, with very few goodbyes – I didn’t get it because that was never part of the equation. Closure is too heavy a word for a situation in which a smile and wave goodbye was sufficient.
I’ll go back, there will always be reasons to go back. Someday after we gain the physical, mental, and financial fortitude we’ll take our daughter to Disneyland. I also want to check out the new Academy museum, even though in typically hilarious LA fashion they made it a joke by building it as a Death Star:
What else to expect from a place where the train to the airport stops two miles from the airport?
The flight in and drive home from PDX made me remember Portland from the times I visited as a tourist. Seeing the St. John’s Bridge in the distance from the plane was a treat, and I dig that first view of the skyline when approaching the city center. Crossing the Willamette always at least whelms me. It may not catch me in the throat quite the way the ocean does, but there’s still nothing like it at the right time of day, and it was the right time of day. I was home.
Snarky and funny. Not mutually exclusive, but enjoyable none the less!