There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like a few days on the
planet called Los Angeles to remind one that reality is the
ultimately subjective phenomenon.
There is nothing, absolutely nothing, like a few days on the planet called Los Angeles to remind one that reality is the ultimately subjective phenomenon.
Ours and theirs are two very different things, and the longer one remains in theirs the more it acquires a certain twisted legitimacy. If you were to conduct a person-on-the-street poll asking the question, “Can two plus two ever equal five?” a significant number of Angelenos would answer with something like, “If the money’s good and the right people are behind it, yes.” In Los Angeles, people like the idea of Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor but they’d be even more convinced of his qualifications if he also had a hit record out.
Los Angeles is the cure for San Jose, in the sense that when you are feeling that Metropolitan Santa Clara County is too big and too impersonal and has too much traffic and too much noise and too much basically everything, Los Angeles cures you of those feelings. When LA is the comparison, downtown San Jose is a good example of open space preservation.
LA has things nobody else has, or would think of having, or in many cases could figure out a reason to have. For example, there is the Getty Center, which I finally got around to visiting last week. The Getty is sort of an art museum and sort of a series of elaborately landscaped gardens and sort of a meeting place for groups, and sort of a … well, it’s primarily a vast statement of how mind-numbingly rich J. Paul Getty was and what can be bought with that much money. Occupying the top of a mountain overlooking West LA and accessible only by its own people-mover, it is so huge that if it had oil reserves Dubya would claim it has weapons of mass destruction and invade it. I mean, it just goes on and on, building after fountain after promenade after random construction for no known purpose, long after it has convinced one that yes, this is the why-stop-at-merely-grandiose monument to one hell of a wealthy dude.
LA traffic is a phenomenon of sublime perversion, going beyond the mundane confines of mortal traffic jams and entering the realm of cosmic intractability. There are glaciers in Alaska that can get from Point A to Point B in a fraction of the time required by an automobile in Los Angeles. In addition to the fact that things in LA tend to be spread out over huge distances so that people think nothing of driving 10 miles each way to get their nails done, the congestion on major streets and worse yet on the freeways is so bad that people have been known to miss two mortgage payments in the time it takes them to get home from work.
I think the reason why LA has a disproportionate share of new, high-end, and exotic cars is that people spend so much time stuck in traffic with nothing else to do but look at each other’s cars that it becomes really important for one’s self-esteem to have a good one. Since everyone seems to be obsessively buff despite the fact that they spend most of their time motionless behind a wheel trying to get somewhere, I can only assume that in addition to the ubiquitous thermonuclear sound systems blaring out competing hip-hop percussion effects capable of sterilizing farm animals at 50 yards these crates all come with in-car fitness equipment.
Now I’m ready for a long, relaxing dose of tiny, uncrowded, semi-rural San Jose.
