Sign in with Facebook
Sunset by Manhattan beach.
Mushroom Fettucine
Califonia Science Center
interior of cathedral of our lady of the angelsLos Angeles State of Mind
Los Angeles is a place of paradoxes. It's a place where you can list all the predictable cliches, yet many things have little or no continuity. The disturbing and beautiful are often one in the same. People so close to each other in proximity are so jaggedly different. Neighborhoods are disjointed in social class, interests, and architecture. There's no city center. LA exists as a pile of shard ends, not much different than the view through a kaleidoscope. Like a circus, oddities are abundant. Ridiculous stilted houses in the hills and large animals atop of restaurants have become a normal sight in contrast to things that are far stranger. Near the Prominade, a pimped out orange Bentley pulls up next to a hobo who is using the sidewalk curb as a pillow. In Downtown LA, a man in a suit on a cellphone lounges inside a shopping cart rolling down a busy parking lot as if laying in his own bed. The black smoke rises from a pile of burning clothes on the driveway of a house on Robertson, apparently due to a lover's quarrel.
Celeb fetishes either are forcefed or lulled. A woman who pulls up next to you and asks for directions to Sprinkles turns out to be in a HBO movie rerun you watch later that evening. The person asking you to excuse him while he brushes past you for the restroom at The Belmont is one of the cast members of a popular mid-90's sitcom you hated. Sometimes these people are familiar off the bat. Others, only recognizeable as an afterthought. Some people loath the tendencies of LA. Yet, when viewing a film shot in the location within a close radius of their home, they are once again romanced at the thought of being a resident.
To live here is like viewing a spinning carousel of snapshots. A fleeting glimpse of things that may or may not be there in the next go-around. The images are misleading. It's not that they lie. It's that they don't tell the full story. They offer the joy of illusion, hiding about as much as they reveal. These illusions are subconsciously accepted to avoid the blandness of ordinariness.
Mistakes are made. Lessons are learned. The difference between fog and smog are as confusing between make-believe and reality. Traffic in intertangled highway noodles, often purposeless valet parking attendants on an empty parking lot, growing lines of people by which a restaurant's quality is judged, and potential motions in the faultline beneath that can erase it all -somehow I love this place.
