Thoughts on Los Angeles

I came to Southern California in the fall of 2001 without much admiration for the city I would call my home over the ensuing four years of my life. At first glance I saw this city as a “concrete jungle,” to quote the popular Bob Marley lyric. Furthermore I trapped myself within the walls of the concrete and cyclone fencing, never venturing far from campus in my first year at USC. Yet, I hardly embraced the neighborhood around me. I was put off by a city in which I found no sense of community and a clear distancing between its innumerable inhabitants.

I knew nothing of Los Angeles. Never had I driven Broadway through downtown, and up to Chinatown. I hadn’t yet found the nature of LA in a Philippe’s French dip, across the street from the decaying boxcars that border Union station. I knew nothing of Los Angeles until I took the time to traverse the Hollywood spectrum. In my car I began to indulge in what Los Angeles had to offer. I found Amoeba music and the incredibly persistent subculture of music hipsters that lurk along Sunset, beneath the shadows of blockbuster billboards and record label ads on bus-stop benches. I found that there are cafes, taverns, bars, clubs, and stages that house one or many of your desires, sometimes throughout all hours of the night. You can taste Los Angeles in the Pantry at 4 A.M. beneath the luminous glare of the downtown skyline.

There is a sense of irony in every meal throughout this fare city. Ask your server why waitressing is merely a side job and she will tell you that she is awaiting a call back from a Hollywood studio. Disney’s California Land goes so far as to mock the dual employment of the waiter/actor in a theme park café. These theme parks, the most glaring symbols of the southern California experience, employ those awaiting dreams of the big screen. “Aspiring” is the key term to describe these dreamers. Their first role usually entails playing a character in limbo, awaiting a chance at stardom and a piece of the promise that the continual sunshine of California, and the “lights, camera, action” of Hollywood, represents.

Yet, there is still a Los Angeles for those who are not pursuing this dream. I came for reasons independent of the typical Los Angeles appeal. What good is a dream if it betrays another? Today, I drive down Broadway and observe the decay of the Los Angeles dream. Where once marquees lit up the facades of theatre buildings, now steel shudders cover the street-front shops of the never-ceasing Broadway flee-market. I drive slowly to the solemn sounds of Indie Rock bands, playing a soundtrack to the broken lives of many who wander the Broadway street, only a couple of blocks over from Skid Row. I wonder, “Where they are going?” and furthermore consider whether or not they wonder what it is that I am doing on Broadway at two in the morning. After all I am white. But if I don’t belong on Broadway then where do I belong? Beverly Hills? Palisades? I’ve never even been to these places. But amidst the stares I feel at home along the downtown streets and up along the unheralded section of the Sunset strip where Abee finds his meanings. I go to the Echo on reggae dub night every Wednesday and know that I belong amidst the cholos and African Americans from the Echo Park neighborhood. It is their neighborhood but it is our music.

There is a community in music. I scan the airways in search for a soundtrack to my drive from USC, up Vermont, and west on Sunset. I have listened to the KCRW pledge drives, and wished that I were more than the typical, penniless college student. I wanted to buy myself a place in the public radio community, endorsing such an independent enterprise within a city that reeks of conformed media.
Let it be known that the movie star does not embody our public, in the same way that Warner Brothers and Capital Records do not define our enterprise. Didion is right. It is fair to say that one can only gain a small sense of this concrete jungle. Yet, our senses must not simply appeal to the Promised Land memorandum. To know Los Angeles one must drive, duck in, embrace, and indulge in the culture of a city begging to be given a chance, just like the young female actress awaiting her first call back while donning an apron, with notepad in hand, and a pencil behind the ear.