City of Los Angeles
Public Services & Government
Los Angeles, CA
High school graduation for a boy from Orange County was coming closer and closer. Turning 18 meant going to Club Beat It or Club Bang. The class of 2001 was not the Class of 2000 but the first high school graduating class past the millennium, which being the first class was somehow more important than being zeroth. First prize, first kiss, first pregnancy. There was The Smell, too. It was nice because the Friday-slash-Saturday night Los Angeles traffic would guarantee that the hangout would be past 2 am or 3 am when you get back.
But being in Los Angeles was separate from living in Los Angeles. There is nothing really penetrable about visiting Los Angeles. (The car is just another surface against the city.) And having abandoned Orange County years ago to San Francisco and London, I moved here, to a close but separate place, because I missed the weather. I also knew about the culture, the isolation, the pretension that is not the beast of just Los Angeles, but Southern California in general. The seductive part of Los Angeles is breaking through its seeming impenetrability. Perhaps seduction is found in the tension that another surface brings it. I’m not sure if Los Angeles could be Los Angeles without the moving car.
Getting to know Los Angeles requires willpower to combat it and a surface to ride against it. I don’t need a car here so I have ridden with my bike from my apartment in Los Feliz to other things on a daily basis for three years. I have hit into things pretty hard so Los Angeles is literally in my arms and legs, and my own blood is on it too. The cracks become the focus if they are what make you fall. I’ve embraced the isolation and glamorous surface and crisscross (and sometimes fall from) these fragments. Yet I think the fragments from around these cracks are the tectonic plates that keep this city moving. There is a hazy cloud of Angelenos who literally live on separate tectonic plates and co-exist as a sub-community of the moving car. And I embrace the counterintuitive impulse to coexist on a tectonic plate, movement against movement, and I like the weather.
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5/8/2014