|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
The End Of Reality
| Article
# : |
10528 |
|
|
Section : |
LIFE
|
| Issue
Date : |
1 / 1993 |
2,357 Words |
| Author
: |
Richard Lourie
Richard Lourie is the author of Sakharov: A Biography. |
I went to Los Angles to work on a film and see my son. I'm always glad to have real reasons to connect me to a place when I'm traveling and never more so than in L.A. It is hard to get a feel for what is happening in any city. The cultural clichés surrounding cities obscure them, and Los Angeles is the ultimate producer of images. But then... the surprise of reality awaits beyond the clichés.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
Ravaged by rains of near-biblical proportions, Los Angeles had been washed clean when I arrived--streets, vegetation, air. Palm trees, endless, slender, towering; green hills gleaming with sunlight on white stucco; lemon and orange trees growing wild by the road as ordinary and profuse as dandelions; the blue might of the Pacific, I had forgotten Los Angeles could be so beautiful.
L.A. glitz and smog are shorthand in the popular imagination. Glitz is in the eye of the beholder. But smog is quite literally in your eye. And no sooner had I arrived at LAX airport than I, too, began contributing to the emissions that would gradually smear the city.
The first thing you learn in L.A. is that every place you want to go is at least forty-five minutes away. If you go two places in a day, it means a minimum of three hours in the car-- an amount that would be considered epic in the East. And for that reason, it makes sense to have a vehicle (a word Californians stress on the second syllable) that is well equipped.
A car phone is a necessity in L.A more than an affectation of ambition. Fortunes surely have been made over the phone during major freeway traffic jams. I met one woman who revealed that her husband had broken up with her by cellular phone from the Santa Ana Freeway.
Without meaning to, the city masks its problems in dazzling light and color. An empty store in the East looks like a missing tooth. In Los Angeles, the windows of empty stores reflect the sunlight just as well as the ones still in business.
Yet the locals do not conceal their problems; they reveal them with disarming immediacy. A common complaint I heard was of "disconnection." New Yorkers tend to complain of alienation, a word that brings to mind Woody Allen, psychiatrists, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The L.A. variation, disconnection, is an almost-technical term reflecting not only
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
