Departures: Draining Los Angeles: Part 0

It was Thursday, the 13th of December, 2001 and I was on a plane flying into LAX. I had a window seat, and I was looking out. I was coming to grips with what I saw outside the window.

Years before, when I was living in the East Bay, I'd known this guy named Martin Turon. Martin was in this band called Whipped, and Whipped decided to move to Los Angeles. If you wanted to make something of your band, you moved to Los Angeles. A year after Martin went away, Whipped came out with an album. It was called "this is what it's like". The cover showed a sort of suburban landscape, a jumbled mass of houses and lawns stretching off to the horizon; above them was a fiery orange sky.

And now I was looking outside an airplane window at urban sprawl that spread out as far as eyes could penetrate through haze. I looked at a sky that was orange, not with fire but with smog. That is what it was like. Whipped was gone and Martin had been spotted back in the S.F. Bay Area and now I was seeing what he'd escaped.

The airport shuttle hauled me and some other people around towards my hotel, dropping off people at apartment buildings built around courtyards in this city that just went on and on for mile after mile. Neal Stephenson's burbclaves didn't seem far-fetched at all. Anything seemed possible. I imagined that if the world didn't have mountains or oceans, that Los Angeles would cover the globe. So many people lived here. So many people lived here that the place had to use its political power to wrest water away from the rest of the state. So many people wanted to live here?

Walking in L.A.

I'd stashed my stuff at the Hotel Stillwell (a hotel which I don't recommend), on the outskirts of downtown. I walked towards downtown, pounding the pavement, looking for lunch. I walked past a parked police car. Something wasn't right. It was a New York police car, but I wasn't in New York. Was I? I'd meant to fly to Los Angeles. I didn't remember losing sight of the coast for very long. I kept walking, feeling uneasy. Then I saw the sign pointing the "NYPD Crew" into some building. Some show business people must be filming a New York police procedural nearby.

I kept walking, walked through a few blocks of tall buildings. Office workers tromped around. I walked past fancy restaurants, but not past any place where normal office workers would want to eat lunch. Where did all of these people eat? Off on side streets, no doubt. In little delis tucked away in building lobbies. They ate in places that I wasn't spotting.

There was a hill. And I was walking past this building, and there was a mosaic on the side of the building, and I was checking that out, and then I did a double take. Mixed in with the mosaic were some bits of metal, and those bits of metal were parts, and those parts looked like they had come from some telephone switching equipment.

It was telephone equipment, and now it was art. I took in the whole thing. It was a sort of map of the world, showing communications bouncing off satellites. It was colorful and shiny. Too bad my pictures didn't turn out. (But the web is a wonderful thing. Check out this excellent page.)

Further up the hill, I spotted a mini-mall at the base of an office building. Specifically, I spotted the "water feature" which decorated its front entrance. This water feature sheeted water over a surface of stone, quite a bit of which ended up dribbling out of the feature and onto the walkway. Upon seeing this, I seethed with righteous NorCal anger. Los Angeles had stolen this water from somewhere else, perhaps from Northern California, perhaps from Mono Lake. And for what? So that they could expose the maximum surface area to the sun. So that they could dribble it onto the sidewalk. My brain oozed curses.

I had found the Water Court mall at California Plaza. A "Water Court" in Los Angeles, desert city. It occurred to me that I should curb my anger long enough to grab some lunch. I wandered around, checking out the food places. A bagelry looked to be my best bet. I approached it. It was dark inside. Were they open? I peered inside. There was a sign there, saying "Yes, we ARE open!!!". Well, that answered my question. I tried the door. It was locked. The sign had lied. Los Angeles was full of water thieves and liars. I fumed.

I got an icky sandwich from (ugh) Briazz and ate it next to another water feature, a mess of waterfalls surmounted by Christmas decorations. I wondered why the Water Court people hadn't set up a snow machine at the top of their waterfalls. That would have allowed them to add more to the faux-holiday feel of the place and allowed them to waste yet more water, plus some measure of electrical power. No doubt the extra bile aided my digestion.

I walked further North along Grand. I saw a lot with a lot of activity: people were either demolishing a building, or they were constructing a Gehry-designed building. A big sign let me know that they were constructing the Walt Disney theater, which had indeed been designed by Gehry.

I walked past a cluster of city-government buildings. The streets around them were barricaded by cement barriers. Police kept watch. Armored fighting vehicles stood by to withstand an assault. Ah, Los Angeles, a government at war with its people. I hurried past before any fighting broke out.

I walked past some historical buildings, and eventually arrived at the Tourist Information Center which was my goal--only to discover that it was a Tourist Information Center only for these historical buildings. I was hoping for something that would tell me about visiting the harbor areas down around Long Beach. This would never do.

I turned around to head back to my hotel. I walked over an overpass, looked down and saw a scary mural. In it, a cop towered over a cityscape. Its caption read, "Buckle Up!" but that was not its main message. Its main message: obey law enforcement officials, or else they will stomp Tokyo destroy Los Angeles. It's as if the city government had seen too many Hollywood movies about plucky rebels defying the evil totalitarian government and decided, "Okay, so let's be, like, totalitarian." I hurried along until I was away from the towering cop's gaze.

I wandered back towards the hotel through downtown. Downtown reminded me of Mission Boulevard in San Francisco: bustling sidewalk, shops packed in cheek by jowl, not too clean. A building had a sign on it: "Bradbury Building". Wow, that building that appeared in "Bladerunner". I was pleased. I'd come to Los Angeles, and now I'd seen a movie star.

Back in my hotel room, I checked my guidebook. There was another Tourist Information Center nearby, perhaps one for all of LA. I scrambled out and walked to it through the skyscraper district. Upon arriving at the Center's door, I learned that it had closed for the day while I'd been tromping back from the decoy Tourist Information Center up North.

Thursday evening, I had dinner with Dave Otsuka whose office, it turned out, looked down upon the Water Court of California Plaza. I'd had vague social plans for this trip, which for the most part didn't come together. I was having dinner with Dave that evening because he was about to fly up to San Francisco. My cousin Kim had just headed up to the SF Bay Area for the holidays. I would have had more time to hang out with these people if I'd stayed home.

There were also a couple of guys who I knew through work. They worked at a place called Calabasas, which I thought of as being in Los Angeles. However, I only thought this until I arrived in Los Angeles and got a better idea as to the scale of the place. Calabasas is actually quite a ways away from where I was staying. This will not surprise anyone from Los Angeles, but it sure surprised me.

Anyhow, Dave and I ate dinner at a Japanese restaurant in the Biltmore Hotel, which was nice and empty so that we could hear ourselves talk. I mentioned that I was thinking of checking out Long Beach; Dave clued me in that Snoop Dogg and Warren G. were from Long Beach. I didn't really know what to do with that knowledge. Dave had good things to say about the LACMA. We talked about the mildew that was taking over Dave's house. Both Dave and his ladyfriend were allergic to it, and were probably going to have to move: move or die.

After dinner, Dave brought me over to the main Los Angeles library. There were a lot of books there. There were comfy seats there. A few years back, San Francisco had built a new main library. The new San Francisco main library had been smaller than the old one; the librarians ended up throwing out a lot of books. Los Angeles' library had soaring art in the foyer--so they were just as newfangled as us; but they still had books in their library. I felt like a barbarian visiting Rome. Dave's sister's novel was nearing publication. I supposed that it would eventually be available from that very library.

We walked up the Bunker Hill Steps, where I heard the trickling of a water feature through the inky darkness. Okay, maybe I was from a barbarian city, but the Angelinos were still water thieves.

Friday was mostly museums

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