I moved to L.A. from New York. My boyfriend and I had lived in the East Village and relocated when he got a job writing for a TV show. We ended up in an apartment in Silver Lake. An apartment with a 'half' number as an address. It's symbolic. I've felt like a half a self since I've been here.
Two friends of mine from college told us that the apartment across the courtyard from theirs was going to be free since its occupant was 'heading east' for law school. We jumped on it. Mainly because it was only 900 and change a month but also because it was in Silver Lake.
We were told that Silver Lake was L.A.'s East Village. We thought we'd feel right at home. It took two years of my psychopathic rants and rages in the alley way behind our apartment and a '1/2' on Silver Lake Boulevard for both of us to realize that we had been duped. Two years later, and I'm finally starting to find the charm of the dolphin signs painted on the sidewalks and the graffiti splattered on our garage door. Although, I haven't gotten over the fact that someone recently took a shit in our garage (I'm not kidding) and the constant sounds of helicopters overhead at night and their probing spotlights through our bedroom windows can be a bit unnerving. BUT, Tropical Cafe, down the block, does make a decent cafe con leche and there are no Starbucks in the neighborhood. So there are two plusses.
Two years. That's about the prescribed time period to adapt to life in L.A. - at least if you're moving from New York City.
So I had been in Los Angeles about a month when my boyfriend and I decided to go out for a nice dinner at a new Thai place across the street called Rambutan.
We were within walking distance so we had a glass of wine in our apartment, then strolled two blocks up Parkman and across Sunset toward the restaurant, where we had 8:30 reservations.
"I think we're heading in the wrong direction, " I said after we had walked half a block east on Sunset. "There's nothing here except for a strip mall." That's when I noticed an understated indigo sign flashing "Rambutan." It was crammed in between a doughnut place and grungy liquor store. I was nonplussed but Joe assured me that this was the correct address and that he'd heard from reliable sources the restaurant was very nice.
Thick, magenta drapery hung in every window so that the world inside was an anonymous rectangular purple cloud. We opened the door and I felt as if I was Alice stepping through the looking glass - or dropping acid. The interior was modern and elegant in a fashionable zen way. To the point where I could swear I heard a waterfall in the distance. We were seated near the bar. A glass-topped, curved counter lit from the interior and displaying an intimidating array of expensive liquors and thin-stemmed glassware.
The menu was impressive and succinct enough to be 'fashionable.' I ordered some sort of ginger martini and Joe had a Sapphire one. The table next to us was a film producer and a writer. Of the rich and employed variety. On our right, was a couple of Asian hipsters in expensive sneakers. This was clearly what people were referring to when they said Silver Lake was hip: L.A.'s answer to the East Village minus the dive bars where women get drunk, dance on bar tops and hang their bras from the rafters.
The bill was more than we would have liked - but aren't they always - and we felt sufficiently impressed by the food and ambiance. We tipped nicely and left, passing the liquor store next door (still open), the liquor store on the other corner (still open), Tropical Cafe where an A.A. meeting had just let out a fleet of coffee-toting, smoking and chatty individuals, and the homeless junkie with the expensive combat boots pushing an overflowing shopping cart. We strolled a few deserted blocks and were home in our 1/2 address.
Our experience, however, would have differed dramatically from those other diners who simply got in their cars and drove home with no other sights and sounds and smells of the neighborhood to make them more familiar with where exactly they had just been.
It is this disconnect which is what, in part, L.A. seems to thrive on. The continuum of experience as most city-dwellers know it, is interrupted in L.A. From your own apartment in your own neighborhood, you get in your car, drive down an anonymous highway or boulevard, park in an anonymous strip mall (or have your car valeted), dine and repeat in reverse. It doesn't really matter where you've been at all. Where is not part of the experience. Especially, when the where can be made to look like anything fom Disneyland to a Buddhist Temple. Much like a movie set. I'm not suggesting it is all facade here but any singular experience as we might know it in L.A. is not necessarily contingent on the reality of its geography.
Life here inspires us to ask questions of content rather than context. We never question why a four-star restaurant is in a lot behind a 99 cent store. It is an existence far beyond post-modernism. Even the "restaurant," as institution - or as we know it - no longer exists. Neither, for that matter, does walking. And not to sound sentimental, but we can never underestimate the value of walking. The uninterrupted flow of movement from one place in time to another is what connects the "spots in time" of our memories, our consciousness and our individual understandings. Wordsworth walked over eight miles a day. Just to place himself in the context of the world and to attempt an understanding of his place in it.
Here, we have no secure placement of meaning. We don't feel guilty or even disturbed by the fact that we have to step over a homeless person outside a liquor store in order to buy a 50 dollar entree at the newest Vegan restaurant.
I must be honest. It is this disconnected state of post-modern existence that drew me to L.A. when I was a college student. I knew I loved the movie "ShortCuts," knew I loved Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49," and I knew I loved being in an airport (where all connections are by definition unanchored and random). So I figured L.A. - the ultimate postmodern city - must appeal to me. The reality of living here, however, is much different from sitting in the Denver International Airport on a two-hour lay-over.
In an airport, time stands still. There is no time because you are forced to remain in the same place and therefore the exigencies of appointments and deadlines exist only on an abstract plane - except of course for scheduled flight departures. But even these are not deadlines of the 'real world.' Ultimately, inside the airport, it is rarely up to you whether or not you make your flight or if it is 'on time.'
In L.A., the time-vacuum is the reverse. There is no flow. Not on the highway where traffic is an indeterminate given. Not from the Thai restaurant to the liquor store next door. Not from one sunny season to the next. You think you've lived a few months and suddenly it's 2009. There is no sensical geographic or chronologic connection.
Forty-year olds look twenty. The newest, nicest restaurant in the neighborhood shares a parking lot with Blockbuster. Downtwon is a non-hub. One can only observe the Griffith Park Observatory from the outside (since it's been closed for three years -- well, actually, it just reopened but you get the point). Coyotes roam the streets of the most populated of neighborhoods. You might stumble upon a rattlesnake half-a-mile from Carl's Jr.
There is something about it, however, which is appealing graspable. After one has stood her distance for two years or so that is. Didion wrote that, "Sacramento is California." I would argue that "L.A. is not California. L.A. is L.A."
The continuum within the present is peculiar in this City of Angels - but so too is its sense of history and connection with the past. Take for example an L.A. mainstay - the movie industry. There is little difference from the screenwriters of yesterday and today. All complain of being forced to water down and dummy their writing in order to sell, sell, sell. All are underrespected and turned over with flippant expediency. Acting is not a business one can depend on with any certainty. Luck is 3/4 a cup of it. Favorites win. Beauty wins. Originality loses. It might not even exist. Read "The Last Tycoon" and you realize your disillusionment is already unoriginal and Fitzgerald probably lived it better than you ever will.
Walk into Palermo's in Los Feliz and take a look at the faded black and white 8 x 10s on the walls. They say it all. This is a city of undefined but neverending hope. Look close enough and those smiling eyes say, "Get out now." Look closer and they're whispering, "Never give up."
We all know what we're getting into. Nothing has changed. It's how it changes that is different. It used to be you had a single dream and a bus ticket. You set foot in L.A. with the clothes on your back, 200 dollars and the phone number of a second-cousin's friend. Now, transplants arrive in convertibles or on Jet Blue. They quit their dot-com jobs to invest in a dream. What's missing is the welcome sign that blinks "Desperation."
Our Welcome now is the sun setting behind swaying palm trees. The towering fronds promise fame and fortune. Problem is that they too are transplants. And now, most of them ar nearing 100 years and will soon come tumbling down.
pissed off 
confused 
