| "Keep the Christ in Christmas" - Fallbrook, CA. |
[Jan. 5th, 2008|01:19 am] |
| [ | music |
| | I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. | ] |
I went to Southern California and it was a lot of fun, but I could never, ever, ever live there. I sat in front of an extremely nondescript, side-of-a-busy-street strip mall, eating the best ice cream I have ever had and will ever ear in my life, and listened to two people talk. One, aged probably 35, spiky hair, sunglasses, british accent, leather, aging C-level rockstar persona. The other, aged 30 (in LA years, that's like 50), wanted to look 20 - an Asian lady with pink hair to match her pink makeup and pink tights, no sunglasses, hoop earrings that you could fit John Candy through on a bad day, and a Kool XL (I'm serious) hanging out of her hand. They are talking about what it was like for the man to see an Ace Frehley solo show at CBGB's in New York City a few years back. They are talking about this as if it is completely, one hundred percent normal to them. Welcome to Los Angeles, this shit happens all the time.
I am driving down Melrose and am trying to turn left on Fairfax or Pico or Beverly or La Brea; they all look the same, it doesn't matter. The light turns green and I don't move, because there is a county's worth of traffic coming straight through the intersection. Within seconds, I hear (and feel) the cab driver behind me pounding on his horn. I inch forward into the intersection. Having moved roughly five feet, I still cannot turn left onto Santa Monica or La Cienega or Olympic or Normandie because of the oncoming traffic, but I have somehow assuaged the driver behind me by moving several feet. The light turns yellow and we both make it onto whatever street we wanted to be on. Funny enough, the only thing that I could do quickly in Los Angeles was eat a six dollar bowl of Matzo Ball Soup at Canter's at 3 in the afternoon on a weekday at the counter. I must have been in and out of there in ten minutes, and it was the most Jewish experience I've had in several years.
I am driving south down the Golden State Freeway (this is "the 5") through downtown Los Angeles and I can only see downtown because I know it is there in my subconscious. I have seen it before and it has not moved, but what moves through it has caused me to not be able to see it. Funny enough, I'd rather see a blurry downtown any day of the week than a semi-blurry Carson, Downey, Commerce, Buena Park, or Santa Fe Springs. The sun does not set through these areas. Everything just slowly gets darker and then it's a brown nighttime forever. These towns just keep going and going and when I get onto the 91 East heading towards godforsaken Riverside County, they just get sparser and sparser and I feel like I'm rolling down a mountain forever, accumulating dust and snowballing all the malls in the world like a glorified Katamari; at the junction with Interstate 15 in Corona, I pick up steam, rolling it up with Temecula and Murrieta and Lake Elsinore and several signs for a casino where Aaron Lewis, formerly of Staind, is playing next week. It looks like I have missed the Brian Setzer Orchestra, but Carlos Mencia is just around the corner. I will not be around that corner. I will be as far away from Carlos Mencia as possible. This is pretty much a rule that I base my life around.
I am driving up Laurel Canyon Boulevard at 4 o'clock in the afternoon on a wednesday. I am effectively killing time. I stop at the Canyon Country Market to get a cup of coffee and sit outside, perhaps sit where David Crosby smoked crack or the Byrds hung out. The coffee shop closes at 3, and I wander about the market aimlessly. I continue up the canyon. I am looking for something. I am looking to try and capture a spirit that so many other people are trying to capture and understand and have been doing so since Roger McGuinn decided it would probably be beneficial financially and personally to plug his Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar into an amplifier, turn the treble way the fuck up, and have a session drummer shake a tambourine over a crystalline plasticine polyethylene cover of a Bob Dylan song. At the top of the canyon, I reach the intersection of Laurel Cyn (they love to use this abbreviation in Los Angeles) and Mulholland Drive. Hey, isn't there a movie called that? Holy shit. I turn left on Mulholland and head for Coldwater Canyon Avenue. The sun is going down and the glow is magnificent, like nothing I have ever felt before. Everything is bigger, better, and stronger in Los Angeles. The beers are six dollars on tap and they have only two options, the movies are twelve dollars, and you pick your own seat, malls and office supply stores advertise free parking as if it were a strange thing that a mall or office supply store would have free parking. The glow is killing me to my left and I pull over into a park. Laurel Canyon Park. This has got to be it, right? Is this where Joni Mitchell and Graham Nash wrote Our House? This is definitely not the place where the flowers were picked and put in a vase and all that. This is the place where people go to let their purse dogs run free. My car is the dirtiest and oldest in the lot, and I drive a 1998 Acura. I get honked at by the ubiquitous ugg-booted woman in an SUV as I try and turn around and try and park in the lot. I'm parked way up the hill and don't bother to go down into the park where people chat on their cell phones as their dogs play with each other. There's supposed to be something incredibly poignant here, something about the demise of Laurel Canyon as a neighborhood in Los Angeles where it doesn't feel like Los Angeles; where these people who work 25 hours a day to pay for their home in West Hollywood or Santa Monica or wherever are not supposed to have taken over but have, but there's not because it's all over and we're all fatalists; we know our doom very well in the city of Los Angeles, population 3,500,000 at one entrance and 3,950,000 at another (both wrong). This all feels like that really bad David Crosby song on Younger than Yesterday, Mind Gardens. Robert Christgau called it a "completely unlistenable acid meander" and this trip through what I've wanted to embrace felt like one. There were (obviously) no hippies in the Canyon Country Store, just the dudes who ran it and make money off shlubs like me who want to capture some sense of faded glory. At least I wasn't as bad as the dude across the street, taking pictures of the storefront with one of those gigantic camera lenses with several bags on his shoulders that held other lenses. At least I'm not an asshole. |
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