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February 22, 2004
"excuse me, did you guys just lose your little world?"
the waitress said. It was late Thursday night, and everyone was hysterical and overemotional. She didn't realise she was a surrealist mindbomb. Yes, yes we had just lost our little world. Not the rubber globe thing she was holding (never trust a company that gives away promotional juggling balls), but Etcon has finished - we'd survived - but now we had to get back to reality.
A hard cold British reality would have been too much for me, so instead I spent a few days in San Diego, and am now sitting in LA worrying about the upcoming British reality.
(illustrations accompanying this story available here)
I couldn't really get a grasp on San Diego. Downtown was dead and deadly, especially the infamous Gaslamp quarter. The food was good, the price was right, but it didn't amount to anything. I went to Old Town, "birthplace of California", and found the state park was just a bad garish reconstruction full of tacky tourist shops. Then I went to Fashion Valley, a shopping mall that screams of alternate states of reality.
Horton Plaza was the same, a new level of hell constructed for a city populous. Seaport Village is a vacuous tourist reality that prevents fun unless it serves Mammon.
A few things changed my opinion of San Diego: the zoo, Balboa Park, and neighbourhoods such as Little Italy and Hillcrest.
The zoo was great. It didn't seem as cramped as London Zoo, the animals seemed to be ok, and it's a nice walking environment. Balboa Park is full of stolen architecture styles, and some great museums. I am particularly enamoured by the model railway museum, and the outside pipe organ - both are labours of love, maintained by the public. There are very few ways people can actively help museums in the UK, so all the volunteers and docents I saw at the museums fills me with joy. And you haven't really lived until you've heard Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man played on a very loud slightly out-of-tune open air pipe organ.
Little Italy and Hillcrest suffer from grid system sameness - a highway to cross every few steps - but at least the shops, the restaurants, the people had character. Areas are more than neighbourhood names.
How do you make an American laugh? Tell them you don't drive. After a while, the laugh disapppears. You really mean it. You don't drive. Can't drive. _Choose_ not to drive. You become some anarchist tendency, some freak of nature. Forget pacifism, homosexuality, liberalism, those can be worked around, forgiven, forgotten. But you're offending gasoline. You're offending the US.
In San Diego, whilst walking around for three and a half days, maybe 10, 12 miles in total, I passed about 80-100 other walkers. I can do that in a minute in London. In Britain, driving somewhere is a major event. You drive somewhere and then walk in that area, maybe even take public transport from then on. Whenever we think about walking, Americans think about jumping in a car. The system is set up this way. Every shop, office, restaurant, cinema... whatever... has it's own parking lot. Have you remembered to get your parking validated? Violators will be towed.
And so I get to LA, a city that sprawls from the air, and makes less sense on the ground. I had positioned myself very carefully - opposite the Farmer's Market in mid-Wiltshire. A lot of things I wanted to see were walkable (i.e. under 3 or so miles), and public transport connections weren't far.
The Farmer's Market is like crack for me - tens of places to grab good food, both ready to eat and cooked. It reminds me a bit of Borough Market and Spitalfields, but slightly sanitized, and catering more for (driving) passersby - the local working and living population. Damn good french dip sandwich though, and a fantastic slice of pecan pie from Du-pars.
Next door is the Grove mall. It's the opposite of the San Diego malls, welcoming, friendly, engaging. The most crazy feature is a trolley that runs from the mall to the Farmer's Market - at most 150 metres away. People queue and use it. This is not a walking culture.
Mall design appears to be what theme park imagineers do when they grow up. Even the most understated has loud quirks. The Grove has the tram and a huge model of a wind up soldier. The Beverly Center has a Pompidou-like escalator to take you to the 5th floor before you even get to any shops. The mall on Hollywood is, well, what you'd get if Elton John's interior decorators were forced to create a family retail experience.
None of them are really what I'd call destinations. Many have less than 30 shops. But still, people drive and park, shop and get validation. The parking lot is often larger than the mall. It's the same at individual stores, people park up, walk across the sidewalk, shop, get back in the car, drive to the next store, even if it's just up the street.
This drive-consume-drive culture is difficult for museums and galleries. LA has some outstanding collections, but it's hard to pursuade people to spend more time thinking and less time driving. There's also quite a hard class culture barrier. Art is seen as high art, appreciated by the few. I'm not quite sure why this is, as the institutions themselves are falling over backwards to be accessible, exciting and inspirational.
The Getty Center is a bold statement. It's art as a destination. Something you have to actively visit and take part in, from its remoteness to the monorail forming a mental barrier between visitor and car. it's a varied collection, from National Trust recreations of rooms, through British Museum ethnography to V&A collections of design and National Gallery Old Masters. There's not much modern work, apart from the photography collection, so the most interesting to me was the design elements - illuminated manscripts, stained glass, furniture.
I think I enjoyed the collection at LACMA more. Again it's a very liberal collection (arts rather than art), but there was a great modern selection, and the Chinese and Korean sections were fascinating. The most striking aspect of both museums is the architecture. The Getty is a huge construction that's very sympathetic to the art (there's some very good curation going on), and manages to hold together as design even though it is 6 large square building blocks.
The Japanese pavilion at LACMA is just beguiling. It's extraordinary from the outside, just about connecting with the right-angled main museum buildings, but the inside is just amazing. A series of ramps and curved spaces display the art, the walls appear to be tatmai screens, diffusing the light. Most amazingly, water and waterfalls providing a distinct serenity that binds the architecture together and benefits the exquisite detailed Japanese pieces.
The Walt Disney Concert Hall is the latest piece of art to arrive in LA. I liked it a lot more than I expected, mainly because the inside works almost as well as the exuberant outside. Originally this building was going to be built in stone, but after the success of Bilbao, the project team demanded that Gehry redesign the building in metal (this building uses stainless steel rather than the titanium of the Guggenheim). The building is quite spectacular in bright sunlight, even producing hotspots and sun traps on the sidewalks. The part of the design that doesn't really work is Bruce Mau's wayfinding. The use of one font and weight throughout is pretty but quite useless, compounded by the decision not to have any obvious signs (all wayfinding is through inscriptions painted directly on walls) and the donor branding of every space and staircase.
The concert hall was all I saw of downtown - I've learnt my lesson. Petula Clark was wrong. Downtown in the US means a place to work, and leave as quickly as possible at night. I got on the first bus out (the Speed-inspiring number 10 to Santa Monica) and wandered down the beach to Venice.
There was nothing that particularly inspired me about Santa Monica, apart from being able to reach a beach from most of the city in under an hour, and being able to walk along the beach with a little bit of sun, even though it was cloudy, and February. Sun and warmth, available in a city year round, always gives me pangs of jealousy.
Time was running out - there was just enough for a visit to the Museum of Jurassic Technology, and then a trip along Hollywood to check I wasn't missing anything (I wasn't).
The Museum of Jurassic Technology is just the most crazy, inspirational, insane, creative, freakazoid, well designed errr... 'thing' I have seen for a very long time. Pictures do not do it justice (as it's very dark in there), words can only brush the surface, although the book Mr Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder has given me the same gleeful smile as going to the museum itself. The museum is a testament to serendipity (and missed chances), fanatical extremes of human mundanity, and unknown/unpopular science, coupled with complete belief, authority, and irony. It's slightly Fortean and slightly true.
Do explore the online texts of most of the current exhibitions, and if you're in LA, ever, move hell or high water to get there. The biggest weirdness is that the Museum is settled between an In n Out and a vacant row of shops, as though it crashed down from space, and no one much noticed.
Nearby is the Center for Land Use Interpretation, which unfortunately had just closed, but is meant to do some great work looking at human geography, and also provides an example of a place publicly stating their location.
And that was it. Yes, I have a similar pang as last year; California does have some attractive attributes (which, I'm sure, would disappear quickly once you live there). I enjoyed LA as much as SF, even though everyone said I was insane to try visiting without a car. Heck, I'd even go as far as saying LA has a pretty efficient public transport system - and I admit that's probably because I didn't try to go really long distances, or to anywhere really difficult. So, all in all, I'm looking forward to going back at some point. I feel I've only just scratched the surface of LA, and I'd love to explore more.
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