strike that

urbia

It takes a few days to get my city balls back so when Julien left this morning for class I considered reading on her porch in the sun all day. Fortunately the first book I picked up was a guide to LA, and I’m speedily seduced by guidebooks with their pages and pages of places I’ve never been. Twenty minutes later I found the subway. LA has a subway! Who knew?

In fact LA used to have many subways, Julien explained. But when the city privatized them they became the property of automotive companies, who bought them to shut them down. So now it can take an hour to drive fifteen miles on eight lane freeway. I decided to give the lingering lines a shot.

The trains were actually clean and quick and took me right downtown. I toured Frank Gehry’s concert hall and sat in the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. I drank a milkshake at the base of a skyscraper.

And now I remember big cities, how to act in them and how to love them, and I am thankful for the citysense that kicks right in – the way transit maps and ticket machines are all intuitive once you’ve learned them one place, the way you turn your bag so the opening is against your body, and look certain, and don’t smile.

I’d forgotten how men in cities make strange sounds at women – clicks and hisses and hums, as if that’s a thing people do to each other. Really? I thought, the first time on the subway platform. Don’t you feel silly? But that’s a city thing born of city anonymity and city contempt. It erupts like the yelling drivers and the short-tempered parents.

I’d forgotten how city blocks can be long and hot to walk down, with the rippling air coming off the building faces and the car exhaust blowing through in waves. The people act stoic and the trees look ill. And the LA River passes through, one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen, a three foot wide sheet of murky water on a thirty foot wide concrete culvert. It hardly flows. It reminds me of a third world sewer. And I wonder what would live here, if it had banks and vegetation and a sandy bottom. I wonder how people get by in this desert – Little Tokyo and Compton and Hollywood with millions of cars clotting in between. I wish LA could start again.

posted by tortaluga @ 2:48 PM