Mike and Cindi go to LA

The city of Los Angeles is like a movie, a curious movie gone horribly awry. It is as if the producer decided to create something without any idea of where it was going to end, and just kept adding to it and adding to it. A sprawling, soulless behemoth, without identity, without charm, but with lots of smog. That's not to say that Los Angeles doesn't have its good points. It has several world class museums, for example, which do give it the trappings of a real city. But make no mistake: calling Los Angeles a city is like calling "Heaven's Gate" a low-budge indie. It isn't a city; it's a nightmare.

Cindi and I were originally inspired to go to LA for the weekend to see the Van Gogh exhibition at the LA County Museum of Art. We also bought tickets for the opening night of previews for "Enigma Variations", a new play that featured Donald Sutherland. Both of these events were to take place on Saturday, but we arrived on Friday and had no plans for that day. In a spur of the moment decision, we found a pay phone when we arrived at LAX and called Warner Brothers studios to see if we could get into an afternoon tour. Yes, they had an opening at 3 o'clock. Cool. It had been sunny and beautiful in San Francisco when we departed earlier that morning. Here in LA, it was cloudy, smoggy, cool, and we even felt occasional sprinkles. Who said that LA was the land of endless sunshine?

We thought it would be fun to have lunch in Santa Monica, so we drove up Lincoln Avenue, also known as Highway 1, also known as the Pacific Coast Highway. We whiled away the bumper-to-bumper minutes by pretending to talk like LA people. The first rule of thumb when talking like an Angelino is to put the word "the" in front of all the freeway numbers: "So we take 'the 405' until we reach 'the 101'." This gave us many laughs and hours of entertainment. By the time we finished eating lunch, it was 2 PM, and we had only an hour to make it to the Warner Brothers studio.

It was Friday afternoon. It was LA. It was the freeway. It was hell.

As we headed ever so slowly up towards the Santa Monica Mountains, we could see the Getty Museum to our left, perched conspicuously on the hill. It was a beautiful building, and an example of the sort of world class facility that gives LA the trappings of being a real city. On the other side of the mountains, we found ourselves in the San Fernando Valley. You know, "The Valley". The home of Valley Girls, the American porno industry, and strip malls. We turned off 'the 405' and took the Ventura Freeway to Burbank. At the first mention of the highway's name, Cindi and I began singing the old song:

We made it to the Warner Brothers studios in Burbank with only minutes to spare. The overpriced tour costs $30.00, but people are willing to pay this kind of money because they hope they'll see a movie star on the premises. But this was the off season, there wasn't much filming going on, and it was late on a Friday afternoon. So the tour guide had to make do by telling us things like "Clint Eastwood walked into this very building just a few days ago!" and "There's Will Smith's stunt double!" But we did see the outdoor set where the last "Seinfeld" episode was filmed and the ambulance entrance to "E.R." The tour also included a visit of the "Friends" set, and covered most of the elements of Hollywood fantasy-making fairly well. We saw the backlot, the post-production studio, and the costume warehouse with miles of clothing of every size and style (the shoes alone filled wall after wall, and would have done Imelda Marcos proud). As we toodled around the studio in our electric cart, it occurred to me that the real reason they charged people $30 for this tour was that Warner Brothers needed to recover their losses from movies like "Space Jam" and "The Avengers". However, credit must be given where it is due. In the Warner Brothers museum, we saw the actual piano that Sam played in the movie "Casablanca". We also saw some of the Oscars that the studio won for such movies as "Chariots of Fire" and "My Fair Lady".

Our hotel was located in the heart of Koreatown, and like everything else in LA, Koreatown itself is very large and sprawling, so large that one wonders if it takes up more square miles than Korea itself. We had dinner at an Italian restaurant called Farfalla. To get there from the hotel, we took Wilshire, which is a very wide street designed to accommodate many cars, and then turned right on La Brea, which is a very wide street designed to accommodate many cars. You begin to get the idea, I think.

The restaurant is located next to a nightclub that was featuring an improv group called "Houseful of Honkeys". Cindi and I had seen them perform with Fred Willard at the Big Stinkin' improv and comedy festival last April. Much like the Groundlings, their style of improv is very frenetic and not really our taste, so we instead decided to watch the Danish movie "The Celebration", which was at the nearby New Beverly Cinema . I had already seen it three times (once in Denmark), which was fortunate because we had already missed the first half-hour (Cindi had also seen it before). I highly recommend this film. It's directed by Thomas Vinterberg, who (along with fellow Dane Lars von Trier) is part of a movement in filmmaking which opposes the use of any artificial elements in filmmaking. This means no artificial lighting or the use of props that were not already located on the set and post-production work such as mood music or sound dubbing is also forbidden. Cindi noticed the irony: the philosophy behind this film represented the antithesis of everything we saw at Warner Brothers.

All in all, though, it was a great first day in LA.

The next morning we spent a wonderful hour and a half at the LA County Museum, looking at the various Van Gogh paintings. Neither of us has any kind of an art or art history background but we both thought the paintings were amazing. The paintings were organized chronologically, starting with paintings from Holland and moving through the years in France. We rented the audio program, which included descriptions and analysis of some of the paintings, but also included excerpts from Van Gogh's correspondence with his brother, Theo. It was all very well done. The museum had a gift shop packed with Van Gogh souvenirs - posters, scarves, mugs, books, cards, mugs, even mouse pads. It was kind of tacky, actually, and the reproductions didn't hold much appeal after seeing the real thing. Still, we each made a purchase or two, of course. We briefly swung by one other exhibit, of Edward Weston's photographs, also well worth seeing.

Afterwards, it was lunchtime, and we decided to check out a little enclave of Ethiopian restaurants that was about four blocks away on Fairfax Avenue. Being self-respecting San Franciscans, Cindi and I decided to leave our car where it was parked and just walk the four blocks. I am sure that even as I write this, weeks later, the Angelinos who drove down Fairfax Avenue that day are still reminiscing among themselves at the shocking site of pedestrians. They probably use the same tone of voice normally reserved for UFO sightings. Fairfax Avenue, by the way, is a very wide street designed to accommodate many cars. There were several Ethiopian restaurants, and we picked one more or less at random. Unfortunately, we didn't care much for the food. We walked along a different, parallel street back to our car, because Fairfax is an ugly thoroughfare. We found ourselves on Ogden Drive, a pleasant side street with homes with front lawns and Spanish architecture, and it almost made LA look rather pleasant.

We had the afternoon free, and decided to drive to the Griffith Park observatory. It's located on a mountaintop within the enormous Griffith Park, which is everything you would expect from an LA park: it is immense, its terrain is too steep for the developed regions of LA to have sprawled into, and it is difficult to explore without an automobile. As we drove north on Western Avenue, we could see the famous "HOLLYWOOD" sign in the hills to our left. Just before we entered the park we drove past the American Film Institute. The view from the observatory is quite impressive. Through the haze and smog we could see LA stretched out before us. The endless neighborhoods dissolved into one another, and there seemed to be as many streets as there are grains of sand in your average LA beach. From such a view you get no sense that LA has any real identity. But you do get a sense that LA is, well, really really big.

Our evening's entertainment was the play starring Donald Sutherland, 'Enigma Variations'. It was playing downtown at the Mark Taper Auditorium. This theater is located in a complex of buildings which includes the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, where the Academy Awards are held. We had dinner at a nearby restaurant called Epicenter, which featured your basic California cuisine and a vague sort of earthquake motif in its interior decorations (most notably, the walls were made up of highly artistic renderings of cracks.) After dinner, we returned to the Taper with some time to spare. We decided to sit and enjoy the sunset and watch the people milling about. The Taper and the Dorothy Chandler lie at opposite ends of a plaza. We gazed at the fountains and the people eating their take out dinners. It was a lovely place to while away the evening. I found that, despite myself, I was eyeing the crowd and hoping to see a famous person. In this city of 3.5 million people, the odds of happening upon a movie star seemed a little unlikely, but then again, didn't Donald Sutherland have any friends? Anyway, I saw no one I recognized.

They finally started letting people in, so we got up and went into the theater. We were handed a program and a piece of paper that we could fill out and return to them. To our surprise, the paper contained essay questions:

Reading these questions gave me horrible flashbacks of my high school English classes. For a moment, I almost thought I saw Mr. Tower, my senior English teacher, sneering at me from the fourth row, but it was only a hallucination. I think. (Just for the record, we didn't answer the questions.)

As for the play itself--it was quite interesting, and both Cindi and I enjoyed it.

All in all, it was a very enjoyable second day in Los Angeles.

By our third day, we were feeling lazy and we spent our final morning in Santa Monica. We visited the famous pier, which reminded me of the song by folk singer Christine Lavin: Cindi and I rode the carousel that Robert Redford and Paul Newman rode in "The Sting". We walked past the fishermen and the men selling finger paintings, and watched two-year-old children ride bumper cars. The breezes were cool and the morning fog hadn't entirely burned off yet. Later, we strolled down the 3rd Street pedestrian promenade, occasionally wandering into a store or checking out the electric vehicles that were on display that day. The sun finally came out and it began to get warm, and the crowds of people walking along Third Street became increasingly dense. We chose a spot for lunch, even though we weren't particularly hungry, and rested our tired feet. After that, it was time to return to the airport.

I am embarrassed to admit something to myself. And if you meet anyone from San Francisco, don't tell them I said this. But I actually, well, sort of, uh--oh hell, I liked LA.

Return to Home Page