Under the bridge

I'm in LA now. My brother and I have been wandering around town for the past couple of days.

6/21




On Thursday night when I arrived we got sushi in Little Tokyo and walked around the civic center district. The area is apparently undergoing a rebirth, and the best evidence of that I saw was the heavy LAPD presence and some shiny new buildings like the Disney theater. A lot of the old hotels have been gutted and are being remodeled as apartments, and money seems to be pouring in. I had my new camera shipped to Mike's place, so I was playing with it as we walked. Most of the pictures didn't turn out very well (I hadn't figured out to change the ISO settings to shoot at night), but it was fun. When we went back to his place, we passed over the LA river and saw a rubble sorting facility. The air inside was filled with dust lit by flood lights, and pieces of heavy machinery were plucking tattered bits of plastic and broken stone from a big pile and moving them to smaller ones. There were people standing along a conveyor belt sorting things by hand. They also had guys spraying misters over the heaps to try to control the dust, and these huge sheets were dangling from the ceiling, supposedly to keep some of the floating particles contained. It was really surreal at first glance, so we walked back over after parking at Mikes (it was only 2 blocks away) and watched for a while.

6/22




On Friday I went for a run. Mike's apartment is in a warehouse in an industrial part of town (in case the heavy machinery didn't give it away), and for some reason I decided that running around the area was a good idea. Of course I went around noon, so the sun directly overhead meant everything was bleached and white and there was no shade to hide in. I knew that the temperature might be an issue, but when I left it was under 80 and I didn't really take relentless, brutal sunshine into account. Running around near a highway was new for me, and not very pleasant, but I'm glad I did it. I saw a lot of wholesalers and factories at work, loading trucks and operating machines and such. An awful lot of these buildings seem to be open to the street, so I peeked in as I went. I had mapped out my route online, but at some point 8th St. enters a giant factory complex with barbed wire and 'No Trespassing' signs. I want to know how big a company you have to be (or as my brother said, how long you have to have been there) before you get a portion of 8th street inside your facility. As far as I know the road resumes as normal when you leave the other side of their fence, but I didn't check it out.

After my run Mike and I went to lunch at a Vietnamese place that he knew of. The food was good and the noodles were cold, which was perfect in the heat. We ate outside (actually cooler than the inside), and the neighbor's cat spent the meal trying to climb my leg and swat bits of food off of the table. It should have been annoying, but the cat seemed smart and was very pretty, so it got away with being a sort of charming nuisance. There were also these guys in purple shirts who I'd started to notice during my run. They're some sort of public safety types, maybe city-funded rent-a-cops or something. They're unarmed, but they have radios and badges and ride around on bikes. I assume their job is to tell the Skid Row types to move along. Anyway, I had mentioned them to my brother, who didn't know what their job was, and then over lunch we saw a lanky white guy in full pimp regalia getting right up in one's face and yelling, "Fuck you!" repeatedly and with varying inflection. He ran off after shouting a few times. Then, later in the meal, a guy walking down the sidewalk carrying some sort of protest sign with only the words "Skid Row" visible yelled something about the "God damned purple-shirted pixies". Thankless job, I guess. There were two guys sitting at the table next to us. At one point I overheard one say, "So, have you read the script yet?" Only in LA, people.

When we finished lunch and got back to where we'd parked the car it was gone. A street sign, which of course we hadn't seen, prohibited parking from 3-7. My brother wanted to walk home and deal with it from there, but I convinced him to wander around to try to find the tow company's number on a sign. We didn't find it, and he went into a store to ask if they knew. The lady didn't, but she wondered why we hadn't asked the parking enforcement car that was visible through the window around the corner, where we'd just come from. It hadn't been there a moment ago, of course, but Mike sprinted out to catch it. He got a card from them with a phone number, then his call led to an address, and we started hiking. It was maybe a 20 minute walk away, which wasn't too bad, but combined with the rest of my day outside I ended up with a sunburn. Retrieving the car meant Mike had to pay a $100 towing fee and a $50 'administration fee', or rather LA's cut of the spoils. To add to the injury there was a $70 ticket on the windshield. The funny thing is that we had almost parked in a lot across the street from the meter for a $4 flat rate, and by the time we had put an hour's worth of quarters in the meter at a quarter per 10 minutes we barely would have saved anything. I'm usually pretty obsessive about checking signs, and my brother says he's the same, but our being lax this time cost him a ton of money.

6/23




On Saturday we went to the Getty Museum and drove around Mulholland Drive. I don't have much to say about either, but not because they weren't really cool. The Getty is on a hill and feels very distant from the city around it and the highway below. The art was great and the museum grounds were lush and green. There was a nice breeze and the sound of the fountains made you feel like you were out by a stream somewhere. Mulholland was twisty and peppered with unfathomably big houses and expensive cars, but it was sort of hard to see in the dark. We ended up getting off of it accidently before we'd seen the best of the lights, so hopefully we'll go back.