#LosAngeles LedZeppelin JohnFante Hollywood OlveraStreet AldousHuxley

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The Id of L.A.

“There’s a feeling I get when I look to the West”…those are the first lyrics of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven. When the band would come into town, they would take over two entire floors of the Hyatt Sunset. It was coined, appropriately enough, the “riot house”. Its hallways and suites adorned by groupies and cocaine, sex and parties. What else is new in a town infamous for excess? Was this heaven? Not exactly a celestial kingdom, but, Los Angeles, the City of Angels, has had its share of both luminaries and would be stars among its population.

A continuous renewal and recycle of street corner prophets, backroom political dealmakers, and rock star poets. The city of Jim Morrison, Charles Bukowski, Biddy Thompson, Kenneth Hahn, and even George Lopez. Shamans, poets, politicians, jokers. Their talent and fortitude have created legends. Heroes to some, nuisances to others, these Angelenos personify the City of Los Angeles. Bicultural before the term even existed. These Angelenos have had their feet in the sand, their heads in the clouds, their faces to the wind, their hands in the “masa”. Their hearts are the center of Los Angeles. That center being Hollywood Boulevard, Barney’s Beanery, Olvera Street, or Tommy’s Hamburgers stand all at once. It is both Olvera Street and Pershing Square, and the new Cathedral and L.A. Live. The heart of Los Angeles beats everywhere, it continues to mystify, and remains one of the great cities of the world.

Los Angeles excites the spirit, delights the palate, and bridges the worlds of imagination, illusion, and reality. This wondrous town both fixates and creates. Angelenos, be they real or fiction, have the unique ability of living in three worlds: the dream, the reality, and the in-between. Since the official founding in 1781, Los Angeles, like many great cities of the world: New York, Mexico City, or Tokyo, has, along with its citizens-Angelenos, forged itself this unique identity…the “sad flower in the sand”.

Identity and Los Angeles. The terms and subject matter complement each other so well. Carey McWilliams wrote of Los Angeles as an ethnic and cultural “archipelago”. A city where identity tends to vary from neighborhood to neighborhood. Contrary to places like Mexico City or New York, which seem be virtually identical in their descriptions: subways and metros, overcrowded and rambunctious; Los Angeles and its enclaves do not have such easy identifiers. East L.A can be identified not just by the Chicano/Mexican immigrant culture of tamaleras, lowriders, and homeboys. What comes to mind are second and third generation Eastsiders that are college grads with real estate careers and ties to city politics. The Westside isn’t only falafel stands, liberals and money. We have Venice, Inglewood and Little Osaka on Sawtelle. Even Hollywood’s Walk of Fame doesn’t just tell the story of stardom and tourism. Walk a mile east in any Angeleno’s shoes. You’ll be either in Little Armenia or the Thai/Filipino district. Just a few steps away from any common city artery, the Sunset Boulevards and the Olympics; the real Los Angeles comes to life. One or two block away from these primary arteries of life, we find the blood and the sand.

Immigrants, foreigners, bankers, actors, writers, students, homemakers. Every single one of them-dreamers. They come to Hollywood for the movies, perhaps at a chance to work in television or the film industry. Some come for schooling; others think they will do the educating. One thing is for sure, all we be taught a lesson.

Many also come from Asia or Latin America to reunite with relatives and family. They reestablish and reinvent themselves: get some work as nannies or busboys, and make just enough money to send home every month. Some may even work two full time jobs to make ends meet. Aspiring to save, forging their nest eggs with sweat equity. Households brimming with tias and sobrinos, abuelos y primos. One day, they will have enough to buy a little plot back in their homeland. But then, reality hits. They ARE home now. This is it.

“Life is what happens when you’re busy making plans” (John Lennon). But when did this all occur? Did the smog in the L.A. Skyline dull their senses? If the afternoon sunlight on a recent December day has anything to do with it, time has now moved ahead. It waits for no one. Everyone’s kitchen overlooks a road now. Not many Angelenos yearn for the wondrous, blissful California days of Helen Hunt Jackson’s character, Senora Moreno. Since the earliest migrations of indigenous settlers, from the Tongva settlers near the L.A River, to the Spanish/Mexican missionaries establishing El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles y Porciuncula, up to the modern day, the modern day Angeleno, if not careful, looks out their kitchen window and can only hope to be cognizant of watching time, school, work, and many dreams come and go. Los Angeles, and its denizens, are not as suspended in time as they are captive to the city’s imagination.

Absorbed into the cries of the Santa Ana winds are the tears of Ruben Salazar, the prolific L.A. Times writer, killed by an LAPD tear gas container. Into the night sky, like the gaseous night’s view from Griffith Observatory go the frustrations of Armenian immigrants. They wait to commemorate their homeland’s tragic genocide on the streets of Hollywood, Burbank, and Glendale. And what of the people dying to get here? Where else in the world to customs and port officials, on various occasions, deal with international human trafficking on such a distinct level? From coyotes to cargo bins, from San Pedro to safe houses in El Monte, people feel the need to get here.

Los Angeles, what is the song you cry out? You are a siren dressed in coastal sage. Your phoenix chaparral burns bright among your anointed ones. The faithful, the faithless, the dreamers and the realists. The Tod Hacketts, Arturo Bandinis, Nathanael Wests, and the John Fantes: whose yearnings have been engulfed by the lachrymal Pacific; you sing the echoes of the millions that have cried their way home, to you. Your song is the Santa Ana wind, the foehn winds- howling through the canyons and passes. The Santa Monica Mountains and the Cahuenga corridor abound with the energy of your music. Echoing your own identity, you sing the song of your citizens’ past, present, and future. Los Angeles, the City of Quartz, is the anthropomorphic manifestation of its citizens. Citizens whose goals, wishes, and dreams attained or unattained, come in the form of a Bunker Hill view, a Santa Monica sunset, a carbon monoxide-stained palm tree, or an unfinished oil painting.

Fante’s Arturo Bandini had his dreams. Whether he envisioned himself a great author, the romancing playboy, or the keen observer, Bandini dreamt of his success and merit. Hopeful, not of the accomplishments, but of achieving them in Los Angeles. The reader doesn’t seem to doubt his talent. But his dreams of success, of merit, seem captive to his routine. A routine intrinsically raveled in the DNA of Los Angeles. A double helix of illusion and failure. “I went to the restaurant where I always went to the restaurant…I walked out of the restaurant, stood before an imaginary pitcher, and swatted a home run over the fence.” In this state, Bandini, the somnambulist, was captive to his imagination. The delirium of a child nestled in the bosom of Our Lady of the Angels. The city cradles and nurses its own. Each Angeleno feeds from the trough, suckles on the teat of the mother.”

The mother feeds her children. Hopes and prayers, the jungle leads to “la Calle de la Eternidad”…with thirty foot arms and hands stretched out to the heavens, reaching for the stars, muralist Johanna Poethig and her collaborators strove for the city to reach its people. The dreams of all its migrants, stretching out to their respective places of origin. The mural, on Broadway, not only reaches out sixty feet above, but stretches to the other “streets of eternity” across the globe, transcending time and space. It evokes the observer’s memory that, to be a citizen of Los Angeles-doesn’t imply having to give up one’s original roots. As any transplant or “native” Angeleno. “Where are you from? Oh, I’m from here, but, originally…”

“She had to leave Los Angeles. She found it hard to say goodbye to her own best friend. She bought a clock on Hollywood Boulevard the day she left. It felt sad.” (X-Los Angeles). These lyrics, taken from the title track of the seminal L.A. punk rock band X’s eponymous album, Los Angeles, tells the story of mid-western girl who just can’t handle her life in Los Angeles anymore. “All her toys wore out in black and her boys had too. She started to hate every nigger and Jew. Every Mexican that gave her a lot of shit. Every homosexual and the idle rich.” Can any other song tie together both the love/hate relationship with this city any better? Written more than thirty years ago, the band was young, nihilistic. Now, well into middle age, they perform the song to newer generations of fans. New and old fans alike, the listener can be a native Angeleno, a punk rock fan in Belgium, or anywhere across the globe. The track, Los Angeles, resonates pungently of urgency and regret. Stay or go. Love it or leave it. Regardless of where one stands, living in Los Angeles, the resident becomes a part of the city. You end up loving it. Even when one has to part ways with it.

Why do so many come here? An often asked question. “Why? Because if he or she can make it here, then I can definitely handle this place. I mean, it’s not New York!” Better to just say “the weather” or the “California Blonde” than to open a can of worms. The new transplant under estimates the ego and heart of this city. Travelers come to envy those that are “fortunate” enough to reside in L.A. Yes the smog and sun can get to you. Everything collides and contracts here. Illusion and disillusion meet where Broadway and Calle de la Eternidad become one.

A commercial airplane lands at LAX, upon arrival, the traveler gets in their car, begins their trek into Los Angeles. Once at their destination, the majority always tend to ask the same question…”Am I here yet? Is this L.A?” Almost as if a double take is necessary to confirm one’s bearings? Where is the Hollywood sign? What about Compton, In-N-Out, or Pinks? Where do the movie stars live? All commonplace questions. Run of the mill superficial questions for, what they believe to be, a superficial town. It is never, “When and where was the city founded?” or “take me to Olvera Street”.

In stark contrast, upon departure, the business traveler or vacationer seems to always be in a hurry to leave the city. Not knowing if what they just experienced was truly a visit to Los Angeles or just a tour of the Universal Studios backlot. One thing is certain of the visitor to Los Angeles, be their visit short term or tenured, everyone wants to come back. The question is if the City’s enchantments are what beckon the visitor of if it is the illusion and fabrication of many a celluloid dream, superseding even the imagination of a child, that call one back to Paradise City.

The Angeleno also never fully appreciates the solitude of the Hollywood Hills or the mountains that roll down to the ocean. It is, simply put, a given. Angelenos nod their heads in boisterous confidence that “it is what it is”.

On the contrary, one of the Hollywood Hills’ most creatively accomplished residents was an Angeleno by transplant. Aldous Huxley-the famed British author of “Brave New World” and “The Doors of Perception”, loved Los Angeles. Admiring such idiosyncrasies as its drive-in donut shaped diners, the winding desert roads near Palm Springs, or simply, Los Angeles’ Mediterranean climate-he came to call the City of Angels his home. Once in Los Angeles, much of his creativity flourished, be it due to his new surroundings, experiments with psychotropic hallucinogens, or reading Hindu texts such as the Veda. The Veda’s primary subject mature and theme are, appropriately enough, the belief that the physical world is but an illusion. Welcome to the identity of Los Angeles.

#LosAngeles LedZeppelin JohnFante Hollywood OlveraStreet AldousHuxley