Should you get in the mood to read a book on public transit for nonspecialists, I unhesitatingly recommend Jarrett Walker’s “Human Transit: How Clearer Thinking About Public Transit Can Enrich Our Communities and Our Lives.” Though Portland-based, the transit consultant Walker makes many a clear observation about Los Angeles, its transit, its communities, and its […]
“Hey, I didn’t know that they had food in Ethiopia. This will be a quick meal. I’ll order two empty plates and we can leave.” This particularly well-known line from “When Harry Met Sally” touches on both the conceptual novelty of Ethiopian restaurants as well as the country itself having become a byword for modern […]
Walking the length of Spring Street one morning, I counted 22 surface parking lots. I do this not out of a “Rain Man”-style numerical compulsion, but a no less distracting desire to feel out the progress of a city’s urbanism. The surface parking lot test gives you a sense of density, for one thing — […]
“When I came to, it was in a cloud of disbelief mixed with the stale taste of morning breath,” says Juniper Song, narrator and protagonist of “Follow Her Home”, Steph Cha’s 21st-century update on the Los Angeles noir novel. “I groaned and lay still with my eyes shut tight. As far as I could tell, […]
“Please stand clear. The doors are closing.” “That’s right! The doors are closing — closing on your chance for salvation! And if you refuse to accept your lord and savior, you’ll find yourself behind those closed doors! Behind them for alleternity!” The preacher went on, instinctively weaving each of the loudspeaker’s announcements into the morning’s forceful sermon. He wore a brown three-piece […]
Los Angeles once had a Seibu. Those who delve into the city’s history tend to obsess over some obscure happening from the past decade, the past century, the past two centuries. My own transfixing blip appeared just over half a century ago and disappeared soon after. “Even in Los Angeles — the city of gala […]
To better understand the tragedy of man’s inhumanity toward man, first observe any motorist regarding any other motorist. Dramatic though that may sound, I do think about the finer points of mechanized depersonalization whenever I ride the Los Angeles freeways. Behind the wheel, the sweetest, most forgiving person you know appoints themselves humanity’s stern judge, […]
“I AM THE FEDER,” read the banner above. The feder? Oh no, I thought: another Jewish tradition of which I’ve gone through life ignorant. Maybe it has something to do with seder, which, as I understand it, involves a ceremonial meal. Or maybe it doesn’t; all I know about it I inferred from an advertisement […]
Little Tokyo sold me on Los Angeles. My northern Californian childhood introduced the delights of San Francisco’s Japantown, still one of my beloved areas, but every time I go there, it looks to have wearily endured yet another wave of exodus and surrendered to yet another degree of decrepitude. This, of course, makes for its […]
Thirty years ago, Missing Persons sang that nobody walks in Los Angeles, but experiencing La Brea Avenue suggests a new, more nuanced thesis: some walk in Los Angeles; they just don’t stop walking. If they sit down, they do so in a restaurant, bar, or coffee shop. La Brea offers a great many of those, […]