Colin Marshall

Call it cynicism if you must, but if I went to someplace called the “Arts District” in most North American cities, I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find art; in most cases, I’d expect to find nothing at all. The name smacks of official desperation, bringing to mind last-ditch efforts to rebrand blocks you’d never even walk through with an absolute minimum outlay of money or effort. You can envision the meetings: what revitalizes tired, dangerous industrial areas? Why, artists. And what do artists do? Arts, of course. And up go the signs. That an influx of artists in the sixties and seventies actually did bring Manhattan’s Lower East Side back from the brink of more or less literal destruction has put ideas into the head of other cities across the continent ever since. It brings to mind the Melanesian “cargo cult,” whose members supposedly built imitation airstrips out of wood and radios out of coconuts in hopes of therefore receiving the same deliveries of goods as did their departed World War II occupiers. The cargo cultists staffed their bamboo control towers and waved their semaphore leaves as imitatively as they could, so the story goes, but nothing ever happened.

It thus comes as a surprise that, in Los Angeles’ Arts District, something has actually happened, and, more to the point, continues to happen. Yet for quite some time, it seemed unclear whether it had or would. “Downtown was doomed,” says the narrator of Thom Andersen’s documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” of the city’s faltering core in the immediate postwar era. “In the eighties, it went vertical, and there was an attempt to promote loft living on its eastern margins, an effort advertised in a few films, but even artists found the new urbanism daunting.” We now know this area, between downtown proper and the Los Angeles River’s west bank, as the Arts District. Back in 2004, when Andersen’s film came out, the neighborhood already had its name, but evidently it still lacked its current regard. Less than a decade before that, the Arts District didn’t even merit an entry in Leonard and Dale Pitt’s encyclopedia “Los Angeles A to Z”, though the law that put artists’ residences in formerly industrial buildings above-board goes back to 1981. You may even now venture into the Arts District and find yourself unimpressed, but bear in mind the way we’ve framed so much of Los Angeles today: don’t look at what it is; look at what it’s becoming.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

Just last weekend, I found myself in Silver Lake attending the closing party of Brightwell, my friend (and fellow KCET Departures columnist) Eric’s gentlemen’s shop. He may have opened the first such business in modern Silver Lake, but I guarantee you he won’t have opened the last. The neighborhood has over the past couple of decades grown only more dense with the relatively young, and thus with that great current fascination of America’s relatively young, artisanal retail. Then again, Japan’s twenty- and thirty-somethings have joined both the shop-small and neo-gentleman movements with even greater zeal; scouts from the Tokyo-basedPopeye, “the Magazine for City Boys,” dropped in on Brightwell while researching their Los Angeles issue. From foreign style journalists to shoppers in need of a respectable aftershave or tie clip, we act like Renaissance scholars poring over ancient Greek texts, deliberately and almost desperately attempting reconstruct the old aesthetics and practices of true manhood. Though Eric’s shop may have gone, I imagine the streets of Silver Lake will remain an advantageous place to set out on your own quest for this lost wisdom.

Recent years have so strengthened the area’s association with creative, style-conscious, do-it-yourselfism that, when I first moved to Los Angeles as a twenty-six-year-old without any particular prospects for a traditional job, friends simply assumed I would land in Silver Lake. They did so for understandable reasons, but they assumed wrong; I chose Koreatown instead, barely giving “the Portland of Los Angeles” consideration at all, mostly because of the bewildering thinness of its connection to the rest of the city. How, I wondered, did Silver Lake become such a center of “cool” when rail doesn’t even reach it? When the buses keep you waiting for ten minutes at a stretch? When even walking from one end of the neighborhood to the other can feel, on a sufficiently hot day, like a grueling ordeal? The journey from Brightwell to the local library comes to almost a mile, and heaven help he who then wants to stop for lunch in the fashionable Sunset Junction — named, ironically, for its convergence of two streetcar lines in the early 20th century — which necessitates two miles’ further schlep.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.

“It’s hard to screw up a pupusa,” a friend replied when I suggested he have one for lunch. The thick, cheese-filled Salvadoran tortillas, topped generously with shredded cabbage and hot sauce, available across Los Angeles, do give their preparers little chance for grievous error. But the location of my friend’s office places him especially well to enjoy a fresh one on the cheap: from the very spot where we stood, nine stories above MacArthur Park, we could see the ladies with their shopping cart-mounted griddles parked on Alvarado making them fresh. This welcoming sight hardly seems to agree with the threatening image the area spent many of the past forty years cultivating, but it contrasts even more starkly against the visions of the park’s late nineteenth-century builders. A onetime high-profile vacation destination and one of the city’s many formerly wealthy neighborhoods, MacArthur Park and the surrounding Westlake area has since become the second-densest (after neighboring Koreatown), and one of the poorest — but one of the most delicious.

“MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,” sang Richard Harris on his immortal 1968 recording of the song “MacArthur Park”. “Jurassic Park is frightening in the dark,” sang Weird Al Yankovic on his parody, capitalizing on the mid-nineties popularity of Steven Spielberg’s scary-dinosaur movie. Strictly speaking, MacArthur Park must also, in that era, been pretty frightening in the dark. Legend has it that, by then, the place had become, effectively, an open-air market of vice: drugs, sex — human souls, no doubt. I’ve heard “Permanent Midnight” author Jerry Stahl tell some serious MacArthur Park stories. Despite sensing little of that former menace today, I can assure you that the neighborhood retains its robust trade in fake identification documents. Walk down certain side streets, and you hear the same short question over and over again — “IDs? IDs? IDs?” — no matter whether you look like you have indeed just endured a trying illegal border-crossing, or whether you look like, well, me. (After turning down yet another fake ID, my friend with the office remarked that the slouchy entrepreneur offering it must have mistaken him for “the world’s baldest sixteen-year-old, non-chemotherapy division.”)

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.