Before I lived in Los Angeles (for only a month, the other month), I wanted to move there, but I only knew the city from what I had read about it in Lightning Magazine. This was over a decade ago, before I began writing my newsletter. Los Angeles, to me then, was the film negative of both New York and what I had learned about it. Real flea markets, bionico, nice cheap old but not that old trucks, bootleg businesses, Bob’s Big Boy, expanses of road. I was going to move, but I didn’t because of work; I would stay in New York.
I had been back several times since not moving, a few times to visit, and once to promote my book. In January I spent a month in L.A. A short time, but long enough to work, rent a car and buy sundries and groceries. I noticed the following things:
This is a car city. Structurally, from the very top down. Very much felt. Leaving aside the obvious descriptors—have to drive everywhere; can’t walk; people don’t dress well there because they don’t have to because they have cars and can hide themselves; people want to fuck their cars—structurally these things are because of the car. From the top down. They don’t tow cars here. They just don’t… they never will. You would think a big city with so many cars and such a big police budget and all sorts of automotive plankton industries would. This is America. There should be a gold rush chasing the tow and impound dollar. But they don’t. And they won’t, ever, because if they did, the whole city would fall apart. It would be worse than losing the power grid. It would be chaos. This is deeply understood by people who live there, and probably uncommented upon (I didn’t talk much about towing or parking with people). Because of this unremarked-upon fact, life is free. Everyone knows cars can’t get towed. And that they barely get ticketed. The result is a city in which a car can do way more than what it wants or could anywhere else. More narrowly I mean you can more or less park wherever you want, however you want, if you’re not an idiot about it. Maybe not downtown. Maybe. But even then… I got one ticket the first week I was there, in Glendale, which is a different city with a different water provider. To be sure, in L.A., people probably get towed—I once averted an incident years ago, with my car on the winch, after making a sober appeal to the maid—but you never see the towed cars, or the trucks. I am told no one in Los Angeles proper gets tickets at all.
There so many generic signs in L.A., ones that don’t say their businesses’ names. They are all over. Mini-malls have them; the signs say what the stores in the mini-malls do. A sign will say something like Accountant, Doctor and Restaurant. This got me. I was moved by the brutalism and directness. I did not understand it. Why this agreement? Were the business in every mini-mall in LA failing at a regular clip and getting replaced? The same pizza place over and over? Was this a legal thing, like how in San Francisco there are sort of no chain businesses? Was it a new type of socialist punishment (see pizza example above)? Or something less describable and more illicit? It felt arbitrary and apart. There is similar signage in the mini-mall by my parents’, where a generic descriptor sits above the business’ name:
But no way I will ever be able to explain that; Ontario is a hall of mirrors. My friend Zach said when we were getting burgers that the generic L.A. signs were probably in neighborhoods where English is a new or second language for a plurality of the residents, and so the signs are speaking to that, and just plain old good business. Someone who is bilingual will pull over to Accountant before H&R Block. It’s both egalitarian and very pro money. It also proves a truth we all know, whether we live in Los Angeles or not: All businesses are interchangeable. That every accountant is the same, every dentist, even every 7-11. You know the old yarn about some software company sleeping through a meeting and so the guy called Bill Gates instead? That’s how the Windows contract happened. It’s also why lobbying and professional societies exist, and why Aaaaaaaaaaa and Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa Locksmiths were real businesses in the yellow pages. It’s also part of the reason why people asked the Lubavitcher Rebbe to pray for their success running a business. All businesses are the same. Or, if you’d like, they’re comparable. What difference does it make what Accountant you go to? Might as well go to the one blessed by a higher power, or to one whose mini mall just says what they are. It is appropriate that this idea expresses itself on the edge of America. It is a fast approach, and more mature.
I have never been to Istanbul but I think Los Angeles is closer to Istanbul than it is to other American cities, even though so many of them are like L.A. but smaller. It is probably closer to a country than it is to a city. (Toronto is slightly like this.) I mean this because the sprawl is not uniform in terms of aesthetic or code. There are palm fronds everywhere, alleyways too, and access roads, shunpikes and arterials, and byways, and up and down streets (lots of vertical driving), and one-off businesses, quarries and rotted signage. This variety hints at an older world, and the continent. (There are neighborhoods like this in New York, off the Belt Parkway, but it’s not the whole city.) I got dinner with my sister one night and the place we ate at was cat-corner from an automobile chop shop satellite office (the real, bigger chop shop was a block away) and in listening distance from an overpass train line (they have trains in Los Angeles?) looking onto some sort of entirely skincare mall. Another restaurant, another night, even worse. It was a few houses down from this brutalist building:
Which is a chemical testing plant that’s across from an electronic parts supplier that deals in summing amps and transformer components. What a crazy city. All this stuff should be on the same block. In New York, morally abject businesses just hide on some office floor; even the big Pfizer building off the Flushing G stop isn’t around anymore. But in L.A. they’re out in the open. The difference is people drive by them and don’t think about them again. Many places, one not speaking to the other, or to anything else. It’s just there. It has to go somewhere. Very rewarding.
I think there is different zoning in Los Angeles. Is there? In some neighborhoods houses can be super different from the ones next to them. In some stretches of Silver Lake, especially. Some are very far from the curb, some are tall, some aren’t. This is something a homeowner’s association regulates in other neighborhoods and most cities. There’s a block in Park Slope, in the low teens west of 5th Avenue, by the block-long art store, that’s pretty varied as far as the neighborhood goes. But it’s really only about a half-dozen houses, staggered. In Los Angeles, though, it goes on like this without pause. Too much variety… the best ones are either free or at odds with each other.
Another thing is the residential streets where there’s parking on both sides but only one lane in which to drive. So you’re driving and someone’s coming from the other way and you have to pull over or reverse. How did they build a society like this? There’s no way there’s this kind of nonsense anywhere else in America. Los Angeles wasn’t very big before 1962. I noticed it most on a side street leading to the Glendale mini-mall that has Hamlet’s (good restaurant) and the international grocery store (gypsy bacon, fermented whey and wheat drink, Russian bread soda); probably a conscious decision.
All the winding hills and roads. It is crazy people build houses here.
It is crazy to see pedestrians. This is the leitmotif of my friend Alex’s newsletter. I walked to the gym when I went there but when I drove (everywhere else) and I’d see someone walking I assumed the worst. Penury maybe, DUIs, nothing to do that day… bacchanalia. What had gone wrong? Ultimately this way of thinking is a damnation. Walking is slightly more important than exercising. Because more of America is like L.A. than New York, such judgements are bad bellwethers for our collective health.
If you have a car and you don’t love it then you have the wrong car. They gave me a Ford Mustang convertible. It was cop grey and new; I was upgraded by a nice agency clerk whose son Rolando and I shared a birthday. Ford Mustangs have a video game cockpit and pretty good pep. I thought about it often. Early in the month under duress—would it get towed? Scratched? Would someone tow or scratch my Mustang?—other times with less specificity. I took photos of the car starting up (you can start some cars up from up to 70 meters away; it’s called keyless entry and is a new automotive technology), or when parked on a slant. I got a photo taken of me standing beside it for proof. This was a new and important development. There are about five structural differences between Canada and America: race, safety net, space, abject contempt for statecraft, and cars. Regarding the last one: In some parts of Canada, especially where winters are cold, there isn’t much of a car culture. The salt the government uses to melt the snow on the streets is bad for any automobile’s undercarriage and shortens cars’ lifespans. So cool old cars don’t last, and boring semi-old cars don’t get handed down; new cars aren’t flourishes but requirements, and must be bought cheap. (Anecdotally: maybe seven students at my high school drove a car; one was the student body president whose dad was the Canadian Minister of Transport.) America is spread out, but not nearly as much as Canada, and Los Angeles isn’t cold, making a cornucopia. To some people, the Ford Mustang is a cop car. It wasn’t to me for a month. In another reality there exists a version of Snake covering upcoming items on BringaTrailer. Driving is one of the best things about being alive. You should be in a car that you want if you drive one.
Time is different in Los Angeles. Like Paris, nothing gets done before 10:15 in the morning. Unlike Paris, it can feel pretty late very early. At 4 o’clock things begin to shut down, and by 8 it is over. In the winter, 7 p.m. feels like midnight. This doesn’t make sense, since it’s hot. It shouldn’t get dark out in summer. There are movies about this. It is probably correct though, the feeling of it being late in Los Angeles all the time, because the correct timezone for the world is Eastern Standard, and Los Angeles is three hours behind. But that’s just a joke. It is this: people in Los Angeles are smarter than people who live in New York because there is more downtime there and more space. They cope well when there is nothing or just one thing to do. In L.A. time bleeds and is a vast cavernous space. It feels like at first there’s too much of it. In New York, people hide from it. In L.A., time needs to be a friend. That can be an adjustment. But it’s the way. People aren’t that different. There is much we can learn from L.A.
The gyms in Los Angeles are so good it’s bat-shit. I went to the Undefeated gym in Historic Filipinotown, which is laid out well: good light, space, old weights, enough MFR stuff, a nice grain of wood on the ceilings and walls, lots of right angles. I hadn’t been somewhere like that before. Not really one like that here.
Most gyms are amazing to be in but unpleasant to look at. Are there architecturally important gyms? Maybe. But probably not. There were some, like the original David Barton; there’s another old one in Chicago. The explanation is… gyms don’t have to feel good, since that’s what the workouts are for, and most gym designs just don’t get that, and do things to get in the way. But in L.A., even the off-the-cuff gyms were constructed well. I got a membership to a key-entry gym a two-minute drive from my hut. It was a converted office space with mirrors on some of the walls and a squat rack, some dumbbells, a cable column, other stuff, and one bike. There was neither a rower nor a landmine attachment; I’d say it was the size of an H&R Block. But it was very different than anywhere else in New York; it was better, because there is so much space in Los Angeles and there are so many gyms so they have to be good. They build them everywhere, even inside of an office. This gym was also always empty—no employees—and they never played music in there. It is nice to work out in silence. Now and then the gym’s owner would come in and do powerbuilding workouts with his girlfriend. The mini-mall the gym was in also housed a Lot Less, an accountant’s office, a gun store two doors down, a medical center and an art gallery. There was no signage to denote any gym from the street.
I don’t know anything about Los Angeles really.
Thanks for reading.
Snake
My rental got towed at the last LOCK show. It cost me $400 to get it back. The most expensive hardcore show of all time. Just last Friday I got a parking ticket for $73! A parting gift to my week back in LA. I still love LA, and this post. Good stuff!