Last month we took a brief trip to California. I was giving a paper at a conference in Orange County, and we stayed on for a couple of days to see Los Angeles and its environs.
We flew into John Wayne Airport, Orange County. My first impressions as we drove to our hotel were that it was both like and unlike the greater Los Angeles area I had imagined. I'd expected it to be all roads and cars, which of course it was, but it was strange beyond that. There was lush greenery all around, towering palm trees lining streets and surrounding buildings, beautifully tended bushes spilling flowers - but at the same time it felt oddly dead. Office blocks, apartment blocks, hospitals - they take up huge spaces, with wide roads in between them, so that they somehow seem like so many remote islands; of course, it doesn't help that there is minimal sign of people moving between them, other than in their cars. The built-up area seems to fill up all the space between the mountains and the sea, and yet there seems to be nothing there. It's a good place to produce films concerned with illusive realities.
We stayed relatively near Laguna Beach, though of course to get there (or anywhere else) you had to get in a car and drive. In fact, most of the time we spent there was in the car, driving along one freeway or another, only to get somewhere from which we had to drive back. Even the Pacific Coast Highway has only the rarest scenic glimpses. It mostly looks like this:
We flew into John Wayne Airport, Orange County. My first impressions as we drove to our hotel were that it was both like and unlike the greater Los Angeles area I had imagined. I'd expected it to be all roads and cars, which of course it was, but it was strange beyond that. There was lush greenery all around, towering palm trees lining streets and surrounding buildings, beautifully tended bushes spilling flowers - but at the same time it felt oddly dead. Office blocks, apartment blocks, hospitals - they take up huge spaces, with wide roads in between them, so that they somehow seem like so many remote islands; of course, it doesn't help that there is minimal sign of people moving between them, other than in their cars. The built-up area seems to fill up all the space between the mountains and the sea, and yet there seems to be nothing there. It's a good place to produce films concerned with illusive realities.
We stayed relatively near Laguna Beach, though of course to get there (or anywhere else) you had to get in a car and drive. In fact, most of the time we spent there was in the car, driving along one freeway or another, only to get somewhere from which we had to drive back. Even the Pacific Coast Highway has only the rarest scenic glimpses. It mostly looks like this:
Overall, it seems untenable. There are lanes and lanes of cars on freeway after freeway, all those people going in the same direction but individually powered by a non-renewable resource. There's no point in calling for more public transport in such a place; either technology has to change, or the whole place will be left an abandoned monument to the strange way people used to live. Somehow it was easy to imagine distant generations marvelling over a deserted landscape of huge empty roads.
Still, there are lovely places amidst the general dystopian monstrosity of it all. The coves around Laguna Beach, with their flourishing greenery, were beautiful.
Still, there are lovely places amidst the general dystopian monstrosity of it all. The coves around Laguna Beach, with their flourishing greenery, were beautiful.
By the pier at Santa Monica, the sea was dotted with strange seal-people bobbing up and down in the water:
And sitting on the railings at the end of the pier, we saw this juvenile pelican, with its beautiful beady eyes.
We also went to the Getty, where I was happy to come across James Ensor's Christ's Entry into Brussels. Afterwards we took a quick drive through the Hollywood area. Once is enough! In spite of being right next to all those residential areas of the rich, Hollywood Boulevard itself is a grimy tourist strip that you can see for yourself if you imagine Oxford Street and then add in the worst of the souvenir shops on the Royal Mile.
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