Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Google, los angeles, maps, paranoia, tourists, urban advice
I had never been to Los Angeles before. I had never even been to the United States in all my 23 years of living in close proximity to the border. But there I was, set on an irreversible course—alone—to the second largest city in all of America.
There are some things that maps just can’t tell you. Google Earth is more revealing than traditional maps, but you can’t even rely on it to tell you all you need to know about a new city. I zoomed in and scoured the Google-mapped community of Westwood to see what I could see. It looked like a nice place—a quiet-looking area with plenty of green, and there were inviting, open sidewalks (an important detail). There wasn’t anybody on the sidewalks (which would have been more comforting), but there sure as heck were sidewalks. It was a sunny day in Google-photographed Westwood, so all in all the map indicated good things.
But maps don’t give you the human perspective. They show you the topography, but not the character. So I did a quick online search and stumbled upon a forum for LA Q&A. “I’m moving to such-and-such area; what should I know?” “I’m going to be visiting LA; what should I see and what should I avoid?” This was perhaps not the most confidence-inspiring discovery I could have made, and much of the advice on the forum turned out to be fear-mongering, unfounded or inapplicable to my own trip. But this is the way you learn about the city, not just the urbs, and the advice opened a fascinating window into Los Angeles culture.
What colours of clothing you shouldn’t wear in order to avoid gang warfare (red and blue, FYI). What areas of town you should steer clear of if you’re Hispanic, or if you’re Black, or if you’re White (know the safe territory for your skin colour). In which parts of town you do NOT want to take a turn into a no-exit side street. Motorcycles will be “white-lining.” The boundaries of various unsafe areas. These are the things you don’t learn from maps.
Then again, these things are largely inapplicable to tourists. Don’t be paranoid.
For a few months when I first moved to this city, I spent every day downtown. I would wake up at 5 am, catch the early bus to work, and give people coffee and muffins. After a while, I was able to add strudel-baking to the mix. But then I would get off work by 3 in the afternoon, and have most of the sunny day left to myself. Those were the golden days of window-shopping, harbour-strolling, and park-lounging, and I never had to take the bus the 30-minutes more from downtown to the university.
It strikes me that I haven’t been downtown in ages, excepting one excursion a few days ago. I never have any reason to take the bus in that direction, especially since I moved across town. But summer cannot be allowed to pass by without many agenda-less trips to the main streets at the heart of the city. Pretty soon, now, I’ll be free to do plenty of drifting.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: buskers, downtown, harbour, summer, tourists
Downtown comes alive in summer. The sidewalk artist replicates famous paintings in chalk with his upturned hat on the pavement beside him. The piano busker lugs his big pink upright into the downtown core and picks out slightly off-key tunes. The panhandlers return to their old haunts and particular tactics. A crowd of onlookers gathers around the fire-juggler more frequently. The ivy on the stately old hotel in the harbour leafs out and turns the building green. A regatta of sailboats assembles at the point south of the city. The tourists come in droves and choke the harbour and nearby tourist-centric street. The open-air tour buses crawl the city with increasing frequency. The regular city buses crawl with less. The big downtown park with its petting zoo bursts into full bloom.
My favourite thing to do during this time is to join the masses downtown and stroll along the harbour, or along the street of antique dealers. Sit at the window of a coffee shop and people-watch. Meander through book shops, wander around Chinatown. Forget about classes.
A University campus is at its best in the summer. The crowds are gone from the hallways, the computer labs always have plenty of space, the weather is gorgeous, the atmosphere is generally leisurely. You forget what it’s like to shoulder your way through groups of hall-hogs in your rush to get to class.
Living in residence during the summer adds an extra layer to the mix. I’ve only lived in residence for one complete summer, at my previous school. The dorm-dwellers dwindled to just a few handfuls, and the local CFL team infiltrated the building for their summer training session. The rooftop walkways made great biking grounds that summer… so did those long, empty hallways. The wonderful thing about my old campus was that almost all the buildings were linked in a large horseshoe-shaped configuration. Theoretically, you could bike right through the interior of the campus (if you disregarded the “NO BIKES” signs on all entrances).
But even better than going to campus for summer classes is going to campus in the summer and not having the burden of classwork on your mind. Or maybe, disregarding that guilty burden as though it were just another “NO BIKES” sign.
You see them everywhere, those ipod people wearing earbuds, with wires trickling from their ears like some sort of plague symptom. And there are hands-free phones, which, I suppose, are a great invention if you can’t refrain from talking all the time and simply must phone people while you’re driving. Unless my eyes deceived me, I believe I’ve seen the mutant offspring of these two gadgets.
I was waiting for the bus, when some guy with earbuds trickling from his ears started having a conversation with the warm spring air. Apparently the air was answering him, too. I soon realized that he was talking on a phone, via his earbuds; I suppose it must have had a microphone somewhere, but this guy apparently didn’t “do” the microphone thing. Instead, he shouted so that everybody at the busstop—and every passing downtown shopper or businessperson—could have the pleasure of sharing in his conversation. I wondered, as he chatted loudly with thin air, if he was intending to exude the image of a crazy person orating to the downtown public.
But I know he was talking on the phone, because he was holding his cellphone (into which the earbuds were plugged) and waving it around as he spoke (I guess “hand talkers” benefit from making gestures even when their conversation partner can’t see them). The thing is, he had to shout every single word (probably because he scorned talking into the device’s microphone)… your phone is in your hand, is it so hard to raise it to your ear and speak into it like a normal person?? Well, the guy boarded the bus with everyone else and continued to shout into general airspace—which happened to be mostly my airspace since he chose the seat next to mine.
I have never owned an ipod, and earbuds hold a particular disgust for me… especially so, now.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: citizen, city, civitas, prairie roots, urban, urbs
Modern life seems to be a progression toward ever larger urban experiences. My roots lie in the prairie landscape, in the fields and farms and rural schools that are inexorably dwindling. But such roots—which are anything but “humble”—can no longer be maintained in today’s world. Adulthood, for me, has been a migration into the urban landscape.
But every city is twofold. On the one hand you have the buildings, the walls, the architectural foundation—the empty shell in which urban life unfolds. On the other you have that very urban life, comprised of people joined by social bonds. The 7th-century encyclopedist Isidore of Seville termed these the urbs and the civitas, respectively. For him, the essence of the “city” was the inhabitants, not the building stones. In this way, too, the city isn’t rooted geographically, but exists where its citizens dwell.
Or is this duality so concrete? Literature and life has long proven the urbs and the civitas to be undoubtedly interconnected. Perhaps urban life really takes place in some compromising middle ground, where citizen and edifice interact. The civiturbs?
