Jacked

Last night Alana and I got jacked...by place. Or as some may prefer, by the social construction of space. One of the lenses that geography has brought to me is the ability to imagine how places could be. The world becomes more interesting - more than rote description - when you think of the historical processes that made a place (physical, social, political) and what processes it would take to change the future of that place. Instead of a static set of people, events, buildings, and intersubjectivity, place becomes an always-changing game, and the game gets wicked exciting when you realize you're a part of it. Tinkering with the direction of a place often involves resistance...against rocks and dirt, against others' will, against power. Alana and I got jacked by the city of Los Angeles. Not by a person like the mayor who represents the city, or by any individual with mal-intent, or by bad luck. We were doing everything we were supposed to be doing to go watch a rapper by the name of Emanuel Jal, an ex child soldier in Sudan whose message has exploded in, and is now exploding out of Africa. Sadly I don't know what that message is because we never made it to the show. We weren't late, it wasn't sold out, and it wasn't too expensive. We did not go to the show because We could not get there. In physical space we were there actually. We must have driven by the Egyptian Theatre (African reference coincidental) 10 times in Alana's car searching for a place to store the car while we were inside. Unfortunately those who controlled the remaining storage space for cars were not the sharing type, and we could not afford the amount of money it would have taken to make them share with us. Of course most people would pay the parking fee, but we resisted, and left the scene. We resisted against the will of the parking attendant, who surely would have prefered the $20 for doing nothing - the $20 that would have given us the privilage to walk around Hollywood Boulevard and go to what I'm sure would have been something enriching and unique. But mostly we resisted against the organization of space in that part of the city. The space is organized in such a way that erects constant barriers to flow. It is the fortress city, crackable only with money.

Fortunately there are alternatives to money cracking, like the bus or bicycle. Unfortunately here those words mean nothing to people. I can attest that they are perfectly functional and viable forms of transportation in L.A., but their social status is so completely shattered by the culture of fear that with some people (mostly natives) you actually lose credibility as a person when you travel in this way. Alana and I could have easily taken a bus from my place to the Egyptian Theatre. From experience it would have taken about an extra 20 minutes to get there. That 20 minutes would have saved us our emotional turmoil and frustration, not to mention a lot of gas and the 20 minutes we spent driving around looking for parking. Oh, and we could have seen the show, which by the way cost only $7. Why don't people bus? Answers I've received from natives: "It takes too long" (read above). "There are weird people on the bus" (if by weird you mean people with brown skin, yes). "It's a bad bus system" (not true). The best answer I've heard so far is "when my car's in the shop I just take days off work." The culturally mediated association with "alternative" transportation (I use quotes because it's not alternative to millions of people in the city) is so negative, so unfounded, and so real, that it makes me sad. As an optimist resistor it also gives me an unending pool of inspiration to ride my bike and take the bus as frequently as possible.

On the way home we ate outside in the cool desert air at Carl's Jr., one of the original burger joints in southern California.

V for Vendetta

This post is in response to a viewing and discussion of the film "V for Vendetta" that has been organized by Chris Limburg in Madison, WI for tomorrow. Chris' invite blurb is:
"As a pacifist, I loathe violence.
This movie ushered me to a seat where I paused to reconsider that commitment.
I took that pause seriously and think it is worth talking about in a forum."

Having recently seen the film, I wish I could be a part of the event. In lieu of my absence I decided to write a review commentary here.

The film is about social change. Social change is so normal that almost 100% of the time we don't notice it. It is in fact so elusive to our reptilian sensory observatory powers that if we make no cognitive effort to observe social change, it is not until catastrophe or some equivalent critical mass that we pick up on it. The glacier-paced speed of change makes things seem the same day in and day out, but with conscious reflection one can begin to guess which events may impact the future course of society. I feel founded in saying that social change is constant and normalized in part because of the experiences I've had in my recent move to Los Angeles, CA. Talking with friends on the phone from Madison makes me realize that even after only a few weeks the Madison I knew and will always remember is already gone. The changes are subtle but distinct. Different ways of thinking, interacting, and flowing are creeping in and replacing what I knew. The degree of subtlety of the change is such that I could return to Madison and figure things out pretty quickly, but the most interesting thing is that without my absence I'm guessing I would not have noticed the change.
So, V. V is a prophet. V wants power. V takes power violently. He justifies the wielding of violence to take power so that he can make the world in a way that he thinks is right, and he can't do it without the support of all those people, hence the propheting. Sounds like a wacky religious thing to me. So the question is why does it feel so good to watch V kill the bad guys, show the light to all those people, and blow up the city? It feels good because it supposedly restores our idea of human rights to the masses who have been stripped bare practically without their knowing. The social change that put the masses in a police state of uber surveillance and punishment happened outside the sensorial realm of most observation. Combined with some governmental lying and trickery even the quick ones in the bunch were duped or forced into this, what we would recognize as an inhumane state of affairs. It feels good to watch because there are so many analogs to the current federal administration and political environment in the United States. It speaks to what many Americans really want to see happen to the government, i.e. a fantastic overnight upheaval. It feels good to watch because as viewers we are given a privilaged position that makes V look smart and outside of the uber violent surveillance police state, a place we'd all probably like to be. Platially he is outside of it -- he has his secure Bat Cave, and he can freely roam the streets. The price he pays for his free flowing, though, is where the moral dilemma rears its ugly head. He secures his freedom with violence and murder. Sounds like our least favorite president to me. Summary so far: Bad guys wield power through violence, we don't like. V wields power through violence, we like. What makes the film morally engaging is that it's hard to imagine V or anyone like him succeeding without the use of violence. We see him and think "well I guess there's no other way, we'll just have to use violence." The peace movement has long (and correctly in my opinion) recognized this as a dangerous response. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously quoted that "Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that."

Power has been shown over and over again as directly linked with violent persuasion. You can't have a revolution without power, and you can't have enough power for a revolution without violence. The crux of the dilemma, then, without discussing the meaning of rights and justice, is how to change the direction and velocity of society without power. My feeble response to a potentially unsolveable puzzle is that the only thing we can consciously change after ridding ourselves of power is ourselves and the way we interact with the environment that surrounds us, including people and non-people. Ridding ourselves of power means ridding ourselves of the desire for control. Now if only we could tell everyone to start doing that at once, it just might work. I know, we could take over ABC and shoot out the message on the airwaves. The age of peace is here. 1, 2, 3, now.

Map History

Harry Beck's map of the London Underground, first released in 1931, is famous because it was one of the first times in modern cartography where an itinerary (or journey) map had no relationship to the geographical space it represented. Even though the stops on the outer edges of the map are miles apart, and the inner city ones are very close, representing the stops that way on paper had been confusing and cluttered until Beck's flash of brilliance. What most people don't know about him is that his true passion and profession was designing circuitry, and the parallels between the schematics are obvious. The reason this map works speaks to something that geographers are very interested in, namely that there is more than one way to know and understand space. We now live in a world dominated by Euclidian geometry, where distance is measured in things like inches and kilometers, and represented as such on maps. Everything depends on this - it's why cell phones work and tennis courts are the same dimensions at the French Open and the U.S. Open. The London Underground map flies in the face of this taken-for-granted principle. It has nothing to do with distance, direction, time, or terrain, yet it is masterful at getting you where you need to go in the most efficient way possible. Strange, no? It is a different way to experience the here/there of space, and movement through space, two themes that I've explored before and themes that I hope to keep in my dissertation. Vessel travel, like in airplanes or subways, is an excellent way to re-experience space in a way that cars or trains don't permit as readily. You don't feel like you're going anywhere. You feel like you're sitting there awaiting to emerge from your hole when the vessel stops, emersed in a new environment.

This map below, and the information on Harry Beck above, comes from a great book that I read today at the beach called "The World Through Maps" by John Short. It's an excellent overview of the field because it includes great reproductions of many of the most important maps in the field, and I reccommend it to anyone interested. The complete citation is at the end of this post.



This is a portolan chart (portolano is Italian for pilot book) from 1547. It was used for navigation, hence the Euclidian straight lines on the water part of the map, but I really like it because it includes racy, symbolic interpretations of the people found on land. This is a rare example of a map that includes this kind of symbolic representation with the mathematical functionality of a navigation chart. Lucky for me, the original Vallard Atals, from which this portolan chart comes, is housed at the Hintington Library in L.A., so I can go look at the original sometime. Cool!

Short, John. 2003. "The World Through Maps: A History of Cartography." Buffalo, NY: Firefly.

Beach

Sunset in Santa Monica.









And this mini vid to boot.

Library

I began work this past weekend on my proposal for the International Conference on the History of Cartography in Berne, Switzerland. The conference isn't until the summer of 2007, but the juried proposals are due at the end of the month. After a year of thinking about ways to re-work the questions of my Master's Thesis at the University of Wisconsin so they speak to a wider set of audiences, I decided that I will write a paper presentation about the use of maps on wine labels by marketers. This will springboard off my Master's work because it speaks to how and why the place of agricultural production is still an effective marketing tool in certain sectors of the American food economy (e.g. wine), even though the majority of our foodstuffs are generic and globalized, with no mark of the labor or the environmental circumstances that went into the production of the food. I think it's interesting that with some products this reverence toward place, sometimes local place, is still in tact, and with other products it is off the moral radar. I am discovering in the initial phases of this proposal -- essentially the task of locating the labels themselves that have maps on them -- that the style of library research here will be vastly different than what it was at Wisconsin.



UCLA is an excellent research institution (pictured above), but not necessarily because of its campus libraries. It relies heavily on other collections in the area, such as the Los Angeles Public Library, the Huntington Library & Archives, the USC libraries, and the UC-Berkeley libraries. While at the spatially small but intellectually gigantic universe of Wisconsin, where all these groups would be folded into one or two square city blocks, it was a matter of walking next door to grab a book. Here it is a matter of taking a day to go somewhere with a research agenda and call numbers in hand ready to pull and photocopy or check out what I need. Fortunately it is possible to have many items delivered to the UCLA campus, but some special collections and archival things have to be viewed on location. Hence the traversal of this never-ending urban expanse, which my dad and I measured once to be over 75 miles in width, so that I can look at a wine label or two.




I made my first of such treks to the LAPL Central Branch yesterday (above pictures), which for the Madisonians in the house is the L.A. equivalent to Memorial Library. It is an eight story cube full of books. The decorations are clearly more intricate, though, and they had a particularly relevant art exhibit going on about citrus crate labels from the first half of the 20th century in the United States (below). I found at the library what I think I'll need to bring together advertising label history and the history of cartography for the proposal. To these literatures I hope to add health geography for my dissertation, as well as expand away from the focus on wine.



The night before this trip I watched the Dodgers hit four consecutive home runs on TV to tie the game against their arch-rival Padres and gain control of first place. It was the first time since the '60s that a team had hit back to back to back to back home runs.

Art Future

Art Crawl is an event where artists, radicals, hipsters, and anyone else can mozy through 20 open-door galleries in the Silver Lake neighborhood just northwest of downtown. It was a comfortable, Madisonesque scene with lots of cyclists, free Tecate beer, and outdoor garage bands in the various exhibits. The neighborhood claims to be home to the future of art in L.A., and I would have no way of rebutting that claim. The event was the first time I have done anything in the city with other people up to this point, and it was nice to have companions to talk and joke with. Pictured above are USC Geography Ph.D student Dan Warsowsky and L.A. Times staff writer Alana Semuels. We met at La Luz de Jesus gallery, then walked to 4 or 5 others, including my favorite called Thinkspace. Besides my second favorite art, La Luz de Jesus had an incredibly interactive bookstore, that is books made for browsing. The topic of their most catching book for sale was "your worst fears," but instead of words it was a 3D pop-out format. Open the book to a dentist moving a drill toward you, or a gang of spiders sneaking on a web, or you at school with no clothes on. On our way back from the art we ran across Love Craft, my potential future car dealership who specializes in refurbishing "Reagan years" diesel Mercedes so that they run on biofuels like vegetable oil and/or biodiesel.

The strong suit of Dan's department at USC is urban geography, and specifically Los Angeles. Perhpas not surprisingly it is one of the leaders in the development of the L.A. School of urban geography, which is essentially grounded in the idea that the future design, development, and evolution of large cities around the world affected by global capitalism (all of them) will come out something more similar to L.A. than to something like New York. The city center core is dead, say they, and the annihilation of space is more relevant than place and distance. This is of course hotly debated among geographers, and there are several examples of cities around the globe that both reinforce and contradict this central idea. With all the rock star L.A. urban geographers at USC, their historically and socially informed visual virtual tour of Los Angeles is worth checking out.

Lost Knowledge

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City is a quick bus ride from my place -- it's not too far from the Jazz Bakery -- and is right across the street from one of the rare city parks (below) in the area.



When I asked the attendant at the tiny museum's entrance/gift shop to describe the scope of the collection in one sentence, he said it is a natural history museum with a focus on technology. Nature, history, and technology...how could a geographer not be interested? The two-story house converted into a museum was recommended to me by great friend, art historian, and special collections librarian at the University of South Florida Keli Rylance. After touring the museum's text-rich exhibits and upstairs Russian tea and cookie room (complete with Russian people) I would describe the place as a spooky collection of lost ontologies that leaves you seriously questioning the Enlightenment scientific endeavor. Not because the endeavor is wrong but because imagining it's death as the guiding way to interact with the world becomes easy. Soon science as we know it will have its corner of the museum along with all the other lost truths about health, animals, God, and the universe. Next to the 21st century science exhibit will be one that tells us how angels move mountains, or one that explains in excruciating detail how eating whole dead mice and toast together cures one of the consumption, or one that pictures the anatomy of lost species of mammals, or one that explains how building a tower to the Moon would cause the Earth to topple out of its orbit and crash into the Sun. Among many others these are all real exhibits in the museum, and they put you in a space somewhere between art and science, where cold hard facts cannot exist. Living in that space is important for the advancement of peace. Truth can rarely be known, intention is always murky, and reactions based on these slippery assumptions can only lead to hurt.



Imagine that we connected the Moon and the Earth with a big steel beam. The Moon would not orbit the Earth as it does now -- and for at least half the globe there would be no Moon in the night sky ever again. Technology would trump cosmology. I think this is an excellent way to think about the geographer's project. It is a hyperbolic example to demonstrate that we live in a universe whose functions are interconnected in complex ways and though certainly human technology is one of those functions there are actions we are capable of taking that jeopordize our place in the universe. A social geographer would ask "who decides who gets to see the moon from now on?" "How did they acquire that power?" "At whose expense?" a cultural geographer would ask about the meaning of the moon to future generations. What stories will they tell about it to make sense of the world? When we leave this imaginary field and apply this thinking to an observable earthly activity such as agriculture the direct consequences for human life are more poignant. What kind of food is being produced and why? What are the problems with denaturalizing the process of growing food and folding it into the political-economic, for-profit system?

Jazz Bakery

It's hard to sit in my open air Spanish courtyard fortress style apartment complex knowing that there is a whirl of activity just on the horizon in any direction.


I could not let idleness win the night, and found myself at a non-profit club called the Jazz Bakery in Culver City, a 35 minute bus ride from my place. The Bakery is in an indescribable, only-in-LA type of drive through stip mall neighborhood zoneage thing. It was an awkward approach to landscape architecture and spatial planning, but probably perfect if you're driving. Once inside my door, however, the scene was cozy and welcoming, and the crowd that mingled was small and friendly. There was a great photo exhibit going on about jazz artists in action from the mid 1980s. Many were names I'd never heard, but there were a few leftovers from the golden years. Playing that night was a piano/upright bass/drum trio with Aaron Goldberg on piano, Reuben Rogers on bass, and Eric Harland on drums. Rogers is a big, smiling, dancing, Israeli guy with a 1960s Fidel Castro beard. Harland is a powerful Texan drummer who didn't miss a beat. And Goldberg is a Brazilian/American pianist whose compositions at times reminded me of a mix between the Charles Schulz Peanuts theme song and John Lennon's later years. Besides being amazed by the professional skills and execution by Goldberg and Rogers, I was most enthralled by Harland's ferocious drumming. One of his crash symbols had some rattlers on it so that whenever he tapped it a sizzling ring would go on for about 20 seconds. It created a nice background for whatever else he was doing at the time. He also was not afraid to go Bonham style, using the four sticks when appropriate, but alternated with soft brushes and padded mallets. The room was not a bar, but a mini concert hall with about 100 plastic lawn chairs set up. There were only around 30 people there, so I was able to stretch out and get close to the stage. I discovered that many of the audience members were students or teachers from the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in LA. I like the oven metaphor of the Jazz Bakery a lot. You mix up the musicians and the audience and the sound in a room, heat them up slowly, and what comes out is likely to be good. It reminds me a lot of playing with Armadillo. On the bus ride home I witnessed a man having a real live conversation with himself about absolutely nothing. He was clear and eloquent and made no sense whatsoever.

Vid Store Robbery

The ability to commute by bicycle almost stopped me from moving here. It is a form of transportation that I value highly, and I decided it would be one of the greatest challenges of coming to a place that must have the highest number of single-occupant cars on the road at any one time. The well-documented benefits of bike commuting, such as increased endorphins from excersise, release from CO2 emissions, escape from parking fees, and the removal of economic support for oil wars are reasons why being a cycling activist here will be an important part of what I do. Showing people that it is not only possible, but fun and easy to get around on bikes is more rewarding when the obstacles to overcome, like a culture hell-bent on driving, appear to be greater. There is a stigma that you can't ride a bike in LA traffic, yet with patience, practice and common sense this is not the case. It's actually a wonderful place to ride your bike if only because the weather is perfect every day. A main thing I've learned is that side residential roads are often carless because of speed humps, and are most likely lined with palm trees and lush flower gardens. It's not too hard to be one block away from a six lane road and sit back and enjoy the pedal. The single most important lesson I've learned from my 7+ years of bike commuting and 6 months of being a bike messenger is that to put yourself in the safest position when surrounded by cars you have to be a car. This means you have to use left turn lanes, signal like cars, fully stop at stop signs, wait at red lights, etc. People respect this and will not treat you as a nusance if you show them that you are as serious about moving as they are, and that you are willing to play by the rules. Ok, ok, before I get too holier than thou about how to bike commute: of course there are always jerks in cars, and of course sometimes you have to not be a car to be safe, like ride on a sidewalk for a block or jump a red light to establish position in your lane.

I wanted to watch the third season of my favorite TV show that has now been released on DVD called Arrested Development. I biked about a mile to the local Hollywood Video store (is it still a chain if you're almost in Hollywood?) and rented it. I came out to find that my front light and its attachment paraphenelia was flat gone. It came to me in that moment that anything not bolted down is essentially like a donation to Good Will. There is a swirling tornado of people out there that need that stuff more than I do, and are willing to take it from me without my permission. I was lucky that the rest of the bike not bolted down or locked (i.e. the wheels) was still there. Lesson learned. It felt dirty knowing that someone was nabbing stuff off my beloved Salsa while I was inside musing about TV shows, but I came away the wiser and am now the proud owner of the top-o-the-line Kryptonite lock and a new front light. Commuting is the easy part now. Learning how to not worry while I'm there is the new challange.

EZ Does It

There's a lot that I knew I'd be leaving behind in the Dairy State, like nice seasons, uncrowdedness, and community-style open spaces. Since moving to Madison in 1997 I must admit I have become a total cheese snob, and this is perhaps the biggest sacrifice that I knew I'd have to make. Yeah sure, California makes more cheese now that Wisconsin, but let's be honest - in California it's possible to have a complete meal without cheese. This is the first brick of cheese I bought in Cali, and it is horrible. I don't even think I'll be able to finish it. Maybe it's really good "New York" cheddar, I don't know. I wouldn't know because they don't serve New York cheddar in Wisco.



"Nice seasons" will be hard to miss when this pool at UCLA is open for lap swimming 10 hours a day all year round. The last time I was there my lane partner told me that it should only take 22 strokes of front crawl to go 50 meters. That's a lot of glide, since it takes me about 52 strokes. Lap swimmers are so funny. They always assume that you're trying to get better at swimming. I tell people that I just swim for 30 minutes then go home. Everyone I've ever spoken with in a pool instantly goes into training programs and why swimming for 30 minutes then going home is the worst way to get better. Well, I don't want to get better. All I really want to do is not drown. Swimming laps in a lane pool is possibly the most solitary thing one can do. You're not just alone, but you're ignorant of the world around you. All you have is the sight of a line and the noise of water swooshing. It's this that I like about swimming. Thirty minutes of escape and meditation. I purposefully let my mind do whatever it wants, and don't try to remember or think about anything in particular. Counting strokes and timing lengths would be antithetical to that purpose. So for anyone reading this who wants to share a lane with me, don't worry about me, just let me go. I promise when I exit the pool my quality of intersubjectivity with the world will be healthier than when I got in, and to me that's a good workout.

Visual Narrative

In Hollywood where I ate pescado sudado at this restaurant. That means sweating fish in Peruvian (steamed fish). Muy bueno.



Keeping that pescado tasty and healthy for us all.



The Rapid is namesake to the largest fleet of green busses in the world. They are indeed rapid and are a great way to get around.



Unless of course you get a Beamer. That's more rapid :-)

Rollin'

7th Street flora market



JeonJu Restaurant on Olympic Blvd.

I walked to the local Avis when I woke up and rented a mini van so I could go pick up all of my earthly belongings from the Amtrak station and start to really move into my new place. My luggage traveled a different route than I, hence its delayed arrival to the beautiful gothic union station in downtown LA. I realized how much power material possessions have when making a place one's own. With all my stuff here I took advantage of a surge of confidence and began to rearrange the kitchen cabinets and pick up the apartment a bit, something I had been hesitatnt to do beforehand for fear of intrusion on the incumbant roommate, Adam. The confidence I felt is related to entitlement, something I've been thinking a lot about lately. My material slef acted as a kind of ticket to prove that I indeed have half the power of what goes on in this apartment. It's telling, and slightly disturbing, that it took the collection of my things to get that ticket punched. Why did I feel free, but incomplete before? The eradication of desire and fear from one's life is what I talked about a lot with my no-smoking-shrink this past year in Madison. The incompleteness I felt without my stuff is certainly related to not being free from either of those things.

Cruising in the mini van was a blast. Saturday meant there was not too much traffic. With the one-day freedom of a car, I brought my map with and did some good long range explorations. On the 45-minute drive to union station from my apartment in Westwood, I made a great stop over at what I would describe as the farmer's market for flowers and plants on 7th & San Pedro, just east of downtown. There were shop owners lined up for blocks and blocks, almost exclusively selling flora of all sorts. The neighborhood was fascinating -- alternating homeless people with their tents set up on various streets were simply part of the neighborhood. They were neither ignored nor ominous. The one thing that area shared was that the only English to be found was from these homeless people. Most others spoke Spanish or Japanese. I found a couple nice plants for the homestead, and was happy to take advantage of the car for such purposes. After grabbing my boxes from union station I continued back west on Olymia Blvd, the main drag through Korea town. I stopped over at a classic LA mini two story strip mall where one of the stores was called Han Li Piano. It was in the minority of signs that included English translations, and for some reason it cracked me up. It was at that point that realized the emotions that LA can rip out of you: elation, fear, sorrow, openness, coldness, hate, happinness, hopelessness. They're all there for the taking and leaving, but most often I'm guessing there will be some very humanistic mixture of them all. I ate hot stone kim chee bibimbop alone with the Koreans. It rocked my world.

Fortress

Today I began to learn what I imagine will be one of the fundamental differences between my previous home of Madison, Wisconsin and Los Angeles, California. The movement of people here is planned. Flows are restricted and cannot be overcome without lots of time or money or both. I have little money and lots of time right now, so I spent the day walking...to blockaded barb-wired pathways, to intersections with no crosswalks, to walls of shrubs, to locked doors at the ends of staircases. I walked to these places because I don't know how to flow. Flowing in this city is an artform, and I am green to it right now. I see the canvas of the urbanscape, but have no paint. I am used to experiencing space as limitless and open, as it exists in Madison. There one can bounce from place to place, with no real anchor point. All is home. My movements here are hiccuped and awkward, and it has affectd the way I psychologically interact with the space. I feel the top-downness of the urban planner. It is clear that fear has been the motivating factor for the development of this city. It is in part its utter Americanness - fear that someone will blame you, the planner, for making a city in which bad things happen to people. I learned that here in LA you will be punished for assuming that space is free. Jaywalking is unheard of, and drivers are quick to remind you of this fact even when they are not impeded. Paths are not necessarily for public movement. To sedate the fear of bad things happening to people, like getting shot or raped or mugged, movement is controlled in a way that makes any transgression obvious and easy to prosecute. It is wholly unorganic. But it is safe. It is also wonderful for the aesthete who prefers clean and neat and tidy and polite. Where will I find transgression here?

Arrivato

My train rolled into the smog soaked LA sunrise this morning at 7:30. It was about 26 hours after I had departed Denver. It was not a long trip, but a meditative one. I could have sat there another 26 hours probably and watched the desert mountains roll by and think about the past and the future and the meaning of the west. You start feeling the gravity of the global city at about San Bernadino, when at 4am there is enough traffic to fill a couple belt lines. Black mountains loom above the line of white and red lights that flow, at least for the moment, peacefully. From there industry builds until finally you're surrounded by people and languages from all over the world. From the union station in LA I hopped on the bus to UCLA, a 45 minute ride down Wilshire Blvd, a road famous for its theaters and fashion shops. The stop let me off only a couple blocks from my apartment, and I landed at about 10 this morning. I had a wonderful day walking around the campus and surrounding neighborhood doing little errands and explorations. Everyone's as friendly as pie - not like what they say. Steve the donut shop owner even walked out of his store down the block with me to make sure I walked in the right direction. When he saw my luggage the bilingual bus driver asked where I wanted to go then told me where to get off (in English). He said if they let him retire right now he'd put the bus in park and walk home right now. But he was still friendly to everyone. Lucky first day I guess. My roommate studies math, buys massive (to the point of hilarity) quantities of dry food, and is an intelligent political thinker. The only things he has hung up on his walls are two maps - one of the world and one of the USA. We'll get along. I got a free bag of food courtesy of Whole Foods upon my check in to the apt, so now I'm eating 365 brand spaghetti and sauce - it's damn good what those hippies can pull off. I ate an incredible lunch at a place called Jerry's Deli on Westwood Blvd. Rare roast beef sand. w/ lettuce and mustard and a Coke. The RB was stacked so high I had a hard time getting my jaws around it. Definite Dillo stop over.

Here are some quick vids from Colorado.

The view from the pad of the Brothers O.

Rollin' in CO