With one home from college and another on the verge, my family planned an impromptu holiday vacation. Los Angeles was their idea; New Year’s Day was hers. I typed “Los Angeles” into My Guides and started dropping pins.
“January will be gorgeous,” a Tulsa friend living in Los Feliz said. It was our Christmas gift to ourselves. First stop: LAX.
“You can have any of the cars in the last row,” the Alamo attendant said. In a row of uninspiring silver and gray SUVs sat a black Ford Bronco Sport. I climbed behind the wheel and stayed there all week.
There is a method to the madness of Los Angeles traffic, a frenetic give-and-take that you must regard no more personally than a sperm cell heading north along a fallopian tube. Like driving in Dallas, with two-and-a-half times the population and none of the climate control.
* * *
Our week in paradise began with a pair of shears and a blowtorch.
We only had time to land, locate and take Bundy Drive to Sunset Boulevard, the most ridiculous route to Koreatown imaginable, short of walking. That said, your first taste of LA is a doozy. We passed the iconic palms of the Beverly Hills Hotel but, when I labeled it the Hotel California, the backseat passengers went rubbernecking. The Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel is named for Will Rogers, somewhat, after the polo matches he organized in an adjacent field some century ago ended at the hotel bar.
This was our M.O.—cram as much as possible into every square inch of the GPS. Mar Vista, our neighborhood for the duration, was convenient to Venice and Santa Monica and Culver City, a neighborhood now trendy for all the reasons Santa Monica is not. The rest of the city felt tragically removed, as if we’d boarded a cruise and were doomed to steerage. That said, Mar Vista is a quiet, maneuverable, and accessible point of embarkation. And respite. A good place to catch a breath.
Like most of the restaurants of Koreatown, we found ours, Sun Nong Dan, in the corner of a grimy strip mall with a line several deep on the sidewalk in front. Our dinner turned out to be the most prominent image on the laminated board: a giant bowl of galbi-jjim—a beef short rib and rice-cake stew gurgling in a fiery sauce—that could feed six. Not every incarnation of this dish is spicy, but this one was, gut-burning and sweat-inducing. Late, beloved Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold wrote that you should absolutely get it smothered in cheese and so we did, largely to see (and very much feel) the pyrotechnics.
The waiter sat the dish in the middle of the table and turned the knob on his butane torch to blue. The heat reddened our cheeks. Some errant flare burned a hole in a paper placemat. Even over some pulsating electronica, the roar of the torch was palpable. Solving the riddle of the shears sitting in a steel can on the table, I began to snip pieces of meat from slabs of bare bone.
“What’s this music?” I asked our oldest.
He shrugged. “Dance music?”
Fair enough.
* * *
We’ve tended to be museum people when on the road. Maybe it’s that prophet-in-his-own-land syndrome, like, only the art elsewhere is credible. I do know that LA museums run the gamut, from the very quirky Museum of Jurassic Technology to the more hoofed Getty Center. Four thousand people a day see The Getty, the best part of which is probably The Getty itself. There are jewels within—James Ensor’s Christ’s Entry into Brussels in 1889, Turner’s Modern Rome–Campo Vaccino, Monet’s Rouen Cathedral in Morning Light—but the bulwark of the place itself is the masterpiece. Not so much Richard Meier’s design, still nothing to slouch at, but all that stone lording over that Brentwood hillside. The Getty proclaims itself the safest place on earth to store art. A view from the highest overlook, affording sun-flared glimpses of Rustic Canyon and, to the coast, Pacific Palisades, reinforces the charmed-fortress aspect of the place, even as the mountain lion warnings bring you back to earth.
We’re also sports people, I mean, in that mostly spectatorial way. Like when LeBron James was in town holding court. After dropping the guys off at Crypto.com Arena for a Lakers game, we met some Tulsa friends for Taiwanese shared plates. We counted ten different cuisines that week. Talk about your melting pot.
One of those—burger, fries and a Coke—we did twice. After the Lakers sent the Hawks packing, ours and seemingly every other hungry Laker fan fell in line at the In-N-Out on Sunset. The drive-through line wrapped onto the boulevard. The dining room, a square grid of vinyl booths lit in fluorescent bright white, was standing room only, and the workers hummed like a beehive doing a waggle dance, all of them sporting the classic paper cap of Burger Capitol of the World fame. With no room in the In, we went for one of the tables outside. A palm tree grew from a concrete island. Three blocks north on Hollywood Boulevard, Nosferatu was playing at the Chinese Theatre.
“What are those?” I asked our youngest of the mound inches from his mouth.
“Fries Animal Style,” he said.
* * *
Our long day’s journey into night climaxed at the New Beverly Cinema in a midnight screening of Death Proof, on 35-millimeter, no less. I hadn’t felt a theater so cult since my first Rocky Horror at the long-gone Fox. A dude in a knit cap, the same one taking tickets, came out to lay some ground rules.
“None of those evil cell phones,” he said with a moan, “even during the trailers, which Quentin curated himself.”
The lights went down and the screen lit up and transported me to a time both distant and intimate. Back-to-back-to-back previews—Convoy, Gone in 60 Seconds, Vanishing Point—all preceded by the psychedelic intro, “Our Feature Presentation,” a more stylized, less artsy, yet still effective relative of that we’d seen earlier at The Getty: our allotted ten minutes with Helen Pashgian’s Untitled (Lens), 2023. Described as a “meditative sculpture and light installation” on cast urethane, watching it evolve through several light changes was like watching a fireball spin a web.
Death Proof, it occurred to me much later, celebrates the controlled rage of LA traffic, the explosive, erotic (anybody remember Cronenberg’s Crash?), destructive force of the American driving machine, animated in the smoking tires of Kurt Russell’s vintage Dodge Charger, that muscliest of cars, skull-hooded and revved—the same car from The Dukes of Hazzard, if the Duke boys had gone seriously off the rails. In Russell’s hands, as the Bronco might have been in mine, the Dodge becomes a weapon of stylized revenge, down to the Convoy-borrowed fighting duck hood ornament. Revenge … watching the bad girls in their swan song, studying Russell’s facial scar, foreshadowing, maybe, the tire that tears the belly dancer a new nose … for all the lost and loose unleashed by Henry Ford and unhinged by Carroll Shelby.
Oil begat automobiles. Waite Phillips, whose tomb we’d seen earlier that day at the Pierce Brothers Westwood Mortuary, sold his Tulsa oil company and fled for Los Angeles, where he invested wisely and widely. Across the improbably green lawn of the cemetery, in the shade of trees behind the public library, the crypt of Genevieve and Waite Phillips—rising over me, pronouncing “WP” in teal—makes mere paupers of Marilyn Monroe and Hugh Hefner, buried side-by-side in matching vaults.
And none of them death proof.
* * *
Sunset Boulevard runs the length of Los Angeles, rolling off the beachfront below Pacific Palisades, curly-cueing through Brentwood beneath The Getty, dipping into the UCLA campus, climbing the Holmby Hills above the Los Angeles Country Club and the Playboy Mansion. It rises past the Beverly Hills Hotel, the Will Rogers Memorial Park, the Frank Lloyd Wright House and Studio, and the Viper Room, into the Sunset Strip. There, it winds for another few blocks before flatlining beneath the Chateau Marmont. Driving this stretch of Sunset is as concise a glimpse into American culture one can witness, appropriately enough, behind the wheel of a car.
It runs due east for nearly five miles, where it intersects Hollywood Boulevard at the so-called “Nightmare Junction,” a car-crash waiting to happen, before becoming Sunset Drive and loping another seven blocks before petering like a dry creek bed.
This eastern stretch is the one I longed to see, lured by its steady diet of coffeeshops and boutiques, restaurants and thrift stores of Silver Lake and Echo Park. We walked it from one end to the other and back again, refreshing ourselves with Stereoscope coffee, Salt & Straw ice cream and pizza in a refurbished cinema. The only bald spot on the street was on the curve between Mohawk and Alvarado, where the embankment has forced itself into the right-of-way.
“I think we just walked through somebody’s living room,” she said as we tiptoed beneath a blue tarp, between a tent and a table full of discarded and reclaimed belongings.
With a chill in the air, we made our way back to the car, stopping to snap iPhone photos near the El Cid, a century-old landmark formerly flamenco hub, cabaret hall and jail-themed night club complete with waiters sporting prison garb. We clicked at the sunset falling on Sunset.
* * *
The smog lay in a vague brown layer over East LA. Westward, thin white clouds scraped across a sky of royal blue. Pulling out of the parking lot at Santa Monica beach, the sign said not to back up, for fear of puncturing my tires. I lurched over the spikes and abruptly stopped inches from the bumper-to-bumper Pacific Coast Highway.
Our final full day in Los Angeles, we hiked up to the Griffith Observatory with some friends from Los Feliz. You say it Los FEE-liz, the way a cowboy would have said it, though apparently there is a move on to reinstate the Spanish pronunciation. In any case, it means “happy.”
Before our hike, we ate lunch at Figaro, a bistro on Vermont. They had Delirium Tremens on tap and I ordered one in spite of the Surgeon General’s imminent warning.
From the Griffith you have a clear view of the Hollywood sign, and one cautioning for rattlesnakes.
Driving around earlier, our youngest noted how tightly packed is the city of Los Angeles. “There’s no wasted space,” he said, marveling at the narrow gaps between houses and the afterthoughts of lawns in most of LA, anyway.
“You put up a rent sign on a house and it’s gone like that,” I said, snapping my fingers, only repeating what I’d heard.
* * *
We’d heard there could be winds of 100 miles per hour. The first wave whipped through Pacific Palisades around 10:00 am. By then, we’d been sitting for half an hour anyway. Then the announcement came that the plane was returning to the maintenance bay due to a faulty fuel pump. Already I was antsy. We’d heard overnight about high wind potential. I saw bits of trash scoot past out of the corner of my eye but, sitting on a giant pad of concrete, it’s hard to get a feel for anything. I drank from a crinkled water bottle I’d brought on board, hoping they’d let us pee if need be.
Turns out it wasn’t the fuel pump but a computer component that monitored the pump. With this reassurance, we were back on the runway in only 15 minutes.
“We’re second in line, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for your patience,” came the announcement from the cockpit.
As we rolled into place, she nudged me.
“That’s Air Force One. Two or One.”
A long, white plane with a blue nose and “United States of America” stamped on its fuselage sat out of the way.
“Wow. Really?”
“Yeah. It’s either him or her.”
As the plane made the turn for the runway, I saw smoke out my son’s window.
“Look, it’s a grass fire.”
“Where?” he said, pulling a pod from his ear.
I pointed toward the brown-black plumes coming over the beach. By nightfall, the cordoned area by nightfall would be within yards of where, the day before, we stood on Santa Monica beach watching a pod of orcas breach against a setting sun. Where a lone surfer caught a few gentle waves. Where a spinner dolphin did its thing. Where the light turned orange in the sky.
According to a story in the New York Times, the first call of a grass fire came at 10:29 a.m. The first engines arrived on the scene at 10:50. By 11, as we readied for takeoff, the fire was raging on the hillside. An evacuation order would be in place by 12:07 p.m., when we were over the San Bernardino Mountains and somewhere over the desert floor.
Merriam-Webster defines a palisade as a fence of stakes, especially for defense, or a line of bold cliffs. Pacific Palisades is a hillside neighborhood between Santa Monica and Malibu. “Palisades Lost” read a headline in the New York Times less than a week after our departure.
“By 2:32 p.m., the fire had churned through two miles and grown to 700 acres, racing toward Pacific Coast Highway,” read the report.
The following day, Will Rogers’ old ranch house in the Santa Monica Mountains, an unchecked spot on my list of sites to visit, burned to the ground. Two chimneys alone stood witness. I watched a video of palm trees waving in the wind like feather dusters.
A week later, with the Palisades and Altadena still on fire, the filmmaker David Lynch died from complications of emphysema, having smoked himself to death. Three of Lynch’s last four films were set in Los Angeles. Each of them relies on a smokescreen of complicated protagonists, warped chronology, non-sequitur dialogue and absurdist characters that appear out of nowhere for seemingly no reason. All of them have that Lynch “thing,” but none of them achieve the darkness of Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks, whose evil lands less obliquely and, hence, a lot closer to home. As if perhaps Lynch couldn’t see his adopted metropolis with the same clarity he gave to Lumberton and the backwoods of the Pacific Northwest, where (to borrow a line) a yellow light still means slow down not speed up, and the storylines, free of smog and dust, look a lot less hazy.
Back home, where temps had fallen into the teens, with snow expected two days after our arrival, we named all the large tracts of land that lay dormant and likely would for a while if not forever.
