From the time I was an hour out of town on the freeway and traffic started to get hectic, I\u2019ve been experiencing a city that moves at it\u2019s own strange and chaotic speed. My dad\u2019s friend who\u2019s lived in L.A. over two decades and who I had lunch with my first day put it well, \u201cLos Angeles is a great city, just not great for sight-seeing or tourism. Everyone here is just doing their own thing.\u201d This past week has felt more like the trip controlling me than me controlling the trip, adjustment to a city that won\u2019t heed if you\u2019re too slow.<\/p>\n
There was definitely a bit of culture shock upon my arrival. I\u2019ve lived in Wenatchee, Washington (small, suburban, pretty friendly), Seattle (mostly college kids where I was) and Olympia (strange but cool). My experience is pretty limited, so it\u2019s no surprise that this is unlike any place I\u2019ve ever experienced. What I\u2019ve seen this week is how confined my life has been up to this point. It\u2019s just plain weird seeing how many people have been consuming the same media as me, ordering things from the same websites, watching the same TV shows and movies, aware of the same celebrities and pop culture, and listening to the same music as me, and how all of them are so different, yet we all like these things, dislike other things, and because of this we can relate to one another. It\u2019s bewildering to me.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m glad I decided to bring my car; I don\u2019t know how anybody here gets around day to day without a car. The traffic here gets crazy, especially during rush hour which I\u2019m told is actually five hours (3-8), which I think is scandalous, because that\u2019s a huge chunk of time during which I usually have to drive at some point. During that time most people on the highway drive like they have a wife in labor in the back seat. I\u2019ve learned to get used to being honked at for not speeding enough or unintentionally cutting people off who otherwise may have cut me off, intentionally or not. It really is everyman for himself.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m living in a garage converted into a studio apartment. It still has the garage door, so if I want some fresh air I open it. There is a little patio outside too, with a wall giving privacy from the sidewalk. I\u2019m right on the corner of the street, the building shares one wall with a house, one wall with my neighbors parking port, and two walls with the street and sidewalk. Really, those two walls are shared with whatever the city decides to put outside my window, and there is a surprising amount of through traffic here. There are a lot of motorcyclists who prefer riding loudly at 2am more so than any other time. Besides the more aggressive and startling sounds though, there is a white noise of the freeway, about a half-mile away. It reminds me of a river in a strange way, there is just enough texture and change for it to be noticeable, but it never seems to die down other than at night, when it gets slightly more quiet. There\u2019s a constant current of traffic passing through, and it\u2019s noticeable from everywhere in my house. I\u2019ve gotten used to it though, in a way it\u2019s calming.<\/p>\n
While a dose this strong of L.A. life has felt like a slap in the face, I\u2019ve noticed a lot of what Botton said would happen in The Art of Travel happening. Most obviously, bringing all of myself with me on this trip. During the stages of anticipation for travel it\u2019s impossible to foresee how the smallest and most unpredictable details will affect your experience, and which details will matter to you. This happened to me quite a bit during breakfast this week, because I had to learn how to make omelets and I always end up messing up the first omelet, and I always have to spend around 20-25 minutes cleaning dishes before hand, because I\u2019m all out of clean dishes for my ingredients and such. Anyway, little things like this add up throughout the day, so I find it\u2019s important to make sure I\u2019m out the door by a certain time every day, and every night I try to have an idea of what I\u2019ll be doing the next day.<\/p>\n
This week I went to the Griffith Observatory, the Getty Museum, Santa Monica Pier, Venice Beach, and to a play directed by Tim Robins. I feel like a got a pretty diverse sense of people from each place. The Griffith observatory felt like all kids on a field trip, while the play felt like a bunch of local people. Everything else fell somewhere in between. The play was probably my favorite thing this week. It was A Midnight Summers Dream by an acting group that normally tours to perform it. They were only in L.A. for two days but my cousin works at the theatre and she was able to get me a ticket. The theatre was small and intimate, probably between 100-200 seats. It\u2019s called \u201cThe Actors Gang\u201d. All of the music was live which I thought was pretty cool, and it was done by someone named Dave Robins who I suspect is Tim Robins brother, but I haven\u2019t bothered to look it up so please don\u2019t quote me on that.<\/p>\n
All in all, it\u2019s been a good week. I love it down here! Over the next three weeks I\u2019ll be conducting interviews with 4-5 people who work in different creative fields. I\u2019ll type up the interviews when they happen and post them for anyone who wants to read them. Other than that, I\u2019m going to continue my readings, keep sketching everyday, exploring the city and seeing what I can learn from this strange and fascinating place. Right now I\u2019m working on City of Quartz by Mike Davis, which is super interesting but much more dense than I expected. It goes over the history of Los Angeles very thoroughly, and while I like reading it I think I\u2019m going to need to extend it as something I read over the course of my whole trip rather than during the first week. My other books have less pages than this, mostly, so I\u2019m hoping this won\u2019t be a recurring theme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From the time I was an hour out of town on the freeway and traffic started to get hectic, I’ve been experiencing a city that moves at it’s own strange and chaotic speed. My dad’s friend who’s lived in L.A. over two decades and who I had lunch with my first day put it well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1285,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[],"tags":[99],"geo":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1285"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=752"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/752\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.evergreen.edu\/musicalcities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}