Los Angeles

I first visited LA in 1991, when I was sent by the consulting company I worked for to get some specialized training in systems maintenance environments. I spent the time instead by roaring around the city in convertibles, going out to fancy restaurants, and sitting in outdoor hot tubs, firmly sharing the conviction of my hosts that a fistful of smuggled config files would meet the technical brief when I got back home. It didn’t, of course, but I have had ever since a soft spot for the easygoing life in the big city on the California coast.

L.A. LIVE
On this trip, I stayed at a luxurious conference venue right in the heart of the downtown. I don’t typically manage to convince myself to stay in the conference hotel, but I was sufficiently nervous about my first visit to a notoriously large and complicated event that I decided to break the bank and stay where the action was. And action it is, with about a million English professors and graduate students plunked down in the middle of a sort of social hotspot called L.A. LIVE. The stadium where the Lakers play is across the street, and a block away is the city’s main convention center, so the area in between is lined with bars and restaurants, large scale video displays about the size of the side of a barn, ten-storey towers that seem to exist just to broadcast light, and a dozen searchlights playing against the cloudcover. There is even a bronze statue of Wayne Gretzke. Everything is artificial, including the grey plastic rocks that line the path between the bars. The crowd it draws is in some cases wildly enthusiastic in matters of sartorial expression, so it wasn’t clear to me if I was seeing citizens or performers from the cast of Cirque Berzerk, which is currently playing at the Nokia theatre. They may have alternatively, of course, just been English professors letting their hair down.

Hot tubbing on the roof
Sitting in whirlpools outdoors continues to be a California staple. I spent some pleasant hours that way in San Diego in the spring, and I couldn’t resist it here, although in this case the lower temperatures (only around 60 degrees f) meant there weren’t very many of us out on the roof. I did, however, have a moment of dega vu when I realized the bird I was watching circle was a vulture.

LA is a Great Big Freeway
It was true when Burt Bacharach wrote it in 1968 and it is still true today, so I put a hundred down and took a taxi out to the Getty Museum, which Richard had advised me was not to be missed. It is unfortunately half an hour from LA LIVE, down a highway with more lanes than I bothered to count, but eventually I was deposited on a concrete slab outside a car park, and began to follow the signs that led me through a maze of nondescript concrete until I got to the tram that is necessary to carry you up to the Museum proper. Not really a walking city, LA.

The Getty Complex
Sprawling all over the top of a large hill, the J. Paul Getty Museum is well worth the trouble it takes to get there. The weather is sufficiently clement that a visitor can spend a lot of time outdoors, walking between the fountains and the massive rocks out to a variety of promontories, where the views of the city are amazing. The collection is as heterogenous as you like, packed into a kind of maze of relatively small rooms, which gives the illusion that the whole thing is at a human scale. There are also plenty of exits through glass doors taking you temporarily back out into the hilltop air. I think the principle of collection may have been “something for everyone,” an effect that is enhanced by the various instructional exhibits.