52 Films

Sunset revisited

In early June I made a long walk along the Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, to see and feel how the city changes along the 24 miles, without being sealed inside a car. I documented this walk with a series of photographs, field recordings and writing and compiled the material into videos I posted in week 2 of this project.
Originally I had a vague idea to use whatever I write during the walk as occasional voice-overs in the video. Because of my goal to produce a constant flow of new work every week though, this proved to be beyond my time-budget. So I went through my scribblings and produced this essay instead. I hope you enjoy it in conjunction with this re-edit of the video which has an improved image quality and a slightly slower pace.

Walking the Sunset

Of experiences and observations along Sunset Boulevard’s 24 miles

The morning is cool and the sky misty as I start walking the Sunset Boulevard. There’s always a peculiar tranquility about mornings, as life is still waking up, be it in wilderness or in the city. People start their work or travel to their jobs. But still not too much traffic, not endless lines of steel and flesh stuck on the roads in frustrated queues (though reality would be very different on 405). It’s quiet enough to hear some birds singing. The air fresh and humid after the night. The misty sky making the light very soft and even.

Sunset Boulevard begins close to Downtown Los Angeles and winds its way through varied neighborhoods for 24 miles before reaching the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway. One of my first observations as I approached Los Angeles by air was the exceptionally long streets, a huge pattern of lines stretching seemingly infinitely, a web for man-insects or giant veins feeding the city. Douglas Adams noted in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, that our cities, seen from above by an alien visitor, would look like they have been constructed for cars—them being logically the dominant race of the planet. I never felt that description to be more accurate than while being in L.A.

The first district I pass through while traveling from east to west is Echo Park, a colorful and diverse neighborhood. Slightly run down in some places still, Echo Park used to be a cheaper place to live, mixing mexican immigrants and left-wing artists. Recent years it has become more and more gentrified and stories of gang warfare on the streets feel now more like an echo. Treading the sidewalk, both sides of the street are mainly residential areas, small houses as in suburbia, yet at the same time the atmosphere is definitely urban. Walking further into Echo Park the streetsides begin to fill up with small shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, galleries, a bookshop, a market for time travelers, a record store. Weeds push through the concrete.

After and hour I stop to a have a morning coffee and write. The day is still relatively quiet, but traffic is increasing. It feels pleasant to step out of the stream and observe it from a different perspective. So much of people’s lives in L.A is spent in transit between points —home, work, market, coffee shop, gym. A constant current of traffic, pushing on determinately through the asphalt veins of the city.

Continuing through Silver Lake the landscape keeps changing yet remains the same. It’s a strange combination of a neighborhood that obviously used to be more poor and rough, but now next to one another on street sides are yoga studios, cheap motels, tandoori pizza, thai massage, mongolian barbecue, liquor stores, organic juice bar, laundries, more cafes, sidewalks decorated with graffiti, fashionable skinny young white people and sunscorched homeless, pushing shopping carts filled with their collection of possessions, like the father and son traveling in the ashes of a dead world in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Where Sunset meets Santa Monica Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, the city changes again. Admits tall hospital buildings is a sky-blue castle, the church of Scientology. It’s getting close to midday and the sun has driven the clouds away. I decide to walk in, hot and sweating. Inside a spacious and cool lobby I’m greeted by receptionists who escort me to a series of television screens, a self guided tour to principles of scientology and the life of its founder L. Ron Hubbard. I sit down to drink some water and watch some videos. His life is presented as a quest in search of knowledge of the universe and Hubbard like some sort of movie star. I watch through more videos trying to understand what their religion is about. To me it doesn’t seem like a religion at all, more like a pyramid marketing scheme. Though now I see why Hubbard’s peculiar self-help cult, which seems to mix psychoanalysis, buddhism, perhaps a bit of anthroposophy, wrapped up in a simplified package of life-lessons, appeals to people especially in Hollywood. Hubbard is painted as a heroic and adventurous figure, a culmination of all the american virtues, a super-boy scout who unraveled the secrets of life to hand them to you in a convenient and easy to use package. A spiritual Indiana Jones telling you how to live your life successfully.

I walk out and enter the much more humble temple next door, The Self-Realization Fellowship, established by Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda in the early 40’s. The place is just open, I walk in and a lady passing by comes over to greet me. She answers some questions I make and at the end she assures me that ”we won’t try to convert you”. A strategy that appeals to me. I walk the grounds and end up sitting in the meditation garden in a comfortable shade under a tree. I space out for a while. There’s a wonderful atmosphere to the place and eventually I have to force myself to continue my walk.

A different kind of world greets me again as I continue my way. The rugged yet joyful neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silver Lake give way to a rougher landscape of ugly strip malls and warehouse stores. People sleeping or begging on the streets. The sun is high up and hot, the air full of noise and exhaust fumes. A man sits on the sidewalk, sobbing hysterically. He holds a piece of paper on one upraised hand, showing it to the world, a testament or evidence of something, while eating french fires with the other at the same time. On the ground beside him some candy bars.

I’m passing through Little Armenia and entering Hollywood and West Hollywood. A wasteland of traffic and billboards and homeless people. Stretching on as a straight line, polluted, noisy, hot… For some reason I find myself thinking of Waiting for Godot. I begin to feel exhausted.

On the street in front of Sunset Plaza Liquor a man probably in his 30’s, tall and skinny, steps out in front of me on the street and informs me that he will kill me. Obviously out of his mind, living on the street, suffering from exposure and malnutrition. He had just been raving to some young kid a moment before, who deftly avoided the man and just continued on his way. I decide to try the same method, supposing that the man, though definitely threatening, is not likely to actually attempt to kill me. So I mutter something and keep going, showing my open palms to him, in some instinctual universal sing language of ”I’ve got no quarrels with you” and he does not attempt to block my passage. He remarks I look like Bon Jovi and then tells me again that he’ll kill me. I keep going and don’t look back.

Poverty is the great equalizer…

And traffic. And madness.

I have not yet seen any single common attribute to the people living on the streets. They are of all skin colors, men and women of all ages, except children. That’s the difference compared to places like India. Otherwise there’s so much poverty, visual, in your face poverty, as I have ever seen in any in any country that likes to call other countries ”the third world”. They sit there on the street sides, their bags of worldly possessions around them, or piled up in a trolley, they wrap themselves up in the junk, like human waste-magnets. Visible but invisible, people passing by do their best to try and wish them away, to imagine there’s nothing there. Devoid of any contact with people, it’s no wonder so many of them start to talk to themselves. Like a person in sensory deprivation, who starts hallucinating a world around him to interact with. The saintly bus drivers of Los Angeles are the only ones who give them attention or recognition, like taking care to lower the ramp for them to enter with their bags and sacks and carts. When they get too loud, the drivers tell them to shut up or go, but they get the same treatment as everyone else: the opportunity to use the public transit. Perhaps this is also one reason why so many homeless use it.

Then the landscape starts to look more expensive. Some fancy hotels appear. Boutiques and restaurants. The skyline is filled with advertisements; every inch of the field of view has been attempted to block with commercial messages advertising booze, films, tv shows and more booze. It would only be more effective if everyone was to wear augmented reality glasses with personalized advertisements darkening the sky. I wander through the fields of commercials, every signpost striving to catch my attention. The only remaining space free from commercials is the asphalt eroded by constantly grinding tires, but I imagine some day in the future they’ll come up with entropy resistant smart asphalt that rearranges its pigment to produce changing advertisements. There will be nowhere to hide.

The price of space. The price of air. The lack of public spaces on this street is striking. Even the sky isn’t free anymore. There aren’t any places to go, unless you go to buy something. And just walking on the street your attention is being demanded by signs and signals wanting you to want things. I wonder how the poor on the streets relate to all this. Have they stopped wanting, stopped paying attention? Or are they trapped in an internal gnawing feeling of wanting all the things around them, yet not being able to reach any of it? And at the same time, lifting my gaze even higher are the villas and palaces of the upper layer of society, the movie stars and executives, overlooking this wasteland. The contrast is incredible.

The contrast gets even more striking, as suddenly Hollywood ends and Beverly Hills starts, like a line drawn on the city. The dusty, hot and polluted street changes into a lush landscape of tall trees and rows of hedges hiding the big houses behind them. It’s pleasant to walk underneath the shade of the trees. The traffic jam next to me is not so pleasant. It’s late afternoon and the street has turned into a parking lot of frustration. I keep walking. There is nothing else to do, there is nowhere to go; couple of bus stops with benches, a small park with a fountain and a man dancing ecstatically to the tune of a psychedelic organ solo from his traveling set of amplifiers. Further into Beverly Hills even sidewalks disappear. There’s just the road and a corridor of hedge-fences. The billboards reaching for the skies have been replaced by trees, but beyond them there are just the little signs of security companies proclaiming private property and armed response.

I reach my half-way mark, the edge of the UCLA campus grounds. The angle of the sun is pleasant now. It’s green here, walking between the campus grounds and Bel Air. Very few people can be seen, mostly it’s just cars. The air feels more fresh. Occasionally I catch the scent of eucalyptus or tea tree, or the chemical scent of detergent from joggers passing by. I enjoy this stretch of walking –even a sidewalk has reappeared. Then suddenly I arrive to a river of noise and steel, the Interstate (parking lot) 405. The sound during the late afternoon rush hour is like listening to a waterfall. Thousands of people locked in their cars. Useless honking. A bundle of flowers is tied to the fence on the bridge arching over the freeway. Memory of someone. Then past the bridge landscape continues similar. Fences, hedges, houses, the road and nothing else. Like an empty stage. Where did the people go?

Then I enter Brentwood Village. Shops, cafes, restaurants, very suburban, feels slightly upper-class. Neat yet lifeless. I sit down to write at Starbucks, outside by the street. Listening to the sounds of people passing by. I overhear a small group of men, evolved to speak loud and with a squeaking high voice so they are sure to be heard. Talking is like a pitch, like telling a story or trying to sell something. Another guy passing by stops to ask for the time. His skinny little dog comes sniffing at me excitedly. He tells me the dog doesn’t usually like males. He also tells me he has six cats and another dog. He seems like an interesting character and he’s my first friendly random encounter but he does not stay to chat longer.

Moving on the local urban center soon changes to houses and hedges again. Except everything is not as neatly trimmed and managed as around Bel Air. A theory: the amount of gardening and landscaping is directly comparable to wealth.

The land is more hilly now and the road becomes winding. I pass by a memorial ground made for a young girl who apparently died in a car accident on Sunset. Signs urge drivers to slow down. Goodbyes from friends and family stapled on a tree. The little shrine is touching. And it’s true that many drive like maniacs even on roads passing though residential areas like this. A symptom of lives spent in traffic is lives lost in traffic as well.

As I continue on I can feel the ocean in the air more and more. It’s moist and slightly salty. While I stop to take a photograph a bunch of young guys crammed in a car standing at the traffic lights shout at me: ”Take a picture of this!” I’m not sure what they are referring to and I cannot really see anything that interesting happening so I just continue with my shot of a security service badge in the bush. ”Take a picture! Asshole.” And they drive away. Perhaps they thought I was a paparazzi spying on some celebrity. I shrug and continue on.

I pass through another fancy neighborhood. This one has a golf club. Houses and hedges one a after another. This walking really starts to feel endless. More houses and more lawns and fences after another, on and on.

Passing by Will Rogers State Park there’s more trees around for a moment. Buildings are more sparsely spread along the road. Sun is setting. I listen to the sounds of the forest and wish I had the time to make a detour to wander around some forest paths. The neighborhood has a more rustic feel to it that seems more dominant to me the closer I get to the Santa Monica mountains.

After an hour or so, I reach Pacific Palisades. Fancy shops, restaurants, cafeterias, an expensive-looking rug shop, a shop selling barbecue grills, yoga studio, several banks… Certainly upper class, but still having a nice atmoshpere. The mountains are getting closer. Topanga Canyon is not that far away. It certainly affects the atmosphere, that and the vicinity of the ocean. It’s getting dark. A signpost warns me of a neighborhood guarded 24/7 by armed patrols. Creepy gated community manifestations. So much for the niceness.

The road continues on. Would have thought to reach the ocean sooner, but compared to the straight lines of Hollywood, the road winds its way like a snake and it makes the way seem longer. And more varied. But it’s well past sunset and I’m still on Sunset.

The road becomes narrower, a residential area without streetlights, without sidewalks. I keep on going, determined I should reach the end of the road soon. The road descents in a long curve. It’s dark now. Hillsides around are littered with lights. There’s a big party happening somewhere across the small valley opening in front of me, bright lights and music. I can see the ocean now. I pass by a large temple next to a small lake. The road widens again. Blocks of flats. The last stretch. Fast-food restaurants appear and I can hear the noise of the PCH. I see a familiar bus no. 2 standing by the side of the street. It’s the end of the line. Then the ocean is there. Dark. A pitch black mass of rolling waves on the other side of the highway. Like another universe, carved out of this one by the stream of headlights flashing by. End of my journey.

Epilogue:

I met a man at a bus stop by the PCH. He was waiting for the same bus as myself and wondering if it was still in service this late. He turned out to be homeless. Sleeping on the beach, trying to find some work on a boat. Ex-marine, in his late thirties, with a patch on his right eye. Could have passed for Woody Harrelson look-alike. Somewhere between a pirate and a beach bum, he was actually a sailor, with a boat license. Arrived in L.A early this year. He told me he was living and working on the east coast, but something happened and he lost everything. Somehow connected to the big oil spill. Then he headed out to California.

The guy was very nice and seemed like a person with a good heart. Living in a rough spot but still keeping his spirits up. He just wants to work. He was heading towards Venice to one of his sleeping spots. And a shower. He said there were public showers on the beach.

Finally the bus came. We got onboard and sat down. More homeless people on the bus. A man in front of me was ranting about something, carrying with him a pile of newspaper clips, books, magazines - text in all forms. He gave me a page from a newspaper with a story about the scarcity of fresh water in California and told me to pass it on.

On Ocean Avenue me and the pirate got out of the bus. We shook hands and went on our ways, me to wander around and watch the nightlife on the Santa Monica pier, him towards a free shower and a spot to sleep at.