Road Trip: LA
Who knew? This place is a proper city: human and alien and alive with art and drama and suffocated ennui and smoke and silliness and ghost-hint memories of London and Beijing and Athens and Tijuana.
Up the coast: we find ourselves sharing the ankle-pulling, chest-striking ocean (all power and promise) with a pair of dolphins. I feel the open-hearted joy of a cartoon child.
Meanwhile, back on earth, there’s a homeless man pissing in the street. Behind him, the graffiti says ‘Chucky loves Kitty.’ He’s smoking as he pisses.
Look up: a poster says, ‘Gentrification Sucks’. Another, ‘We Are Not A Minority’. A cardboard sign above a fading shop: ‘Mariscos 4 Vientos’.
The old Sears building is a beautiful, messy thing, a dozen kinds of church. It watches us like the Texas sun did, but it knows its place in our histories far better.
LA has a Byzantine-Latino Quarter. Google says it’s ‘permanently closed’.