SoCal

Los Angeles :: USA

All good things must come to an end.

Places: Santa Barbara & Los Angeles.

Coolest thing I did: Saw the Walt Disney concert all. It's tops.

Coolest thing I didn´t know: There are oilfields right in the middle of LA.

There is a definite border between the two halves of California, as things change quite dramatically once you arrive in the lower Sans or Santas (as all towns seem to be named here). Dramatic, sweeping coastlines and cliffs are replaced by miles and miles of mountains fringed by beaches. Santa Barbara was a very nice place to stay for a couple of nights, as it seems to be a Spanish themed gated community crossed with a University town. As I mentioned last time, the weather while I was there was dramatic, but not very well suited to the beach. I did get some very spectacular photos, but my decision to ditch the car for a day and walk up to the mission that was the start of the town was not well thought out. Right about the time I was an hour out of town in the hills the heavens opened and didn't stop. The mission was a very tranquil place, and well worth visiting, but doing it whilst drenched didn't make the experience exactly what I was after. Still, like I said, it was worth the visit, but I can imagine it's even better with the sun filtering through the palms into the courtyard, rather than big fat drops of rain.

The nightlife in Santa Barbara on Saturday night, even when spring break is on for the local Uni is something to behold. There are a whole load of bars down the main street that are evenly divided between the underage drinking crowd and the aging retiree crowd and to tell the truth, I didn't quite feel at home in either. Still, it's a great Saturday out. I managed to see a complete showing of Top Gun, cage dancers in their underwear, a live blues band and the comedian Bill Maher. The last one has to be taken with a grain of salt, unless you hate Bush with a cult-like devotion. Some of what he said was funny, but most of it was plain stupid. Those were the bits the crowd cheered the most. It has to be said I don't think there are a whole lot of Republicans in coastal California.

I was prepared to hate Los Angeles. Everyone told me it was crap and I'd want to leave the second I got there. I was called mad for wanting to keep the hire car I drove down from San Francisco and use it for transport. I'm always glad when a place bucks the trend for me. I have to say I dig LA.

I think I was helped by my accidental start. I drove in through Malibu on Highway 1 and decided to take a look at the Getty Centre, as I'd heard it's a architectural gem, and would be worth seeing, even if it wasn't full of art. Thanks to the fact I entered the car park and couldn't turn around again, I ended up giving them $7 to park so thought I may as well visit. I'm very glad I did. It's not so much one building as several, perched on a cliff top looking over the city. I couldn't help but think of it as a modern version of the Alhambra in Granada, only full of Monets instead of angry Muslim warriors. The five buildings ring a set of fountains and gardens, and that was the first time I started to appreciate the scale of the place. You look down on what seems like endless flat buildings, only broken up by the few high rise buildings of downtown and the hilltop oilfields on the other side of the city. I since learned that I was only looking at about a 1/3 of the city at that point, as South Central and Long Beach lie beyond those oilfields and behind me was the San Fernando Valley, which stretches out quite some way again. Thats the trouble with building a city in a place that frequently knocks tall buildings over with earthquakes, you need top build out instead of up. It's like the anti-Manhattan.

I ended up staying down on Venice Beach, and that too was a good move. With the sun out I was ready to see a beach again (it's been more than a year since I saw my last one) and the vibe of the place during the daylight hours is revitalising. So lots of very weird people hang out there, but they are entertaining and harmless. It's also a fair bit less gentrified than Santa Monica, just down the road, making it a whole lot cheaper too. The hostel is in the dead centre (Venice Cotel for those keeping score at home) and had a very nice cafe just down the road which made me breakfast burritos on some very hung over mornings. It was a young crowd, so I ended up going out most nights and suffering for it in the mornings. Again, watching backpackers out on their first trips makes you remember why you do this in the first place, with all their energy.

My favorite bits were probably just driving around the city and checking out all the different bits. Without a car you'd be spending hours on the bus just to get between bits (it's a good 40 mins drive from Venice to the downtown without traffic) and there's nothing like a white guy cruising around Los Angeles in a Saturn Ion listening to Dr Dre. The white people just stared and the black people laughed at me. It's tops. I liked the tattoo-parlour in a juice stand grunginess of Melrose a whole lot better than Hollywood, though I did think the Mann's Chinese Theater deserves it's fame. That building is very cool, but it probably looks like it was made in Disneyland by actual Chinese people.

I've decided the Gerhy designed Walt Disney concert hall now pips the Reichstag in Berlin as my favorite building in the world. It's a silver rose bud, and in the Los Angeles sun it is a myriad of reflections and magnifications of light. I can't describe how cool an idea it is to use all that sun to such effect, and there are very few other places in the world you could have pulled that off. Compared to the tourist trap that is the Adobe house just down the road (LA's oldest Spanish house) it also has a practical use, which makes it even better in my book. Pity I don't like opera.

I thought that the rich parts of town were way too sterile. The sheer lifelessness of Rodeo Drive makes me wonder why the hell anyone would shop there, let alone pay the world's highest prices for things. I'm told it's for the anonymity that comes with paying way too much for stuff, but with tourists being the only other people there besides celebrities I wonder if that's entirely true. I did, however, dig the art deco grandeur of the Beverly Hills town hall and police stations. It's a pity they don't make them like that anymore. The statues out the front of the town hall are also very cool.

Most movie stars homes are just big houses, so seeing them didn't do too much for me. The exception was the late John Candy's mushroom house. Take one look at the magic toadstool chimneys and tell me he wasn't on some serious stuff.

I think LA was probably a pretty good place to end my American trip. This place is probably a better epitome of how the US works than anywhere else I visited. New York has the hard reality of cash ruling everything, and Wall Street's dominance of the American way. For most people, that's how life works, banks, money, working many hours and seeing other people get rich. Los Angeles is the flip side of this, the fact that there is one way to buck the system and that's celebrity. Forget Vegas, that's the big jackpot here. Every now and then, some commoner finds out they can sing, act, dribble a basketball or just look plain hot and find themselves elevated to the new American aristocracy. For the average person, that's what they aspire to, and that's what LA represents. While it has it's angry, ugly side just over the hill in South Central, it provides middle America with it's hopes and dreams. It may be a surer way to comfort to go to Uni and earn a degree and work hard, but everyone, deep down, wants to be a star. It's the release valve on the American Way, and why people seem happy with their lot here.

So that's it, I'm off to Dublin. I've enjoyed America, and it's shattered some of my preconceptions about the place, but I'm so glad this is not my country. It's such an extreme place, a land of big ideas without the tempering force of common sense most of the time. It's easy to admire, but probably best done from afar. I know I'll be back here one day.