The Not Quite Tamed West

The Los Angeles River comes around Griffith Park from the San Fernando Valley (I admit I used the zoom to conceal the concreted banks...and couldn't do much about the wires).

(Note to self: must do a more substantial blog again soon)

Suburbia

Mornin' sun kisses the windows, 
Kisses the walls of the little white house; 
Kisses the the doorknob, and pretty red roof of the little white house in Scarsdale...

- Leonard Bernstein, Trouble in Tahiti

The "Valley" gets such a bad rap ("suburbia"), but so many people try to do something with their own little bit of turf, and sometimes you get beautiful contributions to the streetscape.

Admittedly not Scarsdale, but still suburbia. Somewhere in the San Fernando Valley

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La Reina de los angeles

Quite a bit of the local LA news the other night (continuing through a couple of ad breaks in fact) focussed on the imminent retirement of Pope Benedict XVI. It made a change from the stories about the manhunt for Christopher Dorner up at Big Bear, or stories about a football code I haven't yet developed an obsession for.

Yet, it also made me think that there must a lot of Angelenos who would be interested in this. Los Angeles, or at least the Valley, is part-Mexico. I practise by reading the signs on the buses - Personas mayores e incapacitadas tienen prioridad de asiento. And most of the Spanish-speakers, I guess, will be Catholic. This is quite a nice coincidence because I've been familiarising myself with Catholicism as part of my research into the opera, Philippa. One of the paintings that particularly attracted me at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art was a rendering of the Virgin of Guadelupe.

I realise that this image is a template and that there are other versions (this is not the County Museum's). No doubt there is someone somewhere who is an expert on images of the Virgin of Guadalupe and can distinguish between the quality of the various artistic renderings. But I like the piety which leads to mugs in 99c Stores on Sherman Way displaying the image. It makes me think about Los Angeles in a different way.

Last year, heading down to San Diego, I saw this by the side of the freeway -

- a big red cross through the Hollywood sign - Hollywood as Sodom and Gomorrah to the Religious Right.

Yes, Los Angeles is freeways and smog and if you focus on the street maybe it's cluttered and congested.

Van Nuys Boulevard, San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles

But see the surrounding mountains turning bright pink at sunset, and you'll realise that we could call these mountains Sangre de Cristo, just as easily as the range in Colorado. And you may even recall, while watching a shootout up at Big Bear on the CBS Nightly News or waiting nearly an hour for the 239, that the city on what Southerners disdain as "America's Left Coast" was named for the queen of angels. It's an intriguing other aspect to Los Angeles.

To read more on the opera Philippa:

1. - 16 Sep 2012 - an account of my initial thoughts on Philippa, when I was attempting to convey a more comprehensive trajectory of her life
2. - 18 Sep 2012 - containing Act I of a revised scenario, beginning the action in Vietnam
3. - 25 Sep 2012 - containing my revised scenario
4. - 7 Oct 2012 - one-page synopsis, to make sure such a story can fit into "two hours' traffic on the stage"
5. - Becoming a Harlemite, Vietnamese and Catholic 10 Oct, 2012 - detailing some of the research I'll be doing
6. - A Harlem Tradition? 20 Oct 2012 - detailing Harlem interest in white culture
7. - Sacrifice? 21 Oct 2012 - considering the nature of Philippa's death and whether it was self-sacrifice
8. - Classical aspirations 30 Oct 2012 - looking at Harlem's attitude to classical music in the age of Philippa
9. - Montagnards and Lowlanders 1 Nov 2012 - looking at some of Philippa's writing from Vietnam
10. - A sobering thought, 13 Nov 2012 - recognising the prevalence of lynching in the US until well into the 20th century
11 -  Words, words, words, 11 Dec 2012 - considering whether Latin should be one of Philippa's languages given that catholic services, even late into the 1960s, would not yet have been in the vernacular.
12 - End of the rebirth, 20 Dec 2012 - some thoughts on the end of the Harlem Renaissance around the time of Philippa's birth.
13 - What Puccini would have looked for, 26 Dec 2012 - examining the theatricality of the Philippa synopsis

Other blogs of mine on Los Angeles are:

A daily reminder, 1 April 2011
When you take a closer look, 21 April 2011
The frame (thoughts on the Getty Center), 24 April 2011
A light on the hill (the Reagan Library), 30 April 2011
A couple of snapshots (Malibu and the Valley), 1 May 2011
More to love about LA, 6 Jan 2012
Walking with stars, 10 Apr 2012
En plein air and a little elan, 16 Nov 2012
LA Substantial, 18 Jan 2013
City of Angels, 20 Jan 2013
City of Nets? City of Dreams, 31 Jan 2013
Rounding off - LA vignettes, 2 Feb 2013
Loving the architectural reminders of old Los Angeles, 4 Feb 2013
Cultural conjunctions, 4 Feb 2013
Cultural conjunctions II, 6 Feb 2013

Non-linear lessons, 7 Feb 2013
More than whimsy - Contemporary Art, 8 Feb 2013
Life and movies?, 10 Feb 2013
But, whimsy indeed, 12 Feb 2013
Pockets of charm, 13 Feb 2013

Contrasts

LA: - I love that there is snow in "them thar hills"

not even an hour's drive from the sun and warmth and backyard (or frontyard) citrus trees in the San Fernando Valley.

Life and movies?

These street trees from around the San Fernando Valley remind me of a set in a Tim Burton movie. And then I read that Burton came from Burbank, not far from here...

Non-linear lessons

Some years ago I learnt not to listen to Beethoven's Emperor Concerto from the beginning. I'd heard it so often I would vague out, find myself compiling tomorrow's shopping list or something, before the end of the exposition. I'd be lulled into a dream by the predictable unfolding of the familiar landscape. Catching snatches of the piece coming out of the open window of someone's living room, however, or absent-mindedly flicking on a radio gave me a new appreciation of the piece. Why? Because what I'd experience when entering the piece in midstream was the actual hue, the full impact of the piece without the dulling of any mental expectation.

This has got me thinking about the mosaic manner in which we most effectively learn something. I'm getting to know Los Angeles in a similar fashion: "Oh, so if that's Westwood, Beverly Hills must be over there" etc...

This has got to be one of the most lovely confusing places I've ever had to orientate myself in. I think it has something to do with mountains on all sides of the San Fernando valley. I wonder how I can be approaching mountains when I've just left mountains behind. But gradually I've begun to piece the city together (it helps to have gotten used to the sun being in the south of course). I've now got a picture in my head of a coast that goes south-east to north-west, then east-west, and then south-east/northwest again. There is a big ring of mountains sitting on the flat bit of coast (bounding the San Fernando Valley), then to the east of that a break leading to the coastal plain where Downtown and Hollywood etc lie. I got a buzz coming home the other day when I knew we were about to hit the Sepulveda Pass into the Valley and "if my predictions are correct, the Getty Center will be up there on the left. Westwood and UCLA are over there on my right, and Santa Monica is behind us to the left." I'm working on the city inside out, rather as a composer does when he's working on a piece and the entire shape isn't yet (can I say "boringly"?) guaranteed.

City of Nets? City of Dreams

Occasionally I have visions of places which look ideal to me. I remember once dreaming of an island in a beautiful bay surrounded by hills and inlets. It was an Australian scene but bushland unlike anything I'd seen around Melbourne where I'd then spent most of my life. Some years later I was at West Head in northern Sydney's Kuring-gai Chase National Park and there, looking up toward Brisbane Water across Broken Bay was the scene I'd dreamed, with Lion Island in the middle. It suggested to me that I'd been meant to move to Sydney in 1987.

Lion Island in Broken Bay, NSW. John Dalton, 2006

I also used to dream of an Alice Springs-like landscape but with the valleys filled by a big city. Walking up behind Griffith Park, Los Angeles last year, I came across this scene as I looked out across the San Fernando Valley.

To me, this is quite beautiful. Otto Friedrich's book on Hollywood is called City of Nets. I think I might call LA the city of a dream. I have started to wonder why I don't have the aversion to Los Angeles that many Australians express. Talk to the majority of Australian travellers and they'll say Los Angeles is too spread out; you've got to have a car; it doesn't have the compactness that makes for a lively city. Well, I suppose. Imagine if in Sydney the Opera House was at the Quay, the Art Gallery of NSW was at Penrith, the MCA at Sutherland and the Wharf Theatre on the northern beaches. But I wonder if it's my Central Australian experience which makes me realise community can be created across any distance. (And certainly, the arts institutions here in LA are well patronised.)

I remember being in Pipalyatyara in northern South Australia in January 1976. The only "contact with the outside world" was the radio shack and one day we had to wait a seeming eternity while two women chatted over the airwaves. "Old ducks" we called them in our impatience, but then I realised that they were doing what neighbours anywhere will do. They were probably ringing in from cattle stations hundreds of miles or kilometres apart, and yet here they were indulging in the Central Australian equivalent of... chatting over the back fence.

A dreamlike bonus: Arpitt's photograph of Lion Island at sunset.

If you liked this blog, others of mine on Central Australia are:

Victory over death and despair in a bygone age (thoughts on John Strehlow's The Tale of Frieda Keysser), 5 Nov 2012
Considering the aboriginal land of Altjira, 20 May 2012
Opera in a land of Song, 29 July 2012
Drowned Man in a Dry Creekbed - Happy New Year 1993, 6 August 2012
Virginia in the Desert, 10 Sep 2012
  
others of mine on Los Angeles are:

A daily reminder, 1 April 2011
When you take a closer look, 21 April 2011
The frame (thoughts on the Getty Center), 24 April 2011
A light on the hill (the Reagan Library), 30 April 2011
A couple of snapshots (Malibu and the Valley), 1 May 2011
More to love about LA, 6 Jan 2012
Walking with stars, 10 Apr 2012
En plein air and a little elan, 16 Nov 2012
LA Substantial, 18 Jan 2013
City of Angels, 20 Jan 2013
City of Nets? City of Dreams, 31 Jan 2013
The combination of effects, 1 Feb 2013
Rounding off - LA vignettes 1, 2 Feb 2013

More to love about LA

'...[A] settler pushes west and sings a song, and the song echoes out forever and fills the unknowing air. It is the American sound. It is hopeful, big-hearted, idealistic; daring, decent and fair.'

I've sometimes asked musician friends if they can identify the source of this quote. Aaron Copland, Elmer Bernstein (the creators of 'Big Sky' music)? No, it's from Ronald Reagan's second inaugural address. Whether the speechwriter (Peggy Noonan?) was thinking of 'The Open Prairie' sequence of Copland's Billy the Kid ballet I don't know, but it reminds me that I share Reagan's love of the open spaces of the West.

I was struck by this love when we were at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley earlier this year. It's the reason for the site.

And I caught my breath again recently when we saw the San Fernando Valley from back of the Hollywood Hills.

This landscape doesn't have Central Australia's ribbons of ochre and mauve hills diminishing into vapoury blue peaks, but it still has the heart-swelling invitingness of open space. I love the feeling.

I love also the way you pass through different language areas in LA. Of course there's always Spanish, but you might pass through a Korean precinct

and the other day down Victory Boulevard we saw a script we couldn't identify - Russian, Thai? The woman sitting next to us on the bus filled us in. She was reading Los Angeles' Armenian-language newspaper.

These zones you pass through give the clue to how to see LA. It's not a city in the traditional sense of something derived from the old walled-city concept. It's a conurbation of old ranches (some maps show where they were), farms, orange groves, movie lots...Tarzana was once the ranch of novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs, who named it after his most-famous character. Calabasas Junction, where I went swimming at the lap pool last week, was an old stagecoach stop.

As a city, LA's quite diffuse. You have to get most nearly everywhere by car (though we've walked from Kittredge to Ventura Boulevard and back, and they're restoring the public transport). And it may not have the compressed excitement of a Manhattan. But there's citrus and sunshine and birdsong as compensation. And it's no less active nor vibrant for all of that.