Areas of Unrest

9 April 2000 - Downtown Days

QOTD: "An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out." - George Jean Nathan

Reading: Laurell K. Hamilton, Blue Moon

Listening to: Hedningarna (The Heathens), Fire

First off, my shoulder is much better. I'm sure that if I checked the home medical encyclopedia, that would be a bad sign. (Apparent recovery is often a signal that death is imminent according to the books. I will not look, I will not look, I will not look.)

Secondly, I have two celebrity deaths to mention. Ian Dury died March 27th. I knew he was a good 20 years older than any of the other new wave rock heros of my college days, but I was still surprised. Apparently, he had colon cancer. If you have no idea who I am talking about, his most famous hits were "Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll" and "Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick."

The other celebrity death was Margo Kaufman on March 30th. She's probably more obscure, especially outside of Los Angeles, but she wrote a book or two, in addition to humor columns in local papers. She had odd taste in dogs (pugs, rather than something sensible like samoyeds) but she was into dollhouses and she wrote about stuff other than her battle with cancer. Out here, avoiding that sort of "pity pity me" material is pretty remarkable.

I should also make a note to myself that there is no point in picking up the weekly free newspapers to find out what's going on in town if I don't read them until Sunday. I missed Pierre Bensusan's concert at McCabe's (and, if you don't know who he is, he's an Algerian-born French guitarist, started out as a folkie but does more of his own, jazzier stuff now, and is my very favorite living musician). And, even worse, I missed Neil Gaiman's signing at Golden Apple Comics. It's one thing when I know about umpty ump things going on and have to choose between them. It's worse when I spend an afternoon doing housework because I didn't know about something I'd have liked to do.

It's not like I had all that lazy a weekend. There was a Volksmarch in downtown Los Angeles. I went partly because I feel guilty if I don't go on walks that are less than a half hour drive from home and partly because I was curious as to how they were going to come up with a route that started at Exposition Park, continued to Union Station, and didn't risk getting anybody shot in cross-fire along the way. Okay, it's not that bad during the day, but there are some pretty marginal areas around that part of town.

Surprisingly enough, the walk actually felt quite safe. It started out through the USC campus, continued along 28th Street (which turns out to be fraternity row now, but those houses must have been pretty grand at one time), then turned north up Figueroa. One of the advantages of walking is noticing things you pass too quickly on foot and that included the grand architecture of the AAA building and of the red sandstone building that houses a convent, apparently part of the St. Vincent complex. (There was also some sort of filming going on outside the church in that complex.) There was a rather bland stretch then until the convention center and Staples Center and on to what I think of as the "real" dowtown, which was fairly deserted on a Saturday. There were pockets of activity - a crowd outside The Original Pantry (a fairly famous restaurant, owned by Mayor Richard Riordan, who believes he is above the law and, therefore, did not close the place to comply with the curfews during the riots), shoppers at the Grand Central Market gawking at the tortilla factory, a few people riding Angel's Flight (claimed to be the world's shortest railroad, this is a funicular that runs up Bunker Hill and was only reopened a few years ago), more shoppers at the swapmeets along Broadway, tourists on Olvera Street. But I've walked around that area at lunchtime when on jury duty and things were deserted in comparison. It's often said that people in L.A. only go downtown when they have tickets for a show at the Music Center or when they're called for jury duty and this was a good illustration of the principle.

From Union Station, the walk instructions actually called for us to ride the subway - three stops on the red line and 2 on the blue line, then to walk the more boring 3 kilometers down Figueroa back to the USC campus and a different path across campus for the final kilometer to the start/finish point. The total distance was supposedly 12 kilometers (7.5 miles) but it felt like less. Incidentally, the red line train was fairly empty, but the blue line was packed. It's good to see some of our transit system getting good use.

Today, I went to downtown Santa Monica and the contrast was quite dramatic. I had gone to see the movie "Me Myself I" which was actually playing closer to home but provided an excuse for a browse at H.E.A.R. Music. (Not a successful browse, as I couldn't remember what either of the 2 CDs I was really looking for were and nothing in the store triggered my memory. I checked the index cards I write this sort of stuff on when I got home and they are Kirsten Braten Berg's From Senegal to Setesdal and Blackmore's Night's Under a Violet Moon. Next time I'll remember to bring the index cards and I wrote myself a note on another index card to do so.)

First, though, I was distracted by discovering that there was a Friends of the Library booksale and paperbacks at a dime each are a good opportunity to stock up on airplane reading. Then the movie, which had its moments, but was somewhat trite in the end. There was also an art show on the Promenade and I bought a pin (a marblized octopus; for 7 bucks, I can buy jewelry on impulse). And I was extraordinarily self-indulgent and went to Tudor House (a British grocery shop / tea room) and spent $2.45 to buy a 500 ml. bottle of Schweppes Bitter Lemon. It was wonderful, but I really need a source that sells it at a reasonable price.

I was going to work this up into a rant on the subject of downtowns in general and how it seems that it's really the downtown areas of smaller cities that are the interesting ones and that there are very few big cities where downtown is anything beyond a business district that is deserted after dark. But it's late and I have to pack to go to Boulder tomorrow. Which is another small city with a reasonable downtown, come to think of it.

Stay tuned for a future rant on urban planning.