falling in la la love
heartbeat Los Angeles’ is easy hidden to overlook as a tourist. But immerse yourself and awaken your passion Calum Marsh,
When I was 17, as a graduat i on present, my father took me to Los Angeles — to Hollywood, a tribute to my interest in film. We stayed at a two- storey motel made of white stucco somewhere on Santa Monica Boulevard, the kind of motel, in fact, that I had only ever seen in the movies, its rooms set in a square facing a parking lot in the centre, the sun hammering the pale turquoise roof. We hadn’t rented a car. The city seemed, in a word, inaccessible — distended and sweltering, mired in smog, with roads like rivers, huge and awesome, hostile to those on foot. One of the goals of the trip had been to get a picture with the Hollywood sign in the background. Wherever we stood, inexplicably, it looked small and dismal, never what we expected.
Was Los Angeles intimidating? We were from Belleville, Ont., population 40,000; we were intimidated. Deferring to my naive agenda, my father plotted routes by public transit from our motel to what I imagined were essential cultural landmarks — the shops on Rodeo Drive, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In lunatic midday heat we joined the crowd of summer-weary locals around an unmarked bus shelter at an intersection my father had located on a map. In the mid-1990s, a civil rights organization representing bus riders in the city sued the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority for discriminatory practices, including discouraging ridership by refusing to post maps and timetables at bus stops. The bus retained an air of financial undernourishment. It lumbered onto the highway with a groan, delivering us up into the hills. Stepping off the bus by a freeway, we had no idea where or when we might catch another.
I had been adamant that we see Mulholland Drive, at the time my favourite movie. A thoroughly impractical venture on foot, my father and I quickly discovered, hiking up the Hollywood hills, exhausted and slick with sweat. How long did it take? It seemed like hours, a gruelling exercise, the only reward a humble photograph of a tired teen stood proudly beneath a street sign. A passerby pointed out Marlon Brando’s house, almost entirely hidden by foliage. The street is home to some of the most expensive houses in the world.
Later we paid for a sightseeing tour and sat on a double- decker that glided through gated communities, an amiable guide informing us that the house on the left belonged to Steven Spielberg, that The Fresh Prince of Bel- Air was set in the house on the right. This was Los Angeles. I couldn’t see the appeal.
Los Angeles is maybe the most widely disliked city in the world. Complaints about its urban sprawl and fragmentation, its vexing discontinuity, are matched only by cavils about its frivolousness, about the superficiality of its silver- screen glamour. “I don’t want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is being able to make a right turn on a red light,” Woody Allen famously grouses in Annie Hall; the city is so clean, he jokes to Diane Keaton, because “they don’t throw their garbage away, they put it on television.” In Marriage Story, a drama about a divorcing couple divided between Los Angeles and New York, there is a running gag in which people try to persuade Adam Driver to give up New York for L. A. for its key virtue: “The space!” That’s all the city seems to offer the unconverted. Emptiness. An abundance of blank space.
In October, more than 15 years after it had defeated my father and me, I returned to Los Angeles, invited to interview a movie star about an important and expensive new cable TV show. The movie star never turned up. Still, there I was, with time to kill and a room at the swanky Edition hotel on Sunset Boulevard in West Hollywood. Months earlier I had been taken to lunch in Toronto by a journalist based in Seoul who specializes in what he calls “city criticism,” a form of writing related to architecture criticism or travel writing that lets “readers see a city through the writer’s eyes,” as he described it recently in the Guardian. Over the course of the conversation I had mentioned that I didn’t care for Los Angeles. He was surprised; it was one of his favourite cities in the world. “Try again,” he urged.
In the bar in the lobby of the Edition I drank a martini, waiting for friends who were in town for the week on vacation to arrive. Fires on the outskirts of the city had been wreaking havoc on the power grid; the lights in the hotel flickered, and for minutes at a time we sat in the dark. That evening we were to meet up with a local film critic I’d known for years and spent time with mainly at film festivals. A devout foodie, he was an ardent admirer of the late Jonathan Gold, Pulitzer Prize- winning food critic for the Los Angeles Times, and he had made it his life’s mission to eat at every restaurant in the city recommended by Gold. Directly across from my hotel was Night + Market, he eagerly informed us. Its claim to fame was that, on the verge of bankruptcy, the Thai restaurant was saved by Gold’s glowing review.
At Night + Market I had the best Thai food I’ve ever eaten. We poured tiny glasses of beer from a huge plastic keg that sat in the middle of our table. On the way to the restroom someone stopped to say hello — another film critic we knew, who had recently moved to L. A. from New York, and was there with his girlfriend for dinner. “This place is the best,” he offered, as if to explain the chance encounter. Jonathan Gold believed Los Angeles was the best food city in the world, a mecca of diversity and cultural breadth, where fine dining could dazzle Michelin- star standards and where a truck on the side of the road could make a taco to blow your mind.
It’s also a place to drink. After dinner we ventured east, toward Hollywood and Vine, unrecognizable at night compared with its tourist- clogged afternoons. At the colourfully named Tramp Stamp Granny’s, on North Cahuenga, craft cocktails fly around a big central piano, where a musician like a ringleader barrels through ecstatic renditions of songs by Billy Joel and Elton John, practically the entire bar singing along wildly. It feels like something from another era. Two blocks over, if you can manage to get in, is Good Times at Davey Wayne’s. Even rowdier and more eclectic, coursing through with an energy that is helplessly infectious, the nightlife here is without the slightest air of snobbishness or pretension, and this in the very heart of Hollywood.
We took an Uber back to my hotel for a nightcap. We were taking Ubers everywhere; more people use Uber in Los Angeles than in any another city, and the rates are lower here than almost anywhere. It is impossible to overstate the degree to which ride- sharing apps have transformed Los Angeles. It has liberated the pedestrian from the inhospitable sprawl that has long daunted outsiders. It’s never been easier to get around Los Angeles, and while it may be an imperfect solution to a problem that demands more forward-thinking civic planning, it has had an indelible effect on the experience of the city day to day. We can now go from Weho to Silver Lake or Korea Town or downtown L. A. in something like a tenth of the time it would take to bus it. Miraculous.
The next morning I downloaded the Lime app and used it to rent an electric scooter, one of the many hundreds dotting curbs all over the city, discarded after use and available for spontaneous trips. Lime scooters are ubiquitous in California’s tech- adjacent cities — San Jose and San Francisco — loved by the geeks who work in and around them. They’re fast, cheap, easy to use and readily available. I took one down the steep decline of La Cienega toward a Crossfit gym on Melrose Avenue, whipping past palm trees, occasionally veering off- course to have a look at an interesting house. Scooters are still a matter of public controversy in L. A., and there are parts of the city where their use is prohibited entirely. But where you can find the scooters, they’re indispensable, and make navigating modest distances a real pleasure.
After my workout I received a text message from my friends asking me to brunch. They advanced an irresistible suggestion: the Chateau Marmont, the famous boutique hotel, bar and restaurant long- beloved by the city’s luminaries. Minutes from my hotel along Sunset, the Marmont is wedged into the base of the hills near Laurel Canyon, concealed from the outside by the surrounding trees. Retro chic and impossibly romantic, it’s a place that exudes the glamour of its own history, retained in the art deco furnishings and smoky allure of its ambiance. At the Marmont you feel as though you’ve been ushered into the old Hollywood, the real Hollywood. You are not permitted to take photos inside, amazing for a place that serves brunch. At the tables diners read copies of Variety, wondering which movie stars are in the rooms above.
Between my hotel and the Marmont — a few blocks, 30 minutes on foot, 10 by car — one finds a staggering cross-section of Los Angeles, a deluge of extraordinary history. Legendary bars and concert venues, Whisky A Go- Go and the Viper Room, the ghost of River Phoenix. Tower Records, The Comedy Store, the tiny used bookstore down an alley that specializes in ultra-rare first editions. Farther up, next to the sleek Andaz hotel, two delirious novelties, the Saddle Ranch Chop House and Carney’s — one a country western saloon that spawned a reality TV show, the other an all- night burger joint built inside a vintage railcar. Right above the Marmont, in the hills, not quite viewable from Sunset, loom some of the most beautiful houses ever designed, including Pierre Konig’s Stahl house, a masterpiece of architectural modernism.
One stretch of one street of one part of the city: this is merely a sliver of Los Angeles, a meagre glimpse of a whole. “This is an important truth about Los Angeles,” my friend the city critic wrote to me in an email, when I asked for his recommendations of where to go and what to see. “You experience a near-completely different city depending on which part you’re in.” On his valuable advice I spent the better part of an afternoon wandering Fairfax Avenue, savouring the wonderful neon signs, mainly authentic holdovers of the previous century, and stopping in to Canter’s Deli just north of Rosewood, which you would know was iconic even if you’d never heard of it before. I had another meal at a Gold- approved restaurant in Koreatown; I had a sandwich at a Chick-fil-a on Sunset at dusk, before heading to a friend of a friend’s house party in a slummy part of the hills.
Not exactly a comprehensive portrait of Los Angeles. But it was enough, more than enough, to convince me that I had experienced Los Angeles the wrong way back as an enthusiastic but naive teeneager — that I had failed to give Los Angeles the fair chance it rightfully deserved. It helped immeasurably to have Ubers and scooters, which unlocked parts of the city I’d otherwise have found inaccessible without a car; and it helped to avail myself of the guidance of expert locals and savvy friends, who knew what I ought to look out for and what I ought to avoid. But the difference was, above all, one of perspective. The Los Angeles that was designed to cater expressly to tourists — the Los Angeles of guided tours through Bel
Air and tawdry monuments such as the Walk of Fame — was doomed from the start to disappoint me. Instead, I needed to be receptive to the real Los Angeles, and willing to love L.A. on its terms.
The end of my trip, Sunday evening. Dinner at Osteria Mozza on Melrose, where owner and chef Nancy Silverton won a Michelin star for, among other things, some of America’s most exquisite bread. My companions had a Lyft pick them up from the restaurant to bring them to LAX after dinner. I lingered; I had hours before my redeye. I shared glasses of fernet with a garrulous bartender and, when it was time at last to leave, I slumped into the backseat of an Uber, remiss to leave it all behind. “Where are you headed?” the driver asked, as we drifted along the wide roads beneath starlit palms. “Home to Toronto,” I replied.
He nodded sagely. “I know a lot of people in L. A. who moved here from Toronto.” As the warm October air streamed through the crack of my open window I understood the wisdom of this, understood completely why someone would want to make
L. A. their home. We tend to think of Los Angeles as a city of surface, but what’s underneath is beautiful and engrossing, full of splendour and excitement and life.
As we banked left on Sunset I looked out over the hills toward the Hollywood sign. I thought of the academic and documentarian Thom Anderson, and his tender confession in his masterful film Los Angeles Plays Itself, that he finds the sign reassuring. “Maybe I find it poignant that a decayed advertisement for a real estate development could become a civic landmark,” he muses.
“Or maybe it’s just that we have to love it because it’s such a fat target for outsiders.”
This strikes me as an essential truth about affection for the city. The outsiders, the detractors, the onlookers and tourists who, like my father and I 15 years ago, saw nothing to cling to, nothing to admire — they don’t understand Los Angeles. Loving Los Angeles means loving it in the face of criticism and misunderstanding, loving it despite its reputation, its first impressions, its misconceptions. It means loving it because you get it and few others do.