by Ray Bradbury
So we have ascended out of Paris into Paris, out of France into France, out of the weather of old time into a weather of the always incredible present, having been rained on by history.
ABOUT LOS ANGELES
QUEEN OF ANGELS, NOT QUITE READY FOR HER CLOSE-UP (UNDATED)
Last night I saw upon the stair
An Angel Queen that wasn’t there.
She wasn’t there again today.
My God, I wish she’d go away.
In other words: L.A., now you see her, now you don’t.
The Queen of Angels is three separate cities, none of which is L.A., but all share the territory.
Listen up.
I love to breakfast in oceanside Malibu, head in to a snow-mountain lunch at Lake Arrowhead, careen down for a Palm Springs desert dinner, then double back to Los Angeles for a midnight snack.
Thus ignoring L.A. itself, for in between these three civilizations there is a desolation.
Hollywood Boulevard for mindless years has had no Hollywood and Vine.
World visitors hoping to glimpse Tinseltown’s navel find only Gertrude Stein’s: “There’s no there there.”
When a New York photography team flew in years ago to film the famed intersection they panicked, finding nothing.
“Go find it at Disney World!” I said. “Walt’s elves snatched Hollywood and Vine one night and flew it to Florida, along with every rare Hollywood Boulevard building I roller-skated past as a kid.”
Now at the west end of Hollywood, they are erecting a giant fortress/cathedral/cinema near Grauman’s Chinese for next year’s Oscars. From this grand embankment, film moguls can ignore the homeless peasants on desolate Hollywood Boulevard waiting for Quasimodo’s downpour of bricks and hot lead.
The rest of Hollywood, from twenty years of neglect, will be a graveyard rarely visited after sundown. The entire street needs resurrection, but the humungous cathedral opens next spring.
Similarly on downtown Los Angeles’s Broadway at sunset, all pedestrians have fled. Chinatown is abandoned, gangs roam free, so the best cafés have turned off their ovens.
The old billboards of Columbia and RKO Studios on Gower Street stand empty. Nothing has been done to revitalize these landmarks to give tourist buses a passing sense of history.
The saddest night in recent history was New Year’s Eve 2000, when TV cameras exploded with mobs and fireworks in wild Paris, New York, and Rome, only to fizzle in L.A. when a sparse assembly of Angelenos huddled under the huge HOLLYWOOD sign with their beanbags and kazoos. The worldwide cameras turned off in disbelief.
There is hope in the arrival of new mayor Hahn, who has a greater sympathy for what cities are.
Meanwhile, to enjoy Los Angeles you must prowl those malls that duplicate the old dreams of what L.A. once was.
Beyond that, you must sift the rich sands of Malibu, ski Lake Arrowhead snows, and broil in the Palm Springs sun. In between, the old Queen of Angels is waiting to be kissed awake. Sometime in the next ten years, perhaps her prince will come.
L.A., HOW DO I LOVE THEE? (UNDATED)
L.A., how do I love thee? Let me count the ways, or, perhaps, let me count one all-encompassing way.
Los Angeles as incubator of forlorn talents. Let me go back to 1934. Hand me my roller skates. With them I skated through life in Los Angeles when I was fourteen.
Seated at an Al Jolson radio broadcast, I was stunned when Jolson leaped off the stage and seized the roller skates off my lap. He jumped back onstage and started putting them on. I jumped after him and tore the skates from his hands. I then spun around, lifted my skates to the audience, and protested, “My transportation!”
Later that month I encountered W. C. Fields in front of Paramount Studios. I skated over to him and asked for his autograph. He handed it back to me and cried, “There you are, you little son of a bitch!”
And there I was, outside Paramount Studios, staring at the wall over which I hoped one day to climb to become part of motion pictures.
At that same time, I encountered George Burns in front of a theater in downtown L.A. where he and Gracie Allen broadcast their Burns and Allen Show every Wednesday night. In those days there were no audiences. I asked George to take me into the broadcast, and, not noticing, or pretending not to notice the roller skates under my arm, he took me and my friend Donald Harkins into the theater, and Burns and Allen performed their radio broadcast for an audience of two in an otherwise empty theater.
During the following weeks, I wrote and gave to George Burns some primitive radio scripts, and he praised them even though he secretly knew they were terrible. He pronounced me a genius and told me I had a great future as a writer.
In the following years, I stood on a street corner selling newspapers, and when friends passed by and asked me what I was doing, I said, “Becoming a writer.” They said, “You don’t look like one.” I replied, “But I feel like one.”
When I was nineteen, I went to confront the actress Larraine Day, who had put together a little theater group at the Mormon church. I wanted to write plays and act in them. Larraine Day looked at me with a cynical eye and was on the verge of turning me down when I cried, “You’ve got to let me in! I’ve told all my friends you would accept me!” She accepted me, and I ended up writing a musical with her and playing in that musical.
Over the years I continued writing, and in my twenties I wrote stories and sent them to Bill Spier, who directed and wrote and produced Suspense Radio for CBS. He invited me up to his house on Bellagio Road and never asked where I came from or where the stories had been published; they had been published in Weird Tales for a half cent a word. He accepted me for the quality of the stories, and I became a writer for Suspense in the following years.
Finally, with a single short story that John Huston read, “The Foghorn,” I was offered a chance to write the screenplay of Moby Dick.
All of this, over a period of time, with no one questioning where I’d come from or where I was going, nor did they notice the invisible roller skates on my shoes.
A day came when I went to the premiere of Moby Dick and noticed, standing in the rain outside the theater, two people who had once collected autographs with me outside Paramount Studios on that day when I met W. C. Fields. I ran over to them and introduced myself. They had long since forgotten the crazy kid who had roller-skated around Hollywood with them in 1934. When they asked me what I was doing at the premiere, I was totally embarrassed but finally admitted I had written the screenplay. In the crowd around my two old friends, there were twelve autograph collectors, and suddenly their hands reached out on the air with their autograph books. I signed them with tears in my eyes, knowing that at long last I had climbed over the wall carrying the roller skates under my arm.
At a banquet years later, I was giving an award to Steven Spielberg when I noticed George Burns over at a table in the corner of the Cocoanut Grove. I stopped the proceedings and said to the audience, “I’ve got to give my own award to George Burns, who treated me so kindly and told me that I was terrific when I wasn’t back in 1934.” When the program was over, George Burns ran up to me and shouted, “Was that you?! Was that you!? I remember you.” We embraced for the first time in forty years.
I guess the answer to all this is that I was someone who skated through Hollywood with no money whatsoever but some ideas between my ears and wound up very late in the day with roller skates in hand and my memories of these people who accepted me without question, because the ambience of Hollywood in those days, and still in many places, was open and gratifying.
L.A., OUTTA THE WAY AND LET US HAPPEN! (2000)
Three images:
That general who leaped on his horse and rode off in all directions.
The inspired chicken who, placed on a rainbow plate, laid plaid eggs.
Ten million Angelenos marching to 10 million drummers, all different.
That’s L.A.
New York? Ten million White Rabbits crying, I’m late,
I’m late, for a very important date.
Paris? A big, beautiful nose that too often detects fish.
London? A larger nose, sending the fish back.
But L.A. now. L.A.?
The true center of the world. Inventor of most sport fashions for women with long lives and short skirts.
The absolute nexus of television. All TV films are born or born dead here.
The absolute San Andreas Fault line for films that crack the world.
And then there’s our changeless weather, that endless summer toward which our whole continent surfs dreaming landfalls on Muscle Beach in one great jumble sale of sunburned limbs.
Our endless summer.
Oh, how they hate us for that!
They got us wrong long, long ago.
Describing L.A. as the laid-back, snooze-happy town.
Laid-back, no. Stand-aside, yes.
To let you pass, let you go, let you become.
It only pretends to be cool. I hate cool people. Next thing you know, they are cold. Soon after, they rent rooms at Forest Lawn.
Not us.
We are in a state of becoming. If we persist, we go on becoming whatever in hell it is we want to be.
First off, and best, we don’t believe in neighbors. Neighbors are a concept that, if you’re not careful, fence you in. We are, in that way, truly western. The cowboy off his horse in Steinbeck’s Red Pony faced with the Pacific, with nowhere to go.
Save that there is. We simply turn on our heel, spin slowly, to become ourselves. Our continental boundary is just turf. We don’t have to accept its landfall palisades or its seeming run-out-of-space. We can simply stroll off through Subliminal Acres. Fancy talk? Maybe. But we wish to stay separate and ignore, if possible, those e-mail idiots trying to run up our noses and out our ears.
So that’s it. Los Angeles is everything you want to be. Whatever you decide, L.A. becomes. It’s going nowhere. You are.
Your engine drives the machine. The machine isn’t laid-back, nor is it la-la-land-encrypted. It only looks that way. It’s waiting for you to tromp the gas and hit and spark.
You want to thrive in the foothills, linger at the beach, carouse Boyle Heights, pretend a half-life in Beverly Hills? Do it.
The simple fact is, there is no Los Angeles. With luck, there never will be. Our prayer should ask that these eighty towns, these eighty oranges in search of a navel, never find it. The connective tissue that once fused jigsaw L.A., the big red Pacific Electric trains, have sunk in freeway dust. And the freeways? Are mobbed with people aboard an attractive nuisance. Crammed with gas-buggy immigrants who each day must make up places to go because, mostly, they’re going nowhere.
So listen up, stay off those no-destination freeways. Keep to the side streets, live your special life, cancel your Variety subscription with its foibles, fibs, lies, and disinformation.
Shoot off in any direction along this languid octopus’s tentacles to find that the San Bernardino orange groves have not truly vanished but picked up their bright skirts and headed for the foothills, there to take root and drop fruit. Between freeway and orchards, find that mix of wineries and dairies that Got Milk? and One More for the Road California reds. Wade the Ventura surf or jump off a Torrey Pines cliff, whose citizens deny it, but, hey, it’s all L.A.!
Stand in the center of the empty cement L.A. dry bed and sing:
Got to cross that river,
Got to cross that hardbed river.
There’s no water in that river,
But I’ll walk upon that water
’Cause the river’s in my head!
And so reach the far side and Mexico City Two to find a huge piñata that, whacked, will flood Broadway with Castilian and taco-brown complexions.
Ride Ventura Boulevard’s Cornucopia Mile floodgates of restaurants, nail emporiums, and palmistry shops that outrun H. G. Wells’s futures.
Or sand-surf Venice and its baroque rococo outré burlesque carnival sideshow geeks’ half-lives. Where beauty itself, being rare, is the greatest show on Earth.
Survey your yards. There, by God, are the lawn-mower nomads trimming grass and manicuring azaleas, unwetbacks from Guadalajara and El Paso; tall, not short, Oriental sumo wrestlers who know how to thwart, tie, and twist a maple tree into a bushido box.
Laid-back? Hell, no. What appear to be immovable L.A. feasts may blossom as picnics. What seems a rootless statue is an idea inside a self-made chrysalis that may crack and let free a papillon or death’s-head moth. Not an invalid trapped in a life of quiet desperation, but suffering serene inspirations in this adjunct to the U.S. Patent Office. Where some of the best twentieth-century ideas leaped forth as cripples and learned to walk, then run, by the Irving G. Thalberg Building or the Warner Bros. commissary. Where the Jews circled their tribal wagons and birthed Hollywood. Where Thomas Mann, Aldous Huxley, Igor Stravinsky, Christopher Isherwood, and Henry Miller, blown across the world by the winds of war, grabbed hold and grew beanstalks.
So here’s to Los Angeles, diverse, multitudinous, going nowhere, arriving somewhere, a gigantic pinball machine with several million balls ricocheting off the future. May it never be integrated, may it never be described. With its tentacles snaking south to La Jolla, north to Santa Barbara, east to Palm Springs, west to Catalina, what a sprawl, what a roulette, what an Ohio-Iowa collision. It’s Hello, I Must Be Going country. It’s a last night I saw upon the stair, a super town that wasn’t there, it wasn’t there again today, my God, I wish it’d go away town. Not full of men running helter-skelter just to run helter-skelter. Laid-back? No, standing aside to let some other genius, torch-brained madman pass.
When François Truffaut, the talented French film director, first visited L.A. years ago, we ended the night on top of Mulholland Drive, where we showed him our City of Light, five hundred square miles of lights extending from sea to (almost) Salton Sea.
“See all those lights,” I said. Six million lights, each representing an individual who doesn’t have to join the pell-mell rush, who is not laid-back but merely considering the ganglion just under his heart, those nerve endings that know what it wants better than TV ads, better than your battered brain. Six million singles who don’t have to “go fetch!” but turn in circles on their own Reebok deck shoes, watching the freeways fill with quasi New Yorkers while they quietly manifest themselves on off-paths and side streets, managing to get where they want to go ahead of the crowd.
L.A. My town. A town with no elbows, no hustles. Where you pick your neighbors, ten miles off, and ignore those across the fence if their shadow lies funny on the lawn.
A town with an ignorant subway that arrived at Hollywood and Vine recently. Folks wander up for a look-see, find nothing, turn, go back down, and try again some other year. A town of those endless summers with the ghosts of surfers nudging Malibu, daring the mud slide to hide them or the brush fire to torch, out beyond reach, not laid-back but upright, riding high. A town more reale than real and therefore a town worth dreaming in. A town where you can trade your tits and ass for a stroller and playpen and not mind the change.
And way up ahead in 2101 Millennium Third? In bungalow courts and multiplex flickers, new generations of mellow kids better educated at last, at last, mapless, chartless, just by going will arrive.
I would go there to that bee-loud glade, to Innisfree Two, California.
Finally, hark (as they once said) from all across the five hundred miles of the City of Light, L.A.
Can it be? It is!
The sound of 10 million people.
All marching …
To a Different Drummer.
L.A., WE ARE THE WORLD!: A NEW-MILLENNIUM REVELATION (1989)
I have traveled to Paris, Rome, London, and Dublin. When I was there, did the natives ask about New York? Nope. Washington, D.C.? Chicago? San Francisco? No way.
What did the locals in Florence, Venice, and Madrid desire? California? Almost. Los Angeles? Closer. Hollywood? That’s it. Hollywood!
>
To hell with the rest, beautiful and fascinating as they are. Tinseltown. With tons of tinsel beneath the tinsel.
Hollywood. Your town and mine. The hometown of all the Continental peoples. Yet when was the last time you truly looked? With the millennium on the fast track, isn’t it time we did?
Not a political arena, architectural wonder, or science study hall. Underfoot, so close we cannot see ourselves, the most important city with the most important people in the world. Otherwise, why would tourists arrive in mobs?
Hollywood! With L.A. wrapped around the edges.
It’s time for a quick look-see.
To see how we have failed our own image and to blueprint ways of salvaging our tenth-rate Champs-Elysées and our Elephants’ Boneyard of Twilight Gods in much need of rebirth.
Commence with Hollywood and Vine. Probably as famous as Piccadilly, the Via Veneto, or Times Square.
Permit me to quote a one-minute TV spot I wrote last year:
FADE IN: Full sky. A Japanese jet shrieking from Tokyo to California. Sounds of cameras being loaded. Tourist voices gibbering.
“Oh, boy, oh, boy, Hollywood and Vine, can hardly wait, can hardly wait. Hollywood and Vine!”
The jet lands. More camera clicks as two hundred Japanese tourists leap out to stare at the hills. “Hollywood and Vine, Hollywood and Vine, oh, boy!”
In limos they race across town, yelling, “Can hardly wait! Vine! Hollywood!”
To burn rubber at the famed intersection.
Ten dozen Japanese leap out, beaming wildly. “Hollywood and Vine!”
