 gravity Los Angeles is a place of complex dimension. The city spreads itself unashamedly across the floor of the valley, an interwoven tapestry of disparate enclaves, each with its own unique metropolitan veneer. East side Victorian neighborhoods ease into the coastal towns with their windswept summer cottages, and always there is the slow rise northward towards the hills where the terraced, silver-screen estates enshroud houses with small, mysterious windows. All of this is connected with a concrete web of roads and superhighways, frequently stacked three and four high and rising hundreds of feet into the air, their massive supports like the columns in some strange, neo-modern temple where the virtues of speed and motion are praised above all others. When the sun drops below the horizon, the city transforms into something else. Nightlife is defined by an audio-tactile science, almost relativistic, where streets become the flow of mass and light, bent to the gravities of those places most dense, most luminous. It's a different kind of speed, another kind of motion. The city is a social crucible, forging everything from the cognitively dissident to the criminally hip, and everyone showcases their particular avatar with a flair that borders on the neurotic. Beneath it all is a charged undercurrent that has the feeling of a perpetual storm, an electric urban vibe that might be described in the local tongue as dope, ghetto-fabulous or completely off the hook. For some, music is the force drives the maelstrom, a crazy-machine-dream-pressure-pulse, arcing from the citys epicenter in an ever-widening spiral before fading completely into the void of the eastern desert. There's another dimension, one less quantifiable, a place of feeling and memory that mirrors the world of real things. Suffused with legend and melancholy, it reflects what has come before and what will come after, with shifting patterns of light and shadow that one might mistake for clouds or phantoms. And sometimes, in those strange moments between day and twilight, it becomes necessary to pass through one world in order to navigate the other. |
