Torrid Noche in Old LA

In this fast-paced world we live in it seems so unusual to find real peace and quiet. In fact, it’s almost impossible to find either one without a three hour drive to the surrounding countryside and then a hike out into the boonies.

For me it's always been that strange balancing act between seeking out the excitement and cultural inspiration (and of course, the essential economic opportunity) the dynamic and high-powered city seems to always provide, and the essential inner need to get the hell away from all of the insane social hubbub and the inevitable headtrip that comes wrapped in ever aspect of city life.

Humans become so utterly submerged in their fabricated culture; awash in their habits, their communities, with their friends, their favorite restaurants, and with the movies, the fashions, and the music that swiftly become the collected identifying elements of our ephemeral internal mythologies.

Face it, we all live in a lovely dream…a dream that is interrupted only when life’s little indignities start to pile up, and suddenly everything becomes a nightmare… usually from having to deal with the billion variations of every other person’s misguided ideas of what your dream is really about. Artistic temperament and/or criminal behavior is often the only way to break out of the swamp of self supported mental limitation.

But in the end the only real balancer is being able to remember that a natural world extends beyond everything that we can imagine, and that beyond the city limits is the real world.

The beauty of the wild coast, beaches swept with the music of thumping surf on sand and rock; the jagged peaks and their whispering pines, and above it all, the astounding tapestry of stars, the stars that city people never see, and who often forget they even exist, painting the skies in parades of nightly celestial fire.

The golden desert light of Southern California has a way as painting the City of Los Angeles and its environs with a thousand splendidly brilliant hues. The daylight colors are extreme, often harsh, and as I cruise around the streets in the sprawling communities of LA & OC it's always a vibrant eyeful; the crazy signage, the perfect lawns, the wild cars, and its bizarre occupants.

Personally, I become far more enchanted with the same city in its nighttime incarnation, when all the glaring details and tawdry aspects of the dusty old town are shaded over by a black velvet cloak of darkness, one studded with a trillion tiny light bulbs that once turned on create their own strange horizontal constellations.

When flying into Los Angeles International Airport at night one can only be astounded. Look outside the window of the airplane as it bumps and roars ever closer to the earth below, dancing like lanterns on that long line of hovering jets on final, and peer out at the vast spinning grid that flows from horizon to horizon in a sea of glowing electric lights.

Aside from occasionally wishing that I could have a penny for every blub down there, I can't help to be thoroughly astounded at the automatic and overwhelming sense of urgency and energy that one gets from seeing this astounding city blazing away in the pitch black of the Pacific night.

Humans are by nature far more emotional, passionate, romantic, belligerent, and dangerous in the dark. The daytime world has us by default acting on our best behavior. Daylight is the time we are to be at our most responsible; hard-working, practical, and attending to the thousand tedious details of our everyday mortal existence.

Nighttime, with its complex dreamlike Yin momentum, inspires people to dress more flamboyantly, become intoxicated, hunker down in fear, tend to the home fires, or go wobbling down life’s hazy byways on the often hazardous and heartbreaking search for carnal love.

Why do dinners away seem to be the most important, the most ceremonial, of all meals? It’s the night.

As I'm writing this it's the middle of October, probably the nicest month of the year everywhere in the world, and certainly a very interesting time if you’re in Los Angeles. This is when the palm tree bending Santa Ana winds begin to blow out of the high desert, snaking through the local mountains with the force of the prop wash of a hundred helicopters landing on your head.

The nighttime hours slow these localized torrid jet streams that race across the grid of the city and in one swift swipe clear away the perpetual haze, the smog, and the sea fogs from this vast and ever expanding bowl of lights.

Along with the Santa Ana winds comes the warm, shimmering, balmy nights that turn LA’s electric ocean into an undulating dragon, a sparkling rainbow colored carpet that when viewed from a poolside terrace in the Hollywood hills one could rightly compare to a ride on a flying carpet over a swirling Galaxy.

It’s the stuff of legendary romances, the backdrop to the passionate drama that gives life in this surrealistic town its meaning. The night in LA. That’s when this colorful sun washed city really shines.