(a helicopter trip in June 2011)
I truly feel, at the moment, that the greatest art piece ever conceptualized was the Panopticon. Simultaneous viewing from a single point while those being watched do not know they are being watched. Originally conceived as a design for prisons with a single guard tower able to view a wall of inmates, the panopticon can be seen as a metaphor for modern surveillance systems, observations points (the top of LA's City Hall is one of my favorite Panopticons) and can be mobile such as the helicopter experience 1000 feet above Los Angeles. From here the city is a vast sculpture garden, set amid green and punctured by the up-thrust of sinewy mountains. We take off from Van Nuys Airport and head southeasterly above the vast sprawl of the San Fernando Valley. 
Since it is early June, I see patches of purple that mark the Jacarandas in bloom. 
The freeways form a concrete circulatory system. They are epic feats of civil engineering that I consider to be art projects done on a mass scale in a mundane context. This mode is one where every inhabitant of a car is its own mass transit system. Why are there not regularly scheduled, affordable helicopter transit services? A “park 'n' fly” in Van Nuys, LAX, Downtown (all high-rises in LA are already mandated to have rooftop helicopter pads), etc with back and forth service for small groups of passengers shuttling forth across the skies of this vast sexy beast of a city. 
We pass over the Universal City area, across the theme park and studios and CityWalk, that hyperreal/simulation/simulacra of an idealized LA street complete with Dodger store, Raiders store, California's largest IMAX theater, Hot Topic (a So Cal original), Pink's Hot Dogs, Wolfgang Puck, a spa/oxygen bar, Tommy's, sushi, Jamba Juice, Mexican food without the Mexican neighborhood, Hard Rock Cafe (named after an LA original dive bar frequented by the Doors), flashiness, lights, stimulation, crowds, views across the urban expanse, sea of lights, mountains, palm trees, more real than real, better than real, etc. 
We are above the 10 Universal City Plaza building (the tallest building in the Valley and 21st tallest in all of LA). We pass RIGHT NEXT to the Hollywood Sign, as close as is possible. 
An LA landmark, curiously it was erected to promote a housing development and subsequently has come to represent the dream of a place with opportunities and stimulation and entertainment and such grandiose notions. We pass over Griffith Park the people at the Observatory are observing what they think is the penultimate view over the Los Angeles Basin, but we can observe the observers observing this spectacular view. Dodger Stadium (viva los doyers...) 
amid an oceanic parking lot and I channel Ed Rusha. Third oldest baseball stadium in the MLB and one of the few that doesn't have some ever-changing corporate name (i.e. AT&T Park, Petco Park, Chase Field, etc). Over Chinatown. Placita Olvera. Twin Towers Jail. Union Staion and Metro's HQ building. Now I'm above City Hall, looking down. 
It is very phallic. Over Little Tokyo (Japantown), 
birthplace of the California Roll and the origin of the sushi craze that swept LA, the rest of California, and ultimately the entire US. There remains a few vacant spots currently occupied by surface parking lots. I can see the red brick paving of the plaza of the Japanese Cultural & Community Center. We pass to the east of the cluster of skyscrapers, sculptures for us. 
Sculptures.
I look down at the SBC Center, 
LA's first commercial high-rise after the lifting of height restrictions in 1957. Even to this day it stands quite apart from LA's other high-rises, as they are in other parts of downtown. Poor old 1964 clean international stark SBC Center still is amid low rises and surface parking lots though adjacent LA Live and some condo towers rise in South Park.
We continue westward, over the Pico-Union area, that teeming dense concentration of Salvadorans and Guatemalans and Hondurans, in the shadow of LA Live's Ritz Carlton Tower and the lights of the Staples Center and Nokia Theatre and the Convention Center. 
Once, in May 2007 I went with family to Star Wars Celebration 3 here. LA Live was still not yet open but I remember a forest of cranes at the site and elsewhere as future condo towers slowly sprouted. Onwards we fly over the Mid-Wilshire/Koreatown area. 
Oh what more can I say about this vibrant dense diverse urban environment, pulsating, like my heart beats in my chest?? It's all LA-style with eclectic architecture, taco trucks, Koreans, Mexicans, Armenians, goths, bike hipsters, Central American families, 24-hour establishments, bricks, mid-century high-rises, slices of Korea inserted here and there amid older dreams and aspirations. Metro Rail underneath. Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, now a public high school. Southern California climate all around. Smog. 
One day I will live there. Now the choice: over Hollywood
? Or follow Wilshire and then up over the Sepulveda Pass? I choose the latter, though a slight compromise as we pass over the Sunset Strip 
with it's expensive boutique hotels and clubs. I see Sierra Tower 
(a 1960s high-rise condo tower) and we are over West Hollywood, LA's gay enclave. I see the Pacific Design Center, 
where furniture and other interior designs are produced and eventually end up in a Target near you (via factories in China and the Port of LA/Long Beach). Over LACMA and the Park La Brea towers (one of the world's largest apartement complexes with 4,000 apartment units). Over Beverly Hills and Century City's 
sculpture-towers in the distance. Alongside the Wilshire Boulevard's Millionaire's Row/Condo Canyon,
the high-rises casting shadows on the one-storey detached single-family residences on leafy quiet streets right up alongside them. Over UCLA and Westwood and I spy the Pacific Ocean, slutty and gaping and stretching into infinity. D.H. Lawrence says: LA turns it's back on the Eastern U.S. and Europe and instead stares into the void of the Pacific Ocean. We pass over the Getty Center, 
beautiful and cultured but proud and elite above the masses. Now back into the Valley, going ever lower back into Van Nuys Airport. I look northward and try to find my apartment quickly before we descend too low. I find the Budweiser brewery and the VA Hospital 
on the hill but do not see my building. The journey is over. Climax. Cuddle.
Since it is early June, I see patches of purple that mark the Jacarandas in bloom. 
The freeways form a concrete circulatory system. They are epic feats of civil engineering that I consider to be art projects done on a mass scale in a mundane context. This mode is one where every inhabitant of a car is its own mass transit system. Why are there not regularly scheduled, affordable helicopter transit services? A “park 'n' fly” in Van Nuys, LAX, Downtown (all high-rises in LA are already mandated to have rooftop helicopter pads), etc with back and forth service for small groups of passengers shuttling forth across the skies of this vast sexy beast of a city. 
We pass over the Universal City area, across the theme park and studios and CityWalk, that hyperreal/simulation/simulacra of an idealized LA street complete with Dodger store, Raiders store, California's largest IMAX theater, Hot Topic (a So Cal original), Pink's Hot Dogs, Wolfgang Puck, a spa/oxygen bar, Tommy's, sushi, Jamba Juice, Mexican food without the Mexican neighborhood, Hard Rock Cafe (named after an LA original dive bar frequented by the Doors), flashiness, lights, stimulation, crowds, views across the urban expanse, sea of lights, mountains, palm trees, more real than real, better than real, etc. 
We are above the 10 Universal City Plaza building (the tallest building in the Valley and 21st tallest in all of LA). We pass RIGHT NEXT to the Hollywood Sign, as close as is possible. 
An LA landmark, curiously it was erected to promote a housing development and subsequently has come to represent the dream of a place with opportunities and stimulation and entertainment and such grandiose notions. We pass over Griffith Park the people at the Observatory are observing what they think is the penultimate view over the Los Angeles Basin, but we can observe the observers observing this spectacular view. Dodger Stadium (viva los doyers...) 
amid an oceanic parking lot and I channel Ed Rusha. Third oldest baseball stadium in the MLB and one of the few that doesn't have some ever-changing corporate name (i.e. AT&T Park, Petco Park, Chase Field, etc). Over Chinatown. Placita Olvera. Twin Towers Jail. Union Staion and Metro's HQ building. Now I'm above City Hall, looking down. 
It is very phallic. Over Little Tokyo (Japantown), 
birthplace of the California Roll and the origin of the sushi craze that swept LA, the rest of California, and ultimately the entire US. There remains a few vacant spots currently occupied by surface parking lots. I can see the red brick paving of the plaza of the Japanese Cultural & Community Center. We pass to the east of the cluster of skyscrapers, sculptures for us. 
Sculptures.
I look down at the SBC Center, 
LA's first commercial high-rise after the lifting of height restrictions in 1957. Even to this day it stands quite apart from LA's other high-rises, as they are in other parts of downtown. Poor old 1964 clean international stark SBC Center still is amid low rises and surface parking lots though adjacent LA Live and some condo towers rise in South Park.
We continue westward, over the Pico-Union area, that teeming dense concentration of Salvadorans and Guatemalans and Hondurans, in the shadow of LA Live's Ritz Carlton Tower and the lights of the Staples Center and Nokia Theatre and the Convention Center. 
Once, in May 2007 I went with family to Star Wars Celebration 3 here. LA Live was still not yet open but I remember a forest of cranes at the site and elsewhere as future condo towers slowly sprouted. Onwards we fly over the Mid-Wilshire/Koreatown area. 
Oh what more can I say about this vibrant dense diverse urban environment, pulsating, like my heart beats in my chest?? It's all LA-style with eclectic architecture, taco trucks, Koreans, Mexicans, Armenians, goths, bike hipsters, Central American families, 24-hour establishments, bricks, mid-century high-rises, slices of Korea inserted here and there amid older dreams and aspirations. Metro Rail underneath. Ambassador Hotel, where Robert Kennedy was assassinated in 1968, now a public high school. Southern California climate all around. Smog. 
One day I will live there. Now the choice: over Hollywood
? Or follow Wilshire and then up over the Sepulveda Pass? I choose the latter, though a slight compromise as we pass over the Sunset Strip 
with it's expensive boutique hotels and clubs. I see Sierra Tower 
(a 1960s high-rise condo tower) and we are over West Hollywood, LA's gay enclave. I see the Pacific Design Center, 
where furniture and other interior designs are produced and eventually end up in a Target near you (via factories in China and the Port of LA/Long Beach). Over LACMA and the Park La Brea towers (one of the world's largest apartement complexes with 4,000 apartment units). Over Beverly Hills and Century City's 
sculpture-towers in the distance. Alongside the Wilshire Boulevard's Millionaire's Row/Condo Canyon,
the high-rises casting shadows on the one-storey detached single-family residences on leafy quiet streets right up alongside them. Over UCLA and Westwood and I spy the Pacific Ocean, slutty and gaping and stretching into infinity. D.H. Lawrence says: LA turns it's back on the Eastern U.S. and Europe and instead stares into the void of the Pacific Ocean. We pass over the Getty Center, 
beautiful and cultured but proud and elite above the masses. Now back into the Valley, going ever lower back into Van Nuys Airport. I look northward and try to find my apartment quickly before we descend too low. I find the Budweiser brewery and the VA Hospital 
on the hill but do not see my building. The journey is over. Climax. Cuddle.
one hell of a ride, Vicente! Thank you for showing me my home city thru your sensibilities in a whole new set of picture frames as Art Unintended yet Art Perceived nonetheless. Art is in the eye of the beholder as much as in the hands of the creator. And you have now passed it on to the rest of us as Art Re-Created... Excellent.
ReplyDelete"The journey is over. Climax. Cuddle." Great closer. I was very intrigued by the psychological effect of the original panopticons and its interesting to note that one such panopticon exists at the appex of LA. Thnx for this free aerial tour of LA. Us starving writers live vicariously through such visual ventures.
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