a list of changes I wasn’t looking for, but have now made actual by witnessing them, r.i.p.:

• Rite Aid — closed, empty
• Hollywood Video — closed, empty
• Circuit City — all remnants of the red now gone
• Mann Festival on Lindbrook closed — “thanks for your patronage”
• National Theatre on Lindbrook closed and demolished (you can still see in on Google Maps street view for living in the past)
• Native Foods — you no longer order at the counter? it’s still as tiny as in memory though
• gift store on west side of Westwood Blvd. where i once bought a prism — closed, empty, along with nearly everything else on the block. There was once a Hawaiian BBQ place.

This is just recent changes. This is just in an accidental few-block tour of the mini-city.

There have been other slower and faster deaths through the years. There are other disappearances I didn’t bother to seek out.

“The years… when I pursued the inner images were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me.” — C.G. Jung reflecting on Liber Novus (The Red Book)

Notes (taken on a receipt that I managed to scrounge up (didn’t have a notebook with me) for something purchased 02-06-10 for *5.00 and *0.49 tx, which I now remember was a Norton Critical Edition of Death in Venice from Counterpoint):

Intro:
quote from the book comparing the growth of math to the growth of a city

Crease:

• inspiration for the book came from looking at a “e=mc^2″ ornament — how equations have become symbolic and taken on cultural meaning

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• Pythagorean Theorem
• symbol of a proof
• c^2 = a^2 + b^2, rule known of well before Pythagoras, but the Greeks did the proof
• first extant example of the proof in Plato’s Meno
• people are still trying to discover new ways to prove this, there are hundreds of variations already; proving this anew is not about the contribution to mathematics but the joy of discovery
• anecdote of when Einstein was 12 and first saw this proof, idea of universal rules

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• F = ma and gravity
• Galileo as bridge between Aristotle and Newton; his idea that mass is something separate from weight
• story of apple traced back to Newton himself
• Newton would ask how? not why? (had to do with his theology)

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• e = mc^2 and general relativity
• why we know it in this form (with the corrective amount left off) due to a book on the Manhattan Project after the bombs had been dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima
• has become a symbol for knowledge itself
• Einstein wanted to combine seemingly disparate ideas of Maxwell’s and Newton’s

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• e^(iπ) + 1 = 0
• evidence in Los Angeles trial
• (my note: see footnote pg. 199 Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea about Euler’s equation as the “paragon of mathematical beauty”)

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• entropy
• referenced across disciplines in works, for example of Stoppard and Pynchon)

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• uncertainty Heisenberg and Schrodinger
• Copenhagen play: Bohr vs. Heisenberg on making sense
• uncertainty and quantum in popular culture — painting, literature, scultpure, theology, literary criticism, humor (A cop pulls Heisenberg over. “Do you know how fast you were going?” “No, but I can tell you exactly where I am.”)
• people know that observations had and effect before Heisenberg

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• Maxwell’s equations
• didn’t actually write the equations (as we know them) himself, Heaviside did that later

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• how equations changed through history
• often given in words first, and becomes “catchier” later, such and Newton with F = ma
• at some point “=” and “+” etc. had to be invented

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• Suggested reading: David Lindley’s Uncertainty: Einstein, Heisenberg, Bohr, and the Struggle for the Soul of Science

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• side note: several of these equations are on the steps outside of LAPL

Notes:

Crawford
-Hitler wanted to “cleanse” music too; wanted to get rid of the culture of chaos in the Weimar Republic

-book covers 31 of the musicians who immigrated to L.A. during the Nazi era including composers and all kinds of performers, especially focused on those with paper “legacy” for research — letters etc.

-utilized Gladys Caldwell’s collection of newspaper articles about live music reviews starting from the ’20s from LAPL

-writers came to L.A. too and some of these people knew each other (Mann, Brecht); émigré circles

-chapter about film composers — how they saved themselves as “composers” (didn’t want to be looked down on as film composers only); composer for Errol Flynn movies

-in those days in Hollywood every studio had a full orchestra

-LACC opera workshop, first of its kind (i.e. at public school); but no opera in L.A. until 1986 which was tough for many of the composers who came from opera-rich Europe, so singers trained in L.A. had to go to Europe

-why did so many of these artists end up in L.A.? tried other European cities first but the Great Depression meant quotas had been set up to save jobs for locals, whereas the film industry had a lot of jobs to go around. +, of course, the weather

-Ojai Festival

-people saving their money to bring people out of Europe

Kraft
-after the wars arts take on a new dimension: after WWI experimentation (Schoenberg 12-tone), after WWII trying to make order from the chaos; in these cases didn’t draw on the past so much

-Tom Mix westerns uncredited composers

-”no minor chords” (Sam Goldwyn)

-L.A. Music Festival (Waxman)

-playing “donuts” = whole notes

While I haven’t yet read the whole thing, it does contain interesting facts and figures that might be worth the reading time.

• “Caltrans works to protect our fragile environment. To protect fish during bridge construction, Caltrans used an innovative new technology known as a ‘bubble curtain.’ The bubble curtain works by piping pressurized air through a series of hoops that encircle steel piles as they are pounded into the mud and shale. In the water, the bubbles froth like a spa. Those bubbles disrupt the underwater sonic waves, which can be fatal to certain fish. Water amplifies sound, and when those sonic waves reach fish, the blast can rupture their internal organs.”
• “Caltrans and our partner, the California Highway Patrol (CHP), launched an aggressive twomonth statewide clean-up in May 2007. The debris and brush clean-up, which stretched from Yreka to San Diego, was part of an effort to remove potential wildfire fuel along the highways. Caltrans has been actively working to raise public awareness of the litter and dumping problems with campaigns such as ‘Don’t Trash California.’ Last year, the State of California spent over $55 million in tax dollars to pick up and dispose of trash that was recklessly tossed or dumped onto California’s roadways.”

These “plans” tend to be more interesting to read after the fact when you can point to results, or lack thereof, but for now I suppose it’s slightly comforting to know there is a plan, even if it leaves out some things commuters and residents might like to see.

All that is preface to why the L.A. Times would bother with the daunting task of mapping the neighborhoods of Los Angeles. The inconsistencies that would crop up in Times stories were enough to make editors, and other Angelenos, grind their teeth at night.

Without further ado: L.A.’s *official* neighborhoods (according to the L.A. Times and reader comments on their site):

Central Region: Chinatown, Downtown, Echo Park, Elysian Park, Elysian Valley, Fairfax, Griffith Park, Hancock Park, Hollywood, Hollywood Hills, Hollywood Hills West, Koreatown, Los Feliz, Mid-City, Pico-Union, Silver Lake, Westlake

Harbor Region: Harbor Gateway, San Pedro, Wilmington

Northeast Region: Atwater Village, Cypress Park, Eagle Rock, Glassell Park, Highland Park, Montecito Heights, Mount Washington

South Region: Crenshaw, Exposition Park, Historic South-Central Los Angeles, Hyde Park, Jefferson Park, Leimert Park, South Los Angeles, South Park, University Park, Watts, West Adams

The Eastside: Boyle Heights, El Sereno, Lincoln Heights

The Valley: Arleta, Canoga Park, Chatsworth, Encino, Granada Hills, Lake View Terrace, Mission Hills, North Hills, North Hollywood, Northridge, Pacoima, Panorama City, Porter Ranch, Reseda, Shadow Hills, Sherman Oaks, Studio City, Sun Valley, Sunland, Sylmar, Tarzana, Toluca Lake, Tujunga, Valley Glen, Valley Village, Van Nuys, West Hills, Winnetka, Woodland Hills

The Westside: Bel-Air, Beverly Glen, Beverlywood, Brentwood, Cheviot Hills, Del Rey, Mar Vista, Pacific Palisades, Palms, Pico-Robertson, Playa Vista, Playa del Rey, Sawtelle, Venice, West Los Angeles, Westchester, Westwood

Some of the neighborhood designations are more questionable than others. For, example the above neighborhood—”Sawtelle”—designated as separate from West L.A.—actually says “West Los Angeles” on the Google Maps image. When I lived there it was “West Los Angeles,” and I’ve never heard it referred to otherwise (except maybe the area on Sawtelle Blvd.) so finding it dubbed “Sawtelle” was a surprise. According to the comments on the page: “This area is West L.A. Sawtelle is a street,” and “If you decide to call this neighborhood ‘Sawtelle,’ you’ll be giving it that name. You won’t be tracking customary usage.”

I’m sure there are other instances like this on the L.A. Times map. It’s a tough job… Designating neighborhoods is like designating emotions: If there’s a boundary between frustration and anger, it’s sometimes vague; and sometimes you can’t even name what you’re feeling. You could dub something “angstration” or “Beverlywood,” but that doesn’t mean other people will know what you’re talking about or grant that it exists. Sometimes it’s best to just not label things, especially if you haven’t lived there. (Of course then we’re left with journalistic inconsistency and subjectivity, and what kind of world is that!?)

some notes, from memory, since I forgot to take notes:

Andersen begins by showing the architecture section from his 2003 documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself, then (after noting wryly that he is aware the Chemosphere has eight sides, he’s just not aware of the difference between a hexagon and an octagon), he reads this quote from Gary Indiana’s Artforum review: “Andersen decries the movies’ ‘frequent casting of Los Angeles’s unsurpassed, innovative domestic architecture as the residences of drug dealers, pimps, and other unsavory types, like the Pierce Patchett character in L.A. Confidential. He feels that these locations, thus used, reflect the contempt both the movies and local architecture critics feel for architects like Richard Neutra and John Lautner. There is no mention of R.M. Schindler, whose buildings have appeared in many less ‘negative’ representations than ones Andersen cites; moreover, despite a genuine-feeling riff about LA’s dispossessed—slum dwellers, bus riders, the black family without hope—his architectural survey chooses for especial sarcasm the theme restaurant situated on the grounds of Los Angeles International Airport, virtually the only structure in the film designed by a black architect, Paul Williams.”

So the point of this presentation, Andersen says, is to address whether the claims he made in Los Angeles Plays Itself, the ones that Gary Indiana took exception to, are, in fact, wrong. (As an aside, Andersen first explains that his point about the LAX theme restaurant was that since the rest of the airport was so boring, it occasionally is used as a passenger terminal, as in Why Do Fools Fall in Love? and Smog (1962, which the UCLA Film and Television archive screened in April of this year, and though not mentioned in Andersen’s documentary is certainly worth seeing if you’re into that sort of thing).)

Andersen says he can’t think of the “many” examples of Schindler houses being used in film that Gary Indiana may mean, but he grants that in Impulse (1990) and Fly Paper (? not sure if i got that right) the heroes, or at least the least-bad guys live in Schindler houses.

He also shows clips from several more movies not included in Los Angeles Plays Itself that house the villains in Lautner residences: Less Than Zero (1987, Silvertop), Bandits (2001, Sheats-Goldstein Residence—same as Jackie Treehorn’s house in The Big Lebowski), Southlander (2001, I can’t remember the point of this clip—whether a bad guy did reside in the Lautner house, but it featured the Sheats-Goldstein Residence and Beck).

The timeline Andersen gives is: In the 1930s Hollywood (esp. MGM) helped popularize the Art Deco style. In the 1950s they were fond of Mid-century Modernism, as seen in Kiss Me Deadly, where the protagonist lives in what is now the Wilshire corridor. Then there was a shift in architecture and architecture criticism in the ’70s and ’80s away from Modernism and towards Postmodern styles, and that un-fondness of Modernism is reflected in the movies (and, as is typical, the movies pick up on the trend a little late). But now, he says, thanks to magazines such as Wallpaper (which is “easy to criticize”—a phrase Andersen is fond of), Modernism is back “in” and even more elite.

He uses clips from Charlie’s Angels (2000, where the villain lives in the Chemosphere—actually a studio set rebuild of the Chemosphere that cost more than the actual house to build and had a few adjustments, including in the view of the city (in diorama form)) and Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003, where the hero Lucy Liu’s character lives in Sheats-Goldstein Residence) to illustrate that shift.

He shows Neutra houses cast as the protagonists’ homes in The Anniversary Party (2001) and Laurel Canyon (2002).

His point being: If he were to do the documentary now, he might have something different to say, since there seems to have been a shift, but there are still plenty of newer examples of villains living in Modernist houses. He concludes this point with clips from The Glass House (2001), Hostage (2005), and Fracture (2007), but he calls these Modernist mansions, and doesn’t have too much of a problem with villains living in them. It’s the middle class constructions of Lautner, Schindler and Neutra that he’s more defensive of, though admittedly these houses are no longer middle class.

There are tons of better pictures on the internet, for example here, but these are mine, so here:

On my way back to the Metro station I was walking on the sidewalk behind this man in a motorized wheelchair going up the street. As we neared the end of the street, he made a u-turn and headed back where he came from. Though there are several explanations to choose from, I’d like to imagine that this is his version of an evening stroll.

and more information

exactly what you want to see (but equally distressing as “delayed” when there is, in fact, NO bus in visual range):

It’s a long story (not really) and needless to say, I didn’t make it on time but thoroughly entertained myself along the way.

But, to be clear, I greatly appreciate that MTA has installed these signs at all, even though they’re at a very limited number of stops and not always accurate. It’s the thought that counts. It’s a step in the right direction. And [insert third positive-sounding turn of phrase here].