We Suck Young Blood
In June 2012 I had a beer with a North American who has been living in Berlin for quite some time, and he said something that really changed how I thought about traveling. He said that visiting Portland made him realize that actually his mindset was more West Coast at heart. He added positive things about other cities I hadn’t been to. It was really weird hearing that for number of reasons.
Firstly hearing someone finding something about themselves while traveling was interesting. Secondly, I had a strong idea of what I liked about the US and what I hated about it. I don’t drive so visiting anything other than New York never seemed like a very good idea. A short visit to Philadelphia, while nice, wasn’t exactly earthshattering. Thirdly, it was weird hearing that because for some odd reason people hadn’t really highlighted to me that life in the big cities on the West Coast was different to New York. I had heard a lot about smaller cities, but mostly I think my idea of LA, which was colored by how it was portrayed in movies and silly stuff like MTV Cribs, was polluting my thought. It all just seemed like an impossible place to navigate with a beach nearby.
I still haven’t been to Portland (Oregon, or any other for that matter) but that whole idea made me curious about all those cities that seemed so impossibly far away. All of this seems so ridiculous after the fact, but I’m guessing a lot of other people are picking their holidays with thinking they don’t fully question either. People have preconceptions about places they haven’t been to. And trying to change that thinking made for an unforgettable holiday.
January this year I had the pleasure of spending a few nights shy of two weeks in San Francisco and Los Angeles. It was very different to what I thought it might be like, yet most things I had heard were really true. Yes, the food in San Francisco is terrific. Yes, the traffic in LA is pretty bad, but if you’re not staying forever it won’t really affect you that much. (Actually the locals I was staying with seemed more annoyed by it than I was.)
There’s a scene in The Devil and Daniel Johnston — a documentary about the singer-songwriter — where he’s excited about playing in NYC and repeats the saying “they say if I can make it here I can make it anywhere.” What’s striking about New York today is that you don’t really see the people who didn’t make it. With not a lot of exaggeration everyone you see in Manhattan appear usually young, beautiful or rich (or the combination of some of these). Whereas in SF and LA the homeless problem is much more visible and a bit out of control.
My trip was memorable for a lot of the usual reasons, but there is one thing that still haunts me. On the first night out in LA, on a side street of Sunset Blvd. near the Cinerama Dome where we parked, there was a youngish man with the looks of a surfer or an actor talking to himself and frantically walking up and down the street with no shoes on. I tried to not pay attention while we stepped out of the car but it all felt really really weird. He had clearly been sleeping outdoors. What made it absurd was that he had absolutely no belongings and as far as I could tell it’s not the worst neighbourhood of LA. But I guess what made it so unusual was that he looked almost under thirty.
Not long after it, I was already thinking about David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., and that scary thing behind the diner. Except the real person on the street was more interesting, and more scary.
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