Scenes from L.A.

Lawrence Weschler once described the light in Los Angeles as "a light I've found myself pining for every day of the nearly two decades since I left Southern California." Halfway through a Seattle January, two weeks back from a visit to L.A., we are definitely pining too. 

Looking north from the Santa Monica Pier, December 2010.

Weschler's 1998 New Yorker article ("L.A. Glows") cites poets, architects, novelists, journalists, artists, film directors, and scientists, all of whom have different takes on the transcendent luminosity created by Southern California's desert-meets-sea environment. Writer Carey McWilliams said that in Los Angeles "light and air are really one element: indivisible, mutually interacting, thoroughly interpenetrated." The artist Robert Irwin muses about "the haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that on many days the world almost has no shadows... the light gets all reverberant, bouncing around like that, and everything's just humming in your face." 

Glen Cass, an environmental engineer at Caltech, attributes this phenomenon to the particles floating in the air -- particularly those particles that have the same diameter as the wavelength of natural sunlight. "When the sunlight from over my shoulder, say, hits one of those particles floating between me and the mountain that I'm trying to make out, the light bounces off the particle and right into my eye. On some days there can be billions of such particles in the line of sight between me and the mountain... It can get to be like having a billion tiny suns between you and the thing you're trying to see." (When Weschler recounts the conversation to the poet Dennis Phillips, Phillips interrupts him: "No, no. You mean a billion tiny moons.")

"That's what the white stuff is," Cass goes on. "And we have a technical term for it."

"I hunkered down over my notebook," says Weschler, "preparing to take down complex technolgoical dictation."

Cass: "We call it airlight." 

Airlight. Exactly. Well, whether it's suns or moons or light or air or some mysterious mélange of them all, the light of L.A. makes you look at things a little differently.

Simon checks out a kaleidoscope vendor in Venice.

It flattens out the landscape somehow, turning the distant ocean into a silver ribbon, and skyscrapers into little mushroom growths popping out of the city's plain.

It gives you a new perspective on people you thought you knew.

Josie and Lexi on the Ferris Wheel at Santa Monica Pier.

Jeff Koons's balloon dog at the L.A. County Museum of Art

Native Seattleites may find the light of L.A. overwhelming at first. If you're lucky, a true California girl will be there to guide you until you find your sun eyes.

Whether the light is humming in your face, or bouncing in your eye... Whether it's interpenetrated with the air, or vibrating across the basin of the city from the Pacific to the San Gabriel Mountains...

Or fading fast in the depths of Eaton Canyon...

Or throwing down shadows at the foot of the Watts Towers...

 

(Which reach for the sky like solid-state searchlights, beaming their own luminous aura of obsessive, incorrigible creative energy into the universe.)

 

However it strikes you, the light of L.A. can make you kick up your heels...

Or more...

You might start feeling movie-star glamorous...

Or heroic, like your eccentric, energetic namesake, whose motto could easily be your own: "I had it in mind to do something big -- and I did."

Simon Rodia, pictured on the interpretive sign, built the Watts Towers all by himself out of rebar, concrete, pottery shards, leftover tiles, seashells, bottles, broken toys, and anything else that struck his fancy. It took him 34 years. When he was done, he gave the property to a neighbor, left town, and never came back.

You might want to try out your brand new Indiana Jones bullwhip, fresh from the gift shop at Disneyland.

You might be inspired to climb a tree (or swallow hard and take your very first roller coaster ride).

The light of L.A. turns ordinary objects into cosmic guardians... 

  Or ancient hieroglyphs, spelling out portentous messages...



Or (as one New Yorker figured out long ago) iconic infinitely-interpretable symbols of American culture.

 


In "L.A. Glows," Lawrence Weschler quotes poet Paul Vangelisti: "The uncanny result is that you lose yourself -- somehow not outwardly but rather, inwardly. Here the light draws you inward." Peter Bogdanovich complains, "I hate the way the light of the place throws you into such a trance that you fail to realize how time is passing."

I know what he's talking about, but I don't hate it. In fact, I love being entranced, drawn inward -- even slightly sunburned -- by the light of L.A. And as Simon discovered, if you soak up enough of that glow, it sometimes starts to feel like maybe the world is looking back at you...