Windowside (Vol. 2)

If driving in Los Angeles is like reading Dante in the original Italian, as Reyner Banham claims in his Architecture of Four Ecologies, then walking in Los Angeles is like getting smacked with the extended text in the middle of a smog cloud. The city’s infrastructure was bent to service the private passenger automobile, and the industries that prop the thing up. The air is loud and thick outside a climate-controlled car, but it wasn’t until I walked in other cities that I realized how lonely, also, Los Angeles could be. Despite rush hour’s press, there are few strangers to nod by, or outfits to admire, or a general serendipity of location: you might be the only pedestrian for miles of these long streets. Even with the delicious spill of a convertible, everyone remains tucked away in machines. There are faces scrubbed cool on billboards, and shadows glancing past behind tinted windows, and nobody else, it might seem. Sometimes, I’d feel that I was walking through a future where giant metal beetles had overrun the desert, that I had to move carefully to avoid these creatures who communicated via red lights, bleats, and the occasional fleshy appendage thrust from a chrome exoskeleton.