Giveaways
UP in the Hollywood Hills (which I blogged about last week) you could see that Los Angeles was a beautiful city, with lots of nature and hiking trails.
Popping back down into Hollywood Boulevard, we found that it was blocked off for a celebrity appearance for Netflix comedians. I managed to get a few paparazzi photos myself!
And then we visited the Getty Center, an art museum just west of Sepulveda Canyon, also in the hills, gifted to the city by the late gazillionaire J. Paul Getty.
The contents of the museum were just incredible: Van Gogh’s Irises, for instance. The amount of wealth they have in America is fabulous, and many of the billionaires are quite philanthropic. Just not enough of them.
Inside the museum there was an abalone-themed display called Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back), devised by Mercedes Dorame, a member of the Native American people indigenous to the Los Angeles area, the Tongva.
New Zealanders will spot the abalone as being a lot like the pāua, prized by the Māori just as much as the abalone is by the Tongva. In fact, the pāua is a variety of abalone, of which there are 56 species in total including three species of pāua.
The main difference is that the colours of the inside of the shell of the most common species of pāua, Haliotis iris, a species known outside New Zealand as the rainbow abalone, are vivid and rainbow-like, whereas for most other types of abalone they are pastel-like, as in the artwork above. Both are beautiful.
After the Getty, we headed downtown, to the La Brea Tar Pits on Wilshire Boulevard. This was a notorious trap for animals over thousands of years, for which a staggering collection of skeletons of current and extinct species have been harvested.
Los Angeles sits on an oilfield, and much of the city’s twentieth-century prosperity came from drilling for oil in the suburbs. These days, Los Angeles still produces a lot of oil, but the larger rigs tend to be hidden away inside fake buildings.
The last time I was in Hollywood, I visited Universal’s studios. On this trip, I joined a tour of the Warner Brothers studios. Warner Brothers, who are still in business, made Rebel Without a Cause (from which I pasted a clip filmed at the Griffith Observatory in last week’s post), as well as many other classic movies.
There were some of the costumes worn by the actors in Crazy Rich Asians.
And the set of Harry Potter.
Travelling around Los Angeles, I saw rooms to rent for $800 a month so obviously the recession is hitting. There is a vast amount of empty office space. Retail is not going to come back. It will be interesting to see what happens.
I musts say, by the way, that one thing I didn’t like about Los Angeles was the compulsory tips in eateries and the booking fees on Uber that added significantly to the posted prices. That is something for the traveller from places where they have different rules to watch out for.
On my very last day, I visited Venice Beach. I much preferred that to Santa Monica. It had more character, people were taking tuktuk rides, and there was a guy playing motown music. And the outdoor gym at the location known as Muscle Beach.
Strolling along, I saw a striking mural, Levi Ponce’s ‘Luminaries of Patheism’.
I saw a curious bird which was, I think, a black-crowned night-heron, with breeding plumes sprouting from its head. This type is smaller and stockier than other herons. Along with a few of the other species of herons, they toss bait into the water to lure fish within striking distance. Which is pretty clever if it is something they have learned to do, perhaps from watching what people do on the wharf, and not completely instinctive.
The surrounding community of Venice, California was carved out of a natural wetland called the Ballona Lagoon by a developer who more or less invented what we now call the canal development.
Here is one of the canals.
And I spotted a brown pelican on the beach.
There were marijuana stalls, there were places where artists were selling their stuff, you could get cheap eats, expensive eats, just the array of things — And I found that at Venice Beach you could get an airbnb for $50 a night.
And coloured bikes for hire, behind a billboard advertising shrooms, man. (Go ask Alice …)
And a painting on the wall based on Botticelli’s Venus, a link with the original Venice (I think).
Here are a couple of video scenes I filmed at Venice Beach, including the takeoff of the brown pelican, looking very prehistoric!
There is vastly more to see and do in Los Angeles and this trip hardly scratched the surface. It was just, indeed, a few days in LA and I will be going back there to see some more.
The last time I was there, I stayed at Venice Beach. And I think that the next time I go to LA I will stay at Venice Beach too. It just seems like the most fun in town, to be honest.
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