Los Angeles Trip: Day Two.

The Getty Center up in the hills just outside LA. Definitely worth a visit.

We ended up walking about eight miles on Monday – so our little legs were tired at the end of the day. Tuesday, however, was a brand new day and we elected to take an Uber to the Getty Center up in the hills of LA.

There are actually two Getty places in LA, both different so if I were you, I’d research both and see which one meets your needs. One is more of a villa-type place (with some museum stuff) and the other is a giant research museum with unbelievable architecture high up in the hills. That’s the one we went to and we ended up spending five hours there just piddling around looking at the various exhibitions and taking one of their docent-led architecture tours with a very entertaining person in charge. (All free, btw, and really recommended.)

One of the views at the Getty…

Loads of things to look at, ranging from photography to Old World Artists, alongside contemporary work and the most amazing architecture (by Richard Meier). The brilliant white of the walls and corners contrasted brightly with the blue sky and it was fantastic.

And then inside one of the buildings of the Getty…

And some innovative landscaping as well… It looks rather stark here, but it’s a perfect complement with the architecture.

The hotel we stayed with the wonderful Marina del Rey Hotel, a renovated 1964 hotel on the end of one of the many boat piers around Venice Beach. Super service, lovely people, walkable to a lot of places (including our first Trader Joe experience!) and just loved it.

I have to thank my mum for the trip! 🙂

Some of the contemporary art in the Marina del Rey Hotel.

Los Angeles, California – Jan. 2020

My lovely mum has been staying over Christmas here in the States, first some time with me here in Texas and then a few days up in Northern California with my sister. As that trip with my sister was coming to a close, mum suddenly phoned me up and invited me to come with her on a whistle-stop visit to Los Angeles, and who am I to say no to that? So, I didn’t. 🙂

We had a fab time. In the end, it was two days in the City of Angels but we got to see a load of things in that short time. Let’s proceed…

You know how I like to research before I go anywhere interesting, but with this quick turnaround, I hadn’t had that much time to do much more than actually visit the library to pick up some info there. On the plane out to the West Coast, I learned more about the history of LA, and more specifically, the history of Venice Beach (which was the area where we would be staying).

Beside one of the canals in the Venice Beach neighborhood. You might need to search hard for this area, but it’s so worth it. It’s a quiet and relaxing world. just steps away from the streets of LA.

This area of town was started, I think, by a man who happened to be a very wealthy tobacco magnate and who was enamored with Venice, Italy, after his travels there. Wanting to replicate this city on the West Coast, this guy developed some of the wetlands (on which LA was being built) and designed a neighborhood with great architecture and on the pattern of Venice, complete with actual canals and gondolas and small curving bridges to get from one side to the other. Only about three miles of these original canals still exist after all this time, and they happen to be in – guess where? – Venice Beach.

So, after quite a bit of tromping around not really getting anywhere useful, we finally asked a friendly local walking his dog if he knew where these canals were and he kindly took us there. (It turned out that this friendly local was actually an expat from Texas… Huh. Small World.)

So mum and I spent quite a bit of wandering around this neighborhood being amazed at the whole thing. The canals are still there, with water and with occasional watercraft, but the waterside does need a general spruce-up. (The real estate prices were unbelievable: one place was going for $3.6 MILLION. Another place could be rented for $12,000/month. You know, if you’re interested.)

So that was fun. We then spent some time wandering along the Oceanfront Path at Venice Beach, people-watching and beach-walking and admiring the sea. Bliss. Then, my mum’s sharp eyes spotted a tiny little bookshop (naturally!). Tucked in a corner of a bigger building, mostly a restaurant, there was the Small World Books shop, a small but excellently-stocked bookshop in between t-shirt and henna shops. A little blissful world of books, which we ended up supporting (as you do). Definitely worth a visit, but you’ll need to keep your eyes peeled as it’s quite easy to miss if you’re looking the other way (at the beach, for example).

Then, after all that, our legs got tired so we walked to the hotel to chill out a bit and then have a bit of a supper. We ended up walking about eight miles on this first day. :-}

The view outside our hotel’s location. Boats, boats and more boats.

There, There – Tommy Orange (2018)

Wow. Just wow. This was a novel that makes you say just that word when you finally turn its last page. It’s that good. 

There, There, written as a first novel by Tommy Orange, a Cheyenne and Arapaho author, is a muscular narrative that weaves together the disparate stories of a large group of Native Americans (First Peoples) who all live in the same city of Oakland, CA. They don’t all know each other, but as the plot progresses, their lives overlap as they each plan to attend the annual pow wow in their community. 

(This is a read that sucks you in and won’t release you until the end of the narrative when you finally emerge, slightly battered and with the air sucked right out of you.)

It’s an “easy” read (in terms of the experience reading as smoothly as “a hot knife through butter” type of thing), but the story is high impact in terms of that it doesn’t shy away from the tough issues of life: depression, alcoholism, unemployment, fetal alcohol syndrome, hopelessness, not to mention life in poverty and as a marginalized indigenous person. 

You’re from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You’re both and neither. In the bath, you’d stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub.

So it sounds like a dreadfully depressing read, and although it addresses these issues, the plot introduces you to each of the characters one by one. You get to know these individuals as humans with lives and hopes of their own, and it’s easy enough to keep each character straight.

(That’s what I meant when I said you got sucked in to the book. I really felt as though I knew these people and cared how things worked out for them. I might not have agreed with some of their life choices, but I can’t deny that I would have chosen anything different than they did if I had been in their situations.) 

So, this book follows a group of characters, all individual but inter-related (at least by the end of the book) and who all decide to attend this community pow wow, an event where life undergoes a sudden and significant change for all. 

A seriously great read which will take your breath away. It’s not an easy read, but it is a good read.

(Plus it’s been recognized with a bunch of literary awards, so it’s not just me feeling the love for this one.) 

The Tortilla Curtain – T. C. Boyle (1995)

A reread from a few years back, this was actually just as good a read (if not better) the second time around. Boyle is an American writer who takes contemporary news issues (in this case, the issue of immigration) and then writes a narrative around that issue, usually raising a dilemma where there is no clear right and wrong. His plot lines are also unpredictable so I can never really guess the endings and that I love. That, combined with excellent writing skills and a large vocabulary, make Boyle a joy to read most of the time, so if you haven’t picked up one of his many novels or short stories, I highly recommend them. They’re almost a guaranteed good read.

This novel, The Tortilla Curtain, tells the story of two couples whose lives accidentally overlap with each other leading to a long chain of events which completely disrupt their lives. A young liberal California couple live in a mostly white community up in the hills just outside LA. Their lives are mostly smoothly run without any major hiccups until one day, the husband is driving his car and accidentally smashes into a Mexican immigrant who is here (along with his wife) as an undocumented citizen and who has no choice but to live in a rudimentary campsite down in the canyon that butts up against the backyard of the white couple. Such a collision leads to serious ramifications for both families, but Boyle writes the story in such a way that there is no obvious right or wrong. No one really does anything morally wrong, and both the couples just want similar goals: to live in a nice home and go to work.

It’s an intriguing premise that compares the Haves and the Have-Nots in today’s world. Through no fault of their own, the Mexican undocumented couple are striving for the same things that the privileged white couple are looking for, but when you are at rock bottom with few resources, how can you ever get out of your circumstances (especially if you can only live in the shadows)?

I could say more, but to tell you would be to ruin the plot and I don’t want to do that for you. Just know that this contemporary novel is a riveting read wherever you may stand on the touchy issue of immigration. It’s especially poignant when you realize how closely the two couples live, geographically speaking, and yet they are in worlds far away from each other. Boyle’s characters represent both sides of the immigration issue, and they are both written with equal parts compassion and criticism, both complicated with no clear solutions. It’s a fascinating read, especially in the light of the political chatter of building a wall between Mexico and the U.S. (ridiculous).

By showing the reader the rationale behind the actions of the characters, you can see the slippery slope that people may be on with regard to how they feel about things, especially when events are not theoretical but happen in your own backyard. Does that change how you view things?

An excellent read from T. C. Boyle and highly recommended.