"I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves." Ludwig Wittgenstein

Thursday, November 26, 2009

She Loves L.A.

Los Angeles is an immense city, sprawling over hundreds of square miles, a seemingly endless urban blanket of “built environment,” where automobiles are the de facto native population, and people seem like an added afterthought, a slapdash attempt to humanize an otherwise non-human landscape. Except in occasional incongruous patches of nearly treeless parks, which appear to be placed haphazardly about the city, L.A. is unrelieved by any connection to what could be construed as the ‘natural environment’ Here, even the rivers are concrete-lined.

On some days, when the winds refuse to blow the smog into the burnt brown foothills and further up into the San Gabriel Mountains, the low hovering sky becomes the color of gray-white cement, and appears as impenetrable as concrete.

It was now 2 PM, as Lola sat in traffic on the Santa Monica Freeway, where, with 73,000 other commuters, she was stopped dead in her car, unable to move. Today, her immobilized Toyota felt more like a casket, than a means of transportation: How can anyone live under the weight of this unrelenting sky?

No comments:

Post a Comment