A Road to Emmaeus

Los Angeles occupies a singular place in the American imagination. It’s the land where dreams are born and die in spectacular fashion. It’s the place where generations of fame-chasers have landed in search of the big break that will usher them to stardom. I have never lived in LA and I’ve only visited a handful of times, but I nevertheless feel a connection to the city because my brother Casey has lived there for the last half-decade. I think of him as a true Angelino now, certainly no less so than the city’s millions of residents who have immigrated from the more sunshine-deprived parts of the country. In early January 2019, not long after my return from my mission in Madagascar, I hopped on the blissfully short flight from Seattle to LA for a taste of Cali winter.

Casey and his girlfriend, Jayne, live on the fifth floor of an apartment in Koreatown. It’s a cozy one-bedroom space with a tight but serviceable kitchen and the feel of an art studio, complete with jumbo oil canvasses and an array of keyboards where Casey hones his music production skills. Koreatown is situated near the center of the city between the ocean and downtown proper. I was immediately overwhelmed by the sprawl of it; one morning I went for a run on the streets, heading north for two miles without ever leaving the enclave of Korean storefronts. As I would soon learn, everything about LA is epic in scale, from its geography to the soaring ambitions of its people.

I was eager to find some good eats given Koreatown’s strong culinary reputation, so on my first night in the city the three of us went out for Korean barbeque. We opted for a feast of pork marinated in different sauces and salivated as the waiter drop the strips of meat onto the shimmering grill in the middle of our table. Accompanied by an assortment of kimchee and other fermented side-dishes, we stuffed ourselves to the point of being completed porked out. A couple nights later I was feeling a ramen craving, a dish that’s easy to find in Koreatown. Jayne found us a newly-opened establishment called Iki Ramen where I enjoyed a “vegan” version with chicken broth (a bizarre request that was nevertheless met). I’ve become hooked on ramen lately as my father eats it routinely for breakfast, usually stir-frying the noodles with onions and bokchoy. In college ramen was practically a food group for my fellow dorm dwellers, a fuel source for late nights of pre-test cramming or raiding the online dungeons of World of Warcraft. Since then, though, ramen seems to have transcended this reputation, becoming a staple of urban hipster culture with its wide variety of ingredients and flavor profiles. Ramen is as synonymous with Japanese cuisine as the taco is to Mexican food.

And speaking of tacos, we made sure to stop at one of Casey and Jayne’s favorite taco trucks. I wolfed down a plate of chorizo and al pastor tacos, the latter being a Lebanese-inspired variation in which pork is roasted on a rotating spit and then sheared off for serving with corn tortillas. While lunching, we watched a mixed group of Angelinos chatting amiably while waiting in line. I guessed that they were likely coworkers, as they all walked off together after taking their orders to go. The group was almost a perfect microcosm of LA’s racial diversity: white, black, Asian, and Latino. It was a reminder that LA is the epicenter of our country’s rainbow future, a vision of the demographic shifts happening across America as a whole. I asked Casey and Jayne if the Rodney King beating and the LA riots were still a subject of discussion in their social circles. According to them, those events seem to have faded from the memory of younger Angelinos. In some areas, notably police reform, the city has indeed done much to promote reconciliation since 1992. Rules on the LA’s use of force have been revised, community-based policing is the norm, and the ethnic diversity of the force mirrors the city itself. As the debate about police brutality and racial bias continues across the nation, LA’s post-King history is instructive, and offers possible lessons for other cities.

I had only a few days planned in LA and intended to see as much of the city as possible. On my first morning in LA Casey and I headed for Griffith Park in the Hollywood Hills. A dirt trail led from the parking lot and wound along a ravine of sycamore trees, then cut west towards the legendary Hollywood sign. With the highest crest of the hills to our north, and with a wispy blue sky overhead, we had some of the best views of the city I had ever seen. The vast metropolis of LA fanned out from the base of the hills all the way to the ocean. It was here that I took in the sheer immensity of the metropolis, an expanse of grandeur that seemed appropriate for the ambitions of its people. The palm-lined boulevards and traffic-choked highways were like veins pulsating with relentless energy. Being among these Angelinos was like being caught up in a dreamscape of sorts, as if I were participating vicariously in millions of other dreams colliding in a spectacular burst light. I was reminded of Mia, Emma Stone’s character from La La Land. Mia is the on-screen avatar of countless real-life artists struggling to pay rent while jumping into Hollywood’s glitzy orbit. Mia eventually does make it to the big leagues as an accomplished actress, but not before facing her fair share of heartbreak along the way. In the real LA, some dreams die hard, while others – by some combination of talent, will, and serendipity – do indeed become the stuff of legends.

Basking in the energy of the city, I began to understand the siren song of LA, the allure of having your genius recognized before it’s too late and your youth has run out. Casey and Jayne are illustrative, both weaving themselves into the social milieu of LA’s artsy millennials while sharpening their respective crafts. Both freelance for a living, a combination of directing, film editing, digital design, and, in Casey’s case, music production. Like Mia, they have visions of making it big – Casey scoring and Jayne directing feature-length films – but in the meantime they’re content doing what they love somewhere in the mid-echelons of the entertainment-media complex. They make enough to pay rent and enjoy some the perks of SoCal living, like weekend trips into the state’s glorious national parks. It is one version of the American dream, vivid in the technicolor of a city that never sleeps.

After about two miles of hiking Casey and I navigated our way through the scrub so I could get some good snaps of the Hollywood sign on my DSLR. On our way back we were passed by horseback riders as we discussed the future of technology: drone delivery and driverless cars, fully interactive video games, cybernetic implants. Casey mentioned the sold-out screenings of the original Blade Runner that still occur regularly in one of the city’s arthouse cinemas. In what is now considered a masterpiece of sci-fi noir, LA is the setting of that film’s narrative, with director Ridley Scott depicting a grimy and dystopian future where human-like robots known as “replicants” are ruthlessly hunted down if they deviate from their assigned programming. One of these robot-hunters, Deckard, is faced with the existential questions that sooner or later burden us all: Who am I? Where am I going? What does it mean to love? Given my philosophical bent, there are scenes in Blade Runner that have mesmerized me ever since I first saw it in the mid-2000s. The LA portrayed in the film is also a land of dreamers, but one that is populated not with suburban, self-actualizing millennials like Mia, but proletarians, drifters, and downtrodden androids just struggling to get by. Still, the desire to transcend one’s limitations, to love and feel in new ways, is a thread that unites the cityscapes of both La La Land and Blade Runner. The real LA of 2019 – coincidentally, the same year in which Blade Runner takes place – bears some of these same indelible traits.

Towards evening, when we were back at the apartment, I climbed to the rooftop and watched the sun fall below the ocean. The sky erupted in orange and gold flames as the night set upon the streets of Koreatown. “This is why people move here,” Casey said, before mentioning that such sunsets are not uncommon; something to do with the amount of particulates in the air. Perhaps that is the one upside to LA’s infamous smog and insufferable traffic. I thought of the opening scene of La La Land in which a traffic jam leads to brightly-dressed commuters spontaneously bursting into song. They prance in between motionless cars, belting out “Another Day of Sun” with a faces of pure, undiminished joy. And indeed, why not sing and dance when the whole world is a never-ending palette of color?

Later that week I had an entire day to myself, which I used to explore downtown. I started with Angel’s Flight, the railway that climbs 300 feet along a steep slope right across the street from Grand Central Market. The tramway began operations in 1901, though its current incarnation dates to 1996. It was only a dollar to ride, so I hopped aboard one of the striking orange cars for the 90 second trip alongside a family of Chinese tourists. One of my favorite TV shows, Bosch, features an episode (appropriately entitled “Angel’s Flight”) in which a high-power defense attorney is murdered just before exiting the car at the summit. It was only through the show that I even knew that Angel’s Flight existed. Given how frequently New York and LA are portrayed in film, people around the world feel like they know a place even if they haven’t actually been there. As I stepped off the train, I looked midway down the grassy slope where I knew one of Bosch’s detectives had searched for ballistic evidence.

Angel’s Flight would not be the last example I found of life merging with art, as I soon discovered upon entering the Bradbury Building just a few streets down. Bradbury is nondescript on the outside, but its inner workings are a wonder to behold. The interior is a labyrinth pulled straight from a steampunk fantasy, complete with five stories of wrought iron grillwork, silent elevators moved by visible pulley systems, and an illuminating glass skylight. The influence of art nouveau is obvious in the grillwork, as it features sinuous, leafy designs that are characteristic of urban architecture at the turn of the century; indeed, strikingly similar to designs I’ve seen in Paris and Brussels. I spent maybe half an hour marveling at the space and its intricacies, meditating on the vision and audacity needed to bring such a complex idea to fruition. Most science fiction fans have in fact seen Bradbury before, as it features in a scene from Blade Runner. I walked into the building knowing this, but it took me a minute to recall the exact scenes involving Deckard chasing after a suspect in an abandoned and foreboding apartment complex. Bradbury these days is far from the decrepit shell shown in the film; indeed, it’s an active office space that even houses the Internal Affairs division of the LAPD.

After Bradbury, I went for a walk through the famed Broadway Theater District. At the time I knew nothing of this neighborhood; my walk was purely serendipitous, as I was drawn by the retro-looking signs appearing on almost every block. I strolled past abandoned theaters that had once been neon-lit giants. I imagined the throngs of people in the ticket line in the 1930s, when the very concept of seeing a motion picture was a mesmerizing idea and silent film still existed. All that remains of this former glory are the names of the establishments: Million Dollar, Roxie, Orpheum. I snapped photos of each one I saw as momentos of another era. This was the Hollywood before the actual Hollywood, the prewar hub of the film world. These days, the theaters are either boarded up and sit idle or have been converted into commercial retail space. The shops along both sides of Broadway are a varied bunch: a mom-and-pop hardware store that’s been in operation since the Great Depression, a strip of jewelry merchants, vendors hawking sports jerseys and tourist trinkets, dressmakers catering to the quinceañera crowd. The Theater District today is an urban collage, a collection of stories of diverse peoples pursuing the American dream in their own ways.

One final vignette of LA: the Troubadour. It’s a Hollywood music club that became the epicenter of American rock and roll in the late 60s and early 70s. James Taylor, Carol King, Jackson Brown, and the Eagles all performed there early in their careers, among many others. Prior to my trip, I had just finished several music biographies profiling this era of singer-songwriters. A pilgrimage to the Troubadour, I felt, was unavoidable, so I secured some cheap tickets for a Thursday night lineup of obscure acts. Walking into the place, I was struck by how diminutive and undistinguished it seemed. I had imagined an immaculate, polished venue like The Hamilton in DC, a cavernous space of tables and chairs arrayed around a center stage, with hundreds of enthusiastic rock fans in attendance. In reality, the interior was marked by a grimy, well-worn look, seating was limited on the ground floor, and only a dozen people were in attendance for the first act, increasing to perhaps a hundred or so towards the end. I was initially disappointed at not entering the grand Troubadour I had envisioned, but the place quickly grew on me, and I came to enjoy the small crowd and intimate ambiance. Casey and I spent time on the ground in front of the stage, but also watched from above on the second floor. The wood benches emitted an aged musk of sweat, smoke, and alcohol, which I rather enjoyed. I imagined Don Henley and Glen Frey putting down a couple of cold ones after a show, or Joni Mitchell lighting up one of her ubiquitous cigarettes. Long after the end of the Troubadour’s A-list lineups, the smell of these legends lives on. They’ve also left behind their guitars, with signed momentos suspended in the ceiling of the bar, relics of the glory days before the Troubadour faded into relative obscurity.

And the artists? There were four acts, of which I knew precisely nothing: Lael Neale, Zander Schloss, Superet, and Maxim Ludwig. Neale was a female singer-songwriter on electric guitar, whose elvish features, delicate finger-picking and dreamy, atmospheric voice conveyed a world of loss and longing. I held on to her metaphors, as I try to do whenever I hear songwriters perform their work. I remember “you killed a clock for killing time” as one of her best lines, describing the fear of a relationship reaching its inevitable conclusion. She performed alone for a twenty-minute set, followed by Zander Schloss, a burly Santa Clause of a man in his early sixties who alternated between six-string and twelve-string acoustic guitars. Lyrically he was not as distinguished, but he made up for this with fingerpicking flurries, big-bellied vocals and a gleeful enthusiasm that drew laughs from the audience. Schloss was a showman, and proof that stage presence is one vital aspect of musicianship. Charisma can compensate for some artistic shortcomings, though it’s nice to have both, as was the case with Superet, a Killers-inspired rock outfit with a dynamic lead singer in Matt Blitzer. Blitzer’s moves were borrowed straight from Mic Jagger’s playbook, with him prancing around stage in between soaring bursts of vocals while the bass guitarist bobbed across the stage and the keyboardist orchestrated a full-immersion sonic landscape, most of it pre-programmed. Superet was near flawless, and I felt they should have been the headliner act. This is not to say that the actual headliner was a let-down; far from it. To close out the night, the roguish Maxim Ludwig commanded the stage in a vest and leather trousers as his group blasted out an eclectic mix of soul-infused rock. I recall him beating the air furiously with percussion shakers, almost trance-like, and then showing some credibility on electric guitar with an extended shred up and down the fretboard on a couple of songs. He wasn’t as gifted vocally as Blitzer, but he made up for this with sheer audacity and an infectious, full-throttle energy. There was no question that he saw thought of himself as a bona fide rock star, and he convinced the audience to see him that way too. For a musician, I suppose this is the ultimate hat trick: to convince others to perceive you the way you perceive yourself.

Maxim Ludwig at the Troubadour was a fitting conclusion to my weeklong immersion in LA. Ambition and the urge to create, to reach inside oneself and deliver something magical for the world to recognize – this is what keeps Angelinos up at night, as I’ve learned. Casey and Jayne feel this, and I imagine these Troubadour artists do as well. It’s why the Hollywood Sign is still the welcome banner for the millions of drifters and dreamers like Mia that crash into the city. Glory fades and is remade with new blood, hot with passion like the sunset bursting into the night sky.