Walking in L.A.
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I have been walking multiple times a day, every day, since California began sheltering in place. I walk all the time anyway—sometimes to work; sometimes halfway to work; sometimes getting off the bus early to walk a few blocks; sometimes just around and around in circles, departure and destination neatly overlapping. Walking for me serves two purposes—a slow, There is something perverse about walk- sustained physical wearing-out, and ing in Los Angeles. Action and context the temporary ordering of a very chatty never quite match. The city, despite my mind. Walking offers a slow, unrolling love for it, feels designed so that walking focus, somewhere between leisure must happen in spite of its qualities: and exercise—a counter-rhythm to my vague, decentralized planning, narrow own cycling thoughts and an antidote or non-existent sidewalks, whole to my own restlessness. I walk in Los neighborhoods aggressively fenced off, Angeles excessively, as if it were somestreets that unexpectedly fail to connect, thing that I risk forgetting how to do, and above all great swaths of distance like writing in cursive. In some ways, between things. Resisting and pushing this is one manifestation of a deep, through these obstacles can be thrilling reflexively contrary impulse: to never in its wrongness, or it can just feel be anywhere too crowded, too popular, wrong—Los Angeles is just as fascinattoo obvious, or for too long. ing, messy, and sporadically ordinary There is something ordinary, even in slow motion as it is by car. The act corny, about walking—hiking without of unhurriedly absorbing and taking in the performative pressure, moving with Los Angeles can be disturbing. It makes no specific order nor even purpose. the city a real place rather than an idea My mind ebbs from focus to distraction, or a myth, just as art devises material stopping whenever, for whatever reason, objects from immaterial concepts. then starting again. Walking and looking Sometime in the 1960s, the Santa at my immediate surroundings have Monica Freeway sliced right through largely replaced biking, taking the bus, the middle of West Adams, where I or driving to the manifold art galleries currently live, demolishing entire blocks within Los Angeles to have a look at of homes. Former neighbors, once able whatever is there. Art can appeal to to stroll easily to one another’s houses, a pondering mind or a sensual body; were left with sporadic connections good art finds a way into both. Art is across the freeway gulf in the form of a rare kind of evaporative experience— occasional overpasses every four to six resistant to strict standards of quality, blocks, many of which now also act slippery to define—and particularly as on- and off-ramps for traffic. Reyner so in a city as ambivalent towards Banham defined the freeway system history and memory as Los Angeles. as “a single comprehensible place, a Walking, when it’s good, ekes out coherent state of mind, a complete way an undulating rhythm of thought and of life” for the Angeleno.¹ In Banham’s recall. Art, on the other hand, works 1971 depiction, the world along the freeon a rhythm of disclosure and opacity, way—consisting of plants, architecture, and looking at artwork, for me at least, and the people living there—is a kind is equal parts work and pleasure. flashing image, with all the depth that The work part of it can invoke a pesky implies. In his schema, we only drive or cynicism that I have to continually arrive—the animating life behind the swat away, which in turn keeps the flickering architecture along our route pleasurable moments enlivening. remain opaque, and our own lives Soon after I moved to Los Angeles, remain dangerously singular. I remember seeing Mernet Larsen’s
Aaron Horst
1. Reyner Banham: Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (University of California Press: 1971), pg. 195. 2. Laurie Anderson, “New Jersey Turnpike,” from United States Live (Rhino/Warner Brothers, 1984).
