The next morning at Silver Lake, I pass an abandoned refrigerator next to it with the refrigerator door open for a common rodentia. Some steps away, I take an old two-color hardback The Great Gatsby and Heart And Night from the kerbside library of other developmentalists. As the difference between high and low, this one does not even register in the city of public housing in the mall, the wonders of construction between all the garbage fences.
Look, I know the magnitude of my work here. Criticism in LA as a traveling city and bring out all the good ideas of Michael Douglas as he leaves his car to go to the vigilante odyssey from Lincoln Heights to Venice. I’m not just an argument Falling Down, but there are a number of established terms for permanent growth and highways tested by lighter years. They have a good foundation.
It’s just that most “walking” arrangements are hopeless. They like to judge cities on the land as well as other ways to benefit pedestrians. The most important test is whether if there is enough in the streets to see first hand. Missing this point is the way Washington lives above Istanbul, and Munich above Bangkok. Effectiveness and coordination are crucial to one thing that a city cannot do or buy: life, either in the form of a smile or a tummy tuck. Susan Sontag wrote that a town traveler should be on the hunt for the “most dangerous”. That is not Bordeaux.
There is no western city of the same heft that is more spectacular or random than LA. Not Paris: a very Cartesian system. Not New York, with its own group, is located in the central park of Central Park and the northeastern part of the Upper East Side. By simply calling itself the United States Population Center Number One, the city cannot support their intellectual commitment. In the case of London, it has a sudden transition from state to state, and construction to housing, but always a connection to the old landscape. Even the free-thinking Berliner is still a well-known Prussian in the grandeur and clarity of its preparation.
If physical relaxation is a test, LA has the greatest and most obvious opportunity to pay for its spread. Whether a warm city is better for a hiker than a cold one is good news. But a dry city is better than a rainy day. London and Paris, decorated as a paradise for travelers Mrs. Dalloway, have as much rain as one with another. A search in the same monthly data in LA is plaguing northern Europe with repeated wording. “Fundraising”.
Taken together, the weather and the surprises will mark LA as the most difficult western city in the west. If distance forces more to be done within and not between neighboring areas, then distance also forces those areas to have their own commercial and cultural environment. Otherwise, I, not the driver, would have been calm and bored or disturbed by Lyft.
Undoubtedly, I write all of this with the unique needs of someone in the “production companies” (their design words, not mine), though they are very interesting. If your work relies on imagination, wall-to-wall stimulation for LA is more rewarding to be in the middle than somewhere compact and ergonomic. Each trip is a possible eureka moment.
In any case, this is the dark age for flâneur and flâneuse. Even before the plague hit the city’s streets, the idea of moving aimlessly in the cities had begun to emerge. The French name doesn’t help, though nothing similar to English can do and, I want it on my business card someday, boulevardier they cannot fix the problem. Spending time while you are awake to move without direction or purpose is incompatible with economics and (often in California) leaning. I have a lot of interest in what the 45th US president called the “presidency.” Not everyone does.
In all cases, the worst for pedestrians is the gradual loss of traffic congestion in major western cities that are highly polished. The artist only realizes things, or what Baudelaire called the “botanist of the pavement”. LAs are still fraudulently profitable for trampling, grass and everything.
Janan’s email at janan.ganesh@ft.com
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