L.A.'s bright lights: Los Angeles is on the world's cultural itinerary like never before

Sunset, Oct, 2004 by Matthew Jaffe

A rainy Sunday in Paris would seem an unlikely place to begin a story about Los Angeles, but here goes.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

About a year ago, my wife and I ducked into the venerable Cafe de Flore along Boulevard Saint-Germain for a late lunch. Our server was a handsome young guy in his 20s with flowing hair and a relaxed manner that was in marked contrast to the famously imperious bearing of most Paris waiters. When he brought the check, he asked us where we lived. And so I told him: California. Los Angeles.

His face brightened. "Los Angeles! I want to visit there so much. The sun. All the architecture. Frank Gehry. Hollywood. It all seems very American, so exciting and new there. So different than Paris."

I bring up this moment not as some Old Europe seal of approval for this most New World of cities but rather to state the obvious: L.A. is not Paris. Nor is it London, New York, or San Francisco. And that's exactly what intrigued this guy about Los Angeles, what he presumed to be the very bearable L.A.-ness of its being. The less traditional, apparently, the better.

Los Angeles may be the least understood of major world cities, the result of its sprawling geography, an avalanche of stereotypes, and the tendency of otherwise informed people to flaunt their sophistication by dismissing the city--that is, without really understanding it.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

With the opening of two innovative downtown landmarks, Jose Rafael Moneo's Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels and Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles is on the world's cultural itinerary like never before. These buildings join a decade's worth of projects--including the Staples Center arena downtown, the approximately $1 billion Getty Center for the arts, and a growing subway and light-rail network--that have helped Los Angeles rebound from the earthquakes and riots of the 1990s. Meanwhile, Hollywood--not the industry but the historic entertainment district--has launched a comeback. Restaurants, new retail projects, and restored theaters are drawing a young, arty crowd to an area that had previously been ceded to starstruck tourists.

If, as it has so often been said, Los Angeles is 19 or 100 or 1,000 suburbs in search of a city, then maybe, at long last, that city has been found.

It's one of those perfect afternoons in Los Angeles--the morning fog has cleared, a light breeze blows off the ocean, and the temperature drifts into the mid-70s. The freeways are moving and the city is wide open, there for the taking.

This is a Sunday to be outside. But downtown, a few thousand people are doing the unthinkable: heading indoors. At the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, the faithful and curious alike are drawn by the dramatic contemporary design, from delicate, playful angel sconces to fresco-styled tapestries that run the length of the soaring nave, all illuminated by light filtered through alabaster windows.

A block away, along Grand Avenue, the gleaming stainless steel panels of the Walt Disney Concert Hall Complex seem to fade directly into the high blue sky. There are two indoor venues at the complex, which in less than a year has already become one of the world's most recognizable buildings. The crowd arriving for the Los Angeles Philharmonic's performance of musical director Esa-Pekka Salonen's composition "Wing On Wing" is for the most part properly proper, with a fair number of business suits and long gowns, even for the matinee. They will enter a hall of surpassing beauty, with walls of Douglas fir that flow as elegantly as the lines of a fine instrument, a space as soulful in its way as the cathedral's nave.

The other performance space is REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), an intimate 250-seat venue created for experimental theater and less traditional events, such as today's Charles Phoenix Variety Show. Its crowd is partial to a retro hipster look, with all sorts of vintage rayon shirts featuring martini, tiki, and palm-tree motifs.

Phoenix comes onto the stage in a bright turquoise cosmic-cowboy outfit with crystal rhinestones and embroidered roses. He dishes up commentary on a series of vacation photos and movies--other people's vacation photos and movies--that he has found at flea markets, thrift stores, and garage sales. It's part reality television, part variety show, and, with Phoenix preparing an ambrosia salad for the audience to eat at intermission, part performance art and part Tupperware party too.

Phoenix, who is the author of Southern Californialand, a look back at the region in the midcentury, is an unabashed advocate for all things L.A. At least most things. While he considers Walt Disney Concert Hall "a unique, bizarre, break-all-the-rules kind of building," the cathedral's sand-blasted cast-concrete walls, designed to evoke the adobe color of California's original missions, leave him baffled.

"I think it's supposed to be something super special, but to me it looks like plywood," Phoenix says. "For 500 years, we're going to be a city waiting for a giant stucco gun to arrive to cover all that plywood."