Wilshire and San Vicente

I had to get a new phone today. After years and years with my old iPhone SE, the screen cracked for the first time after I dropped it on Tuesday. The phone is so old that the repair shop didn’t have any screens in stock that would fit it. For some time now, it’s been slowly dying due to the increasing size of iOS and mobile apps, and so I took this as the final sign it was time to finally upgrade.

So I bought a new phone this afternoon. Afterward I had to go to Beverly Hills for a medical appointment, and I found myself sitting in the waiting room with some time to kill. Fiddling with this new iPhone, trying to figure out why Apple has made iOS so ugly over the past few years, I was struggling. Holding the phone along the base as I am used to, my thumb couldn’t reach the navigation buttons at the top of the screen—an action that was pretty simple on the SE. This seems like a flaw in basic functionality from a product design point of view, as my hands are a pretty decent size and should have no trouble reaching across a screen.

It felt really appropriate I was discovering this new inconvenience in Beverly Hills.

South Arnaz and Wilshire

Ten years ago, the iPhone was a perfectly fine device that was well-designed and comfortable. Somewhere along the line, though, that American idea of Bigger is Better seemed to take hold and the phones became more like mini-tablets. (I held on to my old phone for so long because it was the same size as an iPhone 6, which was nearly perfect.)

But in America, we take what we can get even—and especially—when we don’t need it. Beverly Hills is the type of city that exemplifies this idea. The palm trees, taller than most in the rest of LA, soar above Wilshire Boulevard. The showrooms for supercars that couldn’t be driven on a majority of the pothole-laden streets of Los Angeles appear sandwiched between realty estate agencies and hot yoga studios. The ostentatious houses that could reasonably house six families have two luxury cars in the driveway.

This sickening need for excess factors in at scale, from the obscene lifestyle indulgences of Beverly Hills down to the fact the smallest phones on the market are too big to fit comfortably in the hands of a grown man. The fundamentals of design are based around function, and we’ve warped that under capitalism to prioritize form, often to the detriment of everything else. Be they systems of urban infrastructure and city planning to products being of lower quality while getting more expensive, the language of constructing our physical reality has been upended by the profit motive.

God I hate going to Beverly Hills.

As a follow-up on some of my hospital thoughts, another part of my experience was actually leaving the place. I arrived around 10:00 pm on a Tuesday and left about 40 hours later. All things considered, that’s not an overly-long stay. However, as I left the parking lot and drove toward the 110—as merging on to a freeway is the most LA way to be reminded you’re back in the real world—I felt incredibly disoriented.

It’s not just that time seems to stand still, but because of the sterile and ubiquitous nature of hospital rooms, I could have been anywhere. Returning to Los Angeles felt like I’d warped into another world after spending nearly two days staring at the same off-white walls, watching repeats of Law and Order: SVU and listening to my roommate repeat the same Christian affirmations on his phone for hours on end.

There have certainly been two-day stretches where I haven’t left my apartment before, but I’m always reminded of where I am by the helicopters overhead, the cars honking from the intersection, the customers of the plumbing store loading materials into trucks in the parking lot outside my window. I can haul my laundry upstairs and have a pretty decent vantage point of Koreatown from the top. I could lie in bed for days on end and still know I’m in LA.

In the hospital, it’s different. All I hear are asynchronous beeps, all I can see out the window—if there is one—is a concrete parking garage. The news on TV reminds me that LA is out there, somewhere, having car chases and traffic jams, but from my vantage point it might as well be Mars. I didn’t realize it until I left, but I was slowly going crazy while I was stuck there.

It makes me think of everyone who has extended stays in these places, or the elderly living out their terms in the death-care equivalent. People who have no connection to the world outside of four, unchanging walls, stuck in the places the rest of us don’t have to be reminded they exist in. We have such a deformed view of what care entails in this country, and I doubt it’s going to get any better anytime soon.

Hollywood Forever Cemetery

There are a variety of things to do in Los Angeles that feel just very unique to the city. Going to a show at the Hollywood Bowl might be one. Sitting next to Bob Odenkirk at a lunch in Larchmont might be another. Watching Dudamel conduct at the Walt Disney Hall or going to any number of the world-class, completely-free art museums downtown is up there. (Ironically, leaving the city to go out and camp at Joshua Tree would be another.) And this is just the shit that like, the average person can afford and experience. I’m sure spending some time at the Chateau Marmont would be the first on my list if I ever won the lottery.

Then, of course, there’s the movies. There are a ton of art-house, independent theaters showing films from all eras of Hollywood history, often with special guests including actors, writers, directors, and producers. A couple highlights for me—just in the past six months—have been Elliott Gould after The Long Goodbye, Paul Thomas Anderson before One Battle After Another, Isabelle Huppert after The Piano Teacher, and Gus Van Sant before Good Will Hunting.

Last night added chalked up a couple of these experiences in to one.

My phone is eight years old and I was far away so this picture is very low-quality

At Cinespia, an outdoor film screening that takes place in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, there was a screening of one of my all-time favorites, Josie and The Pussycats. Four thousand people were in attendance, and when writer-director pair Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont were introduced (whom I also saw a couple weeks ago after a screening of their first cult classic, Can’t Hardly Wait), they said it was more people who saw the movie in its original theatrical run.

Also in attendance? Star Rachel Leigh Cook and Letters to Cleo vocalist Kay Hanley, who provided the vocals for the music in the film.

These aren’t always things that add too much substance to an experience, although there are guests that really provide some insight into process or creativity, but it is just kind of cool and the type of thing that doesn’t happen anywhere else. Stars might show up to a new film to promote it in New York, but Werner Herzog doing an extensive interview after a fifty-year-old film in Heart of Glass is not something that happens often outside of LA.

Though plenty of people who attend these things work in the industry, some of us just fucking love going to the movies and getting a little peek behind the curtain as an added bonus makes the experience just somehow more—as well as feeling more a part of the fabric of what makes this city unique.

Robot crossers

Human walkers

8th and Normandie

I would say intersections are where my biggest pet peeve of driving in LA takes place. There are plenty of lights that have dedicated left-turn lanes (an interesting thing about LA driving is that you come to learn after a light turns red, two cars usually still turn left). However, there are a lot of side streets that don’t.

There’s nothing more annoying than being behind a driver at one of these intersections where they don’t turn on their turn signal until the light turns green. You’re stuck behind a car that will have to wait the entire length of the light before they can actually make the turn, leaving you to stay behind them through the green light, then having to wait until the next to actually cross.

It would be nice if this was a minor, occasional inconvenience but this probably happens ten to fifteen percent of the time. Given how frequently driving is a part of life in LA, that’s an incredible amount of annoying drivers to deal with. I have about five major pet peeves of driving here and this one is at the top of the list.