1. Nobody Walks Here In Los Angeles But Me, The Lonely Sidewalk-Man, The Only Man Looking To Connect With Another Human Soul Only There’s No One Else On The Pavement To Connect With, Just Me And The Sun
2. I’m The Walking Man But Nobody Understands Hiding In Their Shiny Cars Of Steel And Chrome Which Are Really Just Prisons
3. Only My Feet Are Self-Reliant
4. A Lot Of People Who Live Here Weren’t Born Here And You Know What That Means
5. It Means They’re Inauthentic Is What It Means
6. How Can People Be Authentic Without Winter? They Can’t. Also They Throw Too Many Parties Here
7. How Am I Supposed To Connect With The Millions Of Faceless Idiots I Have Nothing But Contempt For Who Live Here
8. This Cocktail Waitress’ On-The-Clock Affection For Me Seems Insincere; I’ll Start Following Her Home To Double-Check
9. The L.A. River Is Mostly Dry. Did You Know That? It Is Mostly A Concrete Tunnel. Yes That Has To Mean Something
10. This Is A Desert Of The Heart
11. L.A. Was Built Too Recently; Your Family Has To Have Lived Somewhere For At Least Six Generations Otherwise You’ll Just Do Murder With No Compunction
12. Freeways: What Do They Mean (It’s Bad)
13. We’re Always Driving But Are Any Of Us Even Getting Anywhere
14. The Smog Has Covered Everything With Soot, Except For My Moral Code, Which Remains Untarnished
15. Too Many Beautiful Women Live In This City. Why Are They So Beautiful When I’m Hungover And Angry. Doesn’t Make Any Sense
16. I Am The One Who Walks.
You’ll be pleased to hear that all of this is included in the Rockstar videogame L.A. Noire.
Which I kinda loved…
The La Brea Tar Pits usually make a cameo, too.
Man do I love The Far Side.
This image is blocked at work, but I know exactly what it is!
omg, I have only just got this joke! Clearly I had not seen this particular comic since before I learned about the La Brea Tar Pits.
(ha! God I love wordplay.)
13. We’re Always Driving But Are Any Of Us Even Getting Anywhere
…. Jaden?
Now I’m gonna be singing “Walking in L.A.” for approximately forever.
rewatching Season 2 of True Detective, I’d add “the Latino community, they are so much more than stereotypes, here are a few more stereotypes to prove it”.
I think this article is literally the script for season 2, abridged to cut out a bunch of scenes where Everything Here Is Dry and Dead, Except My Liver Which Is Sloshed But Still Improbably Hanging In There
With closing/opening/middling shots of If You Zoom Out All The Cars Look Like Insects And What If Our Importance Like Our Size Is Relative
Have You Seen The Cult Leader, He is Surprisingly Unenlightened
UGGGHGHGHGHGH this drives me nuts more than anything! The city is 50% Latino, full of plennnnnty of multigenerational families who’ve been here forever and people who work as like, teachers and accountants and managers and nurses.
But no. According to Hollywood, the only narratives that exist are gangster, yard guy/nanny/farm worker, and/or tragic-heroic immigrant. Literally like 4 million Latinos in LA county, and the entertainment industry thinks they only have three possible stories.
Right??? And I go to Albuquerque and it doesn’t happen there. WTF? Why can SoCal not just embrace that it’s got a whole lot of Latin@ up in it and roll with that?
You’d think people would accept that the Pueblo de los Angeles has a whole lot of that entire Spanish part of the New World happening, but no, this seems to genuinely shock people.
You rewatched Season 2 of True Detective? Why would you do that to yourself?
The Oranges Are Rotten
A Murder Has Happened At A Certain Theme Park Known For Being A Happy Place, How Ironic
You Could Tell She Was Morally Corrupt Because She’d Had Some Work Done
Once upon a time I visited Sacramento. I couldn’t figure out why oranges were rotting on the side of the road everywhere, so I knocked one down to eat it, and that’s how I found out there was such a thing as DECORATIVE orange trees, aka bitter oranges. *gag*
This Infrastructure Project Surely Conceals a Grand Conspiracy
It’s all about the Owens River Valley watershed
She’s my sister and my daughter, you fool
You can drive the PCH all the way from Mexico to Canada, but you can never leave LA
As a child of famous yet emotionally distant parents, I have no choice but to set this shit on FIAH, but in a deeply disaffected and affectless way.
as long as it’s affectless.
(my spellcheck suggests “leafless”, so, maybe take that into consideration as well.)
I once spent three days accidentally stuck in L.A., and this sums up my feelings about the place perfectly.
… did you mean to be stuck somewhere else?
which is weird, because it isn’t actually like this at all.
I’ve heard there is also a lot of Drinking In L.A.
I was thinking this needed more alcohol. Maybe that will do as-is.
16. I Was Thinking This Needed More Alcohol.
No More Parties, though.
Sunnydale may be literally right on top of a hellmouth and CHOCK FULL of demons, yet L.A. is worse.
16. Maybe the real demons were inside us all along
The only things consumed here are organic local kale and cocaine. Nothing in between. The kale is the greater signifier of evil.
Once in a bar I ordered a strong drink and a small raw vegan food item. The waitress said, “oh, are you vegan too?” and I said, “no, but it cancels out the booze” and she nodded sagely and said, “I think we’re on the same diet.”
I live in LA and this would fit the thread nicely if this scene happened in LA but in fact it happened in Philadelphia.
Clearly the worst city to try and be noir in this side of Dubai.
The Sea, like my Soul, is Troubled
These Hippies aren’t as Pure of Heart as I Imagined
Something Something Sunset Blvd.
I had a college professor who described LA as “America in flight from herself,” which always seemed to me like a description straight out of a noir story.
Also, Why Is It So Sunny, It’s Unnatural, and Only Further Demonstrates This City’s Inescapable Corruption Because Nothing Can Hide from All this Vile Sunshine.
god but why IS IT so sunny, it is genuinely terrible
As someone who suffers from severe seasonal affective disorder, I REALLY WISH there were places as sunny as LA that I didn’t hate as much as I hate LA. New York is my soul city but dear god do we need more sunlight.
> Why Is It So Sunny, It’s Unnatural, and Only Further Demonstrates This City’s Inescapable Corruption Because Nothing Can Hide from All this Vile Sunshine.
Desert Bluffs?
– Random James Ellroy Book
#15 is my real feelings
16. drugs drugs drugs drugs drugs
(The only LA noir I’ve read is Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway, which is AWESOME, but 90% drugs)
“6. How Can People Be Authentic Without Winter? They Can’t. Also They Throw Too Many Parties Here”.
Is this story the cousin of “New York Is A REAL City Because Pizza Rat And Also Living In A Garrett”?
“New York Has More Culture Because Hot Garbage Smell Also There Is No Getty Museum In LA Only Kardashians That Is A Fact.”
The Getty is the place where I really get LA noir, because I always feel like some kind of 50s movie starlet as soon as I step off the tram. Something about the big windy vistas and that architecture just taps straight into my imagination.
See, I love Griffith Park Observatory for that dirty historical glam feel. The Getty is beautiful, but it doesn’t properly feel of any time or place in history.
For the record I love LA noir and am going to a noir symposium at USC in 40 minutes.
Whaaaa??? Is there a newsletter for things like this?
I did notice the river was actually wet this morning (thanks, rain!) and felt it seemed more cheerful than usual, and then I realized I was ascribing emotions to the dry riverbed and THEN I realized I’m just as much of a hack as the other wannabe writers who were born somewhere else and moved here and should probably just leave already. And now I’m in a full-on “what am I DOING here, here on EARTH” crisis and frankly it’s more than I needed on this, the first day of my period.
Amazing. Please write that book that VampireDeer was describing, I too would DEFinitely read a detective on her period story.
I hope you got out of your existential crisis and maybe had a brownie and snuggled up under some fuzzy blankets or something!
“When you said you were writing a ‘period mystery,’ this is not what I was expecting.”
Toasties strike again, providing brilliant ideas and the kind of support a girl needs to make it in this sunbleached city of facades (starting already)
“People Are Afraid to Merge on Freeways in Los Angeles.”
disappear here
I got to “We’re Always Driving But Are Any Of Us Even Getting Anywhere” and suddenly was stricken by the possibility that I have to reinterpret Less Than Zero through a noir lens, a.k.a., think about Less Than Zero for the first time since the 1980s.
the winds of Santa Ana feel like murder
(does that show up in noir or just Joan Didion essays)
Except they doooooo.
Hot nasty dry murder winds. I’m looking at you for all my sinus problems.
It also shows up in The Holiday, which is the best romantic comedy and nobody is more surprised than me to find this is a hill I’m willing to die on anyway they do something to Kate Winslet’s eye and then Jack Black pokes around in it and horrifyingly that passes as a meet cute, I might have watched that movie too many times.
It’s totally in noir. My mom often remarks with glee about some famous noirist whose name I of course have forgotten, “the Santa Ana is practically a *character.*” ETA: puzzleg identifies Raymond Chandler, and of course it is, I bow down before people with functional long-term memory, etc.
Oh yeah, definitely noir. From Raymond Chandler: There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen.
My mother quotes that part too. So does my dad. Because they both lived in Riverside and agree that it’s an apt quote.
“L.A. Was Built Too Recently; Your Family Has To Have Lived Somewhere For At Least Six Generations Otherwise You’ll Just Do Murder With No Compunction”
Which is why we had to leave. Who has time for all that murder AND maintaining their disaffected, kale-snorting ennui? Not me. So much murder to keep up with when you live in LA. And have no decent river.
KALE SNORTING
This is the entirety of Angel the series though
Mallory, it’s already a Bingo card: http://la.curbed.com/archives/2015/02/how_the_new…
Los Angeles is my home and my True Love and I’m over being defensive when others don’t get it. I do enjoy articles like this, though – both Mallory’s and the one linked above.
LA! LA la la. Weetzie Bat!
It Is Christmas But Also It Is Hot And Dry, Ho Ho Ho What A Land Of Contrasts This Is
(Shout out to L.A. Confidential, which I am obviously a very big fan of)
You’d think they would that in Australia too, but it seems more like “Time for a barbecue!”
HULLO THERE
It is still my favourite movie.
I remember watching it for the first time thinking, “Jesus, this Guy Pearce is going places.” Exley is such a great character.
James Cromwell needs to be cast as a villain more often, he’s got such a menacing presence in the movie.
Incredible cast all round – any yes, Guy Pearce’s face when he takes off his glasses for the press! Perfect.
t was my first encounter with James Cromwell and I could not believe that they chose such a sinister person to be a kindly old farmer in “Babe”.
For someone I find kind of irritating, my God, does Guy Pearce make Exley attractive. He has beautiful cheekbones, and the fifties styling really suits him.
(That being said, nerdy awkward dudes ARE totally my type; it’s just mixed up with irritation).
If you did not drink rye while reading this you are inauthentic.
We need more posts under the hashtag “Raymond Chandler”.
17. Literally everyone hides A Shameful Secret. Even Kenny the valet guy.
18. Yes, that’s a fake name.
19. Sure, the world looks sunny and perfect, but the people who should be happiest are All. Dead. Inside. And they’re into Some Dark Shit.
20. That sweet young actress? Porn.
21. Forget her. She’s trapped with him, and will never escape.
22. Looking for the center of all evil? Take a short ride up PCH, then a left.
N.B. This is why I read Ross MacDonald.
Hate to say it, but the hero of your noir is obviously a douchebro.
As so many of them are.
Missing a #martinamis in the tags.
I am a fan of Martin Amis, for the most part, and yet I spent about thirty seconds looking at this and trying to figure out what kind of drink a martinami might be.
Though are any of his books set in LA? I thought maybe Money, but Wikipedia informs me it’s in New York.
Yes, it is Money! He spends a bit of time in LA too. There is a lot about not walking, obviously, but also some complaining about taxi drivers not knowing how to get to where you want to go, which is a very English (more specifically, a very London) complaint about getting a taxi somewhere that is not London.
And that’s what happens when I try to rely on Wikipedia for my memory of a book I haven’t read in two decades or so. 🙂
I read that as “Martinimas,” which is now my favorite holiday.
what about Walter Mosley?
not on topic but when I first loaded this page I got this massive terrible ad from Intel that blocked numbers 5-15. It took up the my whole ipad screen and there was no way to exit it. It wasn’t exactly a pop up I think, because I could scroll to see the rest of the page like the comments.
Also pretty much LA Story with Steve Martin.
Except that movie doesn’t have any dead bodies in it, which is nice. It does have one guy with literal brass balls, but you never see the balls. You just hear them. The guy wasn’t born in LA and is not sincere.
Okay, I created an account just to comment. As a “Buffy” fan, I recommend you watch “Angel” as a remedy to all this lonely sidewalk man, artificial LA noirnonsense. I know, I know: it’s Angel. BUT hear me out: like “Buffy”, it’s all about creating your own family and specifically how stupid an idea it is to be a lonely sidewalk man. Yes, sometimes they knock LA for its artifice, but the city also becomes a self-made sanctuary. ALSO more Faith, and who doesn’t want more Faith? Don’t start with the first episode, start with “Rm w/ a Vu”.
So I watched Lucifer last night and it turns out it’s set in LA and is definitely going for noir. They even talk about who is “authentic” pretty much immediately. So if you enjoy watching a silly procedural with a hot, hot British man playing Satan as the hero and Principal Wood as an angel, you’re covered.
True, but even here, the bus is very class-based. They put a fantastically expensive streetcar system in on a route that had perfectly good bus coverage, because you can't expect tourists/gentrifiers to ride the BUS. With the POORS.
Too many people tell you to have a nice day. What’s that about? It can’t be good.
‘This city is named The Angels but no one here is’
‘Lost and Jealous’