Not afraid to merge: on driving, Drive, Los Angeles and what I’ll write about here
During the first year I lived in Los Angeles, two things happened:
1) We drove north on the 110 through Downtown on a Saturday night and got stuck in stop-and-go traffic, keeping stuttered time just ahead of a flat-bed tow truck. I was in the passenger seat when the truck nosed forward, its cargo sliding slowly into view: An oversized SUV with deeply tinted windows, shiny spinning rims — and somewhere upwards of 30 bullet holes sprayed across the driver’s side doors. I was close enough to try counting them all. Close enough that I could see the flat quarter-sized indentations of paint-stripped metal around each hole.
2) Driving by myself south on the 101 late on a weeknight, coming down that steep hill above the Hollywood Bowl. Only a handful of other people on the road, music on the stereo and the windows down a little because it was a nice night and I had another half-hour of freeway ahead of me to get home to Long Beach. And then a roar of engines and halogen lights as two souped-up race cars blew past me doing at least 100, probably more like 110 or 120, intertwining and crossing back and forth like fish in a stream, battling for first place every inch of the way. Gone in far less than 60 seconds.
I understand the impulse of the second one, as heart-thumping terrifying as it was at the time to be swept up in the wake of. Especially coming south on the 101, a freeway that winds and curves its way through and around the city in the most illogical, often unhelpful way. But when you hit the 110 to come through Downtown, it’s like flying. It’s like Bladerunner. The road is raised above Downtown’s surface streets, so you soar through all the 50-story bank buildings at waist-level. At night it’s one of my favorite ways to see the city.
For the past two years I worked just on the west side of the 110, with a view of the steep, curved banks and the on-ramps and that exact spot where I sat in traffic in 2004 and watched the remnants of a drive-by shooting slide by my car window.
Los Angeles Center Studios is an anomaly in this town. It doesn’t have a sprawling lot with stucco bungalows or or sepia memories of the ‘30s. Its standing sets — most built inside the 12-story building — are not of New York brownstones or small-town diners but police precincts, courtrooms and morgues. The exteriors are glass and black and white granite, concrete skyways and sleek metal trim. The main tower was built in 1957 (by architect William Peira, most known for the futuristic Transamerica building in San Francisco) to house the headquarters of oil & gas company Unocal, and some of the office space has been maintained as period sets. Mad Men shoots there.
So did Drive.
Drive is the id of Los Angeles playing itself, our darkest self-reflection, and through it struts Steve McQueen’s heir apparent in a denim jacket. It is not, as with most films in which Los Angeles is prominently featured, about: 1) Sex. 2) Drugs. 3) Making it in Hollywood, though it makes most excellent use of the film industry-as-mafia, money men and stunt guys and sleeper hits.
It’s about survival, about pushing through everything you need to do to stay afloat to find what you might want if you were allowed to even dream of something a little bigger. A bigger score, a faster car, a child’s easy sleep, a clean getaway. In this movie it’s the dreaming that really kills you. And when you’re trapped in a car trying to cross Los Angeles, there is nothing to do but dream.
Since mid-November, I am commuting to Culver City, not quite as far across Los Angeles county as you can be from my home in Eagle Rock, but very close to it. Every day I drive between 15 and 20 miles to work and then back again. I can take a combination of as many as four different freeways in each direction or none; I can limit myself to no more than a dozen long stretches of surface streets or zig zag every few blocks. It takes anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes, but usually about 45 in the morning and 60 in the evening.
I bought a new car, my first ever and — for the first time in three years since my used Corrolla died a premature death after a back alley engine repair gone wrong — not shared with anyone else. It’s bright blue, so true to its zoom-zoom promise I got my first speeding ticket of my life almost immediately.
As much as I love to drive, I hate the commute and every minute it steals from my life at home. But I love Los Angeles, and even in the dark — and it always dark coming home right now, and sometimes just barely light when i leave — I can’t stop looking at her.
This is what I see.
1) We drove north on the 110 through Downtown on a Saturday night and got stuck in stop-and-go traffic, keeping stuttered time just ahead of a flat-bed tow truck. I was in the passenger seat when the truck nosed forward, its cargo sliding slowly into view: An oversized SUV with deeply tinted windows, shiny spinning rims — and somewhere upwards of 30 bullet holes sprayed across the driver’s side doors. I was close enough to try counting them all. Close enough that I could see the flat quarter-sized indentations of paint-stripped metal around each hole.
2) Driving by myself south on the 101 late on a weeknight, coming down that steep hill above the Hollywood Bowl. Only a handful of other people on the road, music on the stereo and the windows down a little because it was a nice night and I had another half-hour of freeway ahead of me to get home to Long Beach. And then a roar of engines and halogen lights as two souped-up race cars blew past me doing at least 100, probably more like 110 or 120, intertwining and crossing back and forth like fish in a stream, battling for first place every inch of the way. Gone in far less than 60 seconds.
I understand the impulse of the second one, as heart-thumping terrifying as it was at the time to be swept up in the wake of. Especially coming south on the 101, a freeway that winds and curves its way through and around the city in the most illogical, often unhelpful way. But when you hit the 110 to come through Downtown, it’s like flying. It’s like Bladerunner. The road is raised above Downtown’s surface streets, so you soar through all the 50-story bank buildings at waist-level. At night it’s one of my favorite ways to see the city.
For the past two years I worked just on the west side of the 110, with a view of the steep, curved banks and the on-ramps and that exact spot where I sat in traffic in 2004 and watched the remnants of a drive-by shooting slide by my car window.
Los Angeles Center Studios is an anomaly in this town. It doesn’t have a sprawling lot with stucco bungalows or or sepia memories of the ‘30s. Its standing sets — most built inside the 12-story building — are not of New York brownstones or small-town diners but police precincts, courtrooms and morgues. The exteriors are glass and black and white granite, concrete skyways and sleek metal trim. The main tower was built in 1957 (by architect William Peira, most known for the futuristic Transamerica building in San Francisco) to house the headquarters of oil & gas company Unocal, and some of the office space has been maintained as period sets. Mad Men shoots there.
So did Drive.
Drive is the id of Los Angeles playing itself, our darkest self-reflection, and through it struts Steve McQueen’s heir apparent in a denim jacket. It is not, as with most films in which Los Angeles is prominently featured, about: 1) Sex. 2) Drugs. 3) Making it in Hollywood, though it makes most excellent use of the film industry-as-mafia, money men and stunt guys and sleeper hits.
It’s about survival, about pushing through everything you need to do to stay afloat to find what you might want if you were allowed to even dream of something a little bigger. A bigger score, a faster car, a child’s easy sleep, a clean getaway. In this movie it’s the dreaming that really kills you. And when you’re trapped in a car trying to cross Los Angeles, there is nothing to do but dream.
Since mid-November, I am commuting to Culver City, not quite as far across Los Angeles county as you can be from my home in Eagle Rock, but very close to it. Every day I drive between 15 and 20 miles to work and then back again. I can take a combination of as many as four different freeways in each direction or none; I can limit myself to no more than a dozen long stretches of surface streets or zig zag every few blocks. It takes anywhere between 30 and 90 minutes, but usually about 45 in the morning and 60 in the evening.
I bought a new car, my first ever and — for the first time in three years since my used Corrolla died a premature death after a back alley engine repair gone wrong — not shared with anyone else. It’s bright blue, so true to its zoom-zoom promise I got my first speeding ticket of my life almost immediately.
As much as I love to drive, I hate the commute and every minute it steals from my life at home. But I love Los Angeles, and even in the dark — and it always dark coming home right now, and sometimes just barely light when i leave — I can’t stop looking at her.
This is what I see.
