SURFIN' SAFARI SUMMER TWO - DAY FOUR - June 19, 2020

 

Made a quick, later afternoon jaunt out to Home Court (aka Marina del Rey) for a long, two-hour workout consisting of a double surf-session, and a run to the Venice Pier and back.

Don’t know if it qualified as actual “surfing,” because the waves were small and breaking onshore, but it involved water and a board and sun, so it was close enough and plenty fun. There was one decent peak, but it was crowded with California brown pelicans possessing beaks that could hold your head like a tennis ball. I tried surfing right through the flock once, but the sight of a middle-aged man sliding past on an orange fluorescent slab of fiberglass left them nonplussed.

The top photo is Ballona Lagoon; a tidal estuary that feeds the famed, fake Venice Canals. You cross it to access the Marina beach. Years ago, when the sewage outfall got screwy, the canals would fill with smelly, partially treated effluent, rendering it a low-rent district. Thanks to a lawsuit by the Reagan administration’s EPA (that's right), Los Angeles was forced to move the outfall further into the ocean and upgrade the treatment plant. End of smelly canal problem. Now you need a few million to live on the canals. And that is how you create wealth through environmentalism.

I know this ‘cause I covered that consent decree process as a correspondent on behalf of BNA Inc. for years, not knowing it would result in a cleaner, future waterworld for me.

It is not an original thought that the only part of California anybody thinks about is the half-mile of real estate running up and down the coastal beaches. Leaving our idyllic spot, we were forced to drive through what, for us anyway, appears an urban dystopia. I’d rather not be here, quite frankly. When the city erupted in 1992, I’d already sent my library to Spain and was fast on its heels. I could read about the unpleasant aftermath through letters from friends and was glad to have escaped.

Not going to happen this time.

L.A. was kind of nice during the lockdown, but the riots and looting lay a sinister mien over the whole place now. It’s trying to open up, but sputtering. Prior to the lockdown, the City had launched a campaign to break up some very solid homeless encampments after a “softer” approach fell out of favor. Those are all back with a vengeance.

L.A. has a wild west town’s DNA complete with lynchings and anarchist bombings of the local newspaper. It is full of drifters and what we called, back in New York, "characters." When order breaks down, it is not a heartwarming tableaux of civic cooperation. I suspect the local police have taken a bit of a lie down in the face of all the criticism, as is their wont, and things are simply not safe. People are aggressive and frustrated and nearing trigger points.

There are pockets, certain iconic locales that are giving it a whirl, but countless mini-malls are boarded up and shut down.

I am reading “The Painting of the Modern World,” by T.J. Clark, which highlights the irony and malice behind all those Impressionist paintings of people having a good time in the 19th-century Parisian countryside. Clark notes how Manet and Co., were chronicling a new thing called “leisure,” enjoyed by a surging bourgeois class that could put its money to work in lieu of its body. Those innocuous pastorals are apparently rife with a painterly sense of modern social decomposition and anomie.

Anyway, and point being, L.A. is a ghost town at night. Packed full of eateries, music clubs, and danceterias, it is top heavy with what Clark calls the “leisure industry,” and which is pretty darn nonessential. Some places are open for takeout, but that’s not the same thing and you have to wonder how long your average restaurateur will run a short-order kitchen in lieu of the lair for starlets and moguls they'd envisioned.

It seems to me that to open the economy with a declaration is to say nothing at all. There is clearly a lack of money to get restarted, a drop in the desirability of L.A. as a place to do business, a dearth of customers, and a lack of confidence in the public health situation.

We did not sustain a national consensus on how to confront the virus - either go with the economy and manage death or lock down until the sickness was done - so I don’t think we are going to get either an economy or a healthy environment, and things will continue to look unfamiliar or downright weird for a while to come.