New Blog: Los Angeles is a Giant Gated Community that in Some Ways is Akin to JK Rowlings "Fantastic Beasts..." Meets Thomas Pynchons' "Inherent Vice

When I hear Alicia Keys Symphonized “New York, New York” I automatically replace New York with “LA LA”. And sing it. LA is really the city of dreams. It is where you go as if you are John Wayne and Ward Bond in “The Searchers”. You are on a journey for destiny. Thank you photographer Edward Curtis and Director John Ford.
One day my arms spread east and west, and my head rotated from to north and south. I needed to see and touch the ends of greater Los Angeles from Thousand Oaks to Riverside to Anaheim to the Santa Monica Ocean. The present history is about to vanish and I needed to touch it and live it. Sometimes I realize I am living too fast like a whirling dervish dressed in a blur of spiraling symmetrical pastel patterns. A photographer has to take a deep breath and merely snap. Not spin like a top.
One day I imagined standing hand in hand with Howard Hughes. Who else but history’s Hollywood icon would I want to be with? Where else would Hughes want to be other than at his 700 Romaine street Hollywood studio. The address is only a bit more than a hop skip and a jump from the center of the universe. There is a plaque in Franklin Canyon that marks the center of Los Angeles. The center of the universe for some is Los Angeles.
Late one morning I headed north from Romaine to the Formosa Cafe with HH. We gazed out over the city’s “Fantastic Beasts”: Los Angeles is a panoply of fantastic desirables roped together. It feels like the seams are coming apart in the worlds’ largest gated community. Cars sped by like cattle herds freed from fenced in pastures. I realized I had to get a move on, there was so much to see with very little time. My good fortune is that my photography agendas take me to every corner and all of the in between in Los Angeles.
In LA I see myself as a searcher: Japan Town for Frank Gehry, Venice for Greg Lynn, Culver City for Thom Mayne and Ed Ruscha, Downtown for Lita Albuquerque, Malibu for Lynn Foulkes, Sepulveda for Richard Meier’s Getty, Brentwood for Michael Crichton. I am really like a cast member in Ed Ruscha’s book “Every building on Sunset Blvd”. Racing through the city I always have Ruscha in mind. I would stop in the middle of the street for a snap of something I didn’t want to miss. I would hold my camera through the sun roof snapping at what I thought the camera could see. It is what a shutter-speed is for.
One day I remember taking a photography break in Echo Park. I was watching the birds and the boats in the pond. I had my feet up like Lewis Carroll sans Alice. In that momentary mind bending bucolic setting, I leaped up and said I am not here for rest and peace, I am here to race on jet skis across the city and capture, capture. So I raced to Richard Diebenkorn’s home in the Palisades, and raced to another portrait session and so much more snapping. Still I can hear the symphony of “Keys “LA”. It all makes sense. The spurts of flaming madness trying capture the city’s more than 500 square miles with all of its “Fantastic Beasts and destinations was driving me crazy.
In some way I was trying to emulate Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne’s weekend sojourns through the undiscovered realm known as Los Angeles. Their journey was to see what the city looked like. Mine was capturing what artists, architecture and streets and parks and memorials and all of the physical I could see.
I always feel as if I am running a steeplechase when I land in Los Angeles. Thinking back on all of the cities I have been to, I realize that is my Modus Operandi. I cannot settle for a mere portrait session. It is not enough to merely have my camera define the dream of architecture. I must walk further, I must drive further to capture what I need.
Somewhere in the back of my mind I just want to park my brain where I hear Keys sing “LA” and I move on from Howard Hughes to Thomas Pynchon and his “Inherent Vice” denizens and meet up with with Billy Bob Thornton’s Goliath and call it a day.