Smokler

Jerusalem and Los Angeles

Today my friend Elon Langbeheim, who founded the ‘realist’ camp of the religious Zionist movement, challenged me about my new found love of Los Angeles. Could I point to anything significant about living here beyond the pleasant weather? Was it just that Los Angeles was the farthest American City I could find from Jerusalem, where I lived this past year, or did my interest have a deeper logic? Elon looks forward to returning to Jerusalem, where his family and friends live. He reminds me that anyone with a lick of intelligence could see the plastic quality of life here, the hollowness of the ‘dreams’ that bring people to this city, the lonely isolation of sitting in your car all day, the lack of any real intellectual life. Sure the weather is nice. But if that’s it, why not move to Boca Raton, where my grandparents and parents settled (and indeed, where almost every Jew’s parents and grandparents are destined to settle)?

A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to understand the appeal and repulsion of Los Angeles. Both detractors and boosters recognize that in the last two generations, the population and physical boundaries of the LA region have grown faster and larger than almost anywhere else in the developed world. People like coming here. Moreover, it is the geographic center of the culture that now dominates world tastes. People like what comes from here.. Like it or not, there’s something unique about this place. But what is it?

The classic book on the question is Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Banham was a British Historian of Architecture closely tied to British Independent group, the precursors of Pop Art. He came to LA in the 1960’s and remarked:

“A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a small downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of ancientry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape. Most of its building are the firsthand only structures on their particular parcels of land; they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory.”

This is not so different from Sarte, who came to LA two decades earlier and pooh-poohed the city:

“Los Angeles, in particular, is rather like a big earthworm that might be chopped into twenty pieces without being killed…In America…cities..that move at a rapid rate are not constructed in order to grow old, but move forward like modern armies, encircling the islands of resistance they are unable to destroy…”

And indeed, Banham is well aware of the baggage LA carries in the mind of the cultural elite, but attributes it to a misunderstanding of LA’s uniqueness:

“So when most observers report monotony, not unity, and within that monotony, confusion rather than variety, this is usually because the context has escaped them; and it has escaped them because it is unique (like all the best unities) and without any handy terms of comparison.”

What is that uniqueness?

“One must properly begin by learning the local language; and the language of design, architecture and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree…and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the glow of its unprecedented life.”

And in surely one of the finest sentences in Art History writing, Banahm concludes dutifully:

“So, like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original.”

From this perspective, Los Angeles is the farthest thing from Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, there is no non-monumental architecture. Everything is built on top of other monumental architecture. Walk with me 400 yards from where I lived in Jerusalem and see: Our apartment was in an old Arab house, from before the 1948 war, complete with the floor tiles and thick walls of limestone. Across the street was a templar house shaped in a perfect rectangle, built by German Christian missionaries, and now housing a machon, one of the infinite, indescript institutes where some scholar or charismatic figure presides over a trust of money to preserve and promote or protect something. Maybe 200 yards to the northeast from the templar house was the cease fire line of 1967, that divided the city between Israel and Jordan. Along the walk to that now vanished line are abandoned Zionist social engineering projects, like the Jerusalem Institute for the Study of Textile Structures, where two chocolate labs now chase each other in circles in the yard. In the valley beyond that cease fire line is the Cinematec, the temple of non-religious culture, open on the Sabbath, serving non-kosher food and foreign movies. And ironically or not, its perched above the valley that used to be Geihinom, the place were Baal and Molach were worshiped with idolatrous sacrifices. Once, I saw The Big Lebowski open the Jerusalem film festival almost a decade ago in that valley, subtitled and misunderstood in Hebrew.

Here in my neighborhood in Los Angeles, our house is the only structure that ever stood on this ground. The closest thing to ancient is Santa Monica Blvd, maybe a mile to the North. It was a Spanish road from the original settlement downtown to the beach. In this sense. there is a weightiness of what was to Jerusalem, where in LA we tend to feel the levity for what we might become.

But the similarities are deeper than one might imagine. Here, there is a smog report every morning. Red means ‘don’t go outside’, yellow is ‘be careful’, and green is ‘feel free to breathe’. Jerusalem has its own smog. Yehuda Amichai, the late modern psalmist of Jerusalem wrote:

“The air over Jerusalem is saturated with prayers and dreams

like the air over industrial cities.

It’s hard to breathe.

From time to time a new shipment of history arrives

And the houses and towers are its packing materials.

Later these are discarded and pled up in dumps.”

I once had the great pleasure of walking with Amichai through Yemin Moshe, the neighborhood, directly opposite the Old City walls, (where the 1967 border ran). He lived not far from there, and took sometimes took groups of students, like the one I was with, on tours of favorite spots in the neighborhood. Every so often he would stop and read one of his poems. This was maybe five years before he died. Amichai had the well worn face of a middle aged Israeli. If you spend time there, you can see it immediately. The Jewish men and women of my parents’ generation are of nearly identical genetic stock as their Jewish counterparts in Israel, and yet the Israelis have a tiredness, a kind of brooding seriousness etched in their face, even when they are happy. Amichai had those lines on his cheeks, and deep sad eyes that took the world in and held onto it tightly. He spoke quietly.

Jerusalem, as much as it is a city built in monuments, is an imagined place. To anyone familiar with Rabbinic Literature, that’s not a revelation. The Rabbis always spoke of the earthly Jerusalem, which could lay in ruins, and the heavenly Jerusalem which sat at the center of the universe.

Los Angeles too, is an imagined and real place at the same time. Unlike the Greek’s Atlantis, or Garcia-Marquez’ Macondo, that never had to deal with the stubborn facts of daily life, both Jerusalem and Los Angeles were cities that had imagined realities as strong if not stronger than their daily life. For Los Angeles, the monumental architecture, Banham and others point out is not the buildings but the films and television. Drive from my house to the beach, and go past the opening shots of fifty different pieces of culture: the diner from the opening scenes of Pulp Fiction, the establishing shots in Beverly Hills Cop, the place where Axl Rose gets off the bus in the video Welcome to the Jungle, or Santa Monica Blvd from a Sherlyn Crow song. I think about these things all the time when I drive around. They are not holy, nor Jewish, but they communicate the aspirations and frustrations of the culture I grew up knowing and, it’s the culture that so much of the world now consumes as well.

A city of less than three hundred years is hard to compare to a city that just celebrated its 3000^th birthday. While it is lived differently in both, the two cities share the experience of existing as powerfully as a fantasy as they do a reality. Los Angeles promises social mobility, riches, beauty, fame, rebirth and pleasure to all who come. Anyone who has seen a movie, or watched television, let alone my generation who has seen thousands of movies and watched hours of television every day, know this. Once you get here, you can’t help but feel the possibility, real or imagined, everywhere. You’re in LA.

Jerusalem promises eternity, holiness, the end of exile, redemption, a place of Gd’s kingdom on this earth. It is the disparity between the imagined life and the difficulty of daily existence that make these two places so poignant. Sit in Hollywood by the bus station, and you can see the incoming bus with pretty young people taking their leap into the unknown. A half our later, the outgoing bus from Hollywood takes the washed up, the fried, the burnt out, majority that didn’t make it, home, or wherever they called the place before here.

“Jerusalem is full of tired Jews.” Amichai wrote.

“always goaded on again for holidays, for memorial days,

like circus bears dancing on aching legs.

What does Jerusalem need? It doesn’t need a mayor,

it needs a ring-master, whip in hand,

who can tame prophecieis, train prophets to gallop

around and around in a circle, teach its stones to line up

in a bold, risky formation for the grand finale.

Later they’ll jump back down again

to the sound of applause and wars.”

I felt that tiredness this last year. Amichai was not a hater. He wrote as a lifetime Jerusalemite in a long, complicated and painful love affair with the city. But he felt both the imagined and real Jerusalem in all its contradictions at the same time. Fantasy and reality were not two distinct modes of being, as much as factors that acted with different, but equal weight on us all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 22, 2006 at 8:25 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.