Sunday, 09 February 2003 | LA, part 2

The flight attendants are chatty. The burgandy-haired plump woman with the painted-on eyebrows and fake blue eyes might want to know where you're from and if you're Italian, 'cause you look just like this Italian friend of hers. She might nudge you and wink and tell you, "I can sell ice to Eskimos" and produce a hearty laugh. Thankfully, she did neither to me; only to others.

Then there's the effeminate male flight attendant with the closely cropped hair who has buttons pinned all over his apron (one says something about "hatred" being a bad thing), and I get the impression he is more amused by his own talking than his audience is, which doesn't seem to bother him. He just chided a person for trying to throw away an empty plastic bag that read "I [heart] LA.," telling the people within a seven-row radius how he really does love LA, and how that bag might aid him in letting people know. A minute later he traipsed by wearing the bag folded over his apron like a bib over top of his button collection. "See?!" he said, as he walked by.

An hour later, he walked down the aisle, swinging the bag over his head in a figure 8. "It's all about you," he said, pointing at the original owner. At the end of the flight, the plane learned over the loudspeaker that he had just won an award for his biscotti recipe in the Pilsbury Bake-Off, an announcement that was met with light, scattered applause.

...

I passed through three stages: hating it, having an understanding for why people live there, and not wanting to leave. Not that I think LA and I are especially compatible; for the past few days, though, I have learned how to overlook the offensive parts, and to briefly suspend my guilt that clings to the consumption-lifestyle of shelling out money liberally and cruising around aimlessly. Aimlessly, with open windows between my bare arms and the sun and blue sky, with a cleverly hidden CD player perched on the hump between the driver's and passenger's feet.

Thursday. I sat in the grass in a park in West Hollywood. Not a terribly exciting thing to do, but it had occurred to me how rarely I've had that opportunity in the past several months, thanks to weather and relieved dogs and a general lack of grass. I sat in the grass between tennis players and Russian card players, gently pulling up blades with my fingers while discussing cities and plans and while thumbing through key chains.

Later, Ryan took me to the Getty, where we were pulled to the top of a hill by what seemed to me to be a sort of Disneyland subway, safe and clean and slow. It was a low-smog day, so we were able to see both the tall buildings of downtown and the ocean relatively clearly, once our eyes had adjusted to the blinding white outdoor patios. We strolled through two exhibits, in addition to the museum grounds themselves, which I guess could count as a third. We saw Dorothea Lange's photography, which was mostly composed of closely cropped black-and-white images of people in harder times, full of deep wrinkles and sad eyes and furrowed brows, and something called "The Passions," which was an incredible exhibit of LCD screens whose images would slowly morph while you patiently watched. It was a study of human emotion, and, without the help of sound, you could tell with some accuracy what the people were feeling, and you could see the awkward transition of the human face that is sometimes accidentally captured in still photography.

Post-Getty. Ryan, Catherine, and I sat on a crest of sand in Venice Beach and watched the easily accessible sunset before going to the Stones concert, which was in the arena where I was told the Lakers play. It was strange seeing TVs displaying the NRDC logo in such an outwardly corporate venue, seeing sporadic people wearing the NRDC staff badge and not knowing who they were (most likely West Coast-ers), and even stranger seeing people I knew from New York and DC. Ryan, Scott, and I looped the arena twice before committing to our seats, amusing ourselves by playing PPPS.

Bill Clinton, whose profile I had a clear shot of from my stage-left seat, spoke for about five minutes about NRDC and global warming and how the Rolling Stones were the best rock band ever. Most of the crowd cheered between each phrase that he uttered, whether appropriate or not. Faint were the boos and the smell of smoke, which drifted down from the section above me halfway into the first song.

Mick is 59, and is incredibly energetic. He moves like an unusual, limber animal, sticking his chest out and jabbing his arms and elbows and skinny knees into the air like no one I've ever seen. Keith bends over and lets his guitar swing in front of him like a giant necklace, or perhaps more like an albatross, as it appeared to weigh him down considerably. At one point he accepted the microphone from Mick, and proceeded to gurgle something into the mic that I could only guess at. They played for almost three hours; my friends and the talkative women in the bathroom whom I overheard agreed that it was impressive.