Walking in LA

Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/jek-a-go-go

I made my annual trip to LA last month — this time without a car, because, like everyone, times are lean for me. I had the luck of staying with a friend in West Hollywood, relatively central, and I walked a lot — up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, along to Sunset, down to Melrose.

I was walking in LA, like that Missing Persons song, and I couldn’t stop humming it to myself. I was also like the beginning of “Party in the USA,” except I didn’t have a cardigan or a multi-million-dollar tv/movie/pop franchise.

But the world opens up when you are a pedestrian in Weho. You notice things — like the numerous neon pot leaves in the windows of pharmacies, or the coiffed actors in sweatpants walking to yoga or Meisner Training classes, or, most notably, the vacant retail spaces cropping up here and there, signs of our compromised economy. It wouldn’t be that noticeable unless you were walking along the street, but I saw a lot of dark, empty spaces that all looked similar — with dusty castaway tables and odd cement bags in their dark stomachs, their facades a little less ambitious than they may have been in 2005.

A few of these spaces were even along Sunset. The strip of cafes and shops east of Cienega seemed particularly deflated. Vacant storefronts that couldn’t weather the Great Recession have cropped up — one, a gleaming white space wrapped in Gehry-esque bands of undulating metal, was empty of all merchandise, a white cube that wished it could be an Apple Store.

Places that were still open seemed a little down as well. The cafés west of Sherbourne Drive were still crowded, but seemed less exclusive, full of young people with clean hair. “You can never imagine how many children of entertainment executives there are in this city,” said my friend.

Down on Melrose, things were different. The huge primary-colored buildings of the Pacific Design Center still looked alien and unapproachable, but the strip of stores and eateries it anchored, between Robertson and Crescent Heights, was buzzing with activity.

The Urth Caffé, where B- and C-listers go to eat big leafy veggie sandwiches and try to look worthy, was overcrowded. Talkative Los Angeles showbiz types spilled out on the sidewalk. Someone here at some table or in some car was pitching Showgirls 3 or Fantastic Four 4 in 3D. Celebrity has been overbred over the last decade, and this grazing ground was full.

I was particularly aware of the men who wandered here and there along the streets in that uniform I associate with LA: jeans and nice loafers, sunglasses on the head, streaked spiky hair, t-shirts with complicated screen prints under cotton blazers.

Kitson, the popular boutique clothing store with outlets all over the city, has a shop across the street from Urth, and acts as a kind of army-surplus store for this LA-guy uniform. Walk upstairs to the second floor and you can find plenty of options to complete your casual LA style: thick hoodies, bright sneakers, distressed tees and fitted button-downs. It’s like a look into a closet shared by Johnny Bravo and Turtle from Entourage. I thumbed through some nice-looking plaid Modern Amusement shirts and soft henleys by Yigal Azrouel, on sale for roughly the price of a day’s car rental.

Here on these couple of Melrose blocks, the economy of fame and aspiration keeps chugging along. No matter how full of doom the news is these days, there are still people meeting, pitching awful reality shows and sequels and roles for themselves in them. It fills you with a weird optimism about the future — LA still seems like the land of outsized dreams.

Mike Albo is an author, a performer, a journalist, a screenwriter and a monologist, and plenty else besides, if his website is any guide.