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when you're above them in an airplane
Thursday, June 15 2000
Kim was off in San Diego most of the day, but in the evening she stopped in at the Dr. Suzy Block Studios at its undisclosed location in downtown Los Angeles. While meeting with the various members of its staff, she familiarized herself with the wacky ongoing indoor carnival happening there. In addition to things like Kim's Bathtubgirl webcast, there is, for example, actually a plan afoot to move a genuine trailer park trailer into the studio. It would be used as a set for a webcasted show featuring a cast of fictitious simple-minded incestuous Appalachian country folk. Shux, I'll wear a black tooth patch if it means I can roll in the hay with with my sister Bobby Lou!
Concerned about getting stuck in traffic while commuting to her new "internship," Kim asked Max, Susan Block's comic radical husband, "When is a good time to avoid rush hour?" He didn't know; he said that he never leaves the building and that he was in London the last time he got stuck in traffic.
I suppose the only way to be happy living in Los Angeles is to find a way to avoid having to drive anywhere. I've successfully managed to do this, as has Kim, to a lesser extent. But now we're finding our social & entertainment lives are being pulled eastward, a place where it's nearly impossible to go except by freeway. For a few select hours every day, the freeways actually work and it's effortless to move rapidly across the city. But most of the time this is far from the case. Los Angeles ends up being more divided than united by its freeways. The emphasis on freeways as a means of connecting people was a serious miscalculation in the urban planning of the city. Without proper mass transit, Los Angeles can never actually be a real city; it can only be a collection of disconnected neighborhoods. Unfortunately, at this late stage of Los Angeles history, it's almost impossible to build a mass transit system; property values are now such that securing rights of way is prohibitively expensive. Of course, there is still a solution: close down the freeways and convert them into light rail lines. But I have a feeling we'll first have to wait for the freeways to become completely useless.
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