Wednesday 16 May 2007

Milton Keynes with palm trees


So: L.A
Truthfully I saw so little of it I can't say much, other than on this brief visit it's probably not my kind of town at all. The streets seemed to be peopled with visitors from another planet, for starters: I think L.A has a higher 'weirdoes per square mile' ratio than anywhere else, which is not necessarily a bad thing - just not my thing. I supect Gary might cope with it better than me, he has an inbuilt 'nutter magnet' that is permanently set to maximum - which often leaves him at the mercy of poetry-reciting lunatics on public transport, but which also does provide him with a constant low level element of amusement/danger and a steady stream of anecdotes about bag ladies and underpants. I suspect it also provides him with a certain nonchalance regarding weirdoes; I stood, transfixed, outside the LA public library watching a man on a bench try to eat his own feet, whereas I suspect Gary would have idly noted him and mentally checked him off as something like, 'Tuesdays nutter, grade 2 lunacy, non-violent, unlikely to engage in conversation, probably hungry'.
It was also peculiar soulless as well; flying into L.A we circled over mile after sweaty mile of dusty tan squares, each containing blocks of houses and swimming pools, demarked with lines of palm trees and queued cars - but no people. It turns out I had made the classic mistake of bringing the wrong clothes to L.A - regardless of the time of year, you need summer clothing on an L.A business trip, because you will only ever be moving from one air-conditioned atrium to the next, via air-conditioned cars. Nobody walks in L.A...
I never saw the Hollywood sign. Too much smog.
The hotel was plain odd, but I did like it. Imagine 5 towers, arranged in a cross and connected by hallways (see picture). Glass elevators climb every side of these walkways. The first 8 floors of the towers were enclosed by a further roofed box, creating an atrium lined with galleries on each level looking in at the towers. The ground floor consisted largely of fountains and water features, so it looked as if each elevator came up out of the water. Within the atrium, the central tower was covered in outcrops pushing back out at the various terraces and verandas (including a whole running track, circling it at the fifth floor).
I have never been in a building that felt so much like a computer game level in my life: it was was like staying in Hotel Quake or Tomb Raider, and I imagine it would be enormously popular as a venue for a snipers convention. I never really got used to the lifts: when riding upward you would appear to suddenly punch through the roof, and suddenly find yourself climbing up the side of a massive tower in a tiny glass box, looking out at the streets - and when riding them down, I got this horrible disconcerting feeling as I passed through the roof and plummeted towards the water below, as in nightmares of falling...
In honestly, probably the least endearing thing about LA was that when I asked at the hotel where I could go locally and buy videogames, they told me the nearest place was 45 minutes away by car. That's probably a useful metric for how much I enjoy being somewhere: if the nearest videogame shop is a 45 minutes drive away, then I am clearly in the wrong place. That also helps explain why I like Tokyo so much, because (just as it is with London and rats) you are never more than 6 feet away from a videogame in Tokyo...