I react to Boris Johnson’s election as Mayor by escaping to Los Angeles, in a West Coast reversal of the John Carpenter/ Kurt Russell movie Escape From New York. I’m staying up a nasturtium-banked lane not far from the house on Hollywood Boulevard where comic legend Lenny Bruce met his end . When I check this fact with a local she looks mildly taken aback with my morbid interest until I point out that Bruce had also lived in the house – not just died there.
On my last trip to LA I’d read Will Self’s excellent essay in British Airways Highlife magazine on travelling without luggage and had the image of him “labouring through suburban LA” with his Barbour slung over his shoulder. On that cab ride I’d really longed to trace his steps on foot into the city – the 10 or 15 miles across town along wide streets adorned with hyperbolic signage to the celebrated Hollywood hills that rise above Sunset Boulevard.


This is the outer edge of Laurel Canyon, a place ridiculously rich in rock folklore. From The Byrds through Frank Zappa, The Mammas and Papas, Gram Parsons, Joni Mitchell, The Buffalo Springfield, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and The Eagles – resided in these eucalyptus the topped hills. It’s the place that Mamma Cass was thinking of when she sang ‘California Dreamin’.
As Michael Walker writes in ‘Laurel Canyon: The Inside Story of Rock and Roll’s Legendary Neighbourhood’ (picked up at the Laurel Canyon Country Store), “The musicians flocking to the canyon – at night, caterwauling coyotes and hooting owls made you marvel that you were only five minutes from the noise and neon of the Sunset Strip – constituted an unprecedented breed of incipient celebrity: the rocker-hippie, as much a work in progress as the music they made”.

The rocker-hippies are largely no more it seems, replaced by preening proto-porn stars with silicone enhancing any appendage that’ll take it. The Griddle Café on Sunset, sat beside The Director’s Guild of America, seemed a particular attraction for this genre of Los Angel.

It’s a city, a place, that I found resisting definition – allergic to prose. I ventured out on a few jet-lag inspired excursions on foot and experienced the odd sensation of being greeted by literally every other fellow walker – such is the exclusivity of the cult of the pedestrian. But due to the sheer scale of the place (and the steepness of the inevitable return to base) that I was restricted to laps of the blocks along Hollywood-Sunset-Crescent Heights Boulevards. Sprawl almost seems inadequate to describe a system of town planning that gives every single building the car parking space of a small supermarket. Atomised would better describe it – but if matter were this loosely aligned the fabric of everyday objects would crumble before us.

I had Will Self with me again for company, in the form of his piece in GQ on walking LA’s Downtown district (I’ve left off a qualifying adjective but needless to add that it’s a brilliant piece of writing). He references some of the city’s onscreen rendering – Falling Down, Collateral and Blade Runner, to such an extent that the No.2 bus from the bottom of the hill that would take me there seems like the transport to another city. I never made it downtown to Will’s vision of Los Angeles. The city I found the place was at odds with the 2-D LA of TV and cinema. Few cop cars, gangsters and aggravation. More violet blossomed boulevards where SUVs lumber along languidly. The only reference to hand for me being the LA scenes in Sideways – but without the pot-bellied Paul Giamatti.