Measuring Time

“A good part of any day in Los Angeles is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease. There is about these hours spent in transit a seductive unconnectedness. Conventional information is missing. context clues are missing. In Culver City as in Echo Park as in East Los Angeles, there are the same pastel bungalows. There are the same leggy poinsettia and the same trees of pink and yellow hibiscus. There are the same laundromats, body shops, strip shopping malls, the same travel agencies offering bargain fares….the signs of promise, on Beverly Boulevard as on Pico as on Alvarado and Soto. ¡No más baratá! …There is the sound that of the car radio, tuned in my case to KRLA, an AM station that identifies itself as ‘the heart and soul of rock and roll’ and is given to dislocating programing concepts, for example doing the tops hits of … 1962. Another day, another KRLA concept: “The day the Music Died”, an exact radio recreation of the day that in 1959 when the plane carrying Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed … such tranced hours are, for many people who live in Los Angeles, the dead center of being there . . . . ”