L.A. Live: Not of This Earth
by Nathan Walpow
L.A. Live is opening beginning today (whatever that means; either it’s open or it’s not), just in time for our own Tony Chavira to rip it to shreds. The L.A. Times is all over the opening, or half-opening, or whatever it is (okay, I’ll stop), with a panoply of features in the paper and on the website:
- Economy could make it hard for L.A. Live to be the life of the downtown party is the headline on a great big article in the California section. The accompanying illustration will serve as virtual caffeine.
- A photo gallery, reminiscent of Bosch, has the charmingly inept headline LA Live prepares for its’ close-up, as if there weren’t already enough ways to screw up its and it’s.
- There’s this groovy panorama thingie, guaranteed to make you queasy, both physically and aesthetically.
- The Grammy Museum is reported upon too, sans coverage of the question of why in hell we even need a Grammy Museum. “Visitors who weren’t taken with the mix on Beck’s "Gamma Ray" [...] can remaster it at one station, while others can rap along with Jermaine Dupri.” Marvelous.
- Finally, architecture critic Christopher Knight’s review is the voice of reason here, arguing (much like Tony) that the beast has little or nothing to do with the L.A. it avers to be the Live embodiment of. A sample:
When you get right down to it, their architecture is fundamentally not really architecture at all but an extensive series of armatures on which the developer and its tenants can hang logos, video screens and a sophisticated range of lighting effects.
I’m reminded of the time I played in a Procol Harum covers band at B.B. King’s Blues Club at Universal CityWalk. During breaks in rehearsal, I wandered around the mall, and its artificiality is what struck me the most. There was nothing real there, nothing organic, nothing of the North Hollywoodish neighborhood around it, or the Hollywood that it claims to be located in, or anything else in Southern California. The whole thing just seemed fundamentally wrong to me, and thus it is with the whole extravaganza that started with Staples Center. It’s like an alien came to L.A. and talked to a visitor from Everytown, U.S.A. and an architecture student who’d accidentally gotten into his roommate’s stash of acid, and based his/her/its design on what he/she/it pulled from those interviews.
I’ll freely admit that I haven’t walked around the area in a year or so. I went to a Clippers game, and the Nokia Theatre was open, flashing its lights at me and beaming mind-melting rays at my brain, and even then I felt out of place; not because the place was way too hip for me (although it was), but because it was ... hell, I keep coming back to the word. It was wrong, unnatural, not of Los Angeles, not of California, and quite possibly not of this earth.
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