The Whole Thing: Escape from NoHo

Here's an update, in the form of a geo-positional overview, though I can't say I'm truly re-settled except in the sense that I'm done moving out of one place, have moved into another, and have no desperately urgent need to move again.

When I started this blog last September, I was living a few blocks from Jimi Hendrix Street in North Hollywood (aka NoHo), California. Around either corner were the entertainment industry dining spots Ca Del Sole and Barzac, and up the street (via Jimi Hendrix) was Universal City, the home of Universal Studios and allied properties (including the theme park). In honor of Universal and in what I guess was an interpretation of a gradual north-south incline, my apartment building was named "Studio Heights," and it appeared to have been designed so that, when viewed from across the street, its two interconnected four-story towers would suggest a strip of celluloid film - the apartment windows as sprocket holes, the landings together with the inside-facing walls forming frames (or "cells," as they say). From my own top-floor skylit apartment, I had an unobstructed view of richly foliate semi-suburbs and the humpbacked hillside that comprises the northern edge of L.A.'s gargantuan Griffith Park: You all know Griffith Park, or adequately picturesque parts of it, from movies like the TERMINATOR, REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, and THE AMAZING COLOSSAL MAN, among many thousands of others.

After an exhausting move-out, I'm now 36.2 Mapquest miles southeast of and at least four stories below Studio Heights, in the community of La Verne. You may be surprised to learn that you probably know La Verne, too: I happened to notice in the INLAND DAILY BULLETIN that Dustin Hoffman has been visiting "again," in (further) commemoration of the filming of THE GRADUATE somewhere in these parts, and it occurs to me that there actually is a bit of late-onset Benjaminism in my current predicament, even if there's nothing in the immediate vicinity to make one think "plastics!" or "Mrs. Robinson" or "Scarborough Fair." The town of Claremont, which has been said to boast more churches per capita than any other city in the world, shares the same area code, and around the middle-middle class housing inlet where the dogs and I have landed, the ambience is much more "Real America" than '60s social statement, with full-sized Old Glories, "Support Our Troops!" lawn placards, and big yellow ribbons impossible to miss, sometimes to be found together for two, three, four houses in a row.

Such manifestations of patriotism were rare to non-existent in my former neighborhood, but the move has required less of an adjustment than one might expect. One advantage of anomie is continuity: One can feel alone and unknown anywhere and everywhere - wherever you go, there you aren't. In another sense, this escape from NoHo may merely be the outward confirmation of my own longer-term internal evolution, though, in the typically sloppy manner of such life changes, it's also an exaggerated overcompensation. The next step for me may be a backward re-approximation, maybe around 18.1 miles and two stories closer to my former universe - but I could also see myself settling into some unexpected new orbit or accelerating to full SoCal escape velocity.

What La Verne is offering me for now is some time to think, reflect... and send my resume around. It is not, however, offering me anything like my former access to cable news, nor yet even to the blogosphere: I'm limping along on someone else's computer, and my own TV doesn't even pick up PBS, much less CNN, Fox, or MSNBC. I can catch snippets, but I have little chance for now of staying on top of the news and meta-news cycle. If I find myself able to return to favorite past topics - the Rs and Ds, war, the media, and so on - I may have to do so as from a greater remove.

I'd also like to make additional observations on the removal itself. The posts that result will inevitably be biographical, maybe even excruciatingly so, but anyone who has read this far is probably also well aware that the distance between the personal microcosm and the social-historical-political macrocosm is often smaller than it seems. Even if I can't be clued in on every twist and turn regarding Bush's National Guard service or Kerry's internal affairs, or whatever other latest pseudo-scandal or fantasy-catastrophe, I hope and trust that what I have to say will remain a valid reflection on and of the Whole Thing.

February 2004