Comin’ into Los Angeles. Sorry
May 17, 2002
Comin’ into Los Angeles. Sorry about the pseudo name dropping last night. I sometimes fall prey to my own excitement and then start to pull back the reigns. This can be embarrassing. The 8 year old boy in me gets reprimanded by the middle aged man in me but just a little too late to hide my immaturity. I’ve slowly learned to handle myself without much social embarrassment but usually my slip is showing. My parents were always sticklers for table manners and general comportment. Dad was an officer in the airforce. My constant battle with proper decorum has led to a bizarre hybrid. Now when I try to hold it together you can feel my boorish undertone. Nobody loves the ass joke more than me. Nothing is more of a relief than when the person you are holding it together for is the first to expose their looser interior. Everything gets better from there.
Universal City Outlook. It actually exists. It seems like a phrase used to describe the way all people carry themselves in an urban environment. It may be what cities do to form the personalities of their inhabitants. The universal city outlook includes road rage, ethnocentrism, faux sophistication, ambition and a high metabolic rate. The universal country outlook is grounded, earnest, guileless and mellow. If laboratory mice were used to test these theories they would be raised in these separate environments with a control group raised in the suburbs. The subjects would be known as the city mouse & the country mouse. Nature vs nurture. Their interactions would yield outstanding fables. The city mouse could visit the country mouse and both could learn the relative merits of each environment. The fable would teach cultural relativity and tolerance. How about that! I’m amazed that nobody has done it already. I’m definitely a city mouse but I go to visit the country mice on what people call holidays. I’m never able to go more than 5 days without feeling like I have to run back to turmoil and work. I know there are many people in the city who dream of the day when they will own a place in the country and spend the rest of their life with less “stress”. If there are two types of stress ( positive and negative) one can thrive on the positive stresses of the city. The suburbs have shaped my personality. When you live in the ‘burbs you view the city as the “real” place to be . That has always stayed with me.
In actuality the Universal City Outlook is a viewpoint on Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles that overlooks Universal City in the San Fernando Valley. Its a little west of Runyon Canyon Park. Mulholland Drive travels east to west along the top of the Hollywood Hills. Its a good stretch to test any rental car’s steering capabilities and the sound pressure levels possible with the stereo system. I passed the Universal City Outlook last night and, even at high speed, the lights of the city down below were captured in one of those mental snapshots that lasts a little longer than most flash impressions. When I started writing tonight the phrase came to mind.
Oh yeah...Bruce McCulloch’s website should be up now.
brucio.com
Go there and check it out.