The White Album (10 page)

Doctrinaire and elitist
.
Artsy-craftsy
.
On the surface the Getty would appear to have been a case of he-knew-what-he-liked-and-he-built-it, a tax dodge from the rather louche world of the international rich, and yet the use of that word “elitist” strikes an interesting note
.
The man who built himself the Getty never saw it, although it opened a year and a half before his death
.
He seems to have liked the planning of it
.
He personally approved every paint sample
.
He is said to have taken immense pleasure in every letter received from anyone who visited the museum and liked it (such letters were immediately forwarded to him by the museum staff), but the idea of the place seems to have been enough, and the idea was this: here was a museum built not for those elitist critics but for “the public
.
”
Here was a museum that would be forever supported by its founder alone, a museum that need never depend on any city or state or federal funding, a place forever “open to the public and free of all charges
.
”

As a matter of fact large numbers of people who do not ordinarily visit museums like the Getty a great deal, just as its founder knew they would
.
There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here
.
On the whole “the critics” distrust great wealth, but “the public” does not
.
On the whole “the
critics”
subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but “the public” does not
.
In the end the Getty stands above the Pacific Coast Highway as one of those odd monuments, a palpable contract between the very rich and the people who distrust them
least.

1977

the closed door
upstairs at 120 South Spring Street in downtown Los Angeles is marked
operations center
.
In the win
dowless room beyond the closed door a reverential hush prevails
.
From six
a
.
m
.
until seven
p
.
m
.
in this windowless room men sit at consoles watching a huge board flash colored lights
.
“There’s the heart attack,” someone will murmur, or “we’re getting the gawk effect
.
”
120 South Spring is the Los Angeles office of Caltrans, or the California Department of Transportation, and the Operations Center is where Caltrans engineers monitor what they call “the 42-Mile Loop
.
”
The 42-Mile Loop is simply the rough triangle formed by the intersections of the Santa Monica, the San Diego and the Harbor freeways, and 42 miles represents less than ten per cent of freeway mileage in Los Angeles County alone, but these particular 42 miles are regarded around 120 South Spring with a special veneration
.
The Loop is a “demonstration system,” a phrase much favored by everyone at Caltrans, and is part of a “pilot project,” another two words carrying totemic weight on South Spring
.
The Loop has electronic sensors embedded every half-mile out there in the pavement itself, each sensor counting the crossing cars every twenty seconds
.
The Loop has its own mind, a Xerox Sigma V computer which prints out, all day and night, twenty-second readings on what is and is not moving in each of the Loop’s eight lanes
.
It is the Xerox Sigma V that makes the big board flash red when traffic out there drops below fifteen miles an hour
.
It is the Xerox Sigma
V that tells the Operations crew when they have an “incident” out there
.
An “incident” is the heart attack on the San Diego, the jackknifed truck on the Harbor, the Camaro just now tearing out the Cyclone fence on the Santa Monica
.
“Out there” is where incidents happen
.
The windowless room at 120 South Spring is where incidents get “verified
.
”
“Incident verification” is turning on the closed-circuit TV on the console and watching the traffic slow down to see (this is “the gawk effect”) where the Camaro tore out the fence
.

As a matter of fact there is a certain closed-circuit aspect to the entire mood of the Operations Center
.
”
Verifying” the incident does not after all “prevent” the incident, which lends the enterprise a kind of tranced distance, and on the day recently when I visited 120 South Spring it took considerable effort to remember what I had come to talk about, which was that particular part of the Loop called the Santa Monica Freeway
.
The Santa Monica Freeway is 16
.
2 miles long, runs from the Pacific Ocean to downtown Los Angeles through what is referred to at Caltrans as “the East-West Corridor,” carries more traffic every day than any other freeway in California, has what connoisseurs of freeways concede to be the most beautiful access ramps in the world, and appeared to have been transformed by Caltrans, during the several weeks before I went downtown to talk about it, into a 16
.
2-mile parking lot
.

The problem seemed to be another Caltrans “demonstration,” or “pilot,” a foray into bureaucratic terrorism they were calling “The Diamond Lane” in their promotional literature and “The Project” among themselves
.
That the promotional
li
terature consisted largely of schedules for buses (or “Diamond Lane Expresses”) and invitations to join a car pool via computer (“Commuter Computer”) made clear not only the putative point of The Project, which was to encourage travel by car pool and bus, but also the actual point, which was to eradicate a central Southern California illusion, that of individual mobility, without anyone really noticing
.
This had not exactly worked out
.
“freeway fiasco,”
the
Los Angeles Times
was headlining page-one stories,
“the diamond lane: another bust by caltrans
.
”
“caltrans pilot effort another in long list of failures
.
”
“official diamond lane stance: let them howl
.
”

All “The Diamond Lane” theoretically involved was reserving the fast inside lanes on the Santa Monica for vehicles carrying three or more people, but in practice this meant that 25 per cent of the freeway was reserved for 3 per cent of the cars, and there were other odd wrinkles here and there suggesting that Caltrans had dedicated itself to making all movement around Los Angeles as arduous as possible
.
There was for example the matter of surface streets
.
A “surface street” is anything around Los Angeles that is not a freeway (“going surface” from one part of town to another is generally regarded as idiosyncrat
ic), and surface streets do not
fall directly within the Caltrans domain, but now the engineer in charge of surface streets was accusing Caltrans of threatening and intimidating him
.
It appeared that Caltrans wanted him to create a “confused and congested situation” on his surface streets, so as to force drivers back to the freeway, where they would meet a still more confused and congested situation and decide to stay home, or take a bus
.
“We are beginning a process of deliberately making it harder for drivers to use freeways,” a Caltrans director had in fact said at a transit conference some months before
.
“We are prepared to endure considerable public outcry in order to pry John Q
.
Public out of his car
.
...
I would emphasize that this is a political decision, and one that can be reversed if the public gets sufficien
tly
enraged to throw us rascals out
.
”

Of course this political decision was in the name of the greater good, was in the interests of “environmental improvement” and “conservation of resources,” but even there the figures had about them a certain Caltrans opacity
.
The Santa Monica normally carried 240,000 cars and trucks every day
.
These 240,000 cars and trucks normally carried 260,000 people
.
What Caltrans described as its ultimate goal on the Santa Monica was to carry the same 260,000 people,”but in 7,800 fewer, or 232,200 vehicles
.
”
The figure “232,200” had a visionary precision to it that did not automatically create confidence, especially since the only effect so far had been to disrupt traffic throughout the Los Angeles basin, triple the number of daily accidents on the Santa Monica, prompt the initiation of two lawsuits against Caltrans, and cause large numbers of Los Angeles County residents to behave, most uncharacteristically, as an ignited and conscious proletariat
.
Citizen guerrillas splashed paint and scattered nails in the Diamond Lanes
.
Diamond Lane maintenance crews expressed fear of hurled objects
.
Down at 120 South Spring the architects of the Diamond Lane had taken to regarding “the media” as the architects of their embarrassment, and Caltrans statements in the press had been cryptic and contradictory, reminiscent only of old
communiqués
out of Vietnam
.

To understand what was going on it is perhaps necessary to have participated in the freeway experience, which is the only secular communion Los Angeles has
.
Mere driving on the freeway is in no way the same as participating in it
.
Anyone can “drive” on the freeway, and many
people with no vocation for it
do, hesitating here and resisting there, losing the rhythm of the lane change, thinking about where they came from and where they are going
.
Actual participants think only about where they are
.
Actual participation requires a total surrender, a concentration so intense as to seem a kind of narcosis, a rapture-of-the-freeway
.
The mind goes clean
.
The rhythm takes over
.
A distortion of time occurs, the same distortion that characterizes the instant before an accident
.
It takes only a few seconds to get off the Santa Monica Freeway at National-Overland, which is a difficult exit requiring the driver to cross two new lanes of traffic streamed in from the San Diego Freeway, but those few seconds always seem to me the longest part of the trip
.
The moment is dangerous
.
The exhilaration is in doing it
.
“As you acquire the special skills involved,” Reyner Banham observed in an extraordinary chapter about the freeways in his 1971
Los Angeles: The
Architecture of Four Ecologies, “
the freeways become a special way of being alive
...
the extreme concentration required in Los Angeles seems to bring on a state of heightened awareness that some locals find mystical
.
”

Indeed some locals do, and some nonlocals too
.
Reducing the number of lone souls careering around the East-West Corridor in a state of mechanized rapture may or may not have seemed socially desirable, but what it was definitely not going to seem was easy
.
“W
e’re
only seeing an initial period of urifamiliarity” I was assured the day I visited Caltrans
.
I was talking to a woman named Eleanor Wood and she was thoroughly and professionally grounded in the diction of “planning” and it did not seem likely that I could interest her in considering the freeway as regional mystery
.
“Any time you try to rearrange people
’s
daily habits, they’re apt to react impetuously
.
All this project requires is a certain rearrangement of people’s daily planning
.
That
’s
really all we want
.
”

It occurred to me that a certain rearrangement of people’s daily planning might seem, in less rarefied air than is breathed at 120 South Spring, rather a great deal to want, but so impenetrable was the sense of higher social purpose there in the Operations Center that I did not express this reservation
.
Instead I changed the subject, mentioned an earlier “pilot project” on the Santa Monica: the big electronic message boards that Caltrans had installed a year or two before
.
The id
ea was that traffic information
transmitted from the Santa Monica to the Xerox Sigma V could be translated, here in the Operations Center, into suggestions to the driver, and flashed right back out to the Santa Monica
.
This operation, in that it involved telling drivers electronically what they already knew empirically, had the rather spectral circularity that seemed to mark a great many Caltrans schemes, and I was interested in how Caltrans thought it worked
.