San Francisco and LA
The first thing to say about this was that the St. George's Spirits Distillery in Alameda has a tour exactly as brilliant as zentiger and all his friends say it is. For $15 I got a tour by a fairly annoying over-enthusiastic guide (which is not why it was brilliant), and then a taste of two vodkas, a bourbon, a rum, an absinthe and a sweet dessert liquor, each of which was really interesting, especially the vodkas. Shame I didn't get to meet TLW or yourself, zentiger, but if ye're ever in Britain or Ireland, let me know and I'll see if I can repay your recommendation.
The rest is boring: it's only here so I don't forget.
San Francisco was quite nice; mainly I think because it's kind of like Europe. Also our apartment was in the Mission area, which is supposed to be one of the more colourful parts of the city. I did little in SF: wandered around, climbed a hill that was lovely because you could see the whole city from it, wandered further, looked for a decent coffee shop (didn't quite find one, though lots of places came close, and my standards are ridiculously exacting, so that's no criticism), poked around a few second-hand and/or niche bookshops, wore short-sleeved shirts and was able to sit still in them without feeling cold (which was really lovely), tried some restaurants with the family and ate some donuts in the artisan donuttery underneath our flat, at which donuttessen I got free donuts because its and our landlord were one and the same kindly donutter. I quite like that San Francisco has such a thing as an artisan doughnouterie, but donuts still taste like sugar to me. Americans no doubt can discern every variety of sugar even when dissolved in strong Joe.
So to LA. LA is really creepy. LAX is ugly, as was the drive thence to my hostel; downtown (where my hostel for the first night was before my family, who came down the following day, took me to the house we stayed in for the remainder) is a collection of gigantic concrete bricks strewn down with the taste of Vogons, with the space filled in by huge roads and even bigger carparks, but never trees or parks. And over all this is the haze of smog. It was for me more or less exactly what everyone says it is. Although I found the public transport pretty competent along the main arteries (even if I was helped significantly by Google Maps).
This is downtown though, which, I gather, is not actually where people go to do things; out where we stayed after my first night, West Hollywood, all is green and wealthy; endless suburbs, admittedly, but ones in which each house is designed individually, and that's quite nice, although it means that nothing is walking distance, and the public transport doesn't - and can't be expected to - adequately cover the ground. The shops in West Hollywood are also creepy, but in a different way. Downtown, they're creepy because they're all huge and kitschy; in West Hollywood, they're creepy because they're all massage parlours, pedicurists or fashion-clothing outlets. (In SF there's a bit of creepiness because of how many stores are speciality dog bakeries.)
Well enough of this. I didn't actually spend too much time gathering impressions of the city, because I was doing things with people I know most of the time. I first went to a two days of a conference on something called deontic modality, which is one of the research areas on the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. Many of the speakers and attendees were full-on linguists. I'd never seen a linguistics talk before, and, although they were interesting in a sociological way, I do hope I never see another, and I can only assume that my friend, for whose sake I was there, has gone mad. But there were two talks by philosophers, John Broome and Frank Jackson no less, and they were pretty interesting, even if only by comparison. (Both gave talks dealing in one way or another with the paradox that the following sometimes looks true, depending on how you fill in the variables: "From 'You ought to do A and B', it does not follow 'You ought to do A'".) Jackson, a septuagenarian by now, gave a rambling talk which involved him repeatedly throwing his arms up with a vigour that looked impossible for someone of his age. Broome advanced a massively controversial thesis that he could defend perfectly, and was clearly delighting in fielding incredulous and barely coherent objections from the linguists.
When I arrived in USC on the morning of the conference, I didn't know exactly where to go. But when I was close, I saw a group of people who somehow looked philosophical, followed them and ended up in the right place. I don't know what it is about philosophers that distinguishes us so. I think flannel might be part of it. A more obvious giveaway, though, was a stocky man with a huge bushy beard, a balding head and a ponytail. This man later turned out to be Adam (I think), a philosopher from Pennsylvania; and he and I spent a lot of time talking over local beers in a bar the philosophers all went to after dinner one evening. Despite this guy working on the most boring topic imaginable, he was really lovely, and had a really good understanding of avant-garde literature and even Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good, which is the most un-analytic work of philosophy I've ever read: it doesn't even really have arguments, it just sets up a way of looking at our moral life which is rich enough to do justice to it. How someone can 'get' this stuff, but then spend their time on deontic modality, is beyond me.
Anyway: on the first night, I was looking for somewhere to read, and found the city library, which was due to close half an hour after I arrived. I asked one of the librarians if she knew anywhere I could go when they closed, and she told me about a place called The Last Bookstore, right in the middle of Downtown; this place was an oasis. I arrived to an open-mic night, which was shit but interesting, and wandered around till they closed (at 11pm!), which was brilliant. The place is huge, and its entire upper floor was a dollar-a-book place, where some shelves were arranged by spine colour, where there were elaborate sculptures made out of books (such as books flying out, as if they were birds, from a bookshelf), and where there was an actual tunnel of books between two of the rooms.
Another thing that happened me was that my brother and I were given by one of mam's friends super-duper passes to one of the movie studios' theme parks. Some of the rides were pretty fun! Even the virtual rollercoasters, which are astonishingly well-crafted. Also it turns out that most ocean scenes - filmed by this studio anyway - are filmed in this one little lake with a green screen in it and a fake New York just out of shot.
On my last full day, I went to LACMA; which is really special. And that's all I have to say on that.
Probably the nicest thing I did was visit a friend who now lives in LA. I took the bus to her in Santa Monica, and we ate falafel, went to a candy store, looked at a car showroom, took a ride on a ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier. It was nice because it was a long, gentle, unpressured evening, but mainly because we talked, and especially because we talked about her recent ex-boyfriend, who's one of my best friends, and my recent ex-girlfriend, who got on with her well, though they didn't know each other well. Both relationships were serious, and I guess they're on both our minds a lot; to talk about them was perhaps the most memorable, most genuine, meaningful thing of my whole time in California.
The rest is boring: it's only here so I don't forget.
San Francisco was quite nice; mainly I think because it's kind of like Europe. Also our apartment was in the Mission area, which is supposed to be one of the more colourful parts of the city. I did little in SF: wandered around, climbed a hill that was lovely because you could see the whole city from it, wandered further, looked for a decent coffee shop (didn't quite find one, though lots of places came close, and my standards are ridiculously exacting, so that's no criticism), poked around a few second-hand and/or niche bookshops, wore short-sleeved shirts and was able to sit still in them without feeling cold (which was really lovely), tried some restaurants with the family and ate some donuts in the artisan donuttery underneath our flat, at which donuttessen I got free donuts because its and our landlord were one and the same kindly donutter. I quite like that San Francisco has such a thing as an artisan doughnouterie, but donuts still taste like sugar to me. Americans no doubt can discern every variety of sugar even when dissolved in strong Joe.
So to LA. LA is really creepy. LAX is ugly, as was the drive thence to my hostel; downtown (where my hostel for the first night was before my family, who came down the following day, took me to the house we stayed in for the remainder) is a collection of gigantic concrete bricks strewn down with the taste of Vogons, with the space filled in by huge roads and even bigger carparks, but never trees or parks. And over all this is the haze of smog. It was for me more or less exactly what everyone says it is. Although I found the public transport pretty competent along the main arteries (even if I was helped significantly by Google Maps).
This is downtown though, which, I gather, is not actually where people go to do things; out where we stayed after my first night, West Hollywood, all is green and wealthy; endless suburbs, admittedly, but ones in which each house is designed individually, and that's quite nice, although it means that nothing is walking distance, and the public transport doesn't - and can't be expected to - adequately cover the ground. The shops in West Hollywood are also creepy, but in a different way. Downtown, they're creepy because they're all huge and kitschy; in West Hollywood, they're creepy because they're all massage parlours, pedicurists or fashion-clothing outlets. (In SF there's a bit of creepiness because of how many stores are speciality dog bakeries.)
Well enough of this. I didn't actually spend too much time gathering impressions of the city, because I was doing things with people I know most of the time. I first went to a two days of a conference on something called deontic modality, which is one of the research areas on the intersection of linguistics and philosophy. Many of the speakers and attendees were full-on linguists. I'd never seen a linguistics talk before, and, although they were interesting in a sociological way, I do hope I never see another, and I can only assume that my friend, for whose sake I was there, has gone mad. But there were two talks by philosophers, John Broome and Frank Jackson no less, and they were pretty interesting, even if only by comparison. (Both gave talks dealing in one way or another with the paradox that the following sometimes looks true, depending on how you fill in the variables: "From 'You ought to do A and B', it does not follow 'You ought to do A'".) Jackson, a septuagenarian by now, gave a rambling talk which involved him repeatedly throwing his arms up with a vigour that looked impossible for someone of his age. Broome advanced a massively controversial thesis that he could defend perfectly, and was clearly delighting in fielding incredulous and barely coherent objections from the linguists.
When I arrived in USC on the morning of the conference, I didn't know exactly where to go. But when I was close, I saw a group of people who somehow looked philosophical, followed them and ended up in the right place. I don't know what it is about philosophers that distinguishes us so. I think flannel might be part of it. A more obvious giveaway, though, was a stocky man with a huge bushy beard, a balding head and a ponytail. This man later turned out to be Adam (I think), a philosopher from Pennsylvania; and he and I spent a lot of time talking over local beers in a bar the philosophers all went to after dinner one evening. Despite this guy working on the most boring topic imaginable, he was really lovely, and had a really good understanding of avant-garde literature and even Murdoch's The Sovereignty of the Good, which is the most un-analytic work of philosophy I've ever read: it doesn't even really have arguments, it just sets up a way of looking at our moral life which is rich enough to do justice to it. How someone can 'get' this stuff, but then spend their time on deontic modality, is beyond me.
Anyway: on the first night, I was looking for somewhere to read, and found the city library, which was due to close half an hour after I arrived. I asked one of the librarians if she knew anywhere I could go when they closed, and she told me about a place called The Last Bookstore, right in the middle of Downtown; this place was an oasis. I arrived to an open-mic night, which was shit but interesting, and wandered around till they closed (at 11pm!), which was brilliant. The place is huge, and its entire upper floor was a dollar-a-book place, where some shelves were arranged by spine colour, where there were elaborate sculptures made out of books (such as books flying out, as if they were birds, from a bookshelf), and where there was an actual tunnel of books between two of the rooms.
Another thing that happened me was that my brother and I were given by one of mam's friends super-duper passes to one of the movie studios' theme parks. Some of the rides were pretty fun! Even the virtual rollercoasters, which are astonishingly well-crafted. Also it turns out that most ocean scenes - filmed by this studio anyway - are filmed in this one little lake with a green screen in it and a fake New York just out of shot.
On my last full day, I went to LACMA; which is really special. And that's all I have to say on that.
Probably the nicest thing I did was visit a friend who now lives in LA. I took the bus to her in Santa Monica, and we ate falafel, went to a candy store, looked at a car showroom, took a ride on a ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier. It was nice because it was a long, gentle, unpressured evening, but mainly because we talked, and especially because we talked about her recent ex-boyfriend, who's one of my best friends, and my recent ex-girlfriend, who got on with her well, though they didn't know each other well. Both relationships were serious, and I guess they're on both our minds a lot; to talk about them was perhaps the most memorable, most genuine, meaningful thing of my whole time in California.