Post yoga day 12 and I meet with a friend of a friend. She’s executive producing movies, essentially sourcing proper cash, and her phone is ringing off the hook while we talk. I prove useful as she is working with Rhys Ifans but hasn’t got the knack of pronouncing his name. I tell her I want to go for a hike up to the sign. She says we should go to Griffith Observatory. We do. There are more people than she expected, but sundown is coming and I remind her that it’s a significant location in Lalaland. She had forgotten. She loved the movie. We drive most of the way up the track and swing into a parking space as soon as we see a vehicle leaving. We’ve been lucky. Parking is hard to come by here. And no surprise. The view is spectacular, across the madness of the town and off to the ocean, glinting in the distance.
LA really is a sprawl, wide and low, with a few fingers of ambitious earthquake proof high rises poking out of downtown. This is a hell of a place to watch the sunset, and lots of couples agree. My new friend is on the phone a lot, but not so much that she doesn’t take it in. We have a conversation about the big things, life and death and illness and time. I sometimes have that effect on people. She has to get to yoga for seven in Santa Monica, and at this time of day the interstate is vile. Miles of stinking pickup trucks and ubers crawling up each other’s arse and honking. Not the best yoga prep, but she’s going for it. She tells me to be careful walking back down the hill. “One of Tarantino’s producers, I think it was Tarantino, it was, it was one of Tarantino’s proDUCERS she was walking down in the dark in a place like this and she just fell off she must’ve fell off the path. They found her body the next morning. You be careful walking down there.” I promise I’ll be careful and she backs her BMW out and spins off. I’m sad to see her go. Good to meet new people in this town and I’m fond of her. We managed in a short space of time to cover comparative history, the roots of the film industry, death, Trump and yoga.
I walk down as the sun sets. The path is treacherous as there’ve been huge runnels gouged into it by the unexpected rainfall over the last few weeks. But I’m not concerned about stumbling off the edge of it. I get to the bottom to find a bust of Leif Erikson which at first I find odd. He was the first Norseman to come to America, in 1000 AD, even before the Norman Conquest of England. History calls him an explorer although it’s possible he did it by mistake. The sculptor seems to think he looked like this.
So, a bit like Agatha Christie. He landed in “Vinland” – possibly Newfoundland. Arguably there were more Viking settlements in the Americas than we ever knew. But surely they didn’t get as far as California. I go on google. It’s to do with identity. Some Danes who settled here think of him as a poster boy. It is we who first were here. And it’s pretty impressive to have so many hundreds of years of a headstart on Columbus. Columbus just had guns and a better publicist.
I walk home from the park, stopping on the way for cheap dinner at a Salvadorean roadside pupuseria. I order two pupusa for less than five bucks. I have no idea what they are. Turns out they’re closed fried crepes with pumpkin, cheese and slaw. Which is a result. They could’ve been dog’s heads. Old people vape at the next table and watch the Salvadorean Bear Grylls running around with a blonde locks and a machete talking to camera. Every time he swears it beeps. Catholics… I tuck in. They taste great. You really can get anything in this sprawl. I wonder if there’s a replica Viking mead hall anywhere. There’s a play I want to put on in one. If only I knew someone who funded things…
AlBarclay 