The Mystery that is L.A.

The week before last I went to L.A. for work. Then last week I injured my eyeball and could not blog about my trip. It was very sad. But now I am all better and hear to tell you that Los Angeles seen from the ground--by which I mean what is, in my view, the only way to see a city and start to get your fingers into it, your head around it: on foot and on public transit (which, of course, in L.A. where the car is king, is an astonishing and apocryphal notion)--is a rather fascinating and mysterious place, a place of well-hidden treasures and treasures hiding in plain sight, all separated by miles and miles of big fat nothing (which you are of course just meant to whisk past in your automobile); a place of a million tiny villages, each their own villagers who love to talk about how they never go to any of the other villages; a place that will annoy you and delight you all within the space of the same minute. Here are a few of the things I saw there (and that, it strikes me, I could have seen virtually nowhere else) that delighted me.