A Weekend in Tinseltown, Part II

[tealin]

Yes, Part II ... Part I will arrive when I have found the appropriate clips on YouTube to fully illustrate its awesomeness.

We went on an L.A. Public Transit adventure today. It does exist! Only, if you live in Burbank, you're not cool enough for it to bother with you. We drove to Pasadena to catch the Gold Line into downtown. Functioning trains, imagine that! A nice way to see new parts of the city, too. Union Station was quite impressive in that Art Deco/Mission kind of way, and the Red Line stations – massive, cavernous things with no one in them. Granted, it was a Sunday, but compared to how packed the Tube stations were all the time last year it was weird to see something roughly similar so deserted.

Half the purpose of our trip downtown was to catch Mass at the cathedral. What an odd place. As you walk up to it it looks for all the world like a CG set, no doubt in part because of the single light source and acute angles that look like forced perspective.* We've been going to a lot of museums lately and I kept expecting to have to pay admission at a desk just inside the doors but, luckily, no. The inside felt like no less of a sci-fi set and while the scale (which you can't come close to capturing in a photo) was mightily impressive, something about the space and the proceedings made me really understand how the rest of the world seems to view the Catholic church as a massive beaurocracy with a billion souls under its thumb.

By the way, can anyone tell me why the LA Yellow Pages don't list chiropractors anywhere?


*Or vast angles and stone surfaces too great to belong to any thing right or proper for this earth, with the abnormal geometry of dimensions apart from ours, if you've been reading as much Lovecraft as I have lately.

Comments

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

A billion souls that are free to leave any time they want. I came to the church late in my life and have found it incredibly rewarding, rich, varied, fascinating, giving, and revealing.

[(Anonymous)]

which is why the inhuman architecture was perhaps a bad choice for a cathedral....

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Agreed. It would have made a very impressive seat of government or finance. Whatever happened to the days of banks whose lobbies cowed their customers? Now it's all friendly linoleum and acoustic tiles in an ordinary office. Give me 'MONEY IS POWER! TREMBLE, YE WHO ENTER HERE!'

Additionally, monocles should be part of the dress code. How can you take a banker seriously if he's not in pinstripes and a monocle? And shiny shoes. Why should I trust my money to someone who looks like he just came back from a whitewater rafting holiday?

I digress.

[noodledaddy.livejournal.com]

No perhaps about it. It should be a friendly, warm, inviting place, but not too homey as to be too comfortable.