Lawrence Weschler Vermeer in Bosnia, Pantheon Books: NY, 2004.
(The chapter The Light of L.A. appeared as L.A. Glows in the 23 February 1998 The New Yorker.)
The Light of L.A.
". . . It's that light! That's the light I keep telling you girls about." You girls: her mother and her. That light: the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles-golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds. A light I've found myself pining for every day of the nearly two decades since I left Southern California.
" . . . everybody knew exactly what I was talking about. The light of the place is a subject that Angelenos are endlessly voluble about -only, it turns out, people bring all sorts of different, and sometimes even diametrically opposite, associations to the subject.
"For example, David Hockney maintains that the extravagant light of Los Angeles was one of the strongest lures drawing him to Southern California in the first place, more than thirty years ago -and, in fact, long before that. "As a child, growing up in Bradford, in the North of England, across the gothic gloom of those endless winters," he recalls, "I remember how my father used to take me along with him to see the Laurel and Hardy movies. And one of the things I noticed right away, long before I could even articulate it exactly, was how Stan and Ollie, bundled in their winter overcoats, were casting these wonderfully strong, crisp shadows. We never got shadows of any sort in winter. And already I knew that someday I wanted to settle in a place with winter shadows like that. In fact years later, when I staged The Magic Flute, its aspect of the story that I keyed onto-this journey from darkness toward the light, how the light pulls and pulls you. It certainly did me, anyway; the light and those strong, crisp shadows."
Robert Irwin, one of the presiding masters of L.A.'s Light and Space artistic movement of the late sixties and early seventies, and a native Angeleno, concurred that there's something extraordinary about the light of L.A., though he said that it was sometimes hard to characterize it exactly.
"The thing is it's so radically different from day to day," he explained, "and then so incredibly specific on any given day."
"One of its most common features, however," he suggested, "is the haze that fractures the light, scattering it in such a way that on many days the world has almost no shadows. Broad daylight - and, in fact, lots and lots of light - and no shadows. Really peculiar, almost dreamlike.
"It's a high light, as opposed to the kind of deep light you might get, say in the Swiss Alps, where your eye keeps getting drawn to the object- say, to that snow-capped peak on the far end of the valley. Here, instead, you're likely to find your eye becoming suspended somewhere in the middle distance, and it can almost get to be as if the world were made up of energy rather than matter."
"I love walking down the street when the light gets all reverberant, bouncing around like that, and everything's just humming in your face."
"A few days after my conversation with Irwin, I happened to be talking with John Bailey, the cinematographer, most recently of As Good As It Gets, and he energetically confirmed Irwin's observation: "I have a sophisticated light meter, which in my work I'm always consulting. Most places in the world when it's overcast enough so that you get no shadows, the meter lets you know you have to set your aperture a stop to a stop and a half below full sun. Here in L.A. the same kind of diffuse light, no shadows -I could hardly believe the first time I encountered this -and my meter will read almost the same as for full sunlight. Other days, though, you'll be getting open sun, which, of course, here means open desert sun- a harshly contrasting light. After all, for all its human settlement, the Southland is still this freak of nature-a desert abutting the sea. And open desert light is very harsh -you get these deep, deep shadows. Your eye subjectively makes these incredibly sophisticated adjustments so that you're able to see into the shadows, but film stock tends to be incapable of such subtleties: you get the sunlit area and what's in shadow just reads as black, unless you compensate with fill-light aimed into the dark patches . . ."
"I mentioned the Laurel and Hardy shadows of Hockney's youth. "Exactly," Bailey said, "Shadows and no shadows -that's the duality of L.A. light, isn't it? And how appropriate for a place where the sun rises in the desert and sets in the ocean."
"But for all that, the main thing about the light here is its consistency," Bailey continued. "Of course, the early independent producers originally made their way out here, toward the end of the first decade of this century, so as to get out from under the thumb of the Edison Trust." . . . back in New York and New Jersey, Thomas Edison initially attempted to enforce a dubiously broad patent hegemony through the creation of a trust which deployed lawyers, detectives, thugs, and even sharpshooters to upend the efforts of any mavericks who refused to fork over the arbitrarily mandated licensing fees. . . . one of the main things that L.A. had going for it at the outset in those early days was its geographic location . . . "from the Mexican border and escape from any injunctions and subpoenas."
"But what they really stumbled upon here," Bailey went on, "was the consistency of the light. So much light, and so many days of it. Back east they'd have to cease production throughout the winter: all those gray cold days when even if the cameras didn't freeze up, they'd barely be able to register anything on film without the use of banks and banks of these incredibly expensive klieg lights." ( . . . such light banks became even more prohibitively expensive during the ensuing decade, when war-inspired shortages seriously constricted the supplies of coal necessary to power them.) . . . But here there were hardly any clouds and the light on any given day stayed consistent pretty much the whole day through.
". . . .
". . . I called Hal Zirin, out at Caltech -the man who founded . . . the solar observatory up at Big Bear Lake. I suppose I was wondering how the sun itself looked in the light of L.A. "Ah, Southern California," Zirin responded, with improbably enthusiasm. "God's gift to astronomy!" . . .
". . . Mount Wilson, Mount Palomar, the Griffith Observatory, our solar observatory out at Big Bear . . . It's not for nothing that during the first two-thirds of this century a good three-quarters of the most significant discoveries in astronomy were made here in Southern California.
". . .
". . . it's all thanks to the incredible stability, the uncanny stillness of the air around L.A. It goes back to that business people are always talking about-a desert thrusting up against the ocean, and, specifically, against the eastern shore of a northern ocean, with its cold, clockwise, southward-moving current. Because, owing to the rotation of the earth, the prevailing currents in the northern hemisphere run clockwise; eastwardly along the equator, in this instance, till they hit Asia, at which point warm tropical currents arch northward, skirting Japan, until they eventually curve back beneath Alaska, where they cool before running southward along the California coast. Hence, the cold California current. And the other crucial element in the mix is these high mountain ranges girdling the basin-so that what happens here is that ocean-cooled air drifts in over the coastal plain and gets trapped beneath the warmer desert air floating in over the mountains to the east. That's the famous thermal inversion, and the opposite of the usual arrangement, where warm surface air progressively cools as it rises. There's a relative lack of clouds- clouds of course being a big problem if you're trying to observe the heavens- because there's relatively little evaporation over the cool water. And the atmosphere below the inversion layer is incredibly stable. You must have noticed, for instance, how, if you're on a transcontinental jet coming in for a landing at LAX, once you pass over the mountains on your final approach, no matter how turbulent the flight may have been prior to that, suddenly the plane becomes completely silent and steady and still . . . That's the stable air of L.A."
". . . "Have you noticed, for instance, how if you go out to the Arizona desert, say, it may be incredibly clear but the road off in the distance is shimmering? That's the heat rising in waves off the surface of the ground. On the other hand, go out to the Santa Monica palisade and gaze out over the cool water. It's completely clear and distinct, clean out to the horizon. The heat rising from the ground in most places-or, rather, the resultant interplay of pockets of hot and cold air, acting like distorting lenses in the atmosphere up above-is in turn what makes stars shimmer and twinkle in the night sky. A twinkling star can be be very pretty and romantic, but twinkling is distortion, by definition, and if you're an astronomer you want your star-or, for that matter, your sun, if that's what you're looking at-to be distortion-free: solid as a rock. And that's what you get here. The stars don't twinkle in L.A."
"And, it occurred to me, that might also account for the preternatural clarity of the encircling mountains, off in the distance-that hushed sense you sometimes get that you could reach out and touch them-on those smog-free days, that is, when you're able to see them at all.
". . .
". . . Glen Cass, at Caltech . . . professor of environmental engineering with a very specific interest in smog: he could care less about its carcinogenic implications, or its contribution to everything from emphysema to the thinning of the ozone layer; what obsesses him is the effect of air pollution on visibility-in other words, exactly why it is that some afternoons he can go up on the roof of the Millikan Library there at Caltech, gaze out toward the towering San Gabriel Mountains, less than five miles to the north, and not make out a thing through the bright, white (shadow-obliterating) atmospheric haze.
". . . I grew up here in Pasadena, and when I was a kid the mountains were a marvelous everyday presence, as indeed they remained until the fifties and sixties when smog really began to get out of hand. It may be that the experience of smog-and for that matter of light generally-is so pronounced here in L.A. as opposed to elsewhere because the uninterrupted visual range is so potentially vast. We live on a flat expanse, sloping gently toward the ocean and backed up against these really huge mountains. [Mount Wilson is almost a mile high, Mount Baldy, 10,080 feet, and San Gorgonio Mountain, 11,502, all of them rising straight up from sea level.] Maybe people elsewhere aren't so aware of the reduced visual range caused by their own air pollution . . . because they can't see that far horizontally . . .
"Well, it turns out that there are all sorts of different sizes of particles floating in the air-from absolutely minuscule to relatively large and coarse," he explained. "Some of those-and especially the larger ones-simply get in the way of the line of vision between you and say, that mountain over there. They blot out or defract the beams of reflected sunlight emanating from the mountain that would otherwise be conveying visual details to your eyes. Contrary to what you might think, though, it's not so much the large, coarse particles that pose the biggest problem. Instead, it's those of a specific intermediate size-about half a micrometer, to be exact-that constitute the jokers in the deck when it comes to visibility.
"And the thing about particles of that size is that they happen to have about the same diameter as the wavelength of natural sunlight. So that, when the sunlight from over my shoulder, say, hits one of those particles floating between me and the mountain that I'm trying to make out, the light bounces off the particle and right into my eye. On some days there can be billions of such particles in the line of sight between me and the mountain-each of them with the mirror like potential to bounce white sunlight directly back into my eye. It can get to be like having a billion tiny suns between you and the thing you're trying to see. That's what the white stuff is. And we have a technical term for it.
". . .
"We call it airlight."
"The next morning, I happened to be jogging on the beach in Santa Monica, heading north, in the direction of Malibu, as the sun was rising behind me. The sky was already bright, though the sun was still occluded behind a low-clinging fog bank over LAX. The Malibu mountains up ahead were dark and clear and distinct . . . Presently, the sun must have broken out from behind the fog bank-I realized this because suddenly the sand around me turned pale purplish pink and my own long shadow shot out before me. I looked up at the mountains and they were gone: lost in the airlight.
". . .
"Actually, the air-pollution situation in L.A. has been improving . . .
"There are fewer and fewer days of sheer airlight white out . . .
"Nevertheless, the light seems more uncanny than ever-or, rather, it may simply be reverting to its original splendor. What with the thermal inversion, even as the smog has subsided a softer version of airlight phenomenon has persisted -one that Juan Cabrillo, the first European to venture into these parts, back in 1542 . . . noted, labeled the curve of shore "The Bay of Smokes." Back in 1946, Carey McWilliams, the poet laureate of California historians, recorded how, the region's aridity notwithstanding, "the charm of Southern California is largely to be found in the air and light. Light and air are really one element: indivisible, mutually interacting, thoroughly interpenetrated."
"When the sunlight is not screened and filtered by the moisture laden air, the land is revealed in all its semiarid poverty. The bald, sculptured mountains stand forth in a harsh and glaring light. But let the light turn soft with ocean mist, and miraculous changes occur. The bare mountain ranges, appallingly harsh in contour, suddenly become wrapped in an entrancing ever-changing loveliness of light and shadow . . . and the land itself becomes a thing of beauty.
McWilliams went on to point out how, typically, desert light "brings out the sharpness of points, angles, and forms. But . . . this is not a desert light nor is it tropical for it has neutral tones. (Elsewhere he suggests that "the color of the land is in the light.) It is Southern California light and it has no counterpart in the world."
". . . recalling McWilliam's comments . . . with the architect Coy Howard . . . "It's an incredibly loaded subject - this diaphanous soup we live in . . . It feels primeval - there's a sense of the undifferentiated, the non-hierarchical. It's not exactly a dramatic light. In fact, 'dramatic' is exactly what it's not. If anything, it's meditative. And there's something really peculiar about it. In places where you get a crisp, sharp light with deep, clean shadows -which you do get here sometimes -you get confronted with a strong contrasting duality: illumination and opacity. But when you have the kind of veiled light we get here more regularly you become aware of a sort of multiplicity-not illumination so much as luminosity. Southern California glows, not just all day but at night as well, and the opacity melts away into translucency, and even transparency."
". . . Howard tried again.
"Things in the light here have a kind of threeness instead of the usual twoness. There's the thing-the object-and its shadow, but then a sense of reflection, as well. You know how you can be walking along the beach, let's say, and you'll see a seagull walking along ahead of you, and a wave comes in, splashing its feet. At that moment, you'll see the bird, its shadow, and its reflection. Well, there's something about the environment here-the air, the atmosphere, the light-that makes everything shimmer like that. There's a kind of glowing thickness to the world -the diaphanous soup I was talking about-which, in turn, grounds a magic-meditative sense of presence."
"The poet Paul Vangelisti knew exactly what Coy Howard was getting at when I related our conversation to him . . .
. . . the pigeon flock
soaring and tumbling every noon
silver then white then sunlight
against the weight of air at the window.
"Coy Howard's associations run to seagulls and mine run to pigeons-maybe not that surprising a convergence after all, since birds are the true citizens of light. But I know just what he means about the sense of threeness-silver then white then sunlight-and about the meditative, as opposed to the dramatic, quality of the light here."
"The light is a constantly recurring theme among the poets of L.A., but I can think of few whose work is as light-saturated, as light-blasted, as Vangelisti's . . .
"For one thing . . . I think the light of L.A. is the whitest light I've ever seen, and the sky is one of the highest . . . there's a strange thing that happens with the sense of distance and of expanse. Because from here in Echo Park the ocean off in the distance is oceanic, but so is the intervening land, and indeed so is the sky. It's that even, undifferentiated, non-hierarchical quality Coy Howard is talking about. And a weird thing is how that light yields a simultaneous sense of distance and of flatness: things seem very sharp up close and far away, with nothing in between, and the uncanny result is that you lose yourself-somehow not outwardly, but, rather, inwardly. Here the light draws you inward."
"Anne Ayres, the gallery director at the Otis Institute, told me that some days the light of L.A. can drive her into a state of "egoless bliss" . . .
". . . the director Peter Bogdanovich ". . . I hate the way the light of the place throws you into such a trance that you fail to realize how time is passing. It's like what Orson Welles once told me. "The terrible thing about L.A. . . . is that you sit down, you're twenty-five, and when you get up you're sixty-two."
"But light is over!" Paul Schimmel, the chief curator at MOCA . . . "There hasn't been light in this city for more than ten years now." [He organized Helter Skelter, a show] . . . to prove precisely that in 1992. On first arriving in L.A., in 1981, Schimmel had half expected to encounter some third- or fouth-generation version of the Light and Space orthodoxies that had come to be so closely identified with the L.A. art scene during the sixties and the early seventies - through the hegemony of masters ranging from Robert Irwin to Richard Diebenkorn. Instead, he found a younger generation of artists-exemplified by the likes of Mike Kelley and Nancy Rubins-who seemed to have rejected the light aesthetic entirely, opting instead for a decidedly darker, seedier, more grimly unsettling and dystopian view of the L.A. reality. "Partly," Schimmel speculated, "this was because by the late seventies and early eighties light in L.A. had been so academicized that it had really become little more than a commercial cliché. There was nowhere else to go with it. In part, too, long before a lot of other people, these artists were onto some of the bleak social transformations that were eroding the city itself. Helter Skelter closed on a Sunday, and the worst riots in the city's history erupted the following Wednesday."
"Of course, in its very title, the Helter Skelter show acknowledged the fact that its countervision of the L.A. reality was itself rooted in a long countertradition-one that wended back from the Manson murders into the noir world of the great crime novelists and filmmakers of the thirties and forties. It's interesting how those noir novelists and filmmakers almost completely inoculated themselves against the blandishments of the light of L.A., in part by setting most of their scenes either at night or indoors - in fact, usually both . . .
". . .
". . . [D.J.] Waldie . . . said, "The light around here is quite remarkable, isn't it? In fact, I gave the matter some thought on my walk home this evening. And it seems to me, actually that there are four-or, anyway, at least four-lights in L.A. To begin with, there's the cruel, actinic light of late July. Its glare cuts piteously through the general shabbiness of Los Angeles. Second comes the nostalgic, golden light of late October. It turns Los Angeles into El Dorado, a city of fool's gold. It's the light William Faulkner-in his story Golden Land-called "treacherous unbrightness. It's the light the tourists come for-the light, to be more specific, of unearned nostalgia. Third, there's the gunmetal-gray light of the months between December and July. Summer in Los Angeles doesn't begin until mid-July. In the months before, the light can be as monotonous as Seattle's. Finally comes the light, clear as stone-dry champagne, after a full day of rain. Everything in this light is somehow simultaneously particularized and idealized: each perfect, specific, ideal little tract house, one beside the next. And that's the light that breaks hearts in L.A."
". . ."
". . . Vin Scully . . . the legendary radio announcer for the L.A. Dodgers, has spent his life in that life, broadcasting the sunset itself . . . "come late July, with the sun setting off third base, the air actually turns purple tinged with gold . . ."
". . . my maternal grandfather, an Austrian Jewish modernist composer Ernst Toch, found himself exiled into that light. He and my grandmother lived on the Franklin Street hill, at the very edge of Santa Monica and Brentwood, north of Wilshire, in a house facing out toward the Santa Monica Mountains . . .
". . . "Well, no wonder you can compose, with a view like that!"
". . . "Well, actually, no. When I compose, I have to close the curtains."