America. Группа авторов
year. This cultural center doesn’t just showcase the past: it shows films and regularly holds big concerts, creating monster road blockages, next to which the traffic on Highway 405 would seem like child’s play to you. Just beyond the museum, you come to the “Champs-Élysées of America,” where I sometimes do a bit of shopping to keep myself “up-to-date” in the clothes department, as the SAPEURS, the Congolese Society of Elegant Dressers, would say . . .
Why my insistence on visiting Mid-Wilshire? So you could see Los Angeles as a vast ensemble and realize that the center of town—or “Downtown,” as they say here—is in fact just a space captured in the broad net of a conglomerate of districts, and that it’s wrong to expect, as most tourists do, to find a clear divide between a main town on the one hand and a set of dependent—and therefore less important—suburbs on the other. This is the thing I like most about Los Angeles county: you can’t tell where the center is, you think you’re in and at the center wherever you happen to be. Anyone who lives in Santa Monica or Venice is likely to say “I live in Los Angeles,” not by way of abbreviation, but to indicate that the various different towns, the different districts of the county, are all guardians of the spirit of Los Angeles, so that it isn’t just a single fixed place, with precise geographical coordinates. The defining characteristic of this metropolis is its ability to exist in all its many different cultures, populations, activities, customs, and even obsessions . . .
Ethiopia in Los Angeles
No doubt you would have asked me where to find Africa in Los Angeles. And I’d have replied that Africa can be found even here in Mid-Wilshire, where I’d have invited you to lunch in Little Ethiopia. We’d have gone down Fairfax Avenue to get to the heart of the place, between Olympic and Pico Boulevards, streets all lined, like Miracle Mile, with shops and restaurants, but here heaped all in a great muddle redeemed only by the festive vibe, swarming with people, in an atmosphere that makes you feel you must be somewhere on the Black Continent. Little Ethiopia started expanding in the early 1990s, gradually replacing the Jewish shopkeepers and, in the 2000s, thanks to the Democratic mayor, James K. Hahn, and in recognition of the concentration of people from the Horn of Africa, the area was officially rebaptized Little Ethiopia.
You’d no doubt have objected that most of the restaurants in this district are Ethiopian or Eritrean and don’t represent the cuisine of my continent. You’d not be wrong there, but having said that, Ethiopia is one of the nations we Africans are most proud of. In each of the restaurants in Little Ethiopia—Messob, for example, an Ethiopian restaurant I eat at once a week—you of course encounter the portrait of Haile Selassie I, the last emperor of Ethiopia, considered by the Rastafarian movement to be the leader of the Earth. His heroism is celebrated in the black and white photos and paintings proudly displayed by the owner of Messob. As soon as he sets eyes on me, he’s brimming with kindness, patting his little belly before folding me in his arms and exclaiming for joy:
“My brother from Congo-Brazza! Welcome to your home!”
Then, as usual, he’d have told me how Haile Selassie refused to acknowledge Italian colonization, convinced that he alone, as noble representative of the dynasty of Kings David and Solomon, had dominion over his territory.
In this restaurant, Ethiopian music is constantly playing in the background, and sometimes you hear the voice of Bob Marley, global ambassador of rastas. I’d order my usual dish, kitfo, which I love for its spicy flavors of minced beef and homemade cheese, all served with a kind of very thin pancake, called injera. The boss would have stood there watching over my first mouthfuls, waiting for my verdict on his cooking. I’d have nodded my head and he’d have whispered, delightedly:
“You should thank King Haile Selassie and Bob Marley . . .”
And once again the owner of Messob Ethiopian restaurant would have gone into great detail, describing the mythical journey the king made to Jamaica, where the whole population was in a state of trance because at last, after so many centuries, the long-awaited Messiah had come!
A bridge for suicide?
After a copious lunch at Messob, we’d have crossed to Pasadena, on the east side of Los Angeles, not to contemplate the splendid San Gabriel Mountains but to admire the Colorado Street Bridge, known as Suicide Bridge. I’d have noticed concern on your face at the dark and daunting name of the structure. Especially as I’d have told you that Suicide Bridge is a fount of different beliefs, legends, and superstitions—as in my country of origin, where bridges are inhabited by wicked spirits who, believing the bridge will collapse and they will drown, are unable to cross the water to find peace in the world beyond. Which is why they cling to the pylons and suspension cables, waiting for the day when the Lord will have mercy on them and suggest an alternative means of transport for getting, at long last, to heaven.
No, I wouldn’t have spent too much time scaring you with my African beliefs about bridges. I would simply have informed you that Suicide Bridge, erected at the beginning of the twentieth century, cost the American taxpayer over four million dollars and today is one of the most highly prized of all historic monuments. I’d have gone on at once to tell you that the first time, it was pure chance that brought me face-to-face with this structure.
Chance? Let’s say coincidence, rather, as you will soon realize, if you will permit the following digression . . .
When I moved to Santa Monica in 2005, I often used to hang out on Montana Avenue, making my way down to Ocean Avenue, a stone’s throw from the sea, where the famous Santa Monica Pier Ferris wheel, constructed in 1909, dominates the view, towering over the crowd of tourists farther down, at the far end of the jetty. Montana Avenue is pretty much the chic center of the district, with its luxury boutiques, café terraces, and a profusion of convertible cars of varying degrees of fabulousness. It’s also the refuge of those movie stars who reject the bright lights of Beverly Hills or Hollywood in favor of the more laid-back feel of Santa Monica and its proximity to the sea.
It was during one of these meanderings, shortly after I had arrived, that I discovered the Aero Theatre cinema—established in the 1930s by the Douglas Aircraft Company—which specializes in showing films around the clock, seven days a week. There’s always someone chatty in the box office who’ll tell you Robert Redford used to come here when he was a kid.
Though it closed down in 2003 for financial reasons, Aero Theatre opened its doors again the year I came to live in this neighborhood, after complete refurbishment, and instantly became one of those cultural venues the municipality of Santa Monica loves to show off in television ads or leaflets aimed at every resident. It was in this pleasantly intimate establishment that I rediscovered Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, and was introduced for the first time to the Suicide Bridge of Pasadena in the scene in which “the Tramp,” played by Chaplin himself, comes to the rescue of a young woman accompanied by her child, who is just about to jump to her death from the bridge. The Kid came out in 1921, and it was proof that cinema sometimes echoes reality: Suicide Bridge was in fact where many Americans ended their lives when faced with the hardships of the economic crisis of the 1930s. Today, as a precaution, there are barriers to stop visitors from following in the footsteps of these unhappy souls, the most famous of which was the British-American actor, presenter, and model Sam Sarpong, who died in 2015 at age forty. Despite the efforts of his family and the Los Angeles fire department to dissuade him from committing the irrevocable, he threw himself off Suicide Bridge and into the void. Followers of certain television series had enjoyed his appearances on Bones and 24, and in the year of his death, he had been cast in American Crime Story. Which is where I bring this digression to a close . . .
A haunted house?
Saddened by our visit to Suicide Bridge, you might have wondered if all our outings would share the same sinister atmosphere. I’d have smiled, thinking you might rather have gone to gaze at the sumptuous buildings of Beverly Hills. Quite understandably—it’s what everyone does when they first set foot in Los Angeles. Personally, I hate that kind of outing: you might as well read celebrity magazines; at least they’re more informative.
No, we wouldn’t have gone looking for such and such an actor’s house. We’d have gone to the “Witch’s House” (or Spadena House), at 516 North Walden Drive, in Beverly Hills. More