Los Angeles

California, U.S.A. – Friday, January 14th to Monday, January 24th

My departure from Grand Rapids Gerald R. Ford Airport was delayed because they had to de-ice the airplane. Day break was still an hour away as the parka-clad crew hosed down the plane with a dyed fluid that rippled across my window as gravity drew it downward. A half hour prior to this I had said my last goodbyes to my dad under the florescent lighting near the security entrance as a few other early morning travelers hurried by to their departure gates. It was biting cold outside and I was dressed with only my spring jacket. At least it had stopped snowing so we would be clear for take-off as soon as our craft was properly thawed.

Six hours and one transfer in Chicago later my eyes were squinting through the bright southern California sunlight.  I would no longer be requiring my jacket for the next ten days, and thus promptly disrobed of it. Perhaps it’s the lack of cloud cover mixed with an ethereal smog that scatters the incoming light rays, but there’s something about the sunlight in Los Angeles that differentiates it from anywhere else I’ve ever been. It’s bright, perfectly white, and permeates everywhere. Shadows hardly exist; they are witnessed only as diffuse, light grey entities defining the spatial proximity between two large solid objects. Our brains use shading to help register depth and directionality. The bright glow in Los Angeles makes everything look flat and two dimensional. I wondered if I were perhaps inhabiting a videogame intended to simulate an improved vision of reality, but some of the finer details are either missing or just a little bit off. And so it goes for everything else in this city.

I shared these observations with my aunt and uncle who were generously hosting me for my ten day stay, which were met with some bemusement when I claimed that I preferred the dramatic ambiance of a dark, gloomy autumn day in northern Michigan over the perpetual warmth and sunlight of southern California. “You might think that now, but wait until you’re forty when you can’t sleep in every morning and have to scrape the ice off your windshield to go to work,” my uncle explained with that twinkle of the eye he gets whenever he’s allowed to impart his incisive wisdom on the younger generation, which when my cousin and I were around was quite often. By logical requirement that is an impossible argument for anyone under forty to soundly defeat, and so I must respectfully yield my position.

We ate lunch at a French café a short walk from their apartment in Venice, where I got to learn all about the inner workings and future of the modern globalized economic world, as well as how to use an iPhone in said modern globalized economic world. The short of it was it’s really dynamic and innovative, but you still can’t use one phone to call home and locally when overseas (at least without paying a sum of money clearly not representative of the actual contributive cost of that individual phone call), which seems to slightly undermine the first point. The first night was mostly spent around their apartment first to catch up and then to catch a nap, later going grocery shopping in an “all organic” grocery store; the sort of place where, unlike in Michigan, you will be greeted with a glazed or confused look if you ask where they stock the Cheetoes rather than the calamari.

One thing I love about spending time with my aunt and uncle is that they know food really well and can make healthy food I would normally have no association with taste really good; yet at the same time some nights they’ll still just feel like going out for some greasy fast food. Being a devotee of Dudism and the Big Lebowski, I helpfully suggested that that evening be spent at the local In-N-Out Burger. (“Those are good burgers, Walter.”) I was also introduced to sushi to help ready me for future culinary experiences abroad. They took me through a pre-approved series of dishes to apparently work myself up to the bigger surprises, starting with the California rolls and ending with the tuna. I guess the surprise was that it looked and tasted nothing like what we normally associate with tuna; when asked what I thought it was I guessed ‘sea snake’, a bit over-imaginative but after it had been revealed that my favorite dish so far was eel anything seemed possible. Our movie selection was The Host, a South Korean family drama and political satire about a marauding amphibious monster on the Han River in Seoul that allowed us to eat raw fish while watching a fish eat raw humans.

Maybe there was some irony to be found in the fact that my journey to the Far East would begin in the Far West. I was on my way to Hong Kong for four months. Naturally when I realized the path would cross through LAX in the middle of January, I was already planning which coasters I could ride during the off-season. The first was Six Flags, over Saturday and Sunday of January 15^th and 16^th. Thankfully I don’t need to explain why I wanted to come all this way to visit them just so I could turn around and spend half of my days alone at amusement parks. When they ask how my day was, I must carefully monitor my words to make sure I’m at the correct level of nerdiness. Too much and you’ll kill future conversation on the topic, but not enough and they’ll wonder why you purport to be a ‘roller coaster philosopher’ spending hundreds of dollars on park tickets when you should really be paying off student loans. I guess that’s what the secondary business degree is for.

Monday was Knott’s Berry Farm and the nearby Adventure City, the latter of which my aunt even joined me for as it was a brief visit and cheap, too. The next two days were at California Adventure and Disneyland, again with my aunt. I could have substituted one of those days at Universal Studios Hollywood but they offered no single-day tickets for less than $75 while openly punting second-day or annual passes for only about one-tenth that cost extra (completely destroying the sense of any intrinsic value in the one day passes), so fuck ‘em. My aunt told me about how she once was able to sneak into Universal Studios for free many years ago, when she went there with a friend and found the tickets were more money than they could afford. They ate in a Universal café next to the entrance to discuss what else they wanted to do, when they discovered that it shared an entrance with the park so both patrons and non-patrons could eat there, and they were more than free to simply exit through that door. Needless to say, I doubt that set-up is still present today.

After the last day at Disneyland, I had a full day of rest, only leaving the apartment once with my aunt to catch a quiet matinee showing of Mike Leigh’s Another Year (why wasn’t Leslie Manville nominated for an Academy Award?), until we had to return to LAX that evening. I was not leaving for China just yet; we were picking up my cousin Caroline on her arrival from Michigan, who would also be attending the same university that spring as I was. Story time: last summer when I was decided on doing an exchange program in Hong Kong, Caroline asked me questions about my experience in Europe as she was thinking of going abroad as well. I asked where she wanted to go, and she listed a few options but said her top choice was in Hong Kong.

“Hmm, do you know the name of the school?”

“I think it’s Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, or something like that.”

“Interesting. There might be someone there next spring you’ll recognize there as well…”

And so that was that. Her late arrival on the west coast was in part because she needed to see a few less theme parks than I. I was required to tag along in part because I was informed there would be luggage that needed carrying. We found her in the terminal with three impressively sized suitcases that, thanks to vacuum pack technology, proved to be even heavier than they looked. I wondered how the plane even managed to leave the ground with these in the cargo hold. We set them down in the guestroom next to my luggage, which consisted solely of a duffle bag and a backpack. This of course did not escape comment from our uncle that evening.

Although Caroline would not be participating on any theme park attractions while in Los Angeles, she would be participating in learning how they are created when we arrived at the Thinkwell Group’s offices in Burbank the next morning. Our aunt had a friend who worked at Thinkwell that was able to set my cousin and me up with a guided tour of their offices. Caroline is studying engineering and was considering themed entertainment as a career option, as she would like to integrate music and the arts into her discipline; I presume I don’t need to explain why I accepted a tour if you’ve even visited one other page on this website. For those unaware of who Thinkwell are, they’re a creative design firm responsible for envisioning many ride projects and even entire parks around the world. One of the first things you see as you step into their offices (who, like every creative, hip business in California, don’t call it work if there aren’t games and fun knickknacks in a modernist living space strewn in every corner) are framed pictures and posters displaying their many projects over the years. One of the largest (displayed front-and-center for maximum attention) caught my eye; a stunning night shot of Hogwarts Castle at Universal Orlando.

“Wow. So, it was Thinkwell that designed the entire…”

“That’s right, we were responsible for the entire grand opening event for the Wizarding World of Harry Potter last May!”

I’m uncertain if our guide, Chris, was able to detect my slightly skeptical tone when I inquired why they kept the “Wizarding World” font so big with the fact that they only did work on the effects and presentation for one night as a footnote, but nevertheless there was some interesting stuff to be learned. A large scale performance event like that with numerous magical special effects, especially as they were working with integrating effects that needed to be convincing but temporary on a pre-existing structure (beyond rigging a special lighting display, they also had to devise a way to make the wands handed out to the attendees glow at the exact same time).

Unsurprisingly, I gleaned that Disney and Universal do their own ride development mostly in-house, and tend to bring in outside contractors like Thinkwell only when there’s a specialized project like this that their own personnel don’t have the time or experience to properly manage. You’ll see more of their work outside the major chains, with probably their most well-known to enthusiasts being Furius Baco. I mentioned to Chris that I had been on Baco several months prior; and asked of my opinion, I had to be honest that it was actually one of my least favorite attractions in all of Europe. The fault lay firmly with Intamin’s jack-hammering wing-walker trains, having nothing to do with Thinkwell’s input. Chris acknowledged they had problems with the drift in the winged car design, though I’m not certain if they’re pressing Intamin to find a remedy to this problem; honestly in the state it was in when I visited in May, I think they’re lucky that the Spanish state health inspectors haven’t ordered it shut down. I wish we had time for me to ask how their brainstorming meeting managed to conceive some of the more (seemingly unintentional) offbeat thematic elements in the story.

I should mention now that the first item on the tour’s itinerary was the signing of a non-disclosure agreement, so when the next parts of the tour led us further back into their designing rooms and warehouses, the less there was for me to report on in this website. Anything that’s on their website or considered open knowledge is fair play, as I was told, so considering that this website is mostly all half-assed speculation with occasional references to vague, possibly imaginary sources, I’ll see how close I can get to a cease and desist letter being mailed out that stops just short of licking the seal. Actually, relatively little ‘secret’ information was shared anyway, most of the tour was just the ability to see in person the place and process by which theme parks become birthed. One of the highlights was in their storage room where they had a large, Emmett Brown-style model of a theme park project I had never previously known about that was close to getting off the ground before suddenly being canceled, which was a tremendous let-down for everyone. (As per the contract, I shall only say that this park was planned nowhere near “Zubailand” before the oil crisis didn’t hit, for an entertainment company called absolutely nothing like “Dime-Learner”.)

The tour concluded with us basically just shooting the shit for about fifteen minutes, which was fun. I was pleased to learn that Thinkwell (and really, most of the theme park industry) hire people from all different backgrounds, as Chris himself had been a philosophy undergraduate major before entering the themed entertainment biz. The lesson to be learned is that if there’s something that interests you, do it; if it hasn’t been done before, then all the more reason to. It’s especially important to go out there and interact, meet  different people, and talk ideas. I’m a hypochondriac when it comes to ‘networking’, so if it’s sold as ‘engaging in the Hegelian dialectic’, I’m more likely to follow that advice. The topic of Disneyland was also much discussed as I had just been there for the first time two days prior. Curious as to my initial impressions, he was a bit surprised to learn that I actually enjoyed the simple retro-classicism of the Matterhorn above all else at that park.

The last few days in California were mostly just chill time with relatives as we waited for the departure date across the Pacific. We had intended to catch a movie at Grauman’s Chinese Theater, but they played nothing but Season of the Witch and I couldn’t stomach to watch Nicholas Cage’s hair for that long. We discussed other options for movies (my vote being True Grit at the Majestic Crest) but could never settle on one, so we spent the evening on other activities instead. The next morning we took a long walk through the suburbs of Venice to the coast, which featured a lot of crazy architecture along the canals that should be seen in person, especially as it seems few people know about this part of town who aren’t local. That evening was spent at the Santa Monica Pier.

For my last full day in America I met up with my high school friend Lisa, whom I had not seen since graduation nearly four years ago (back when we directed kind of shitty student films together), and who was studying at USC to become a screenwriter, what probably would have been my #2 career choice had I not long before been sucked into the dream of becoming a real RollerCoaster Tycoon. We ended up getting lunch at an Indian cafeteria in Artesia, then talking philosophy on the streets for a half hour before settling into a Bollywood movie theater for an afternoon screening of Dhobi Ghat, not totally Bollywood style, but the closest I’ve ever gotten over Slumdog Millionaire and was probably our best choice regardless. I’ll admit, I was sort of frustrated as our reunion reminded me ever since I went to Michigan State what a good conversation was like (well, at least outside of the Dead Philosopher’s Club), and I sincerely hope Lisa and everyone else can make it to the first high school reunion, whenever that might be.

With Lisa’s approval on my future travels, I was finally ready to leave behind America and venture eastward to Hong Kong the next morning. Our luggage checked, I made one last phone call to my parents before Caroline and I embarked on our 11:20am Cathay Pacific flight number 6075, due to touch down at Hong Kong International Airport in a short fifteen hours. Watch out China, trouble is on its way.

Next Series: 2011 China

Next: Six Flags Magic Mountain (Part 1)