Category: Van Nuys and the Valley

IMG_4431.JPG, a photo by Here in Van Nuys on Flickr.

More and more I have been leaving Van Nuys, going downtown, to Hollywood, and Silver Lake and riding the Orange Line Bus to the Red Line Train.

When I first started doing this, in 2005, you would purchase a day pass that allowed you to take that paper ticket, get on the bus and walk into the train and do the same thing in reverse.

Now there is the TAP system where you load funds onto a plastic card which you “tap” every time you enter a station.

No longer are there any humans in the Red Line North Hollywood station, so I assumed that one tap before I got onto the bus was all I needed for a one-way trip. I was wrong.

You must tap when you get on the bus and then you must tap when you get on the train. So two taps each direction.

Each tap deducts $1.50 from my card. No signs advise a rider about how to use the card. You are expected to know.

On the train, things have changed since 2005.

There are people drinking beer, people smoking on the platform, people playing radios inside trains.

I never once have seen a law enforcement person riding a train or standing on the platform. Maybe my timing is just poor.

I wonder how they know who taps their card, who is eating or drinking on the train or the platform.

Metro is not a bad system. I think it is pretty clean. It is certainly expanding and getting bigger. Pretty soon you will be able to ride a train from downtown to Santa Monica.

But it needs to be watched and monitored. Because this is Los Angeles. There is a need, by some segments of the population, to destroy anything clean and worthwhile. They will mark it up and make it dirty. They will scream and run wild and do whatever they want to.

And then nobody will want to ride the train or the bus.

And that will be a shame.

Art Institute of California building, North Hollywood, a photo by LA Wad on Flickr.

A few days ago an ad popped up on my Facebook page to study graphic design at The Art Institute of Hollywood. So I clicked it and said I was interested in more information.

Two minutes later the phone rang.

The Art Institute was calling and they wanted to speak to me about visiting their shiny, glass, black skyscraper school on Lankershim near Magnolia.

I was connected to a woman who interviewed me and learned everything private about my financial and career conditions, and about why I might want to study graphic arts.

By Good Friday afternoon, I was at the luxury campus hi-rise, a gloriously slick and modern edifice, landscaped with tall palms and clumps of ornamental grasses, tended to by security guards and flocks of skinny young artists on skateboards, gliding past with black skin and tight jeans.

A sweet XXL at the security desk, stuffed into spandex, handed me a check-in clipboard, and minutes later I was ushered into the offices, past the cubicles, into a room where an admissions officer filtered my eligibility into his academic actuarial tables, and proceeded to assess whether I, 51-years-old and out-of-work, formerly working in TV Production, but now employed by Word Press, Pinterest and Flickr, might make a good candidate for this career builder college where the average graduate makes close to $30,000 a year and finds fulfilling work in online cartoons, illustrations, digital packaging, and assisting other artists.

Answers that once would have disqualified me for school, were now the exact ones I needed to enter: gay, middle-aged, in need of work, looking, exploring. Any heartbeat with a credit line was welcome.

We rode the elevator up into a brilliantly outfitted and equipped school, a place where tall smoked glass windows overlooked the exciting metropolis of North Hollywood and Toluca Lake, rooms of unending concrete floors and acres of Mac computers. Every corner held more computers, and the library, a place once filled with stacks of books, now held long tables of electronic screens.

Smiling broadly, the admittance lady led me on a tour of walls and galleries, filled with student projects: Project Runway Catwalkery, environmentally sensitive water bottles and graphic labeling, photography of smokestacks and digitally altered women who represented “The Seven Deadly Sins”. All in all, it was a creative mesh and mix of all the aspirations of the school and meant to persuade me that any idea, no matter how banal, might be sold and packaged to a wider audience.

We passed one poster that advertised an emergency number. to answer the serious problems faced by 18-22 year olds: roommate problems, parent problems, car trouble, relationship headaches. There was a number to call if it all was too much to handle. Such is life that no number exists for emergencies once one graduates from college.

Back in the room, it was like shopping for a car at Galpin Ford. The unveiling of the numbers and the sticker shock: $49,000 for a 1.5 year associates degree in Graphic Arts and a $99,000 price tag should you want to complete a bachelor’s degree. When I expressed shock at the numbers, the finance manager was called back in, but he was busy, so unlike Galpin Ford, I was free to walk out back into the sunshine noir of North Hollywood where muscles and 24-Hour-Fitness provided a tranquilizing visual after a tour that promised a future that nobody but a sucker could afford.