A metallic Los Angeles dawn. The streets are dry [Unlike film shoots where they spray them down for that surreal reflective quality. Or maybe that was only in the eighties and nineties when they did this, but he thinks the history of the street location wet-down must have started much earlier, peaking at the height of the drought specter–but there is perpetual drought here. When the citizens of the realm were asked to let their lawns die and bathe quickly the preponderance of wet streets on film increased dramatically. He’s almost positive of this. At which point it also becomes a sort of trope for car ads. A study of aforementioned car ads will reveal that 65% were shot in various abandoned and decrepit late-night downtown post-industrial locations. A significant subset of these were staged with moistened blacktop. He’s not certain what the ads were trying to insinuate. The figure driving was always opaqued behind dark windows and the cars were always speeding through the empty streets, though much of that could have just been CGI.] but his windscreen is still streaking with the dew that started out on his car at his point of departure. He thinks it’s really too early to be down here.
The streets are mostly empty–like in the car ads so he can see why they like it. The distressed ruins of brick seem pimply and diseased with their seismic retrofits spiking through. Bums, silvered like dirty crows with their filthy blankets over their shoulders, shake off the dust of lives lost, finally free of night, surprisingly dead-cold night. The seaweedy smell of the Pacific is improbably heavy for being inland. A suited man emerges from a ground floor security door. A woman in a pink bathrobe waves him good day. A dog sits in a high window with his head out like he’s a passenger driving in the neighborhood as it rushes forward.