Last

Today was the day that I left Los Angeles and the United States, but my flight wasn’t until mid-evening so there was still time to get a little last minute touristing in. Since I was in the neighborhood, I decided to go up to the Venice Canals at Venice Beach.

The Venice Canals are what the canals in actual Venice would look like if they were laid down in straighter lines, dredged on a tight budget, and all of the Renaissance buildings were torn down and replaced with small, very expensive designer cottages. Still, these canals were similarly bereft of cars – uniquely in Los Angeles, I suspect – so it was pleasant to walk up and down the narrow paths that separated the cute little buildings from the cute little canals.

With time slipping away I chose to make one last run to the Getty Museum, to catch the parts I missed the first time around. This mostly entailed a couple of galleries of wonderful modern photography, including this work:

Turtle Orgies Take, Like, Forever, Arthur Tress, 1975

I also stumbled across a perfect composition of my own, which I snapped with my iPhone as I emerged from one of the galleries.

Still Life with Fatigued Fat-Ass, Blandwagon, 2023

As the sun dipped towards the horizon there was also an opportunity to stroll in the gardens, which are an amazing work of art in themselves. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that a garden is a work of art, but the gardens at the Getty actually look like they were designed by a leading modern artist, playing with the artistic possibilities of mundane items like garden stakes and trellises, contrasting poisonous flowers with quaint cottage plantings, and glorying in great swathes of architectural cacti and succulents.

It was actually a lovely way to finish my Los Angeles holiday, standing on the terraces of a spectacular art gallery, watching the sun sink into the ocean and casting a golden glow over the land. Although realistically, the smog probably helped with the glow.

Once the sun had set there was nothing left to do but battle rush hour traffic to get to the airport… pausing only at In-N-Out for one last brush with American fast food.