Yesterday Jett called and said, “You’ll never guess where I am….Koreatown! And it” — Los Angeles, he meant — “smells exactly like it always did. It all came back the second I stepped out of the Uber.”
There are three different geographical aroma pockets in that haunted, infected, worn-down, architecurally underwhelming city.
(1) The stink of congested mid-city nabes and boulevards, which is what most of it smells like. (“Once the stink of L.A. gets into your bones” is one of Charles Bukowski‘s greatest lines.) (2) The mostly delightful fragrance of the affluent canyons and hills and hiking trails. And (3) the beachy areas, which is to say a mixture of sea air, grassy soft-soil cliffs, fast food wrappers, road tar and gasoline vapors.
You just need to occasionally take a moment and sample as much of it as possible. A few minutes of olfactory meditation.
I recall walking down an open-air ramp out of a DC-10 at LAX in the late spring of ’81, and leaning my head slightly back and taking a few sniffs and saying to myself, “This definitely doesn’t smell like New York.” You could taste the jet exhaust and melting tar and carbon dioxide, of course, but also the faint scent of dirt and sand and marshy grasses and the nearby Pacific Ocean, and the flowery fragrance of Jacaranda trees or something in that realm, and the faint smell of tacos or hot dogs or something like that.
That was 43 years ago, of course. That kind of aroma salad is gone from the LAX area for good now. Dead and gone.
But there are a few scent pockets here and there. You just have to get out of your car to really inhale them. Which no one ever does, of course.
The problem with so much of Los Angeles today, of course, is that too much of it is covered in asphalt and steel and plastic and concrete shopping malls and massive apartment buildings, and it doesn’t smell like anything exciting or promising…certainly nothing you’d want to stick around for.
I used to talk to Robert Towne about how Los Angeles used to smell in the 1940s, particularly after reading his screenplay of The Two Jakes (which is much better than the film) for some great descriptions of the fragrances that were fairly commonplace. Or talk to anyone who remembers what it smelled like from time to time in the ’70s even (despite the town being covered in horrible smog back then) or the early ’80s.
Paris is probably the greatest aroma town I’ve ever sunk into. A feast wherever you go. The Seine at night, outdoor markets (especially in the pre-dawn hours), the aroma of sauces and pasta dishes coming from cafes, warm breads, scooter and bus exhaust, strong cigarettes, strong coffee, fruit stands, gelato shops, etc.
Cannes is a heavenly aroma town during the annual May festival with the briney sea air, especially at night. Tuscany, Rome, the Amalfi Coast, etc I could go on and on.
