(Allow me one final post about The Rock and then I'll return to more Noirish topics, I promise!)
I had a fun adventure Friday night / Saturday morning. With bike, camera, tripod, and survival needs packed in the car I headed to Figueroa and Gage at about midnight. I knew the convoy had left that area an hour or two earlier, but figured I head up Fig to Jefferson and then up Western until I caught up with it.
Apparently the rock had been making good time. To my surprise and disappointment I didn't see the flashing lights until Western and the 10 freeway, about halfway to LACMA. Oh well. I parked the car at Western and Washington and mounted by bike. It was a warm clear evening, with a nearly full moon.
There were good size crowds lining the streets, and a lot of other bikers. The trucks traveled at about 5 MPH, so a person had to run to keep up with it; not a thing that many wanted to do. With the street closures and such you couldn't really follow it in a car either, so the only good way to join the convoy
was by bike. The police and other workers seemed to give us free reign, so it was a great way to watch the event.
Unfortunately, despite much effort, most of my photos came out poorly and are not really worth posting. (I learned the hard way that for long exposure night shots, you need to use a timer or remote shutter control. Pressing the shutter manually moved the camera body and caused blurring.
)
After chatting with some of the Emmert workers and bikers around Western and Olympic I passed the rock and raced up to Wilshire, hoping to find a nice vantage spot to watch the convoy make that big left turn. I wound up atop a big bike locker at the Red Line station. Hundreds of other onlookers lined the intersection. At around 1:30 the massive transporter negotiated the turn onto westbound Wilshire to much applause and hooting, continued for another block or two...and then stopped.
The next couple of hours were an illustration of insufficient planning, public stupidity, or maybe both. Figueroa, Jefferson, and Western had been relatively smooth sailing but in Mid City there are medians in the middle of Wilshire Blvd. The huge transporter needed 3 entire lanes and though temporary No Parking signs had been installed along Wilshire they were rather hard to see. The path down Wilshire was blocked by dozens of illegally parked cars and this whole operation, which must have cost at least $10,000 a minute, had to wait while tow trucks were called and slowly removed the scofflaws, one by one. There were some colorful confrontations between law enforcement and car owners leaving the local Korean night clubs as this unfolded! One wonders why the lanes hadn't been coned off or all those cars towed, hours earlier.
So, the journey to down Wilshire to LACMA fell into a pattern of move a few blocks, wait for the next batch of cars to be towed, then move a little further west.
A bunch of hookers emerged from the IHOP at Wilshire and Hauser to watch the parade. A man on a unicycle joined us. A guy had a boombox and played a mix tape of topical songs (We Will Rock You by Queen, Michael Jackson's Rock With You, Like A Rock by Bob Segar...). Costumed revelers joined the throng. One of the Emmert workers operated a strange looking remote controlled miniature helicopter-like machine that flew overhead and shot video.
We haltingly continued west. The final stop was the "street light" installation near Museum Square, where workers prepared for the tricky right turn onto Fairfax. For this denouement, police seemed to relax the rules a bit and they let people come quite close to the trucks and transporter. When the Emmert workers executed that very complicated last turn up Fairfax it was very impressive to watch. After
barely clearing Johnnie's Coffee Shop they continued the sharp turn, then slowly but very neatly swung in to the temporary driveway on the Fairfax side of LACMA.
I wish I had some good photos to share but it was great fun. (And I assure you that if you want to see a lot of strange sights, ride a bicycle across Los Angeles at four in the morning!)
Whatever you think of the rock and its installation at the museum, I think it was one of Mid Wilshire's greatest nights. Part street festival, part Doo Dah Parade; an exhibition of huge unique machinery and its amazingly intricate coordination. The rock itself is just a rock; the amazing thing was how they transported it 105 miles to LACMA, and the spectacle of that amazing convoy moving across town. In the end, this was a totally L.A. event and if it had happened 70 series ago and, I'll bet that photos of it would be treasured here. After all, we know from this thread that Los Angeles is, perhaps more than any other place, a land of preposterous schemes.