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This is the html version of the file http://www.csun.edu/~rdavids/301fall08/301readings/To%20Pico.doc . Google automatically generates html versions of documents as we crawl the web.

To Pico

To Pico

By Peter Schjeldahl

You are one of the shadowless east-west routes

You start or end, or neither, in breezy Santa Monica

You are one off-ramp on the Santa Monica Freeway(You cede all long-distance traffic to the Santa Monica Freeway)

You are the back door of Century City, ass-end of the Avenue of the Stars

You point at Beverly Hills, then bend unconcerned away

You skulk past Hillcrest Country Club fences and high foliage, offended and offending

You dawdle through the endless blurry unnamed reaches of central L.A.

You duck under the Harbor Freeway into so-called Downtown, to which you lend your irrepressible shabbiness

You consist of asphalt, cement, and largely cheapish small buildings

You have a dustily marginal air

You seem immunized against the showy

You favor the gross wholesaler and the odd small business

You look unphotographed

You are unthronged

You are a familiar address for stop-and-go business

You are unlike swift Olympic, purposeful Santa Monica, wishful Wilshire, nerve-racking Sunset

You are the back of the turned back of the city

You are broad and dry

You are blessedly unfoliaged

You jerk through the city, stoplight to stoplight, like a blunt knife through an unfeeling body

You are imperturbable and dumb, abstracted in the sun

You abstractly acknowledge the sun

You do not care

You are Los Angeles and not Los Angeles

You have unlimited, because unneeded, parking

You make each pedestrian look like a thief

You are a deserted mansion of air

You are honest and without illusions, with no spoiled illusions, because no one ever had any illusions concerning you

You are fiercely depressing

You are poetic—obviously

You are the typical address of a chiropractor

You laze in the afternoons like a long flat cat

You are, late afternoons, almost beautiful, light soaked

You are destroyed by twilight

You are dead in the night of your feverish streetlights

You are ruins in the night, post-nuclear, site of mountainous gloom-vapors, suicide alley

You are inhuman horizontal monstrous in the night

You feature, in the night, a few beery, low-wattage Mexican joints, a few gas stations, some lighted signs

You feature no haven

You inform the visitor that something is wrong here

You inform the restless, nervous, uprooted visitor

You inform him that where he has come to is a joke on him, and you're not kidding

You do not care

You look uncared-about

You look unintended, uncalculated, uncontemplated by anyone ever until this moment

You look to be the forlorn historical accident you are

You are like a side street with elephantiasis

You are a great place for a murder

You are a great place for the murder of an obscure, transient person by another obscure, transient person

You are without remorse, remorseless

You are innocent with the innocence of a homicidal moron

You inform the visitor that sky, light, air, that nature is not worth caring about

You inform the visitor that humanity is not worth caring for

You are self-fulfilling prophecy

You would taste chalky, if you had a taste

You would smell of dry rust, if you had a smell

You would be, if a sound, a faint, distant rattling

You'd be grainy to the touch, of a hardness gradually crumbling

You would be to the inner sense, and are, the paradox of a grandiose humility

You are the spirit of littleness lordly in the sun

You are a parade route for entropy

You lie across the city like a UFO runway

You complacently anticipate a horrible future

You are stronger than love, than intelligence, than energy

You are a spiritual Fault that has slipped, toppling the better, flimsier constructs of human aspiration

You are the secret of the city, the incision that reveals its heart of stone

You inscribe on the map a vast, mean smirk (upside down)

You attract me; I am yours;

I return to you

You resonate to a well-known old emptiness

You are intimate

You whisper