Los Angeles daily views

(Photos by your humble blogkeeper)

Hiking up Assisi's medieval streets to the Rocca Maggiore years ago, I imagined Dante taking the same path 700 years before and being inspired to write the Inferno: Narrow streets, the night patch black, my way lit only by the blue glare of televisions from inside the ancient houses.

I felt something like that driving through Los Angeles' Laurel Canyon yesterday: Houses perched on hill tops, ready to tumble down on passing tourists, vistas of stunning beauty that plunge suddenly into the darkness, and, of course, winding roads populated by incautious drivers.

It's not a route calculated to induce tranquility, and I can well understand why Raymond Chandler has the pornographer Arthur Gwynne Geiger live up there in The Big Sleep. The only trouble is that the narrow streets afford few opportunities for leisurely photography, so some of these pictures come from the more expansive precincts of the Griffith Park Observatory or other flatter, straighter parts of town.

© Peter Rozovsky 2013