By D.J. Waldie

Los Angeles loves wheels.

It loves the wheels on trains, chrome wheels on custom cars, and the urethane wheels on skateboards.

Wheels over the asphalt, the concrete, the adobe soil of any freeway or sidewalk or backcountry trail, if it leads away from wherever it is you are.

In many earlier works, Huerta would include the streets directly in front of the house in the painting’s foreground.

Wheels are the fix for this city's need.

The need-the rush-is momentum. Los Angeles moves or it isn't Los Angeles.

Nothing is too good for wheels.

There are 21,198 miles of roads, highways, and freeways in Los Angeles County; two-thirds of our public space is space just for wheels.

There aren't enough acres of parks for all of us, but there are acres and acres of parking lots.

Nothing is permitted to stop the city's wheels, unless it is the presence of even more wheels.

Angelinos, even if they've been here only a year or two, claim to remember a better time, a time when the traffic wasn't as bad., and when driving was exhilarating, a release, and a promise that you could be in control of something, even if it's only a car.

Wheeled Angelinos will pretend to be in motion, rather than be seen pausing, all of us making a rolling stop, making a right turn on red, making a lane change, just to get one car-length ahead.

It's not about the cause for all that motion-bike or subway or relentless treadmilling-or even the reason for moving; it's about the momentum that seems to stand for something else.

Or maybe it doesn't stand for anything. In "Play It as It Lays." Joan Didion's freeway-addicted Maria drives the way a dancer moves or a jazz player riffs on a familiar melody: It's not in the destination; it's in being carried away. This is a city of joyrides, often disappointed.

The blues in Los Angeles are played to the slow beat of tires thumping over lane dividers on the 405 or the 710 or the 101. No sound in this city is more melancholy
than that.

I was made for the city's wheels, but I don't drive. I would if I could. But that's another story. So I'm detached from the skin of steel and high-impact plastic that surrounds the city's drivers as they move in beautiful crowds, completely alone in their cars.

I watch them from the curb, a pedestrian exile from the city in motion. And when the urge to move overcomes me, when the longing that is Los Angeles takes me, I ride the bus or the Blue Line just for speed.

Los Angeles isn't one place; it's many places, their disconnections relieved, only a little, by the wheels that turn, all of us in motion because there's no still point where our place in the city is revealed.

That would be the ultimate gridlock, if we could find it, if the wheels of Los Angeles would stop, and we stepped out of the car, got off the treadmill, dismounted from the bike, and looked at ourselves at rest.