LOVE from Above
By Monte Thrasher
When I was a kid at Burbank High (I graduated in '78) I heard a teenage rumor
that if you climbed to the top of the local mountains and looked down upon
Burbank by night, the word “LOVE” was spelled out in streetlights. And this is
true!
Of course street lighting changes with time, so it may no longer be so. I
acutely remember the old blue-white streetlights of my teen years, before they
were replaced by that plague of orange crime lights. I'm a painter, and keenly
sensitive to color, and I hate those things. Their one
virtue was that their efficiency, since they put out all their energy in
exactly one finely controlled too-narrow orange frequency. They really ruined
the beauty of the night, turning the sky the color of rust, so even the clear
nights seemed smothered in smog. And they did not turn blue with distance, as
white lights do, so the vast ocean of starry lights that was the Valley at
night became flat and tedious to behold, all the same irritating orange.
Actually, the orange had a dose of nasty ultraviolet mixed in, which soured it
and made it even harsher to the eye.
My glasses have one thin and one thick lens, and since any lens is a prism at
its edge, I can look at a light obliquely through my thick lens and get its
spectrum splayed out for analysis: one orange and one purplish ultraviolet, a
sad, barren spectrum. I remember on my first acid trip the sweet revelation that
those blue-white lights were not all the same color: this one was a little
greenish, that one had a dash of pink, or of violet, or frail yellow. That's a
fact of optics, not of hallucinogens, since every filament is imperfect and
idiosyncratic and shines a slightly different spectrum. I remember studying an
orange streetlight, too, one of the first ones I'd seen, and thinking (with a
kind of anti-amazement, a super-letdown) that it was the one thing that didn't
get more interesting on acid. It buzzed in a supremely grating way, too, as if
to underline how fiercely uninteresting it was. And then they took over the
night and ruined it, creeping across my beloved night landscape for the next
twenty years, like a spreading stain, or infection. The 80's for me was
horrible orange streetlights, interminable car alarms (they had no automatic
timer to shut them off, originally, and seemed to run for hours) Reagan (eight
years of him) and Rap (thirty years and counting, God help us). The Four Horsemen of Tedium.
As for LOVE, I'm sure the V was formed where Burbank slices sharply into
Victory. I'm a bit vague on the other letters, though. I think Alameda meeting
N. Victory formed the L, and Buena Vista and Hollywood Way formed two
horizontal strokes of the E. The O was the largest letter, and rather
irregular. Somewhere there's a satellite or aerial image of Burbank at night
that would resolve the issue. Actually, it's a lovely idea, of LOVE writ large
right across the city; with a few strategic lights added here and there and a
night-flying photographer to capture it, it would be quite a memorable image...
I just now got a street map of Burbank, inverted it in Photoshop to make it
pale lines on dark and tinkered with it here and there to get an approximation
of what I saw, see attachment. Done with proper care (based on a nice nighttime
photograph) it would be quite a pretty thing. A black Burbank T-shirt, in
rhinestones, perhaps?
By the way, thanks to years of effort from the Department of Energy, a new
White Light hath come to replace the dreaded orange Lamps of Hell. It uses a
focused blast of radio energy to energize the element, making light as white as
pure sunlight. On my nocturnal strolls through the Burbank hills I feel a pang
of gratitude every time I see them, slowly spreading to redeem and relieve the
achingly tedious orange expanse.
Disclaimer: Monte's comment about Ronald Reagan is not shared by Burbankia management. (I liked the Reagan Administration.) But I do share Monte's opinion of those ghastly orange streetlights. I recall seeing them start to pop up all over in the late Seventies. (This 1976 nighttime view of Burbank shows that the old style blue-white lights were mostly in use.) As for seeing things from above Burbank, my pal Mike and I noted that if you drove to the curve in the road on Via Alta at night, you could see what looked like a "XIII" etched in streetlights. Since we liked the Blue Oyster Cult, we referred to this spot as "Cult Point XIII (thirteen)." It's hard to see nowadays, the residents having erected wooden, view-blocking fences.