Contemplating L.A.

In this month's KCRW newsletter, essayist Marc Porter Zasada -- who reads his "The Urban Man" commentaries on the station Mondays at 6:44 p.m. -- picks five of his favorite spots to mull over our fair city (edited for space):

1. Along Valley Blvd. near Del Mar in San Gabriel, you will find large splinters of Hong Kong embedded in the eastward sprawl. Join the late crowd at the Hawaii Supermarket buying fresh durian fruit from Thailand: big as footballs, but foul-smelling and covered with nasty spikes. Reflect on your life in the city as you cut deep to find the strangely sweet and creamy insides.

2. Drive up the PCH to Solstice Canyon and take the shady hike to the ruins of the Roberts house -- a doomed attempt to create a genuine L.A. paradise in the 1950s. Imagine the well-dressed parties which once occurred in the terraced tropical gardens and watery grotto -- all of it now crumbling and overgrown.

3. Visit the first L.A. Aqueduct, north along the 5, just beside Balboa. Contemplate the big white pipe heading out 300 miles to drain the desert on behalf of the metropolis. Picture William Mulholland standing here on Nov. 5, 1913 as he choked back tears to say, famously, "There it is. Take it."

4. Choose a foggy night to drive into Chinatown (above). Park along the 900 block of Broadway, where Faye Dunaway got shot in the film. Cross the decaying kitsch of Gin Ling Way to the hip Mountain Bar, where th ewalls drip red paint and lost poets add to the atmosphere.

5. Take a date to the Getty Center when it's open late. Muse over guilded clocks and Baroque rooms from the 18th century. Just at sunset, walk toward the large horizontal opening in the South Facade: surely the greatest framed piece of art on the hill. At first you will see nothing but light and sky. Then, suddenly, L.A. will open out vast and glittering and unmannered at your feet.