I am currently exhibiting a New York artist in my downtown LA gallery and she agreed to come here for the opening. Before she arrived, she spouted all the usual nonsense about having to have someone drive here everywhere, that everyone is plastic, etc. I assured here that she could easily take the subway and/or bus, and that she could walk just about everywhere she needed to go on this trip. She ended up staying with a friend in Hollywood, who does not even have a car, and by the time she left she was raving about the ethnic diversity, how easy it was to get around (she preferred the bus to the subway because she was amazed at the diversity on the street), all the great art she saw, and what a fantastic city this was. It blew her away that LA was not the postcard image of Beverly Hills, or the cynical suburban stereotype of West LA and Century City. In many ways it is more real on the ground than parts of New York, which have become so gentrified that they are losing authenticity, becoming “museumified.”

Ultimately, however, it really does not matter what people say and think, what matters is the reality, which is that Los Angeles is in a fascinating state of development socially and culturally. Those whose minds are closed to this will have to read about it in the history books. That’s their loss.

If someone from somewhere else criticizes L.A. to me, I will laugh and say to them, “please, please, do not move here. You will only add to some of the very problems you mention, including traffic and cynicism.”

The entire piece is really pretty great but this passage rang especially true for me… “Living in L.A., being a cop and a writer here, is something like being with a dominatrix. She calls you names, walks on your fingers with spike heels and you think, what part of this was supposed to be fun again? Then she kisses you.” So although I’m neither a cop or a writer by trade that really stuck with me as I was first encountering the push and pull of the city.

Here’s the link.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-beall20aug20,1,5174147.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

As a French transplant in L.A., I cringe every time French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy is cited as a pundit on America or L.A. since he wrote American Vertigo (a supposed “road trip in the footsteps of Tocqueville” he took at bracing speed in a chauffeur-driven car.) His “expertise” on L.A.? A limo trip from LAX to Sharon Stone’s estate in Beverly Hills and back. Yet he is a reference in Europe, and a darling of “references” such as The Atlantic, Adam Gopnick, or Charlie Rose. Whence the perpetuating of myths.

Since Lulu mentioned Baudrillard, here is a beautiful ode to L.A. from his book America:

“There is nothing to match flying over Los Angeles by night. A sort of luminous, geometric, incandescent immensity, stretching as far as the eye can see, bursting out from the cracks in the clouds. Only Hieronymus Bosch’s hell can match this inferno effect. The muted fluorescence of all the diagonals: Wilshire, Lincoln, Sunset, Santa Monica. Already, flying over San Fernando Valley, you come upon the horizontal infinite in every direction. But, once you are beyond the mountain, a city ten times larger hits you. You will have never encountered anything that stretches as far as this before. Even the sea cannot match it, since it is not divided up geometrically. The irregular, scattered flickering of European cities does not produce the same parallel lines, the same vanishing points, the same aerial perspective either. They are medieval cities. This one condenses by night the entire future geometry of the networks of human relations, gleaning in their abstraction, luminous in their extension, astral in their reproduction of infinity.”

Thanks for the post.

Moreover, I want to emphasize that LuMi is incomparably more fabulous than her namesake (in case my post failed to make that clear). Chairman Mao was a positively terrible blog captain (despite his fine title), and the Cultural Revolution showed really poor editorial direction. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

That’s all I’m saying. I also want to to say I LOVE your P.O.V. here, as an outsider who’s not yet fully comfortable in LA, and who can see our shortcomings with a little less baggage under your belt.