On Los Angeles
Tomorrow I start a great new job Downtown, which means I’ll be remaining in Los Angeles for the forseeable future. As it turns out, I’ll be thinking about LA more than ever at my new gig.
Los Angles is an incredible city, a complicated one, and it’s often misunderstood. In many ways, everything you’ve heard about LA is true. Yes, there is traffic and smog. Yes, there are soulless, insincere people. Yes, you can see celebrities at the supermarket. Yes, the weather is sunny nearly every day. Yes, everyone here is from somewhere else.
However, what most people don’t realize is that there are many more things true of Los Angeles that you don’t hear about. For every trendy restaurant, there are 10 neighborhood gems serving food from all over the world. For every nightclub with a line around the block, there are 5 dive bars with Bowie on the jukebox. For every vapid, shallow person, there is at least one person sincere, interesting and passionate.
In Los Angeles, you can be whatever you want; this city will be whatever you make it. It will accept you all—heroes and heroines, dreamers, misfits, degenerates—but it will not come to you. If you want to really get to know LA, to understand it, you have to dig. It’s not like other cities; when you get off the plane in New York, Paris, Tokyo, the city is right there in your face. In LA, you may wonder whether there’s any city there at all. Trust me—there is.
It’s not perfect. There’s a huge disparity between haves and have-nots; “affordable housing” is practically an oxymoron. The traffic is horrendous, and we desperately need public transportation. There’s pollution. There’s crime, there are gangs. These are big-city problems. But remember that Los Angeles is a young city, and know that it’s trying. Personally, I hope that Los Angeles will continue to grow up into the truly great city I know it can be. After all, it’s home.
