It's hard traveling with my family. When all of us agree on something, it's almost magical. Before we even decided to visit Los Angeles, my sister staged a fit (“We were just in San Diego! Same thing.”) and my dad commenced his complaining (“What is there to do in LA? Why don't we go somewhere more interesting, like, say, Las Vegas?”)
Though I was the one who suggested LA to my mom, even I had my qualms with LA. I remember when we lived in San Diego, I used to dread the occasional two-hour drive up along the lip of the Pacific, the I-5 encased inside the coast like a snake in the dirt. To me, LA represented everything that was wrong with California: Its liberal dose of pretension and artificiality—the fake-looking people, the fake-looking buildings—and what I perceived as a diluted culture. It was such an underwhelming experience to walk in the city that, to me, it transformed into something different altogether: an enormous suburb, only dirtier. I yearned to know why anyone would willingly bury themself into that immense, open-air grave of lifeless smog.
In some ways, I believe all those things still—but my attitudes towards them have changed. I don' t know why. It had been four years since I'd visited LA when I met my closest friends in college, some of whom live in LA, and love it. On a whim, I decided I wanted to see with my own, newly-opened eyes what is so great about the city that I once loathed with every ounce of my being.
It's gonna be hard, explaining why I love/hate LA, what made me love it. On the drive back, I thought about the way language is only another way for us to convey accuracies—to express, to specify, to explain; it's a barrier to the real, genuine thought processes that are unconscious and language-less. I'll try to make sense of my feelings about LA, but it might end up sounding like a ranting reflection that shows how messed-up I can be and how much of a barrier language is.
One thing I started understanding recently is that everything in the world has some sort of historical narrative that had carried it from the beginning of time to where and how it exists today. LA is like that, even though sometimes it doesn't seem like it. Everything is so contrived there that it almost exists outside of the realm of history.
LA belongs to the moment. Anywhere else, “on a clear day you can see forever”—but in LA, you can only see the present: nothing before, nothing after. Maybe it's because of the laid-back atmosphere—that sort of apathy that disregards the future, because there is no future. Los Angelenos are “goin' nowhere on the streets/With the Spanish names,” Billy Joel sings. Yesterday had been a clear day, and tomorrow will surely bring another one.
Everyone in LA seems apathetic—and not in a reckless way. There's an overbearing feeling of irony in the people; they don't care about what's happening to them, and they don't care about what's happening to anyone else. I can't really describe it. Others have said it in other ways—some see it as a freewheeling acceptance of everyone, no matter how different they are. (In LA, anything goes. Just walk down the boardwalk at Venice Beach—where metal, ink and dye collide in an explosion of skin and hair; where storefronts gleam with twisted bongs and pipes of a million colors; where the normally-dressed tourist families become the freak show—and you'll see what I mean.) To me, Angelenos' ironic attitude feels like a self-consciousness of their own desire to be something they're not. It's a self-awareness of their own hubris. They know that they live in sin—whether it's pretentiousness or voyeurism or sloth or needless violence—but they don't care, or at least they pretend they don't care.
LA is pretension within pretension within pretension. But that makes it unique, and within every unique object there's a kernel of genuine feeling. Even though it's a homage to commercialization—a la Disney/Universal and the Santa Monica Promenade, two places that hanker to out-commercialize Times Square—there is no place in the world where that kind of capitalist artifice is acknowledged and even admired.
Now that I understand the mythic cloud that LA steeps itself in, I like it more. I finally see all of the elements of quintessentially American cultural ideals that have amassed themselves to form this mammoth, apathetic city-suburb. First of all, there's that Western drive—that idea of riding up towards the Golden Coast, that yearning to start anew with nothing in their pockets, in a place where no one will judge them—where no one will even grab a side glance at them. And this is where that “anything goes” attitude emerged from, and where LA draws all of its ingenuity: All of the cutting-edge avant-garde art and food and architecture, all of the stark eccentricities and unchecked excesses—they all come from the need to uncover a new West and, perhaps, recover the old one.
LA defies categorization. It's so large and diverse and cynical that you really have to dig deep to even begin to understand what makes it tick. Maybe that's why I hated it so much—I'm an inherently categorizing person; I love New York because, in some ways, categorizations stick to it easily and quickly.
LA is a crosshatch of lifestyles and images. It punctuates the beautiful things—the awe-inspiring architecture, or the jaw-dropping natural outgrowths—because they're the exception. In a city of concrete structure and suburban sprawl, anything that is different becomes infinitely more valuable. LA is an imperfect marriage between the laid-back beach life and the metropolitan hustle-bustle; between the poor, crime-infested cultural abundance of the inner city and the seemingly boring, excessive wealth of the Hills.
If I were to live in LA, it would be to immerse myself in that sort of mythic lifestyle—and to lay back, preferably draping a beach chair in the sand, and observe everything around me, because I don't think I've nearly reached any kind of expressed definition of the way this city works.
