“No, I don’t,” I replied.
* * *
I have a confession to
make. I am an adulterer. I have betrayed what I am supposed to
love: Los Angeles. It is time to be open and honest, and stop
living the lie. I love New
York.
This begs the question: how can I write about L.A.
when my heart belongs in the east? And
what of my entire life spent in the city of angels? Was it a marriage of convenience, or
somewhere, deep in my chest, did I split my heart between two coasts?
In my defense, I must say that Los
Angeles is not a city easy to love. It is false, fictional, and never what it
appears to be. The world sees the
glamorous, the heavy makeup and ruby red lipstick. It is only in the morning light that the
cracks are evident. The light reveals a
city older and more jaded than the Hollywood hype. I cannot get close to this city; it is
enigmatic and distant, best left to the image on a silver screen. There is emptiness and haunting loneliness to
which L.A. gives a unique
spin. Sure, you can be lonely elsewhere,
but it is different here. In Los
Angeles, loneliness becomes a suicidal, lost,
drug-induced hallucination.
New York
City is a character.
It has character. Los
Angeles is a backdrop, a malevolent shadow in the
surreal tent show of life. Writers don’t
make L.A. a character of equal
billing in novels and screenplays. Bret Easton Ellis tried. But really, could
Salinger have set his story in Los Angeles? Holden Caulfield could not have walked the sprawl
of city streets among the landmarks without falling down from exhaustion. L.A.
is an attitude more than a place.
The subtitle of this blog is
“Searching For The Soul of Los Angeles.”
Maybe because of the film industry and the history, that soul is subtle
and often hidden. It is not in-your-face
like New York. However, after living here my whole life, I
know the soul is there. So it is not
necessary to love L.A. to write
about it. One of the most intriguing
things about the city to me is the layered texture of the place. When peeling back those layers, all kinds of
surprises come out. London,
Paris, New York—what
you see is what you get. We
instinctively know those places, even
if we have never been. We find them in
the pages of books and on the screen, and when we finally do visit, it is more
to validate what we have seen portrayed elsewhere. Los Angeles
will surprise you.
That is what I enjoy about
living here: the surprises. The city cannot be taken for granted. There is always a juxtaposition, a contrast,
a dramatic fault line. People elsewhere
think of the city as a paradise: great
weather, beaches, mountains. But the
layers bring the dark corners, the insinuations, the hints of something
psychologically more complex and interesting.
Our conflicts are epic—just look at the recent battle for ownership of
the Dodgers.
So I’ll always love New
York for what it is, but I am connected to Los
Angeles not just because I was born here, but because
I am addicted to watching what it will become.
Things are always changing, and that leaves everyone slightly off
balance. There is this collision of
money, politics and dreams that makes the city interesting to explore, but
almost impossible to fully capture. That
is what makes the challenge of writing about L.A.
so inviting.
As for my sin of city adultery,
I know I will be forgiven. L.A.
knows the human animal has secrets, dark and malevolent. The city is noir to the core. With the
pain of a civic hangover, we greet the morning light with squinted eyes,
wondering how we got to where we are. It
is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. New
York may be the city that never sleeps, but Los
Angeles never sleeps in the same bed twice. She is a restless lover, trying to capture
the dream that almost always proves illusive and fragmentary. She keeps her distance and her secrets
carefully hidden.
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