A Los Angeles Primer
The always multiplying, subdividing, subjective experiences and perceptions of Los Angeles make for an infinitely more interesting city to write about than any single, objective place. Hence my own project, a book which takes the name of "A Los Angeles Primer" and extends its spirit to the many Los Angeleses of the 21st century. Each week, this column will adapt an essay on one aspect of the city from the book-in-progress.
A Los Angeles Primer:
Does the Jazz Age linear downtown, "America's Champs-Élysées" which once offered car-friendly shopping (and a huge Japanese department store), have a place in our urban renaissance?
A Los Angeles Primer:
The freeways fascinate in the same way the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinate: they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.
A Los Angeles Primer:
Why a walk through this both formerly and currently Jewish neighborhood, recently the incubator of first-rate revival cinema and a world-famous "willfully repugnant" hip-hop group, must naturally end with the contemplation of a tortilla full of chili, cheese, pastrami, and sausage.
A Los Angeles Primer:
The place to stock up on canned green tea, buy a genuine futon, burn an hour at the arcade, eat a heaping plateful of Hayashi rice, or gaze upon the finest men's style magazines: Little Tokyo remains all these, but does it, strictly speaking, remain Japanese?
A Los Angeles Primer:
Despite making genuinely credible claims to importance in eating, drinking, and specialty shopping, La Brea remains, on a human being's scale, for much of its twelve-mile length, starkly inhospitable.
A Los Angeles Primer:
Say what you will about their limited reach; the Red and Purple Lines surely must rank among the cleanest, most comfortable, least urine-smelling systems in America. You may lose twenty minutes waiting on platforms, but you'll have taken a subway - in Los Angeles!
A Los Angeles Primer:
The tiny municipality seems to punch above its weight in most of the important modern rankings: food, no doubt; culture, in certain senses, yes; street life, seemingly so; homosexuality, most definitely.
A Los Angeles Primer:
One can technically live an entire life in only Korean or Spanish - or indeed, only English - within these almost three square miles, but it would by no means count as a full one.
A Los Angeles Primer:
The always multiplying, subdividing, subjective experiences and perceptions of Los Angeles make for an infinitely more interesting city to write about than any single, objective place.
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