I Loved L.A.

I'd never been to Los Angeles until last week, and when I first found out I would be going down there I didn't expect to like it much.

Growing up in Seattle, almost everything I'd heard about L.A. was negative—especially during the 90s, when this city was gripped by nativist resentment and something close to cultural hysteria about all the L.A. people who were moving up here.

The complaint, at the time, was that L.A. people didn't drive like Seattleites, didn't talk like Seattleites, didn't expect housing to be as cheap as Seattleites, and didn't have the crunchy-earthy-earnest Seattle ethos. Back then, people in Seattle talked about L.A. transplants the way some locals now talk about the condo boom—a sign that Seattle is being transformed, and not for the better, into a place the old-timers and professional gripers don't recognize.

Anyway, I landed in L.A. on Wednesday, ready to hate it, ready to look down, like a good Seattleite, on it's car culture, its fakery, and its self-satisfied sprawl.

It was hot, the light was squint-making, and all that I'd been warned about was there: the cars crawling along the 405, the people always talking like pitchmen, the endless streets, the unapologetic strip malls, the skyline-obscuring haze.

Who knows exactly why one falls in love with a city, but I have a theory about why I proceeded to fall in love with L.A. last week, against all advice and all the long odds of a Seattle native feeling such affection for such a place.

My theory is that L.A. was a huge relief. Maybe I'm more vulnerable to this than most people, because of the nature of my job, but when I landed in L.A. I was completely full up on the hectoring tone of Seattle's gripers, finger-waggers, and utopia-demanders. It's unbelievably grating to live in a city where the dominant civic discourse is one of lament about the absence of the perfect (twined with perpetual disagreement about how to get to the perfect, and achingly slow steps toward that end).

L.A., by contrast, is completely fucked up, completely beyond environmental repair, completely imperfect, and completely designed to give tight-assed Seattle people an aneurysm. Granted, I was only there for three days, but it seemed to me that people in L.A. have a sort of wry satisfaction with their state of affairs. I loved that. I drove 20 minutes to get everywhere. I ate in a strip mall. I had superficial conversations. I drove some more. I stopped worrying about sprawl and sprawled out at the beach. (That's not me below, by the way.)



To ask the hot Seattle question of the moment: Is it sustainable? Would it last, my thrill at life in a city that does everything my home city tells me not to?

I don't know. Probably not.

But man, it was nice for a while. On my last day I went up to the Getty, wandered its other-worldly gardens...



...and looked down on the huge, flat metropolis. The sun was warm, as always. The air was striving for opaque, as always. I couldn't quite see downtown Los Angeles to the east and, looking west, I couldn't quite see where the ocean ended and the land began. It was all blurry, messy, resistant to resolution. Everyone I saw seemed happy with this. I didn't want to leave.

(Photos by Corianton Hale, who was also in L.A. recently.)