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.)

Re: My Pigeon

Slog commenters had a lot to say about the plight of my pigeon.

Joe suggested it could be a reincarnated spirit, and pointed me to this lovely New Yorker piece about a pigeon that, for a time, came daily into a Burmese restaurant on the Upper West Side, walked down some stairs to its favorite landing, and took a nap. The Buddhist waiters at the restaurant believed the pigeon might have been the place's former owner.

Tenspeed suggested I enlist the help of a Pelican:



Keshmeshi warned that sometimes well-fed pigeons attract much bigger pigeons.

And Lloyd Clydesdale told me to call PAWS already.

Which I did.

The PAWS people discouraged me from leaving a nonflying pigeon on the streets to fend for itself, which had been one of my plans. They basically suggested that if I abandoned my pigeon (a bird I never asked for, by the way) I would probably become complicit in this poor creature subsequently getting mauled by a dog, hit by a car, scratched by a cat, or tormented by "mean humans." They got to me with those images. Once I could envision the chain of events I might set in motion by releasing an injured rat-with-wings into the wild city, I couldn't live with the thought.

So I agreed to take the bird down to the Seattle Animal Shelter, where the PAWS people swoop through each day and pick up certain animals that they then rehabilitate up at their Lynwood facility (my pigeon, I was told, would be one of the PAWS picks).

The PAWS media representative wrote me:

Thanks for showing compassion toward urban wildlife.

And so I headed home to box up the pigeon and take it down to the animal shelter. But when I arrived the deck was empty again. The pigeon had disappeared, leaving nothing behind but uneaten bread and bird droppings.



Was it just toying with me earlier this morning when it showed me it was unable to fly away? Did it simply require a little more rest? At this point, I like Joe's reincarnated spirit theory best.

My Pigeon

So I wake up this morning and there's a pigeon walking around on my deck. It won't fly away when I try scare tactics. It flaps around, but can't seem to achieve liftoff. It looks tired, perhaps injured. I call Brendan.

I'm not feeling hugely sympathetic toward this creature. I'm also not feeling ready to put my fingers all over a flapping, possibly injured bird first thing in the morning. I want the pigeon gone. I want it to stop shitting all over the place. But I don't want to get my hands dirty, so to speak. I'm a heartless wimp.

I figure Brendan will be both heartless and ready to get his hands dirty. I think: Perhaps he'll make a lunch of it. You know: snap the pigeon's neck, pluck off its feathers, garnish with a sprig of parsley.

Or, at the very least, I figure Brendan will be supportive of getting this nonflying pigeon off of my deck somehow—either by carrying it down to the street for me or by tossing it over the side and letting it sink or fly, so to speak.

Harsh, I know. But the urban jungle is harsh. What else am I going to do? Nurse it back to health?

This, it turns out, is exactly what Brendan recommends. This man, who once stalked 12th Avenue in search of pigeon prey, now tells me to fetch a cardboard box and some breadcrumbs so that he can make a nest for my weakly flapping house guest.

How could I not comply? The urban hunter was more sympathetic than I was. I felt ashamed.

The pigeon gets 24 hours.

No Talent, No Problem

A Sub Pop rep defends Sanjaya.



(Hat tip: TMZ via the Hasson seder.)

A Passover Tip

From Japan, via Sullivan: