Sep. 23, 2012 at 9:56pm with 11 notes
this was a weird thing to writepersonalL.A.
“
A year ago, New York’s Time magazine said the revitalization of downtown LA could be dubbed the neighborhood’s “Manhattanization,” as if New York invented the idea of clustering bars and restaurants to attract crowds. A few months later, writing about Pacific Standard Time, a massive multi-museum retrospective of the best in LA art from 1945 to 1980, the New York Times called the collection “overcompensation” from a city “where interest in culture starts and ends with movie grosses and who is on the cover of Vanity Fair.” “It’s corny,” art critic Dave Hickey, who also used to direct the Reese Palley gallery in New York, told the Times of the collection. “It’s the sort of thing that Denver would do.
—

Cord Jefferson, I Used to Love Her, But I Had to Flee Her: On Leaving New York

Even though New York is closer to my home state and does not require me to own a car, I have much more of a love affair with the idea of moving to L.A. I have come to terms with New York (enough so that I signed up for an Amtrak Guest Rewards credit card to make visiting my friends there more affordable, and enough so that when my life in D.C. starts to compress too tightly it is where I go [usually on a whim and always on a train, thanks to the aforementioned credit card]; that I have not hidden out in New York recently, as things have gone poorly both in both personal and professional arenas, is a testament to my very secure, safe grounding in D.C., which I most certainly will not be leaving anytime soon), but I have no fascination with it.

I visited L.A. for the first time as an adult last November and have spent many, many moments since then checking prices of flights against my schedule. When I arrived there on the Coast Starlight in April—the southbound train pulls into Union Station around 9 p.m., but before it does, there is a moment in which it passes under a highway and visible just to the west is a piece of neon text art that says “Another City is Possible”—I felt as if I was very, very slowly untangling something.

People like me—East Coast snobs, bike-transportation snobs, non-TV-owning snobs, density snobs, urbanist snobs, smart-growth snobs, Jane Jacobs snobs—are, I suspect, not supposed to like L.A. But I do (and you may, too). This is largely because my predilections, my interests, and my habits do not square with L.A.’s signifiers and stereotypes. It holds my interest in a way that New York cannot.

Which is not to say that I’m over New York, should you interpret my comments that way. Plus, it’s facile to continually pit the one really big American city on the East Coast against the other really big American city on the West Coast because they’re both large and have elements of world-class-ness and are magnets for people my age who do the creative-industry thing because there are creative-industry jobs to be had and oh my God why am I even bothering to defend the fact that I continually defend a city that I don’t even live in?

Because, when I came back to work after my trip in November, my editor asked me how my weekend was. When I told him that L.A. had grabbed me, he said, “I can never hate L.A. as much as I want to.”

As far as I can tell, no other American city has that kind of power.

  1. thebrowncoat said: Heading out to San Diego in October and then to L.A. - know anything about the Pacific Surfliner train from San Diego to L.A.?
  2. sarahluz said: i reblogged tesslynch’s post with this article earlier and just realized tumblr ate it! but i have very similar thoughts about LA. long-standing love affair going back to my stint there. will repost.
  3. thecallup said: As a veteran east coast, bike riding snob, I can say that LA has the goods. I recently told an NYC friend, I believe they are morally obligated to loathe LA, but we are happier. You get to choose your own adventure.