Don’t count Vancouver Canuck hockey player Gino...

Don’t count Vancouver Canuck hockey player Gino Odjick among those who knock L.A. It’s his favorite National Hockey League city, the 20-year-old native of Quebec told Hockey News.

“I’d never seen palm trees or the ocean before,” he explained. “I like going to the carwash and seeing the nice cars.”

There’s more to love about L.A. than its fine palm trees and carwashes, of course.

Filmmaker Paul Mazursky pays tribute to such wonders as personally monogrammed surfboards in “Scenes From a Mall.” And in “L.A. Story,” writer-star Steve Martin points out the many fine shortcuts available to freeway-phobes as he calmly motors to work through alleys, up and down stairways and along the bed of the L.A. River.

List of the Day:

With the above two movies, plus a recent KCET special on novelist Raymond Chandler, the Bard of the Basin, the City of Angels has been receiving plenty of attention.

In order that the neighbors not feel left out, we offer our own special--”The Suburbs in Literature.”

1. “Redondo Beach was not as heavily frequented by Hollywood types or muscle-builders or the general flotsam that seemed to wash up around Venice,” writes Michael Katz in the thriller with the provocative title “Last Dance in Redondo Beach.”

2. Long Beach’s Belmont Shore is “a jumble of ambition, filled with salesgirls who took a acting classes at night and bartenders who wrote screenplays during the day, part-time waitresses and substitute teachers, single and anonymous and overextended,” rhapsodizes novelist Robert Ferrigno in “Horse Latitudes.”

3. “You could live there a long time and not see a tommy gun,” Raymond Chandler says of Bay City (Santa Monica) in “Farewell, My Lovely.” “Sure, it’s a nice town. It’s probably no crookeder than Los Angeles.”

4. “I was going to say you’d make a fine wife for somebody,” a character says in James Cain’s “Mildred Pierce,” “if you didn’t live in Glendale.”

The latest issue of USC Trojan Family magazine contains an irreverent guide to the campus, including a reference to the building where “the masons made a monkey out of Rufus B. Von KleinSmid.”

Legend has it that Von KleinSmid, the school’s late chancellor, held up construction of the Student Union Building with so many unsolicited suggestions to the builders that one artist left an unsolicited tribute in a frieze (see photo), still visible six decades later.

One last L.A. culture note:

“The Big Love,” a Broadway play set in a run-down L.A. bungalow, is a one-woman show starring Tracey Ullman. She portrays Florence Aadland, whose daughter Beverly was briefly famous in the 1950s as the 15-year-old girlfriend of actor Errol Flynn.

The title is taken from Mom’s autobiography, which wastes no time getting to the point with this opening line:

“There’s one thing I want to make clear right off: My baby was a virgin the day she met Errol Flynn.”

miscelLAny:

The birthplace of the sport of hang-gliding is generally acknowledged to be Dockweiler State Beach in Playa del Rey.