The New Alexandria : SEX, DEATH, AND GOD IN L.A. <i> Edited by David Reid</i> , <i> (Pantheon Books: $22</i> ; <i> 300 pp.) </i>

Finishing the collection of essays called “Sex, Death, and God in L.A.,” I thought once again that we exaggerate when we sing “I love L.A.” What do we love? Fractions of the whole, a sunset, a party, a tostada, a basketball game, a bookstore, a wave, but never everything on the way there. How can we love a city we barely know?

Obliterated by a million hours of movies and television stories placed here arbitrarily; settled in the last decade by the millions of immigrants come to a city incapable of absorbing them in a rational way; economically gutted by reluctant taxpayers who would rather commit their children to die in battle than spend money to educate them--Los Angeles has become a terrible blur.

David Reid, the book’s editor, wants Los Angeles to be recognized as the new Alexandria, which is an exciting idea, but where’s the library? Reid, who lives in Berkeley (!), has an enthusiasm for Los Angeles not exactly shared by his writers, all of whom, except for Alex Cockburn, live here. In different ways, each of them--Cockburn and Mike Davis on politics, Carolyn See and Eve Babitz on sex, Lynell George on death, David Reid on religion, Ruben Martinez and Reid himself on God, Thomas S. Hines on architecture and David Thomson and Jeremy Larner on the Industry--tries to define the thing that makes this strange place worth loving, even if all that can be loved is the city’s potential.

The best of the writing in the book addresses Los Angeles as it stands now, with some retelling of the city’s short history and a slight tendency to restate the dominant and outdated mythologies of the area even as the writers often pretend to do something else. The book has occasional trouble separating itself from the mystifications it wants to dispel, which is one of the curses of writing about Los Angeles, always to see an ominous significance in the wrong particulars (a curse that surely infects these thoughts as well, reading too much significance about L.A into a book about L.A.). But where the writers avoid the temptation to stand above the city and offer the usual limited prophecies, (gonna be bad, gonna be badder) when they place themselves in the city’s life, some of these pieces should be interesting even when the foreman of history walks in with a verdict.

Alex Cockburn, in “On the Rim of the Pacific Century,” commits himself to the usual dystopic cliches: This is the future, and it’s “Blade Runner.” On a trip through downtown with author Mike Davis (whose two following essays are better conceived), Cockburn tells the story of a once vibrant area blasted by developers. Since this was precisely the grim district that gave the world noir , does his romantic depiction of Italian and Irish gangs battling for turf 50 years ago coincide with an equally romantic notion about the Crips and Bloods as the revolution’s avatars? And his allusion to developers looking at downtown and “counting the shekels and yen” is repulsive. Cockburn, like George Bush, is an aristocrat who believes in class war, and although he supports the other side, he still, like George Bush, wants the poor and the dark to do his fighting for him.

Davis, when he is Virgil without the companionship of Cockburn’s Dante, is one ofthe few writers thinking about the city who really understand more than the zone between downtown and the beach. No one else has written with such knowledge about all those ignored districts of the region--Vernon, Commerce, Cudahy, Bell Gardens, Maywood--and their economies and political histories. Less concerned with whether the city will turn into something out of “Blade Runner” than he is with the specifics of who controls it now, and who is heartbreakingly exploited, his two essays in the book are invaluable demystifiers. In spite of a vein of contempt and bitterness, Davis has to be read.

I would imagine that Davis, from Fontana, and Cockburn, from Ireland, must hate the rest of the book, summed up in this line of Carolyn See’s: “Politics, the ‘militant’ commitment to some strong point or other, never really gets going here. Los Angeles is about living together nicely, striking it rich--if you get around to it--and taking the afternoon sun.” In “Melting,” she tells the story of her marriages and loves, first to Walter Wong, then with an unnamed Slovak, and then with Frank Romero, a Chicano artist. Where Mike Davis ends his second essay unable to eat an orange because he has learned too much about the hard life of the poor vendor who sold it to him on the street, See ends her essay in a mini-mall, at an Indonesian restaurant, finding, in the quiet mix-up of cultures, some hope for herself, if not for the city.

The drone of anecdotes seems to be a mark of writing about the city. Is one person’s story insufficient to capture what is unique here, or, lacking magazines and journals with enough influence to collect an audience that would take writing here seriously, are writers cramming in all their observations hoping that the heat of this concentration will finally draw attention?

Eve Babitz, on the religion of exercise, tells too many stories. She throws away her observations on the difference between yoga and aerobics, trying to be funny about something that she should have taken more seriously. A deeper exploration of those differences might have yielded something profound, since taking seriously just what the world mocks in Los Angeles is the necessary step to a real culture.

Lynell George’s article on death in Los Angeles is also too broad, but in the essay’s best section, a few pages on the deaths of two artists downtown, she re-creates beautifully something about the area’s emptiness that should have been the piece’s only focus. (And for a book with sex and death in the title, Reid should have had a piece about AIDS.)

The book’s finest essay, “La Placita,” by Ruben Martinez, could have belonged under any of the book’s section headings. Martinez filters a family’s history through the renovation of his grandparents’ kitchen, and although the structure is a bit forced, he offers sadness, the appropriate emotion. Brilliant on the collapse of his own sure politics, Martinez sees a model in Father Luis Olivares, who, sick with AIDS, fights for his church and for the street vendors from whom Mike Davis runs in needless shame. Martinez knows himself to be unequal to such heroics, and knowing that, resigns himself to hope and a prayer.

This tension between religion and politics leads to Reid’s own contribution to the book, “The Possessed,” a nicely sympathetic look at the city’s spiritual history. The Aimee Semple McPherson story has been told too many times, but the material on Krishnamurti and the sections on Aldous Huxley and the early acid-heads are excellent. Along with the next chapter, Thomas S. Hines on L.A. architecture, he justifies the book at the least as a good gift for visitors.

The book ends with two pieces on the Industry by Jeremy Larner and David Thomson. Thomson, who wrote “Suspects,” has been better elsewhere, and when Larner doesn’t strain, he’s funny, but I missed one of Bruce Wagner’s Bud Wiggins stories.

In his introduction, Reid indicates that the book was produced under the pressure of a changed guard at his publishers, and that his writers suffered under “uncomfortable deadlines.” He should have insisted on more time. I wanted more.

Given the book’s mission, he should have asked more writers for their thoughts on his themes. I missed a Harold Myerson piece on city hall politics, and something about the new coffeehouse culture, and the book would have gained something wonderful with a long piece by Jonathan Gold, whose Counter Intelligence column in The Times every Thursday, about cheap ethnic restaurants is more than the best writing on food I’ve ever read in the city, touching on all of Reid’s subjects. Like Carolyn See and Ruben Martinez, and even Mike Davis, Gold knows that the great spectacle of Los Angeles, our Eiffel Tower, our skyline, really is the mystery of what it’s going to become, and that the place to see the most hopeful possibility is only on the ground, where we meet, where we can fill in the gaps.

And if we do know the city, if we do know each other, will it make a difference? Will the city then be great? Will we then fund the schools and clean the air, and build a library that will be famous in 3,000 years?

Probably not, but the wish is nice.