Examining the Way of Life on This Side of the Hill

I moved to the Valley from Atlanta almost 15 years ago, and Shock No. 1 was the odd geographical snobbism that cast a golden glow over the Westside and caused so many people to mumble when they admitted they lived on this side of the hill. So pervasive was this absurd phenomenon that a novelist friend began to mock it by calling his community Van Nuys-by-the-Sea.

Since I had grown up in Philadelphia, I understood something about this bogus You Are Where You Live business. There, your status is instantly upped several notches if you live on the Main Line, a weird distinction indeed since it refers to the perfectly ordinary rail line that serves Ardmore and other upscale Philly suburbs.

In Philadelphia mythology the Main Line is way better than, say, Oreland, the noneuphoniously named suburb where I grew up. Our house was virtually identical to that of my cousins in Ardmore, but they unquestionably had geographical bragging rights, something, fortunately, most kids neither care about nor exercise.

I raise the geographical status issue because one of the assumptions that will be made in this new weekly column is that the Valley is as interesting as any place in L.A. and its 1.6 million or so residents as sophisticated as other Angelenos.

Last week, for instance, a young couple bought a house in my modest East Valley neighborhood--he’s an astronomer, she’s a computer animator. They are the kind of people who work hard and also read, hike, listen to music, try to find the best tomatoes at the farmers’ market, go out to brunch, and dress up and celebrate Halloween with their friends--leisure and lifestyle activities that give shape to people’s lives in Encino as well as Santa Monica.

What you will find in this space are slices of Valley life--profiles of artists and other creative people, stories that spring from the Valley’s hundreds of ethnic communities, stories on how people interact with food (or foodways, as the anthropologists say), perhaps a story on whether more people really are bowling alone. Collecting, publishing, museumology, foraging, birding, coffee bars, all the things that contribute to culture in the Valley and Valley culture will be grist for potential columns. Some will no doubt deal with the Valley’s Great Good Places (Du-par’s in Studio City has its fans), and there will also be stories on how Valleyites choose to spend their increasingly precious time. I’ll look for the unexpected and the new (When did people start to turn their front yards into gardens? What brings down the house in an Armenian comedy club?), but I’ll also try to give a context to the familiar.

There are always fascinating stories if you dig far enough beneath the surface. Early in my tenure at The Times, I did a front-page story about chick sexing (who knew there was such a thing?) that focused on a huge, now defunct egg farm in Moorpark. It employed a Japanese American chick sexer, a man who performed the difficult but crucial operation of identifying the valuable female chicks and weeding out the males.

In reporting the story, I learned that chick sexing was traditionally a Japanese American profession. Moreover, expert chick sexers were so crucial to the American economy that they weren’t interned during World War II as even Japanese American physicians were. All this in Moorpark, in what seemed to be just a really, really big egg farm.

The entertainment industry will be a regular source of columns (one of many). I have always been fascinated by the cycle that draws talented people from all over the world to Hollywood, much of which is actually located, of course, in the Valley.

When William Faulkner was slaving away at Warner Bros., wishing he didn’t have to write movies to support his big, needy family--he suffered in Burbank. It was there that he articulated what could be the mantra of every writer who would rather write a serious novel than dialogue for Don Johnson: “I just kept saying to myself, ‘They are going to pay me Saturday, they are going to pay me Saturday.’ ”

Another column might deal with the people who do want to write for TV but find themselves stymied, because of their age, by its notorious gray list.

Novelist Theodore Dreiser never managed to sell his first novel, “Sister Carrie,” to Universal, but he, too, moved here to try. (RKO Pictures finally bought it in 1940 for $40,000.) Dreiser lived for a time in Glendale, and, indeed, he’s still there, buried in Forest Lawn.

The Valley has great ghosts because of the Industry, and the Industry also helps give the Valley its vibrant present. At Disney, for instance, there is an entire department that dreams up attractions--such as faces in the fake rock--to entertain people as they wait in those endless lines at its theme parks. Such is the stuff of columns. This is the Valley, where servers have agents and there is a screenplay on every hard drive. Some of these people will find themselves in future columns, as will Valley horse people, computer people, foodies and countless others.

One thing you won’t find is geographical piety. The Valley all but invented mall culture, and, for that, it must be punished. I won’t do the literary equivalent of genuflecting when writing about something goofy that Valleyites are up to--like changing the names of their neighborhoods to something that sounds tonier.

You think we don’t know you still live in Reseda?

And, hey, that’s just fine.