Yo, San Francisco, You’re No L.A.

Last summer I found myself sweltering in downtown Houston in the middle of a 16-city book tour, with Dallas next up on the schedule. Because the city of Dallas was responsible not only for John F. Kennedy’s death but also for all that bunkum about America’s Team, I pleaded with my publisher to ditch the stop and let me go directly to the West Coast for the weekend. I said I wanted to clamber aboard the next plane to L.A. and spend each morning lazing by the hotel pool ordering room service, one of the truly archetypal experiences in American civilization. My publisher graciously complied with my request.

When I returned to New York at the end of my tour, some of my friends expressed surprise that I would choose Los Angeles over San Francisco. San Francisco, as everyone knows, is America’s Athens, neatly paired with Boston, its Alexandrian counterpart on the East Coast. It is a city of charm and culture and sophistication and understated elegance, as it never tires of telling everyone. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is a rude, crude, vulgar belly of the beast where everyone spends all their time on car phones. So why on earth, with my publisher springing for the bill, would I voluntarily choose the City of Angels over the wee, dainty, elfin town where little cable cars run halfway to the stars?

This was not the first time I’d been asked such questions. Four years earlier, I had written a story for Spy magazine challenging San Francisco’s claim to cultural suzerainty of the West Coast. If San Francisco was such a rigorously cerebral locality, why then was it serviced by the dim San Francisco Chronicle and the inanimate San Francisco Examiner, newspapers that are never mentioned in the same breath as the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, nor for that matter the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Globe and Mail in Toronto or the newspaper that brings you this magazine. If San Francisco had, in fact, inherited the scepter dropped by Constantinople lo these many centuries, and its neighbor to the south was nothing more than Marina del Gaza, why then did Los Angeles have it so seriously outgunned vis-a-vis orchestras and museums? And while it was true then, as it is now, that San Francisco was brimming with trendy movie houses showing classic films such as “Citizen Kane” and “Sullivan’s Travels,” it’s worth remembering that those films were made in Los Angeles, not San Francisco.

Since that article appeared, my case has only been strengthened. While San Francisco has added its Museum of Modern Art, a snazzy building with a so-so collection, Los Angeles has built the Getty Center, a cultural theme park so beguiling that no one can get in to see it. I have always taken it as a basic rule of thumb that for a city to attain true greatness, it must have museums, clubs and restaurants that no one can get into, and it must have lots of them. Once again, the tote board favors L.A.

Although I am prepared to argue till hell freezes over that the cultural resources of Los Angeles far outstrip those of its neighbor to the north, this is not the reason I prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco. The reason I prefer L.A. is because I have never been able to stomach San Francisco’s daunting phalanxes of unpaid civic boosters. Not unlike the denizens of Montreal, Toronto, Boston and even Dublin, all of whom have convinced themselves that they are locked in some sort of cultural death match with great cities such as New York, Paris, London and Los Angeles--a struggle of which the inhabitants of those cities are utterly oblivious--people in San Francisco are always pushing the merchandise.

“Isn’t this the most beautiful city you have ever visited?” they demand, conscious that you hail from New York by way of Philly.

“No,” I reply. “There’s a little hamlet on the Seine that can kick its ass any day of the week, and I’d think twice before putting San Francisco in the ring with Sydney, Australia, either.”

“Don’t you adore our fabulous weather?” they wonder, condescendingly.

“Sure, but in L.A. you can go to the beach and actually go into the ocean. And you can do it in January.”

“Wouldn’t you agree that the quality of life here is higher than in places like New York and Los Angeles?”

“No, because when I measure the quality of life, I tend to calibrate how much my fellow citizens annoy me, and no one is more annoying than the residents of San Francisco.”

My problem with San Francisco has always been the same as my problem with the south of France: It’s a physically stunning place blighted by legions of obnoxious people. And it cannot behave like an adult. When I visit self-conscious townlets like Austin, Texas, or Burlington, Vt., I am neither surprised nor annoyed when I am subjected to the boho booster third degree about the locality’s vertiginous quality of life; I simply write it off as the addled ramblings of gnats trying to give the visitor from dreaded, unsanitary New York a hard time. But San Francisco is a big city, and to my mind there’s something unseemly about big cities that always feel that they have to sell themselves. Truly great cities take their stature for granted: Nobody in London harangues visitors with facts and figures proving that London is a more livable city than Rome. People in Paris and London and New York and Los Angeles simply assume that they belong to an exclusive club, and they don’t have to trot out the Louvre, the Sistine Chapel, the Empire State Building and “Godfather II” to prove it. People in truly great cities don’t worry about who’s No. 1. That’s the kind of thing they do in absurd, synthetic municipalities like Raleigh-Durham.

Ultimately, my problem with San Francisco is twofold: It’s pokey, and it’s twee. Great cities are universes containing many, many overlapping solar systems: You can’t capture the civic ethos in a snapshot the way you can in San Francisco, with its regiments of interchangeable, slightly left-of-center Rotarians. Moreover, great cities always have more than one product on their shelves. Their pudding does not have one single theme. San Francisco, by contrast, has a one-dimensional personality whose defining element is a cloying, self-satisfied smugness. A smugness that continues all the way up the West Coast through Vancouver, an indisputably charming burg that has somehow confused itself with Byzantium.

That’s why I opted for Los Angeles, where I spent three days reacquainting myself with trusty old pleasures: the Santa Monica Pier, Farmers Market, the diner on Sunset Strip where half the patrons drive Porsches, those incongruously downscale tar pits poised next to the L.A. County Museum of Art, the inner sanctum of Book Soup, the phantasmagoric real estate of Beverly Hills and, most of all, the city’s Edenic vegetation. When push comes to shove, I love Los Angeles because it lacks self-consciousness. Like New York, it is a sprawling Babel, a genuine melting pot, a complete mess. The architecture is always at war with itself. Nobody ever hauled out a drawing board for this assignment. Zoning boards do not seem to exist. It’s a city that defines and even celebrates the raucous incoherence that lies at the heart of the American character. It’s full of surprises, full of anomalies, full of festive contradictions. In no sense does Los Angeles ever feel like a corporate city with a written game plan. It is always a work in progress.

San Francisco is a whole other thing. San Francisco, much like Chicago, has a chip on its shoulder. But unlike Chicagoans, who seem to have a deep and abiding hatred of New York, San Franciscans don’t have enough points on the scoreboard to seriously compete with the truly great cities of the world. Chicago has one of the world’s finest orchestras, a remarkable art museum, Wrigley Field, the blues, an awesome mythology stretching all the way from Richard Daley to Al Capone, great journalists and grit. San Francisco, by contrast, is a prisoner of its own cuteness. When you walk around the city at night, it’s no secret why the most famous local band named itself the Dead. Basically, it’s a city that needs to stop pounding its chest. It’s a city that needs to get over itself. Most important, it’s a city that needs to start acting like a great city. It’s a city that should take a cue from the immortal Tom Landry, architect of the great, albeit annoying, Dallas Cowboys of the 1960s and 1970s, who once derided players who boisterously celebrated the most routine touchdowns by sneering, “When you get into the end zone, act like you’ve been there before.”