After All of a Month, L.A.-Friendly Totally
Anniversary Day.
One month after moving to Los Angeles from New York, I get an e-mail from a New Yorker who reads The Times online. This I find curious because without a gun to his head, no self-respecting New Yorker would admit to more than a passing, loathsome interest in L.A.
“I visit as often as I can,” he taps back in response to my query. “Where else in the U.S. do you find a Thai Town, Korean shopping malls and Jewish delis in neighborhoods that remind you of Mexico City [MacArthur Park]?”
This guy’s got a pretty good eye for a New Yorker. But here’s where he really soars above his self-adoring, five-borough brethren.
“[New York] is a pretty predictable place, unlike L.A., which doesn’t seem to know what the [heck] it is or where the [heck] it’s going, which is fun to watch.”
Bingo.
For the last four years, my job was to fly around the country chasing stories. It took me to 40-some states, to mountain and prairie, to city and village, and nowhere did I find a drama as curious and compelling, nowhere did I find the hand of God so close to the work of the devil, as in the cracked plate that runs from Baja to Santa Barbara.
And I speak not just of stratified this and polyglot that. Not just of SigAlerts, rolling blackouts, Dennis Rodman’s helicopter landing at his pink compound in Newport Beach, or any of the other obvious signs that true darkness awaits and death will be by torture.
I’m talking about the drama of ordinary life in the endless city, built on desire, that wakes up each day to the surprise of its own reinvention.
Greater Los Angeles is the slow fade of post-World War II settlers who worked in aerospace and lived in their backyards in Downey and Lakewood, saving up for layaway dreams like Winnebagos and screened-in porches.
It’s the desperate industriousness of the Lynwood man I know, if he’s still alive, who scrapes the green paint off fish tank gravel and sells it on the street as rock cocaine.
It’s Noel Irwin Hentschel coming out of her gated spread in the hills of Bel-Air to give away money in the South-Central flatlands she grew up in.
It’s the collision of three continents at the corner of Third and Normandie, where a woman with a barbecue sells tacos for a buck across from a row of Asian storefronts, and nearby lies the gray glory of elephantine mansions built in another time for a distant universe.
It’s the pink-gray sundown sky that rolls off the sea and embraces the hills, and it’s my Silver Lake neighbors bringing in the cats at nightfall, when the coyotes reclaim the metropolis.
Greater Los Angeles lies undiscovered and undisciplined, a symphony without a conductor.
Who needs one?
Pro football, politics and even leadership we can do without. On a good day, maybe two dozen souls in all of Los Angeles have the remotest interest in the vapid vitriol of conventional politics. That’s part of what defines the place and sets it apart.
And yet $13 million into their campaign for mayor, Jim Hahn and Antonio Villaraigosa took the stage for their fifth and final debate in a city that has moved further beyond race than any other in America, and what did these two Magoos do?
They trashed each other with racially charged accusations. And they did this, don’t let me forget, at the Museum of Tolerance.
If you can’t in good conscience vote for one of them, then vote twice against the other. One day soon you’ll be in a six-mile backup and feel more entitled to unleash profanity and threats.
Anniversary Day.
News on every street, a scam on every corner. Yesterday is buried, tomorrow unrecognizable.
Los Angeles is home.
Not that New York doesn’t have a thing or two going for it, to be honest. A nice park, a few museums and a mayor with a wife and girlfriend passing each other in the hall.
But any city where you’ve got to work so hard to find a fish taco isn’t ready for the future.
Steve Lopez’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He can be reached at https://steve.lopez@latimes.com
