They Still Actually Like Lazy Cliches?

I saw in the New York Times the other day that Bill Bratton, the LAPD chief from the Northeast, might stick around for a while because “he had gotten used to Los Angeles and actually liked it here.”

Imagine that.

The quoted words are not from Bratton, but from the newspaper, which can only mean that the New York Times finds it odd that anyone would like it here.

The NYT, an ambitious paper, ought to follow its heart and do an investigative series of stories on other New Yorkers who have moved west and “actually liked it here.” There could be thumbnail sketches and photos, maybe a few hundred a day, until the NYT closes in on a theory as to why hundreds of thousands of people have abandoned New York.

In that same edition, I was perusing a review of a book by a reluctant New York transplant and her issues with California. “Like most devoted New Yorkers who find themselves in La-La Land,” the reviewer wrote, “the author goes through at least half of the five stages of grief.”

Memo to New York:

References to La-La Land are as fresh and funny as references to the Big Apple.

Even if used ironically, they don’t work.

Please discontinue immediately.

End of memo.

As a California native, I can’t fairly evaluate the claim that transplants go through five stages of grief. But wouldn’t it help if they brought their psychiatrists west with them, so they could avoid the added trauma of finding new ones?

And speaking of stereotypes, I should set up a relocation-counseling service, because I know exactly what the problem is. New Yorkers move west and settle in the places that are the least like New York.

They go for beach compounds, gated isolation and the dullest suburban enclaves and then complain for the next 30 years that it’s not like New York here.

They all keep reading the New York Times, too, not because it’s better than local offerings but because it reinforces their misery.

Ordinarily, when I spot gratuitous swipes at California, I quickly move on, attributing them to a combination of self-loathing and intellectual laziness. But my vacation was almost over, so I needed to get my blood pressure back to unsafe levels for my return to work.

As for the La-La Land reference, was the review meant to be ironic? Hard to say, because I haven’t read the book, and this was one of those useless reviews that’s more of an attempt by the reviewer to be clever than to analyze the book.

Regardless, L.A. does not come off particularly well, and knowing that my wife would be returning to the grind too, I felt it was only fair to get her blood pumping. So I suggested, in passing, that she be sure to read the review.

She went through five stages of anger. Then her body convulsed as she flipped the paper in disgust.

“What?” I asked. But I knew.

The reviewer referred to Los Angeles as “a place where the dominant feminine paradigm remains bodacious, blond and brainless.”

“I can’t believe it,” my wife said, shaking her blond head.

Among the many problems with the cheap hit, my wife said, is that blonds are in a distinct minority in a city dominated by Latino and Asian populations, many of whom actually like it here.

Someone tell the New York Times.

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Reach the columnist at steve.lopez@latimes.com and read previous columns at latimes.com/lopez