I am currently writing from a cafe in West LA’s “Little Osaka” neighborhood, drinking the worst (and most expensive chai tea) I’ve ever had. In my mind are swirling all the accusations I’ve ever heard about LA: that it’s dirty, that the people are phoney, that everyone’s toxically ambitious, that everyone’s superficial. And although I can’t really claim any of these facts is untrue, I have to say this: LA is surprisingly not-horrible.
Okay, sure, so I went to a party and I’ve never head the phrase “I’ll hook you up,” more times in my life. And yes, I’ve already met a skinny blonde lady calling herself a vegan who eats fish. And yeah, I’ve been in bathrooms larger than the room I lived in for the last three years. And I’ve heard a tragic story about someone’s yacht breaking, where the “money wasn’t the problem.” And I’ve been to an abandoned zoo that had a photoshoot happening inside it. And I’ve had a fashion designer try to convince me that drinking pure chlorophyll was good for “cleaning out your neurons.” And I’ve been surrounded by perfect butts 24/7, further evidence that people are living in gymns.
And yet, I like it.
Why, you may ask? Because despite all the bullshit, people seem to be nice. Sure, it’s entirely possible that my years in Chicago have severely depleted my dopamine levels until simply being in a city with sunlight and plants and mountains is causing a temporary bliss. And it’s entirely possible that staying with some of my favorite friends who left Chicago a year before I graduated is doing the same thing. But thus far, I for some reason, like it. I, who disliked Portland, who vowed to spend about five days in LA total. Time keeps passing, and yet I remain.
The thing is, when you’re in any place where people are moving from all around the world to make something, it’s inherently stimulating. You’re surrounded by all kinds of people, many of them artists. And yes they spend a lot of time thinking about their butts, but still there’s diversity.
“You have to spend a bit of time in LA to figure out the neighborhoods,” said the photographer from couchsurfing.com who me and Kevin crashed with our first day in the city. He shared an apartment with his girlfriend where they ran their photography company. We slept on their porch, where they’d made a kind of tent out of colorful fabrics and christmas lights, with a floor of blankets and pillows. From that view you could see a lemon tree as well as the view of downtown. We were in Echo Park, the neighborhood where my mother had lived years ago.
“LA is like a lot of little cities,” said Rachel, his partner-and-girlfriend. “Each has their own little section of downtown. And each is their own little world. We moved to Echo Park because it was cheap, and filled with artists. Every week there’s a free music concert by a new local band. There’s cheap taco trucks, and a coffeeshop/bookstore. We’re aiming to be here for a while.”
Rachel and Ben had moved from Chicago, where they’d lived in the southside neighborhood Bridgeport, an industrial neighbhorhood full of artists lofts with a workingclass vibe. Like me, they knew after college they didn’t want to stay in Chicago and wanted to move someplace new.
“Chicago was so flat,” said Rachel. “I just wanted to see mountains again.”
“So we literally just looked for a city that was good for artists and close to the mountains,” said Ben. “And here we are.”
I could completely sympathize–coming from Philadelphia, which isn’t mountainous but at least is hilly and full of trees, Chicago had been oppressively barren after a while. And of course, Chicago, like Philly, has a bit of a grim, post-industrial feel to it.
It’s easy to love cities like Portland. They’re small, and generate a lot of local pride. People who move there feel they’ve “discovered” it. These cities draw a lot of post-college artists, just like LA, but because they’re so much smaller they only represent one small culture versus many, giving it a “unique” rather than a mainstream feel. These cities have the underdog’s chip-on-the-shoulder, and tend to look down on the large cities with their booming economies that never give them a second thought.
“People from LA tend to be unaware of it’s bad rap,” said my friend’s father, who moved to LA from Portland and is a documentary film-maker and anthropologist.
“That’s funny,” I said. “I guess LA’s too busy being LA.”
The thing about “quirk” and “charm” of small cities is that it tends to be far more homogenizing than a large city where many cultural identies have been smashed together. It’s like high school versus college: both have their clicques, but one has far more space to live between cliques than the other.
So when I was in Portland I soon felt suffocated. While in LA I just want to keep exploring. And I’m sure you can live in a suffocating little world in LA; I’m sure there are plenty. Having seen the gated rich houses along with grocery-cart filled shanty towns, I’ve gotten a glance at the suffocating worlds that LA offers. And people give this city shit for all the blonde, tanned, ridiculously leggy people walking around with ridiculously tiny dogs. But meanwhile everyone in Portland looked the same: they wore the same clothes and had the same piercing. They’d been to the same colleges, and belonged to the same race. They were uniformly quirky, and in some ways LA seems a lot more honest. Honest is ugly, but at least it’s true.
this is real this is fiction 