Unreliably Yours

One of the reasons I love in LA is it’s geography.

It tends to encourage a certain mentality in anyone who lives here;

Mel Gibson-Everyone's Favorite Anti-Semitic, Culture Mix-n-Matching, Bloodthirsty Fundamentalist. (Thanks to Mike for the last adjective)

Namely that of rage ridden, homicidal, Mel Gibson like fuckers on PCH, Wilshire, and Sunset; bewildering frustration for those that hail from dinky Midwestern rural suburbs where you DO drive everywhere like you do here, but with much faster ETA’s; or bitchworthy icebreakers when sipping Newcastle at the bar for hipster imports from NYC or SF whose subways run every 5 minutes at light speed late into the night.

It pisses off rich housewives in Brentwood who don’t mind driving to the valley for their manicure or dog grooming appointments, but won’t set foot in Downtown LA except for the arts venues (despite the massive pandering to them by downtown developers who want much of Downtown to be the Rich’s playground).

It’s rough for the broke queers coming all the way from East Hollywood or South Central via the 4 bus on Santa Monica to the clubs in Weho.

Yeah, it’s tough.

Sprawl sucks and that one reason I’m trying to become an urban planner when I get big-to fix some of the problems here. Though I find that there isn’t a set vision to aspire to for how we should be, even though we need stuff like better transit and parks. Argh-the paradox of activism!!!

Getting back on track, there are however, some advantages to this notoriously large, grotesquely planned beauty of a monster called LA. Los Angeles is definitely not under anyone’s thumb, so ooey-gooey it can be anything and everything, a romantic(’s) nightmare. It’s like an unlit mass in outer space, with no brightness to give contrast and definition. I’m thinking it’s a great thing-anyone can come here and claim the place.

It’s like a magical projector that simply reflects Angelenos’ prideful man(girl?)handling in creating whatever dream or existence (be it lowly, high up there or somewhere or nowhere in between) they want to transpose upon it. LA can always be recreated, in my mind, as far as how I experience a certain neighborhood. Other towns seem to be eternally defined, stagnant though glamorous somehow. LA is a bunch of niches that overlap. Neighborhoods bleed into one another, as many an LA newbie has confusedly noted, when, for example, trying to find Little Armenia, they suddenly find themselves also in Thai Town. It’s the same with the people, too. Nothing being set in stone, people are able to re-invent themselves continually here, there aren’t any cultural elites you can’t break into, no class you can’t upgrade into… Just take a look at  multicultural suburbanites, like my family. We take more chances here in LA; more experimental stuff is allowed to happen here.

Perhaps I am personifying LA too much.

LA Is Cloaked In Anonymity Like This Little Boy Is Cloaked In Well, A Cloak.

But the landscape lends itself well to anonymity. Disappearing into the glaring gray of the city when avoiding lovers who become ex-lovers becomes necessary, being the eternal new kid on the block is a satisfying part of living in LA. I mean how many other cities are so large you can straight up immigrate to another neighborhood and not run into anyone you know?? The geography allows for this.

It also deconcentrates scenes, which make it less suffocating than living in a smaller, hipper city. I like that I can fade in and out of whatever social group I want to, or get completely the hell away from any of them.

So, on a historical nostalgia vs. urban moderne architecture note, while writing this entry, I read a really cool editorial in the LA Times by Gregory Rodriguez (http://www.latimes.com/news/

opinion/la-oe-rodriguez4-2008aug04,0,3517229.column who also coincidentally, is trying to convince people to vote no on Prop. 8, an anti-gay marriage homophobic ballot measure this November, in order to make for a happier society! (ha ha ha! I agree-happy queers make for a happy society, or at least them suffer like most married heteros do!, goes the joke!)) which totally went with this post, about how China bulldozes all it’s building left and right, just like LA!!! Here’s some juicy excerpts from his interview with the head of the USC Architecture Dept., who’s also from China:

“Ma sheds no tears for the quaint buildings that have given way to thousands of new structures — and they aren’t all ugly by any means. In fact, he barely conceals his disdain for architectural nostalgia. “The concept behind historic preservation is foolish,” he said. “It assumes that there is infinite space for future generations. We have to allow people in the future to build their environments based on their own needs and intelligence.”

It turns out that L.A.’s lack of historical sentimentality is one of the reasons Ma enjoys his adopted home. “L.A. is for the future,” he said.

And that makes it like his home country. “I think our sense of our ancient lineage gives us a perpetual sense of obsolescence,” he said, referring to the Chinese. “I think we know that whatever we’re experiencing now is part of a long passage. Each new dynasty replaced the buildings that had been constructed by the last one.”

Ha ha, the parallels are amazing! Chinese people and Angelenos have a lack of sentimentality and destroy all that was to recreate a new identity! It’s inevitable for me to perpetuate this sort of mentality-I can’t be blamed!!! Destroyed art deco and pagodas= Asiatic Angeleno happiness! (Too bad Asians are assholes, or I could have lived in China, having the same don’t give a fuck philosophy and all. See my former post on that:http://manushkin.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/

asians-in-asia-are-assholes-and-other-thoughts-on-ethniccultural-hoo-ha/)

I put some of these comments in response to it, but I doubt they’ll allow them since it’s too long:

“What Ma had to say about historic preservation rang true, despite the fact that I am an LA History nut, and have always lamented the lack of our old, beautiful buildings and their replacement with, as the City Planning Dept. calls it, “a sea of stucco”. Similarly, the lack of firmly planted sentimentality in LA has brought us to try new and different things that entrenched East Coast towns can’t/ won’t.

I agree that architecture, especially in LA, has not been designed for public use near enough, for example, the upcoming Grand Ave. park project-it looks like an extension of a business park, not a civic treasure.

No más concrete parks!!! We already done got Pershing!

And yes, I do believe that Westerners, even good liberals, often expect others to conform to their values, in this case, involving historic preservation. We might find what China is doing now to be aesthetically horrendous, but can we expect them to be preserving old proletariat concrete brick housing or to always be mired in stereotypes of being nothing but ancient, wise, and rural?

Every country deserves to reinvent themselves. I just came back from China a few weeks ago, and have to say that it truly looks as bad as Gregory was describing with regards to most of the architecture, but as citizens of one of the most disturbingly planned (and often just as ugly) cities in the US, who are we to judge? They have the right to mirror our Capitalistic garishness, too, I guess.”

It could only be in earthquake country like LA that these constantly shifting sensibilities would be the norm.

And there you have it, y’all, the destruction of our precious old, centralized communities and buildings in LA has given rise to sprawl and traffic, and amnesia, but it’s also allowed us to accommodate the population growth, as well as reinvent what LA means. More to come on historical preservation issues in LA…