Los Angeles, I'm Not Yours

Here's the thing about Los Angeles. Most people (Midwesterners, I mean, or other normal people) would say that Los Angeles is dirty, dangerous, fake, slick, plastic, and a convenient modern American stand-in the city of Dis. But, as I traveled to the city for the first time last week, none of these things bothered me. It seems no more dirty or dangerous than any other American city, and I've seen plenty of them, coast to coast. Its slick, plastic, unethical nature I found amusing, not awful. But here's the real horrible secret of Los Angeles.

It's boring.

It exists for no real reason. There is nothing to do there but sit around and watch people (and, more importantly I suppose for the people who work there) have people watch you. My sister (who lives there and who I was visiting, otherwise I never would have gone) agrees. She loves the place, but she admits there's nothing to do there (for a girl who spends half her life in an editing bay and the other half on the couch, this is the perfect world). But as a vacation spot I found it basically intolerable. I had an entire day to explore this city on my own, which is typically my favorite way to travel, but instead I found myself desperately wandering from cafe to cafe, reading the books I brought with me and unable to find any other diversions. The shopping that I could find was either tourist trinkets or ridiculously expensive or chain stores. LACMA (not entirely it's fault) was half closed for renovations (to be fair, the half I saw was interesting, Latin American and South Asian exhibits, which I'm not very familiar with but enjoyed). There seemed to be no public parks, no art galleries, no neighborhoods to wander around (well, no real wandering to be done at all... you know the song).

Part of this is my fault. Los Angeles is a county, not a city, and as everyone knows it's a county of cars. I had no car. The subway and buses were cheap and easy to use, but they didn't go everywhere I wanted to, and so I was pretty well stuck with what I could access in a half-hour or less in downtown LA, West Hollywood, and Hollywood (I did go to Silverlake for breakfast, and if you ever have the chance, Madame Matisse makes some excellent pancakes).

But that was about it. When I had access to a car, we went to Malibu Creek State Park which was some excellent hiking, absolutely beautiful and very un-crowded, but that's not what people think of when they think of LA. They think of the parts that I was bored out of my mind in. I get that lots of people move here because they want to break into The Business (very creepy that it's referred to that way, like The Family) but I can't see why anyone would come here voluntarily. If Rose didn't live there, I'd never go back.