What the hell is wrong with Los Angeles?

We find out when:

Los Angeles has a special place in my heart. Unfortunately, that place is the corner of the heart reserved for scorned ex-girlfriends and particularly nasty chunks of cholesterol. I spent a year of my life there, and during that time, developed a hatred far beyond acceptable levels for a geographic region. I could wax poetic about my loathing of this abysmal place, but it would, sadly, be entirely unnecessary, as The Decemberists pretty much nailed it when they called Los Angeles "the ocean's garbled vomit on the shore."

Los Angeles, I'm yours.

What I hope to accomplish in the following paragraphs is not a rant, although it may appear to be one at points, merely out of the inarguability of the negatives at hand. Rather, it is a documentation, of sorts; a sociological and anthropological field notebook collected (loosely) in an attempt two answer a single question: What the fuck, Los Angeles?


Kidding. Well, kind of. The question is actually two questions, and more like, "What is wrong with LA, and why would anyone want to live here?"

And before you say "the weather," know two things:
1. Air quality counts as weather.
2. Earth's moon is not supposed to look like this.

Arriving in LA by plane is an arresting experience. The rolling desert hills below suddenly disappear beneath the outstretched tendrils of a virulently expanding urban growth boundary, and you're faced with a lifeless concrete carpet that stretches out until there is no more land to expand into. Whereas other North American metropolises --either by choice or because of topographic constrictions-- grew upward, Los Angeles, faced with nothing but desert and pressure from automobile manufacturers eager to see people driving as much as possible, simply sprawled outward like a pool of blood leaking slowly from a felled gang member.

As a result, LA is the apex of America's autocentricity. It is next to impossible to exist in Los Angeles without a car. Millions manage to do it; somehow coercing the public transit system into a usable entity, but their tactic is not advised. The city's colossal footprint ensures that biking or walking anywhere terribly meaningful is out of the question, and there aren't even any places to land a helicopter, so that's out.

In a city built around the necessity of cars, one might expect a meticulously constructed city plan that made the endless flow of cars as smooth and steady as realistically feasible. But instead, you have whatever nightmare you want to call Los Angeles roadways. Even the most horrendously planned city could still maintain an acceptable pace of traffic if Angelinos were capable of behaving like human beings behind the wheel, but some anomaly caused by the coalescence of heat, smog, and botox results in perfectly normal people  developing delusions of Steve McQueendom (if he had a pretty severe case of rabies) the instant they sit in a driver's seat.

Red lights are considered more of a suggestion than a recognized construct, and the rare absence of parked cars along any given curb means that another lane has opened up for the biggest asshole who desperately needs to be three cars closer to a blocked intersection. For as much as Angelinos seem to brag about their collective driving ability, it's odd that basic functions like using turn signals and having your eyes open aren't too strictly enforced on the LA County driver's test.

You'll notice a city bus attempting to beat a yellow light.

Given the amount of time these people spend driving, you'd think they'd have a better handle on the concept. But ultimately, vehicular manipulation is just one drop in the ocean of LA's incongruencies, contradictions and paradoxes.

The drive into town from the airport, or any drive in LA for that matter, will instantly reveal another: The juxtaposition of abject poverty and gaudy opulence. Just when it seems that the rows of one story stucco houses will indeed prove themselves to be never-ending, an equally eternal wall of ivy-coated mansions, each sealed safely behind unbecoming gates, takes over the roll of scenery. Each socio-economic boundary will be bookended by a multi-tienda strip mall or a Whole Foods, respectively.

The traditional line of thought is that an influx of financial means into a region will result in a distribution of wealth throughout the community, as the purveyors of that means will patronize local businesses and services, resulting in a population collectively benefitting from their presence. It's called the trickle down theory (you may recognize it from being grossly misused by Republican presidential candidates and subsequently misunderstood by their supporters), and in theory it works.

In reality, it doesn't. LA is the prefect example of why. Give the autocentric culture, purveyors of financial means - colloquially known as "rich people"- are able to ignore their immediate surroundings, knowing they are safely locked behind their fugly (I'm bringing that one back, guys) gates, only sojourning out to drive across town to shop at corporate grocery chains, rather than nearby shops and markets. Because driving for 45 minutes is the norm, there is no obligation to invest in the community of which they are actually a part.

98.3 % of the square footage in LA looks exactly like this. The other 1.7% is the set of Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Despite the disparities in wealth, Los Angeles manages to support thriving communities based around the various ethnic groups that make up LA's massive immigrant population, as they are traditionally known. But as immigrant communities are entering their second and third generations, the tag of immigrant is no longer applicable. The city is an undeniable melting pot of culture, and it's sad that the dominant one exported in the city's image is the Hollywood lifestyle, not the multi-ethnic hodgepodge that has resulted, among other things, in some delicious freaking restaurants.

From the delicious potato balls at Porto's Cuban bakery in Glendale to just about any noodle shop or taco truck you come across, LA is home to some good eats, all of which I eagerly anticipated being in my belly shortly after my arrival. Beyond the ethnic fare, there are LA staples like Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles, Langer's Delicatessen and Phillippe the Original. Unfortunately, like anywhere, there is a lot of crap out there too.

Los Angeles is now home to the worst Thai food I've ever eaten, at a restaurant that I can't bring myself to name, lest I suffer horrific flashbacks of the microwaved cat food dumplings and the Red Dye #2 with chicken. Let's just say everyone should steer clear of any Thai food in Santa Monica. All the Thai restaurants must suffer for the fact that this sickeningly bad place inexplicably had an 88% approval rating on Urban Spoon.

When in doubt, a safe bet is to revert to your nearest Fatburger or anywhere you see the words "In" and "Out," but there is always something to say for exploration. I got unlucky, and now I have night terrors about Pad Thai. Maybe you'll fare better.

What was interesting to me was that while I skipped a lot of the "classic LA spots," I stumbled across a lot of restaurants that were analogous to neighborhood places in my hometown. These are the places where the food might not be spectacular, and it might not be worth the price, but they are the places you love if you grew up eating there.

For me, these are Portland spots like Chez Jose and Laurelwood. I wouldn't exactly bring visitors to these places to showcase Portland's cuisine, but the thought of them made me happy as an excited and wildly hyperactive native of the Valley informed me that the entirely average salsa dripping off my chip onto a platter of grey beans at Casa Vega was "the shit!" I'm sure I pushed Chez Jose's salsa on many an unenthused guest as a kid, so going to places like this actually served to humanize LA more than any trendy food truck that was equal parts delicious and pretentious.

Which isn't to say that charging $15 dollars for a crappy burrito and having mandatory valet parking at a Mexican platter restaurant in the suburbs isn't pretentious, but that's just how it goes in LA. The place is pretentious, arrogant and self-obsessed. Ultimately, I think that's what sits at the core of both the questions to which I am seeking answers in LA.

The entire city has an air of artificiality to it; the forced hipness of a person who choses their own nickname mixed with an heir who brags about an inherited fortune as if they had earned it themselves. Unlike other population centers that earned their standing by providing tangible services like ports or manufacturing, LA's foundation is in the entertainment industry, which has a intrinsic frivolity and inconsequentiality at it's core. Perhaps this underpinning set the course that the personality of the city would follow, a personality mimicked by those drawn to live in it.

People who come to live in LA by choice dream big. They have aspirations of fame and fortune that gets lost in self-obsession because it lacks any self-reflection. They are people who have put on a front for so long that they no longer remember who they were. They're people who forcibly enter a solid line of traffic without signaling, then honk and scream as if they are witnessing genocide when someone else performs an identical maneuver in front of them. They're people who think they have a "secret code" at a massive hamburger chain restaurant, which, in reality, amounts to little more than a type of sauce not listed on the menu. They just live in their own little world.

They are Los Angeles.