Damn, I can't help but re-read that essay:
In L.A. you can grow Fabio hair and go to the Arclight and not be embarrassed by yourself. Every mode of living is appropriate for L.A. You can do what you want.
And I don't just mean that Los Angeles is some friendly bastion of cultural diversity and so we should celebrate it on that level and be done with it; I mean that Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void. It is the void. It's the confrontation with astronomy through near-constant sunlight and the inhuman radiative cancers that result. It's the confrontation with geology through plate tectonics and buried oil, methane, gravel, tar, and whatever other weird deposits of unknown ancient remains are sitting around down there in the dry and fractured subsurface. It's a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots.
And it doesn't need humanizing. Who cares if you can't identify with Los Angeles? It doesn't need to be made human. It's better than that.
Take that, New York.
2 comments:
Is this article written by a dude? My guess is that it is. It's an interesting notion, but I think it's more applicable for males. Not that it's completely irrelevant for females, but it doesn't have the same ring of truth. For a women in LA, what you look like is more important than what you do, and to a greater extent than this is the case in other cities.
yes, it's written by a man, although i know several "females" who found it applicable to them as well.
i don't really know what you mean "how you look" is more important. to who? yes, I (bolded) care more about how a woman looks while playing beach volleyball than the fact she is playing beach volleyball when i'm riding by on my bike. however, i'm sure she is more concerned with the fact that she is playing beach volleyball than how she looks playing beach volleyball.
and now that i think about this, i have the feeling any conversation on this topic will be senseless.
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