There is something called the California life, though you and I will undoubtedly have different ideas of what that life actually is, depending on your hobbies, your upbringing, and your current city of residence. In fact, I often find non-Californians assuming we are all beach bums or liberal politicos, despite overwhelming evidence that yes, we too have apathetic students who don’t know how to surf and our fair share of what the census deems “average American households.” No one in the state even offers to contend the bay area life and socal life are one and the same. Yet there is a definite form of California life, a CA mystique if you will. And it usually involves sunshine and palm trees.

Rather than trying to distinguish the nuances of what is and isn’t completely accurate, instead I’m going to just out and tell you: all of it is true. There is someone here that fits any bill you could possibly come up with, but the thing is, just because we have celebrities with drug addictions and big sunglasses, just as we have supernerds amassing great sums of tech wealth, doesn’t mean California is any of that. Los Angeles especially is a tricky place to live. Geoff Manaugh wrote a great piece about LA’s citizenship. He brings up a good point: it doesn’t matter if you want to walk around naked, or if you have three sex changes, or if you become a morbidly obese christian science fiction novel addict, or if you spend your days building a mountain out of trash and taking pictures of your left elbow. No one cares. It’s simultaneously a freeing and restricting idea that LA’s environment is just as hospitable to whatever you want to make yourself as it is inhospitible, because while you now have unprecedented control over your own image, no act you could commit, no matter how outrageous, would make you stand out. The bottom line is that very environment of LA is manufactured, not by the press, or the industries, or by the weather, but by every moving part that makes up the great machine of Southern California. We buy into it. And you do too.

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…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.
Geoff Manaugh, BLDGBLOG October, 2007

So why do we buy into it? Why do we even entertain the possibility that this is the kind of life we want? Do not underestimate how Los Angeles urban sprawl shapes this very phenomenon. Los Angeles is big. We have an incredibly diverse landscape and population from Koreatown and Little Tokyo to Beverly Hills and Century City, and San Pedro to Long Beach, from Pasadena to San Bernadino. And (though people from Los Angeles will fight you to the death on this subject) it’s all still LA. It’s perhaps the only living example of a melting pot we have in this country. But from space it looks like a giant parking lot. This is what I consider to be the most important fact about LA. It’s a big waiting room where you aren’t waiting for anything. You park your car and go inside, but once you’re there everything suddenly becomes monochromatic and you’re just a parking space. There’s so much here, but then again, there’s nothing here.

I’ve had a love/hate relationship with the city for ages that I can see isn’t about to change anytime soon; as one of my friends says, you have to fight hard to find the good in this city. It doesn’t just lie around waiting to be found. You have to dig deep for it, in all the dodgy taco stands and blathering homeless people and traffic-clogged motorways and seventeen-dollar sandwiches. If you’re really lucky (or you’re in Silverlake) you just might find it. For a city that we grow up learning is so brimming with culture, it can be monumentally frustrating to have to seek it out like a bloodhound tracking its game, when everything else tells us it should be at our doorstep. A weekend in New York will still let you stumble into one or two neighbourhood gems or unusual spots, just as a fortnight in Paris will alight you to must-sees far beyond what the guidebooks and brochures have to offer by nature of the city. Four months in Brisbane had me frequenting most of the insider’s haunts, but four years in Los Angeles and I still feel like a stranger in my own city, with no local coffee shop to hit up, no neighbourhood bookstore to browse, and no favourite bar to harass. No other metropolis this large or this culturally poignant guards hers secrets so well.

When I was a green fresher, a fresh-off-the-plane college kid with nothing but a duffel bag and an overwhelming joy that I could see the Hollywood sign from campus with a pair of binoculars and a clear day, I started to get the lay of the land. My first impression of the city was unfavourable, no matter how many pairs of sunglasses I purchased or trips down Sunset I took. I found it crushingly disappointing that the city, which stacks of movies and magazines and scores of song lyrics had long since convinced me was a distinct cultural capital, was in fact quite the opposite. Los Angeles is so nondescript and indistinguishable the Midwestern tourists feel right at home. I wanted to feel like I was somewhere special instead of feeling like every neighbourhood is just another white line on the exit ramp. It makes sense if you think about it; all the movies and TV shows are filmed in LA, this we know, but we forget these same movies and TV shows are rarely set in LA. Sure you get a good Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, or a a decent Gone In 60 Seconds every once in a while, but by and large Los Angeles is sculpted to look like everywhere else in the world.

In the world of movies, the Palm Desert windmills out on I-10 become Germany, Manhattan Beach becomes Florida, Griffith Park is now Colorado, the Mojave part of Africa, and Lakeview a rural town in China. So why is it so surprising that inner city Los Angeles isn’t all that different from inner city Detroit and the Chicago projects? Why was I so shocked that Mac Arthur Park looked like Guatamala, or that Encino so strongly resembled Stepford? Contrary to popular belief, Los Angeles doesn’t have its own brand of identity. LA doesn’t even look like itself; it looks like everywhere else by design. In lieu of this identity crisis, it suddenly makes sense why I’ve had such trouble making my peace with the city. After all, it doesn’t speak for itself.

My feeling about this weirdly inflated village in which I had come to make my home suddenly changed after I had lived in Los Angeles for seven long years of exile…it suddenly occurred to me that, in all the world, there neither was nor would ever be another place like this City of the Angels. Here the American people were erupting, like lava from a volcano; here, indeed, was the place for me — a ringside seat at the circus.
Carry McWilliams, “Southern California Country: An Island on the Land“

Coming from a long-deserved break from my life in LA, my return has thrown the details of my relationship with the city into sharp relief. I hadn’t been back on my block for 24 hours and already I had witnessed purple trees, a gaggle of men dressed as gigantic Lady Liberties, a fistfight during a community football game, a ’50s style bar hidden in the upstairs of a gay restaurant, a Hollywood film shoot, and a woman buying nothing but a cartload of avocados. Perhaps that’s just the sort of list of encounters that drove Carry McWilliams to pen the barrage of words that sit now at the entrance to Pershing Square. Which Los Angeles is mine? Is it McWilliams’ circus? Is it Manaugh’s void? Lauren Green’s girl culture? Or is it Phantom Planet’s inescapable circle or A&E’s trendsetting camera flashes? Will the city ever stop disappointing me? Will I ever feel like I’ve reached the quintessential LA? I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to call Los Angeles a great city, or an epic one, and I cannot yet say through what coloured lens I will look back on my time in this city, but even I cannot deny that Los Angeles is certainly unique.