Los Angeles: An Active Retrospection

In my 3 months of living in LA, I have come to glean some culturally relevant information that I never thought to really get. As a self-hating Midwesterner, I find it hard to love any place you live, so let that be a warning for what follows.
I have never liked LA (Not to say that I can't make it in LA, because if you can make it in small-town middle American, in the slums of Beijing, and in the metropolitan anomie of Tokyo, you can make it anywhere). But I have always loved the idea of LA. The almost extreme amalgamation of different cultural and ethnic backgrounds symbolized by the cities with the city makes for almost a utopian landscape where a bright-eyed 20-something could really learn something or everything about the world.

This has not been the case. (It's almost too painfully ironic how unironic it is.) I never really knew why I didn't like the city when I started living here. I would casually tell my best friend/roommate's friends (who all have lived her for more than a year, struggling to make it in the film industry) in response to their question "How are you liking LA so far?" with vague answers like: people feel so disconnected here; people are so nice but it's impossible to know if they're being genuine or not; it feels superficial but I guess it isn't. And really, these ramblings were probably more close to the (or rather, my) truth. Yes, the entire idea of connection is almost laughable when in reality, the various "neighborhoods" and "cities" that make up LA are all entirely disconnected on an individual level. That is meant in two ways: the individual locales are disconnected and the people that make up these locales are disconnected. Outside of kinship and very restricted friend/work groups, this is basically a city of strangers. Yet, the pervasive civility makes it so that even if you were looking to connect with someone you do not know, it would be impossible; any civil advances are written off as casual, therefore, meaningless encounters.

I believe all of this is reinforced by the subtle superficiality of this metropolitan wasteland. No one is likely to disagree that plastic surgery and gym culture are horribly en vague, but that is not what I mean by superficiality. The city itself, by way of its upperclass, manicured neighborhoods and almost slum-like, dirtpile ghettos, has an intrinsic superficial quality. As an exercise in understanding this superficiality, take the Big Blue Bus from Westwood to the eastside. You'll see the gulf between worlds that speaks so much to the construction of city life. The obviously rich areas are beautiful, almost magical in how they remain like impassive and impervious icons to the fevered energy of the city. Then you'll see the grungy, concrete playgrounds of filth and activity. But it's here in these "bad" areas that you feel like there is a real bit of honesty, of genuine human life shining through an otherwise disconnected city. These places are dirty and likely dangerous and stilly unquestionably disconnected from its neighbors and even itself, but there is still an essentially relatable human element to it. The "good" areas are completely devoid of this humanity, yet anyone who lives in LA is dreaming about attaining those manicured lawns in front of those impossibly clean front steps. No one is interested in reality; no one is interested being human here. People think that they're trying to gain something when actually they're already losing everything. It's painful and exhausting to watch.

In the end, I consign myself to the haven that is my apartment, which I have unknowingly created as the only "safe" place in the city, the only place that feels alive and that I can call my own. And I think a lot of other people here feel that way as well about their own homes. I could never pass judgement and call this a bad thing, but this home vs non-home mentality only inspires further detachment and estrangement from one's neighborhood and the city itself. But there really is no cure. There's no way to fix something that someone cannot even begin to grasp as a problem on a conceptual level. People can only live their lives, and what can more can be expected? Perhaps this all is a horribly pessimistic and subjective way to view Los Angeles. I certainly cannot claim that this is all in the realm of hard fact. But I can say that I have known better. I do love some of the time I spend here in LA and I can't claim to hate my circumstance, but I've lived all over the world; no one can tell me Los Angeles is THE city.