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| Los Angeles' Phase 2 of the Expo line to Santa Monica opened May 20. |
Los Angeles. The City of Angels. The city where dreams are
made, and where they’re broken that will chew you up and spit you out like the
next fad diet. The city of gangs and sprawl and Rodney King, a melting pot and
a patchwork quilt. The most racially integrated large city in the United
States. A relatively young American city that smells like the ocean and urine
and mountains and smog and bulgogi and pupusas and Spider Man will help you to
some Mary Jane. A city of Beverly Hills and Skid Row. A city that is Googie-fantastic
and noir and booming and just friendly enough for you to get comfortable. A
city that drilled for oil and found movie reels. Where lalaland always be reel.
A city where the first question on Saturday morning is “surf or ski or work on
a movie?” A city where “old town” means “looks like New England.” A city where
anything goes, except during rush hour on the 10, but that’s changing because
it’s building rail faster than any other American city because rail is hip
again. A city that knows how to party like it’s 1984 in 2024. A city of trends
that’s still too cool to care. A city where sometimes you’re better off if you
speak Korean or Spanish than if you speak English. A city with all the culinary
trappings of New York but we rock up in sand-covered flip-flops because
bourgeois intellectualism is like
totally
banal man. A city where the streets aren't paved with gold, but the crosswalks are painted with rainbows. A city where who the fuck cares because the sun is shining and
there’s wind in your hair. It’s Little Tokyo and Koreatown and Little Osaka and
Beverly Hills and Little Thai Town and Historic Filipinotown and Chinatown and
Little El Salvador and Compton and Watts and cakes melting in the rain that so
rarely comes. A city of East and West. A city that gives new meaning to blight
and flight and light and might. A city that will inspire you enough to write naïve
and possibly oblivious paeans to all of nothing.
From the land where the sun rises to the land where the sun
sets,
You are fantastic.
