this is getting shared around
- Frank Lloyd Wright From the article: What matters is what you do there. Not mentioned is that whatever it is you do, it's far more of a pain in the ass to do it than just about anywhere else. You want to buy groceries? Okay, well there are seven grocery stores within a half-hour drive of you but none within ten minutes. Wanna get your hair cut? Well the local place only cuts their friends' hair; you're going to get butchered and overcharged which is why you now drive back to the neighborhood you haven't lived since 2011 because it took you three years to find that place, dammit. Wanna get your teeth cleaned? The dentist didn't feel like coming in today, as you and the fifteen people waiting out front have discovered. Want to get a deposit back on your aluminum cans? Well they closed all the facilities on the Westside so they could keep your money so you're loading your trunk up with soiled aluminum and driving to Commerce. A friend explained to me when we visited in London (back in '89) that London is such a sprawling metropolis that you can really only accomplish one or two tasks a day. So. Get the vacuum fixed or buy groceries. Post a package or buy a sweater. The rest of your time is spent in traffic. Los Angeles is like that except instead of living in London you're in fucking Los Angeles. This lack-of-reward is what drives Los Angeles culture: you're either driven enough to put up with the bullshit until it pays off or you're stuck there because you're a low-functioning loser that doesn't realize there's more to life than this. No one anywhere cares that you listen to Carcass and Pat Robertson. In Los Angeles, though, there's such a barrier to progress that listening to Carcass and Pat Robertson defines your goddamn existence.Tip the world over on its side and everything loose will land in Los Angeles.
It says: no one loves you; you’re the least important person in the room; get over it.
So I had a great time in LA this weekend. We went out for the gf’s bday and did some bar hopping downtown. The first bar was a rooftop bar. It was nice but waaay too crowded so we stayed for a drink and went somewhere else. On the way to the second place we stopped in The Last Bookstore for a bit and browsed. The second place was a very hipster-chic place were we hung out on leather chesterfield couches and had artisan cocktails and bar fare. That place was super cool, and we went to a Japanese whiskey bar afterwards. All the people were cool and all the service was great. We somehow managed to avoid the usual headaches of traffic, parking, assholes and so on. 10/10 experience. That’s a nightlife excursion though. I’ve worked daily in LA before and the perks of the city never really made up for the extreme headache of daily traffic, parking, noise, smog, the harshness of skid row, and all that Jazz. Great place to visit. Having had a taste of actually living there, I think I’ll pass though.
See that's what I'm talkin' about. LA has "The Last Bookstore." Wanna trade some used books? You get to schlep your ass downtown, find parking somewhere (budget 20 minutes during off-peak), drop off your books, give them a phone number, wait six goddamn hours, get an embarrassingly low offer, tell them to keep your books because you've long since had lunch stuffed the meter twice and left, and then order 1/10th of what you were thinking on Amazon. Fucking anywhere else you haul your hoard, wait fifteen minutes, take your twelve bucks and buy four books you didn't know you needed before the ice cream in the trunk melts. Yet Angelinos will go "zomg The Last Bookstore is teh awesomez!!!!!!!" because there's some MFA with a $250k debt from Art Center manning the counter when he's not busy arranging five editions of JP Guen's The Art of Cinematography into a pentagram on the table or covering scripts for 40dollarnotes.com so that he can afford to live with six people in an 800sqft hovel in Silverlake because his girlfriend scoops gelato for a living and doesn't like to drive. You hit three bars. In college I mixed in five bars that were walking distance from each other; they were five of the seventeen clubs on Pioneer Square joint cover where you could get into all of them on a weekend for $8. LA? LA you can pay for pizza by the inch and then wander into a dark hole with a McIntosh playing obscure dubstep into Klipshorns over tables with placards reading "please respect our listening environment and keep your conversations hushed" while paying twelve fucking dollars for Voss. I'm glad you had a great time but "three bars and a bookstore" should not constitute an epic weekend, should not be subject to the vagaries of "traffic, parking, assholes and so on" and it is a distinctly LA attitude that holds that somehow, this meager diversion should be enough.