Smokler

More Specifically, LA.

But it’s not just California. For me it’s Los Angeles. I grew up in a small liberal mid-western college town that valued its independent bookstore, its boutique record shops, and its 5,000 person legalize pot festival every spring. Los Angeles was the place of plastic where some of my cousins lived. Fake, empty, and too hot.

Then I actually came out here. Jill Soloway describes it much better than I ever could in her book Tiny Ladies in Shiny Pants, which just came out in paperback. She writes

“Los Angeles is Magic. Its yellow-orange-red and the smog makes everything blurry in a good way. I hate when people come to Los Angeles and just bitch, bitch bitch. I know its not New York. I know it’s not Chicago. Yes, some of the people here are fake. Shut up and go home. I love landing here. When I emerge into the sun at LAX after I’ve been away, I hear Joni Mitchell singing her song….”

The more I leave and come back, the more these sentences resonate with me. Oddly enough, when I was living in Jerusalem during the cold rainy winter, with everyone coughing from the fog and ideology in the air, I would sit back and drink my crappy coffee at Café Hillel at think of landing at LAX.

When we finally got home, some friends came to visit. Sure enough, it just was like Jill described in that same essay:

“When I visit other cities, I go out of my way to praise them in a fake high voice, “Wow, Chicago is getting so cosmopolitan!” and “Hey! Boston has some great shops!” When people come here, the’yre not five minutes on the ride in from the airport before they say flatly from the back of their throat, “I could never live here”. I really don’t care if you could ever live here. Magic happens here and maybe you just can’t handle.”

She goes on to paint a beautiful, lyrical picture of LA, capturing a lot of the feelings I get day to day just driving around. It’s a complete heresy to say if went to college on the east coast, or you’re a serious Jew, (or even a Rabbi…) like me, but I sure like living here a lot more than Jerusalem…More on this later.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15, 2006 at 9:37 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.