The LA hate

My mother sent me an e-mail about my California Casserole recipe, mentioning how many variants were online. While looking around Google, I stumbled on one that includes frozen peas and other strange-to-me variants, but I also came across the author unleashing some LA hatred:

Recently it occurred to me that for all practical purposes, Los Angeles has already tumbled into the Pacific. I am old enough to remember the 80s, and this means I remember when New York was considered a shithole and L.A. was, for all the jealous disparagement, considered the epicenter of hip. Wolfgang Puck and California Cuisine were on the rise. Nowadays, of course, New York is rightly known as the place to be and L.A. is about as cool as creamed corn.

So it makes sense, somehow, to combine the term “California” with something equally passe, casserole, and hope that two wrongs make a right. In this case, they do. This recipe for California Casserole came to me from Laurie’s grandmother, who lives in Lompoc, California, an hour from Santa Barbara and therefore far enough from L.A. that it still retains a glimmer of personality.

I’ve never really gotten the hatred of Los Angeles. I lived in New York, on my brother’s couch, for several months after returning from living in Egypt and while I had some fun there, whatever inherent specialness the city has and that residents go on about, I don’t see. (I also don’t get the cult of San Francisco, either, for what it’s worth.)

When I moved out to Los Angeles, I had been primed by decades of bashing by East Coast types to find it a soulless awful place, but instead found it to be a sunny sprawling city with a great mix of folks of all sorts, lots to do, an amazing variety of restaurants and a keen awareness of “the business.” (In DC, everyone follows Capitol Hill goings-on to an extent that is alien to the rest of the country, probably to their detriment.) In other words, it’s New York with better weather and worse transportation.

Unless you’re a rapper (and living in the mid-1990s), the whole East Coast/West Coast rivalry thing is sort of dumb, in my opinion, sort of like two very similar siblings unleashing a full-on hatred of one another and pretending they’re not more similar than they are different.

One of the funniest complaints I’ve heard about LA is that it’s so fake because — and I’m not making this up — people are so polite and friendly. (This is coming from a New Yorker, so anything short of shoving another person off the curb in front of a taxi is seen as polite.) That’s right: Manners are a reason to complain about Los Angeles. Riiiiight …

Now, I’m sure that “the business” is full of fakes and jerks, but that’s not endemic to Los Angeles, or even the entertainment business. It’s certainly not enough to color a whole city by the industry’s presence here.

We should all save our hatred of those sneaky Canadians, eyeing us from across the border, them and their crazy duck money …

2 Comments »

1. Loons are not ducks. /fired

   Comment by Nicole — July 19, 2006 @ 11:25

2. LA is not a city. It’s a suburb in search of a city center.

   Comment by Dmitry the Wizzy — July 23, 2006 @ 7:24

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