Eight Reasons New York Is Better
I ran across an article link posted by Elizabeth Spiers on why New York is better than any other place. The clever author uses a seemingly snooty angle of using the number of Vermeers a city possesses to determine its rung on the ladder (I suspect this was a well researched case in which NY outdoes any European city). I had to look up Vermeer since I never took art appreciation and he was a Dutch artist. Well known but not made sordid by the masses such as, say, Van Gogh or Da Vinci. The entire article, it seems, is a reaction of incredulity to a recent GQ article that pitched Raleigh-Durham, NC as the "best city" in the US.
Of course it is clever of the author to use simplistic snobbery because by doing so he plays on how simplistic it is to say that one place is better than another. I think it also emphasizes the subjective angle one must use to really benchmark cities.
The article did strike a chord with me, however, because a lot of people have been bad mouthing L.A. around me. Even though I wouldn’t call it the best city I’ve been to in the U.S., one always feels a defensive reaction when comments born of misunderstanding or narrow mindedness fall upon their knowing or experienced ears.
You see, the thing people don’t get about Los Angeles is the thing that Neal Stephenson gets so well in Snowcrash: Los Angeles, whether you like it or not, is the future: a diverse mishmash of culture, separate and never equal, cooperating but chaotic, interacting under a polluted sky. It’s a maze of traffic jams and suburban tract homes, planned developments and unplanned minorities crammed into a space that is expanding at a terrific pace.
You can drive to Rancho Palos Verdes, where this rich family I know of lives, and see blue blooded boys who will attend Harvard or you can drive down to Compton to find the kids that will never make it past the street hustle. In a day you can go from an extravagant vista in Beverly Hills to the most run-down, third world existence in El Segundo, by the airport.
Even though I don’t see Los Angeles as the best place to live for me, I love it for what it is: futureshock. Diversity, industrialized rubble, bored kids breakdancing, bored kids skateboarding, fake Hollywood actors in overpriced French restaurants, Russian Jews on the west side, Mexicans in Santa Ana, Armenians in Glendale, Koreans downtown, soul-less Orange County soccer moms with breast implants listening to bad impressions of Jobim, Leisure World in Seal Beach, "players" at the Fox Hills mall, decadence in Beverly Hills, Day Laborers early in the morning, Zankou Chicken… all these things and more, with me swimming right in the middle.
It must be maddening to think but where we’ve been, you’re going.
At the end of the Vanity Fair magazine there is an interview of Joan Didion in which she is asked where she wold most like to live – she responds by saying that she switches the answer to this question about once a month. Me too – there is no ultimate destination or habitation. The answer for me, this month, love for Los Angeles notwithstanding, is Lucerne, Switzerland. Coffee, a lake and some mountains… too much of the future can be bad for you.
9:05:21 PM 
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