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Reality Check: Out-of-Towners, Do Your Homework
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4935 Reads
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 Open letter to all the foreign correspondents in the city:
You're not Angelenos yet if you're still writing nonsense like this:
To the New York Times, which wrote in this morning's fawning piece about Oscar parties: In the hierarchy of place here, there is no more exalted locus than the Chateau Marmont. The hotel high above Sunset Boulevard has launched a thousand clichéd magazine profiles, is legendary for bad behavior by its inmates, and is the place where business is not so much done as memorialized ...
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Were I less civil, I'd be tempted to bray, "SHUUUUUT UUUUP!!!"
Instead, please let me just suggest - a bit more genteelly - Oh, please.
Hyperbole is what's left when you have no facts to report. The Chateau Marmont is as much the most-exalted building as the Scientology Celebrity Centre. I'd put Griffith Observatory, City Hall, the Coliseum (back in the day), the Dome, Santa Monica Pier and Staples Center far above the Marmont in terms of places important to real Angelenos.
To the Times of London's Chris Ayres, who has spent much of his time here hating on Los Angeles and recently wrote (as if he's anything but a visitor) that he's glad the Oscars are over: Like any city in the midst of a conference, Los Angeles can be unbearable, especially when the delegates earn seven-digit salaries. But what happens when everyone leaves? Personally, I will take a walk up Runyon Canyon — a public park accessible from Hollywood Boulevard — and admire the white-tipped outline of the San Bernardino mountains set against the baked flats of the Mojave. If the smog lifts, I’ll be able to see west towards Malibu and the Pacific.
This is my Los Angeles — one of the few places on earth where a paradise of mountains, desert and surf can be home to ten million people. Fortunately, during Oscars week, it is a place that few visitors will find.
Chris? Oh, please.
You delight in feeding fellow Londoners chirpy anecdotes about how superficial, smoggy, celeb-obsessed, trigger-happy and sexually desperate we all are. Don't act like you're one of us.
To (justly)Oscar-anointed screenwriter Larry McMurtry and London Free Press reporter Bruce Kirkland, who quotes and abets him in lauding the cartoonish vision of Los Angeles in Crash and recently wrote: Crash, which rips into the racial divide in the heart of Los Angeles, is not only urban but also "a hometown movie," McMurtry said, so it had a built-in advantage.
Crash is an outspoken and raw look at the racial schisms in American society, specifically in Los Angeles.
Gents? Oh, please.
If Crash gives an accurate portrayal of real life and race relations in Los Angeles, then Duck Amuck is a brilliant bio-pic about the mallards in Echo Park Lake.
To the New York Times - which promotes its ongoing L.A. sneerfest once more with an article proclaiming that the whole city somehow hits Fred Segal en masse for hundred-dollar T-shirts whenever its feeling the need to primp - and which published this fatuous nonsense by Alex Kuczynski in same: LOS ANGELES is a place where people live in a world of fantasies, and earn their livings by promoting fantasies, and so all the world — even the popular local clothing boutique — becomes a place to satisfy the needs for props and equipment.
At Ron Herman Fred Segal on Melrose Avenue, you can practice your Attitude.
In Los Angeles, Fred Segal is the outfitter of those Hollywood fantasies, selling uniforms of expensive shirts and impossibly overthought bluejeans and kitten heels to the city's well-to-do inhabitants and celebrities. And the impulse to dress as part of a grand and cohesive Hollywood team comes most strongly the week before the Oscars.
Oh, puh-leeeeeze.
Fred Segal is for the one-percenters: the spoiled teens from 2.5-acre estates; the 7-Series-driving adrenaline junkies whose kids see more of their nannies than their parents; the graceless fashion-plates whose agents run every aspect of their lives including their wardrobe; and the pampered few whose personal organizers know exactly which part of the closet they use to hide their stash.
That store - and that culture - is for those few Angelenos with whom you seem preternaturally obsessed. The rest of us mortals buy clothes at malls, chain stores, tienditas de ropa thrift stores and cool little boutiques we only tell our best friends about.
Alla ya: If you can't be bothered to understand the city beyond parroting back the rest of the world's tired cliches to your otherwise (and still) uninformed readers, then stop making generalizations about Los Angeles.
If you actually do care to stop perpetuating these myths, then go do your clothes shopping on Broadway just once. Eat lunch at the Grand Central Market. Spend time at the LAPL.
Ride a bus to the beach and fish off the pier. Take Metrolink out to the Valley - any station - and then get off and walk around until you've actually experienced the place. Eat the food and talk to the locals about what's important to them.
Frequent a taqueria, hit a Koreatown barbecue joint, ride a bike to and from work, read all the L.A. blogs and newspapers - Christ, listen to some banda, find an open-mike night or go to the Zoo or something, you're missing this place entirely.
And if all of this scares you, then please, at least browse the library's photo archive and learn a bit about the city's history before you decide it's all just a big, dark, boring wasteland out beyond the strobe-glare.
As the ancient flat-earth map said, HERE THERE BE MONSTERS. Or not.
Hopefully,
m a c k
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Tuesday, March 07, 2006 - 11:31 AM
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