Is the Valley really Los Angeles, or a breakaway region all its own?
Hell, I thought we put that shaggy old religious debate to rest four years ago by killing the destructive secession measure. But now it's reared its ugly head in the form of an L.A. bloggers' debate, replete with snide remarks and insults.
We think The Valley Observed may just be a rebranding of a pre-existing site for his book. Is it bad that he's using the more widely-known LA Observed name to promote his book? Surely not. It's his business.
But we're still bothered by the new image bug on the top of the page, which creates an artificial division between Los Angeles and the Valley. The San Fernando Valley is not a counterpart to Los Angeles; it's a part of our greater metropolis. Isn't it?
Roderick fires back at 2:51 p.m. with something of a dismissive correction of her post:
LAist editor Carolyn Kellogg doesn't get the San Fernando Valley's complicated relationship with Los Angeles or vice-versa, but her commenters do. She also doesn't seem to know that the traffic sign logo I'm using for The Valley Observed is real—or that 1.3 million Valleyites live in Los Angeles—or that I do too. She can catch up on the Valley's kissing-cousin connection with L.A. here or here or here—or just enjoy some fun quips and quotes. Sample: "Smogadena … Pornadelphia … Unknown Actorville" — Jay Leno.
FranklinAvenue's Michael Schneider chimes in with a dispassionate report:
LAist's Carolyn Kellogg wonders if it's redundant to have both sites -- there's no VALLEYist or blogging.valley.la, after all. But Roderick, who literally wrote the book on the subject, responds here that indeed there is quite a difference, and goes into the Valley's "kissing cousin" relationship (I'd say it's more of a "kissing sister" relationship, since they both have the same parents) in this essay on the Valley's image.
And barely more than two hours later, Joseph Mailander dumps an all too familiar steaming load of insults into the fray:
If only he weren’t such an old, angry, doughfaced, ceaselessly self-promoting whiner, we might pay more attention to him than we currently do, as we’re just dying to know what’s in the LATimes each and every morning, and can’t quite figure out how to access the site ourselves. Meanwhile, we’ll wish him many sleepless nights compiling things we don’t read in two places rather than one.
While a visit to your Thomas Guide or Google Maps could answer the surface-level question of the Valley's geographic identity (hell, yes, it's part of the city) the underlying philosophical debate is an ideological turf war into which I'm just too bushed at the moment to march.
Anyway - the comments in two of those posts (on the sites that allow comments) are worth a read.
