"Is This the City of Angels or Demons?"
“I'm in Los Angeles today: It smells like an airport runway.
Jet fuel stenches in the cabin and lights flickering at random.
I'm in Los Angeles today:
Garbage cans comprise the medians of freeways always creeping
even when the population's sleeping.
And I can't see why you'd want to live here.”
-“Why You’d Live Here”-Death Cab for Cutie
“I’m shocked by anyone who doesn’t consider Los Angeles to be anything less than a bozo-saturated hellhole. It is pretty much without question the worst city in America.”
—Chuck Klosterman in “Killing Yourself to Live”
Oh the joy of failed bar bands reborn as novelty "street performers" in Santa Monica
In many ways, I can’t disagree with the previous thoughts about L.A. Despite its beautiful locales and weather (I just played basketball near the beach in February in 75-degree weather), L.A. seems like a nightmarish laboratory of our worst American impulses and failures.
It’s overcrowded, sprawling, choked with traffic and filled with either stunningly pretentious self-absorbed elites and elite-wannabes, misguided liberals or the living ghosts of the working poor and homeless.
F is for freeway, and for other words you want to use when you're driving on an L.A. one.
According to some statistics I've read...Los Angeles County, with 6 percent of its households boasting incomes over $150,000, has more high-income households than anywhere in the state or nation. A lot of them are in the elite 90210 zip code: The median household income in these confines is $134,000, more than triple the county median.
But barely a half-hour drive south, the world turns upside down. In South Central LA's ZIP code 90059--just five minutes from the Lakers and Clippers' bungalow, the Staples Center, the median household income is just over $20,000 a year.
Los Angeles also remains the homeless capital of America, with 50,000-80,000 people on the county streets every night.
Consequently, it isn't unnecessary to travel even the half-hour between extreme ZIP codes to capture the socioeconomic contrasts--and conflicts--of this city.
I live in seaside Santa Monica. On a recent weekday morning on Ocean Avenue at the head of the Santa Monica Pier, the world seemed like a timeless tacky paradise, with the bubble-gum-colored, Corona-flavored fantasy of Endless Summer. Tourists filed toward the pier's famous carousel, while good-looking couples covered in sunblock and dark glasses lazed on the benches and gazed at the waves.
It sounds like a scene in a postcard, but if you look beneath the surface, Santa Monica and much of L.A. is dependant on the back of cheap labor. Poor Latinos and to a lesser extent blacks dominate the service, construction, and retail portions of the economy, and many of them make minumum wage or not much more.
(Even at $9-an-hour a worker in Santa Monica can't afford to live there, many of them have to commute to work from the inner city by bus.)
And then there is the homeless, the often dirty, disheveled, and hopeless men and women who have fallen through the cracks of society and community and sleep in parks and beg for money or find creative ways to perform for money.
What you have then in Santa Monica is two different worlds that exist in the same space. There is the predominately white upper-middle and rich classes that the community was built to serve with its opulent hotels and condos and ridiculously unnecessary spas, herbal food stores, overpriced salons, and upscale shops.
Then you have the second world of working poor serving them, and the homeless which hopes to get a few scraps from the first world. The middle class is a dying breed here, unlike central Missouri.
Though these two worlds are connected and share much of the same physical space, you can feel the socioeconomic chasm between them and most interactions between them usually involve a business transaction. (Such as the upper classes having their cars fixed or their gardens tended by cheap labor, or the lower classes asking for money.)
What doesn't make sense to me is the disconnect these self-proclaimed tolerant and well-intentioned elites have from the second world/ underclass.
Today, there are thousands of crosses in the Santa Monica beach symbolizing the Americans who have died in Iraq. It's a protest against the war, and hundreds of man hours have gone into staging this dramatic protest that ultimately have no effect at all on our nation's foriegn policy. Yet, I see at least 20 homeless people laying on filthy blankets all around the faux cemetary.
Earlier this week at the Third Street Promenade, a earnest blonde hippie-girl from Greenpeace tried to sign up some friends and I to Greenpeace and pledge at least $10 a month so that we could help fund some professional lobbyists in Washington to persuade the government to stop cutting down a rare spruce in Alaska. (I was a little bit of a smart-ass and told her I was trying to get a job as a lumberjack. She also said Greenpeace had recently stopped guitar makers from using this spruce in their guitars. I told her "But what if you use the guitar with the rare wood to write a song about saving the environment? Isn't that better in the long run than saving some stupid tree? Rock N' Roll saves more than trees." She disagreed with me.)
Meanwhile, there were people all around us who barely afford to eat.
All in all, it's pretty depressing to see and in many ways, its going to be difficult for me to reach out to these people and love them. It’s only through God’s help I think, that I can fathom spending the next three years devoting my life to these people.
All I know is..Like I said before...I can't complain..I just wrote most of this in February on the beach in 80 degree weather.
Seriously, it could be worse.
“I'm in Los Angeles today: It smells like an airport runway.
Jet fuel stenches in the cabin and lights flickering at random.
I'm in Los Angeles today:
Garbage cans comprise the medians of freeways always creeping
even when the population's sleeping.
And I can't see why you'd want to live here.”
-“Why You’d Live Here”-Death Cab for Cutie
“I’m shocked by anyone who doesn’t consider Los Angeles to be anything less than a bozo-saturated hellhole. It is pretty much without question the worst city in America.”
—Chuck Klosterman in “Killing Yourself to Live”
Oh the joy of failed bar bands reborn as novelty "street performers" in Santa Monica
In many ways, I can’t disagree with the previous thoughts about L.A. Despite its beautiful locales and weather (I just played basketball near the beach in February in 75-degree weather), L.A. seems like a nightmarish laboratory of our worst American impulses and failures.
It’s overcrowded, sprawling, choked with traffic and filled with either stunningly pretentious self-absorbed elites and elite-wannabes, misguided liberals or the living ghosts of the working poor and homeless.
F is for freeway, and for other words you want to use when you're driving on an L.A. one.
According to some statistics I've read...Los Angeles County, with 6 percent of its households boasting incomes over $150,000, has more high-income households than anywhere in the state or nation. A lot of them are in the elite 90210 zip code: The median household income in these confines is $134,000, more than triple the county median.
But barely a half-hour drive south, the world turns upside down. In South Central LA's ZIP code 90059--just five minutes from the Lakers and Clippers' bungalow, the Staples Center, the median household income is just over $20,000 a year.
Los Angeles also remains the homeless capital of America, with 50,000-80,000 people on the county streets every night.
Consequently, it isn't unnecessary to travel even the half-hour between extreme ZIP codes to capture the socioeconomic contrasts--and conflicts--of this city.
I live in seaside Santa Monica. On a recent weekday morning on Ocean Avenue at the head of the Santa Monica Pier, the world seemed like a timeless tacky paradise, with the bubble-gum-colored, Corona-flavored fantasy of Endless Summer. Tourists filed toward the pier's famous carousel, while good-looking couples covered in sunblock and dark glasses lazed on the benches and gazed at the waves.
It sounds like a scene in a postcard, but if you look beneath the surface, Santa Monica and much of L.A. is dependant on the back of cheap labor. Poor Latinos and to a lesser extent blacks dominate the service, construction, and retail portions of the economy, and many of them make minumum wage or not much more.
(Even at $9-an-hour a worker in Santa Monica can't afford to live there, many of them have to commute to work from the inner city by bus.)
And then there is the homeless, the often dirty, disheveled, and hopeless men and women who have fallen through the cracks of society and community and sleep in parks and beg for money or find creative ways to perform for money.
What you have then in Santa Monica is two different worlds that exist in the same space. There is the predominately white upper-middle and rich classes that the community was built to serve with its opulent hotels and condos and ridiculously unnecessary spas, herbal food stores, overpriced salons, and upscale shops.
Then you have the second world of working poor serving them, and the homeless which hopes to get a few scraps from the first world. The middle class is a dying breed here, unlike central Missouri.
Though these two worlds are connected and share much of the same physical space, you can feel the socioeconomic chasm between them and most interactions between them usually involve a business transaction. (Such as the upper classes having their cars fixed or their gardens tended by cheap labor, or the lower classes asking for money.)
What doesn't make sense to me is the disconnect these self-proclaimed tolerant and well-intentioned elites have from the second world/ underclass.
Today, there are thousands of crosses in the Santa Monica beach symbolizing the Americans who have died in Iraq. It's a protest against the war, and hundreds of man hours have gone into staging this dramatic protest that ultimately have no effect at all on our nation's foriegn policy. Yet, I see at least 20 homeless people laying on filthy blankets all around the faux cemetary.
Earlier this week at the Third Street Promenade, a earnest blonde hippie-girl from Greenpeace tried to sign up some friends and I to Greenpeace and pledge at least $10 a month so that we could help fund some professional lobbyists in Washington to persuade the government to stop cutting down a rare spruce in Alaska. (I was a little bit of a smart-ass and told her I was trying to get a job as a lumberjack. She also said Greenpeace had recently stopped guitar makers from using this spruce in their guitars. I told her "But what if you use the guitar with the rare wood to write a song about saving the environment? Isn't that better in the long run than saving some stupid tree? Rock N' Roll saves more than trees." She disagreed with me.)
Meanwhile, there were people all around us who barely afford to eat.
All in all, it's pretty depressing to see and in many ways, its going to be difficult for me to reach out to these people and love them. It’s only through God’s help I think, that I can fathom spending the next three years devoting my life to these people.
All I know is..Like I said before...I can't complain..I just wrote most of this in February on the beach in 80 degree weather.
Seriously, it could be worse.
| Permalink | 
