3-02-08, 10:24 am

Driving to the stables the other day – one eye on the road and the other on my half-empty gas gauge – I found myself thinking about Los Angeles.

No coincidence; I was playing the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s gorgeous “Under the Bridge,” a song I associate with tough times in the early 1990s as an assistant professor at Brown and my overwhelming homesickness for California. “I don’t ever want to feel like I did that day,” mourns Anthony Kiedis, and I remember the spring of ’92, wanting, needing to go home as LA burned and the Providence local news was covering the 40th “birthday” of local icon Mr. Potato Head. I recall my worry for LA, for my sister who lives and works there; I recall longing to be back in my home state whether as part of the solution or of the problem.

“Take me to the place I love / Take me all the way.” Though “Under the Bridge” is about LA and I am a native San Diegan, to me it is the quintessential California song, both celebration and dirge. No Beach Boys lilt or Mamas and Papas ballad, not Randy Newman’s study in irony nor X’s eponymous punk angst in “Los Angeles” so evokes the contradictory lived experience of California in general and LA in particular as the Chili Peppers’ 1991 breakthrough hit.

And yet, the song is indeed about LA, about driving its hills and shooting dope under a downtown bridge, as confirmed by Kiedis in his 2005 memoir Scar Tissue. The Baudelairean flaneur as driver and junkie, the automobile a uniquely Southern California emblem of the simultaneous immersion in/alienation from the crowd that France’s greatest poet described over 150 years ago. In Southern California, the car is our pod, yes, in the body snatcher sense of the word, a needed embryo and mobile isolation chamber. This is especially true in Los Angeles, where vast numbers of people work far from their homes and public transportation is even more inadequate than the problematic infrastructure sustaining the web of freeways. From the great megalopolis to the border, we all refer to the freeways with the definite article: “the 405,” “the 110,” “the 5,” “the 15.” People from other regions of the country find this quirk strange and risible.

Los Angeles in particular is easy to mock, as it has been in countless high-, low-, and middlebrow popular media. Me, I have terminally mixed feelings about LA; in fact, I wonder if it’s possible not to. Los Angeles is endlessly fascinating, endlessly grotesque, this boundary-less space in which dramatic disparities and an effusion of differences are thrown into stark, at times unnerving relief. San Diego has both a longstanding inferiority and superiority complex regarding its northern neighbor; the smug civic bogeyman of “Los Angelization” has served to obfuscate our own problems of sprawl, congestion, overdevelopment, and lack of affordable housing. McMansions and strip malls crop up like overnight toadstools on a damp lawn, and the small Del Mar valley where I stable my horses, open space when I was growing up, has shrunk to the size of a couple of football fields. But God forbid we be like “Smell-A,” San Diegans still whimper. San Francisco, of course, hates LA and vice-versa. The elegant, expensive City by the bay derides Los Angeles for its horizontal sprawl, clogged freeways, and Hollywood` kitsch, while Angelenos view San Francisco as a self-satisfied, elitist, and dismissably tiny enclave for Yuppies with wine caves but no assigned parking spaces. I do – unequivocally – love San Francisco, but I can see both sides of the argument. Los Angeles is not, generally speaking, an especially pretty city. Its lack of greenbelts and well-maintained public commons, along with the vast and ongoing privatization of its most scenic areas (all well-explored by Mike Davis in his 1999 book Ecology of Fear), are striking even for a parochial San Diegan accustomed to an urban center by the sparkling harbor and Balboa Park’s acres and acres of public greenery. A gas-guzzling cruise the entire span of Sunset Boulevard yields disconcerting, shifting vistas of over-the-top mock-baronial mansions replete with dual Bentleys in their driveways, sleazy blocks of tattoo parlors, prostitutes, and Hollywood Star Map kiosks, working-class neighborhoods caught between gentrification and nonviolent ethnic cleansing. Excesses of boon and blight. In Los Angeles, gun violence grabs headlines only as an interloper, when it trespasses onto the “secure” terrain of the Westside, the South Bay, the Hollywood Hills.

As for the pop culture imaginary of “Hollywood,” entertainment capital of the world and originator of all species of manufactured glamour and tabloid sleaze, my experience is that ordinary Angelenos are not so much blasé as they are largely uninterested, personally or materially, in the parallel lives of Britney, Lindsay, and Paris. To this extent “Hollywood” exists outside of itself as much as it is insular and self-referential. Sure, one LA friend sent me cellphone pictures of Paris Hilton at a nightclub. My sister recently sat an elbow away from Tim Robbins at a Westside restaurant. My brother glimpsed Larry David at a Santa Monica eatery that was featured on Curb Your Enthusiasm. But such sightings are generally reported with an air of amusement at oneself for having even noticed. To quote another Chili Peppers song, “It’s understood that Hollywood sells Californication.” Hang around LA long enough, and yes, you’ll see someone famous for something. It’s a matter of odds, not awe.

Yet Los Angeles, blighted and congested, over the top and under the bridge, is as multiple and uncontainable as it is contradictory. Baudelaire again comes to mind – “Swarming city, city full of dreams” – although the French adjective, “fourmillante,” literally evokes a swarm of ants. LA is no Paris, but the notion of the formicary seems apt. But consider the afternoon skyscraper shadows and fluted sunlight mirrored in Disney Concert Hall, Frank Gehry’s downtown masterpiece in which music and matter appear fused in a kind of bizarre yet exhilarating literalization of the term “material culture.” Or Chavez Ravine on a hot summer night, where even a Dodger-hater like me in my Padres cap can comfortably enjoy a game against the stunning, still backdrop of Hollywood-tall palm trees and silhouetted mountains. Consider the La Brea Tarpits and the Miracle Mile, where the architectural, cultural, and geographical pasts seem to interact with a diverse and vital present. Visit the beach cities of the South Bay, which, while generally well-heeled, are less celebrated and more multicultural than their counterparts north of LAX, not to mention the lily-white shoreline communities that dot the Southern California coast from Orange County to Coronado. Go to a movie, a mall, or a restaurant in the South Bay to find a casual intermingling of races and ethnicities. (Oh, and by the way, I once saw WNBA superstar Lisa Leslie at the Manhattan Village mall! As a San Diegan, I reserve the right to gush.)

I suppose what I’m leading up to is that yes, I like Los Angeles. The gross economic, racial, and social inequalities that characterize LA also mar most US metropolitan areas, although perhaps only in LA does an obscenely wealthy couple build a “Versailles West” but a few zip codes away from the infamous Skid Row where a confused elderly woman was dumped courtesy of the good folks at Kaiser Permanente. The faux “Versailles” is currently on the market for $125 million, while the forgotten of Skid Row are a little less forgotten every time Steve Lopez of the Los Angeles Times devotes his column to their plight. Steve Lopez is one reason to like Los Angeles; Earvin Johnson and Maxine Waters and the countless organizers and demonstrators mobilized against the forces of xenophobia and racism are others. I don’t love LA as I do San Francisco, but that city’s cosmopolitanism and beauty seem forever beyond arm’s reach, materially unattainable. I don’t even love LA the way I grudgingly love San Diego, which is the way one loves a difficult, stubbornly reactionary family member – you love him, her, or in this case, it, simply because it’s yours. But one thing that distinguishes Los Angeles is its constant suggestion of potential, as yet unrealized and deferred but still within tenuous grasp. Not through the proposed “Manhattanization” of downtown LA, which would, if undertaken, displace low-income earners who work there and further pave over public space, nor through the machinations of power brokers whether named Spielberg or Geffen or Broad. It is Los Angeles’s very horizontality that makes foreseeable an authentic social heterogeneity wherein differences may one day cooperate rather than merely collide (as imaged in the feel-good, can’t-we-all-just-get-along movie Crash). Despite the ongoing institutional corruption and racism of the LAPD, the shortsighted, self-serving partnerships between local government and developers, and the top to bottom social dysfunctionality emblematized by “Versailles” at one pole and Skid Row at the other, Los Angeles remains a decentered urban topography in perpetual motion. This motion has nothing – or perhaps everything – to do with the freeways or the earthquakes. In its refusal of stasis, LA evokes the possibility that its very dynamism carries the seeds of radical transformation, not just those of Nietzschean catastrophe.

Oh, what the hell. I guess I love LA after all.

--Karin Coddon writes frequently for Political Affairs.