I CAN SEE how some people find LA impersonal. I can even imagine people living here right now who feel that same way. The way that you feel when you are in a place where there are a million people around you, and you still feel so alone. It breeds the tropes that are attached to LA as a dangerous place, a place where celebs live, and one filled with materialistic people who are good looking and tan all the time. These stereotypes are damaging, as we have already seen in class, and are quickly quieted by a closer look into what we might refer to as the "real" city. But, what about those that are still lost in the shuffle? Would they still feel like this if they were living in another city? Should I set my sights to an examination of the human psyche instead of this city, where many still leave feeling empty? The fact is, LA is not what it is cracked up to be for many people. We love to discuss the people who live in and love the city, but for every one, there is probably someone out there who doesn't love this place. Did they just not look for what we try to find? Did they not see the hidden gems that we seek out when we decided to discover the real city? Is it just too big, too impersonal for many to find a real connection with it? It could be as simple as it's just not their thing, that they just don't have a taste for this place, but I wonder if anyone has an answer to this question that has kept me thinking...
-- Kimberly Dennis
(photo credit: nate vawser, flickr creative commons)
Given that one in seven Californians are native-born, with the majority of non-natives gravitated toward the larger metro areas of LA and SF, I wonder if the fact that so many are strangers in a strange land is what makes it feel so impersonal. Compared with the larger metro areas on the East Coast where several generations of families live within a few miles of one another, allowing for a sense of family and shared history, perhaps the price of living in a blended metropolis like LA is a heightened sense of loneliness.
ReplyDeleteThat's an interesting point and something that came up in class this week. We've been talking about how the city "works" in terms of its borders, dividing lines etc. Also the idea that often people who come here, attempt to reconstruct where they've left or find people most like them which creates a strange, silo-like existence...
ReplyDeleteI was actually thinking of all the people who might be attempting to recreate some sense of what they recognized as home after moving to LA when I was writing my blog, I think that is a great point. It seems to me like LA is simply just too large to have a small community-type vibe where people feel comfortable enough to branch out, and yet there are so many great neighborhoods within it where that is necessary for discovery.
ReplyDeletebut beyond neighborhoods, i think what happens is that it's difficult to build a lasting social consensus in terms of building a community. look at venice. it was a real estate dream to build a village like the italian city that would, in theory, attract people who wanted that sort of planned community. but aside from the disaster of trying to force the landscape to conform, the people who gravitated there did not all view the place with the same romantic reverence and the idea died long before the canals did.
ReplyDeletelikewise, i think people who try to bring a little of the old into the new of los angeles find themselves marooned on islands of exclusion that tend toward the us-against-the world status. and i don't think it's because LA is too large so much as LA as a whole isn't interested in building a lasting singularity of place. it tears down more than it keeps, reinvents itself faster than any city on the planet, and prefers to exist as if it's never had a past. all of which contributes to the loneliness factor.