El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula

You're not supposed to like Los Angeles. New Yorkers will tell you it's
soulless suburban sprawl, you can't walk anywhere, you spend all your
time stuck in traffic, breathing toxic smog. San Franciscans will warn
you that it's full of plastic people, air-kissing backstabbing phonies
who can't think about anything but flashy cars, chiseled abs, and which
celebrity name to drop next. And people from other countries will know
without ever having been that it exemplifies the very worst of
narcissistic self-congratulatory America.

But in the same way that Europeans don't get the USA - don't understand
the size and diversity of the place, that there are at least a
half-dozen Americas tucked uncomfortably into one legal nation -
non-Angelenos will never grok L.A. Yes, it's sort of a relentless pea
soup of suburbia thickened only occasionally by clusters of density,
but hidden in this bland fog are a few terrific places. I'm now back in
Canada (like a snowbird; it's not a coincidence that winter has almost
ended) but I will miss Los Angeles.

Well. Sort of. LA proper is an exhausting sprawl of a city, that much
is true. But I will miss my 'hood, Venice and Santa Monica, the
beachfront communities to the west of the official city. Venice is sort
of a declasse beach-bum strip, populated by artists, freaks, hippies,
and surfers, along with the denizens of its million-dollar canal-front
homes. Santa Monica is upscale beautiful-people land, wide tree-lined
boulevards and elegant pedestrian shopping thoroughfares, yoga studios
and juice bars. I lived right smack on the border, a block from the
beach, and I can't think of a better place to be in all of Southern
California.

And I did enjoy roving through the rest of the city. County. Area. DMZ.
Whatever you call it. It's important to understand that Los Angeles is
not so much a city in the traditional sense as a) a state of mind, b) a
network of freeways, c) a greater urban area comparable in size to
Belgium. It wasn't planned; it wasn't designed; it just grew. And so it
is the least European of all the cities in the USA, 100% pure
accept-no-substitutes America, with all the loathsome excess and
jaw-dropping awe that that implies.

But there is as much good as bad. And so, in an attempt to defend a
city that is so often the target of so much vitriol, I give you a
quick, entirely unbiased, exhaustively researched, and absolutely
indisputable guide to How To Live and What To Do in the City of Angels:

( my L.A. travelogue email, some of it cribbed from previous posts )