LA, I Love You. ...We Need to Talk.
I have lived in Los Angeles for about 8 years now. The smell of the air when I get off a plane here is the smell of home, but some things about this place I have no patience for anymore.
I was initially on board with the ban on plastic bags. Great, we’re cutting Big Oil out of our lives one baby step at a time. Paper has such a trendier, more rustic appeal to it anyway! But after the first few months of cradling jenga-esque towers of groceries against my chest only to have them topple all over parking lots and stair cases I am ready to get off my environmental high horse and put that bitch to work pulling fracking equipment. It’s not like they stopped making plastic bags. They just cost 10 cents and come pre-filled with public shame. Hats off to Burbank for being above all this noise. In the city of Burbank, plastic bags might as well grow on the trees that will inevitably be clear-cut for oil drilling and/or refining. You buy a single lime, and a lovely Burbank grocer will place that lime in a plastic grocery bag like it’s 1995 and you’re going home to squeeze it in some Zima.
LA is home to a very perplexing parking paradox. It is a town of emotionally abused artists, yet there is no parking anywhere. How can that many of us be out having a good time all the time?!? Hats off to Burbank to being above all this noise. Go ahead and shit on the Valley all you want. They figured out how to put up a bunch of parking lots and keep paradise in tact. “It’s too far! It’s too boring!” Please, continue to think that! I love my artsy architecture façade chain restaurants. I love my plethora of clean, well-stocked grocery options, each with its own large, luxurious parking lot. I love my townhouse apartments of quiet yuppies. I love my happy hours and pilates studios filled with entertainment executive fiancés and street parking generous enough that I don’t have to worry about some burn-out denting my bumper as s/he 10-point parallel parks his/her Geo Metro/archaic Honda behind me in a space barely big enough for a Lil Tykes red Cozy Coup. So my Ventura Blvd gastropub can’t get away with playing Ice Cube and Dre... I got Gin Blossoms everywhere I go!
What I absolutely hate the most about LA isn’t the rush hours, nor is it the inconvenient spread-out vastness between neighborhoods. It isn’t even the perpetually stoned & entitled under-25 crowd that ruin any concert/mall/Lobster Festival with their parent-money and their non-music. What I hate deep in the heart of my soul here is that existential bane, that Belthazarian belt of bile and belligerence known as The 10.
I take a fair amount of Lyfts in this town, and there’s two things that me and old ethnic drivers from all over the globe agree on. 1) 94.7 the Wave is the best radio station and 2) The 10 SUCKS. If I was the 10 freeway, I would just suck the barrel of dicks I knew I deserved and let everyone get on with their day. I could be on the 101, the 5, 405, Lincoln blvd or Crenshaw, Anytime I am near the 10 the flow of traffic self destructs into a monstrous mosaic of brake lights and panhandling bums.
And it’s not just the 10; everything it touches is equally detestable. The 10 connects Venice – for those of you who like your art and ocean views to come with a side of head lice and crime - to downtown. Much like a beach whale corpse, bloated a glistening in the California sun, downtown LA is filled with noxious gases, but also teeming with life! It’s a magical place where the one-way streets are paved with pee and your transportation options are as numerous as they are ineffective! It’s a place where dreams are made and windows are broken as those dreamers finally wake up and hurl themselves from their high rises. Venice and downtown. I’d rather be run over than even attempt to park there, and the drinks arbitrarily cost $2 more.
In between these two diabolical ends of the shi10ing lies the grand wizard of get-me-out-of-here, Koreatown. Stop asking me to go to Koreatown. That’s where it would happen, right? That’s where World War Z would hit. Zombies, Aliens, Isis, you name it. I know it’s your birthday and you want to do karaoke, but Koreatown just feels like they took a section of New York from smack in the AIDS epidemic, a piece of China from smack in the SARS outbreak, threw in some actual smack, some active vials of tuberculosis and scarlet fever and let the race riots smear it all over the place. There ya go, Korea town.
Hats off to Burbank to being above all this noise. The 101, 134, and 5 are all respectable grown-up highways with reasonable back ups from time to time. Plus, more commuter-friendly surface streets like Hollywood Way, Barham, and Magnolia curb the rush hour shit storms. Crenshaw aint got shit on Riverside Drive.
Twitter/request contact info: @jessicarosefx
