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Home  Articles Travel - International and local What I love about Los Angeles
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What I love about Los Angeles |
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Since I spend so much bandwidth carping about things that could be
better, maybe for once I should post something I really, really like
about where I live.
I live in Hollywood, which is actually just a district of Los Angeles.
It might sound glamourous, but the majority of this end of town is
still surprisingly middle-class, even with the recent insane real
estate boom. We get plenty of immigrants, and there are
well-established enclaves from many parts of the planet. And because
the area is modestly prosperous, a lot of the good service jobs here
attract immigrants from less-affordable nearby areas.
All of which means you meet good people from everywhere in the world,
every day, if you keep your eyes open. And that's a pretty amazing
thing.
 Heck, I don't even need to leave my apartment building. Tonight I went
down to the rental office to pick up a package and met Samir, the new
security guy. He's from Nigeria. Told me stuff about what the
countryside looks like near the old capital. How cool is that? Some
nights the guy downstairs is Werner, a Salvadoran who amusedly indulges
my efforts to improve my broken Spanish. During the day, the place is
run by my friend Mona, a delightful Lebanese woman who speaks four
languages and puts up with bullshit in three of them on a daily basis.
The previous security guys were Leo, from Brest-Litovsk, and an
Egyptian whose name slips my mind but who had a wonderful laugh.
That's just in one room in this very building.
When you see L.A. on TV, it's usually all the crap up in the hills,
fancy gated houses perched precariously on rocky hillsides, spotlights
and Hummers and collagen. That's not the L.A. I live in or would want
to, although bits of it twinkle in the distance through my window.
My neighborhood is a place where Orthodox Jews and flamboyant gays
intermingle every day with white suburban hipsters and black kids from
Baldwin Hills, a place where the South African tea shop is a
five-minute walk from the place that serves Malaysian food on a banana
leaf. No, we don't all hold hands and sing "Kum Bay Yah," but you'll
see some of each at the Karaoke night at the Farmers Market. We get
along pretty damn well.
It dawned on me after going around the world last year that there's not
a single place I visited that didn't have somebody living in my adopted
hometown.
Think about that for a moment. It wasn't so long ago that
something like that was a great, impossible project dreamed of in the
abstract by idealists -- a world in which people of vastly different
cultures really can get along, respecting and listening to and learning
from each other. And man, that happens every damn day in my neighborhood, at least a little, and often quite a lot.
Of course, it's the nation we've always been in large part -- a nation of
immigrants, clamoring in a dozen languages in cities on every coast,
the vast majority working their honest asses off, doing right by other
people, expecting no more
than they earn and willing to get along with everybody else doing the
same damn thing.
That's the America I love.
That may not be George W. Bush's America, with its fanatic insistence
on one god, one economic ideology, one party, ein volk, ein reich, ein
vaterland, where absolute lies are so often used to question the
patriotism of anyone connected to reality.
But the reality is still here.
I bet that wherever you are, you might find more of this
constantly-changing, ever-hopeful, always-renewing-itself America
nearby than you might first guess. Maybe not to the UN-on-a-stick
degree in my little corner, but still.
In the daily swirl of fresh abominations, it's easy not to notice. But America, at its very finest, still
exists. In some places, in giant vivid glorious colors.
Bob Harris lives off of Melrose Place, Los Angeles. When he is not sitting in a West Hollywood cafe sipping cappuccino, he is writing emmy award winning television.
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