Downtown Los Angeles 2011
It took a few years for me to get to like Los Angeles. I had grown up in Cleveland, Ohio—nobody’s idea of a beautiful city. I was used to red brick buildings overlaid with grime, along with hot humid summers and unrelievedly grim winters. My first opinion of Southern California was, “This place just isn’t real!”
Oh, it was real all right. After enduring earthquakes and floods and smog and wildfires, I saw that L.A. had its own demons, which were more intermittent. (In Cleveland, they were pretty constant.)
When I was in college trying to decide where to go to grad school to study film history and criticism, I remember reading a snide book (whose title I forget) about a state whose residents were called Procals (short for Pro-California) whose residents endlessly plugged their state as “God’s country.”
The part that sticks in my mind was the description of the Pacific Coast Highway as it followed the coast north from Santa Monica. Anyhow, the highway was always being covered with destructive landslides. Well, now I live a scant two miles from that road. It is incredibly beautiful, but I haven’t the heart to drive it ever since the January wildfire that destroyed Pacific Palisades. Too many of my favorite places have been burned to a crisp.
Am I a Procal? No, not at all. There are too many people in Southern California. Too many of the recent arrivals are homeless people who live in tents pitched any which way on sidewalks, surrounded by piles of trash. They have taken a lot of the shine off Los Angeles. I still love the place, but I am all to conscious that no place ever remains the same over the decades.
Tarnmoor 
I have spent a lot of time in Socal over the last half century and driven that road many times. Los Angeles in particular has a plastic nature about it – a blatant falsehood that echoes Hollywood. But I get the impression that people acknowledge the fabrication as fabrication, but celebrate it at the same time. Los Angeles could be bombed tomorrow and rebuild next Tuesday. Nobody would really notice. It’s just a film set. And I like it for that.
I think people think too much of Hollywood and the film industry when they look at L.A. Now that the film industry is dying (who goes to movies any more?), and Hollywood is just another slum, it is evolving into something else. Exactly what, I am not sure.
HOLLYWOOD
Whatever happened to the magic of the Silver Screen?
Now we only see the tarnish where the silver’s been
An occasional glimpse, a technicolor dream
Is all we ever get on our TV screen
All the sugar and the plastic that we once adored
Dreaming up these fantasies we can’t afford
Playing to an audience that won’t applaud
Whatever happened to the stars of the Silver Screen?
All those celebrated pimps and their jaded Queens
Now the fancy dress is over and they’ve taken to the streets
For their sadomasochistic means.