“I’ll tell you what – after seeing Los Angeles…well, I guess I seen something every bit as stupefying as you’d see in any of them other places” – The Stranger, ‘The Big Lebowski’
Look, I’m on vacation. I’m not going to justify the headline too much beyond “Aimee Bender and Raymond Chandler are SoCal writers, that’s enough.”
That traveler/tourist distinction? I’ve found you can’t really be much of a traveler with a four-year-old. That’s okay! You control what you can control—we try to pick interesting places, activities that are new experiences for all of us (or at least tectonic-level joy-inducing for the four-year-old), and try to eat local.
The first spot we hit out of LAX was Tacos Escondidos, a food truck with a self-serve salsa bar and al pastor that tasted like so many religions have bans on eating pork because God wanted to make sure there was enough pork to go around for this specific al pastor.
This phase I’m in, where I’m comfortable to admit things about myself that are kinda ridiculous, it feels liberating. I unironically love the Santa Monica Pier. You’re telling me there’s a road that starts in Chicago and ends at the Pacific Ocean with buskers and beach kitsch? I am a danger of walking into any shrimp joint, I will play whatever grubby version of Pop-A-Shot you put in front of me. Who wants churros?
Some ingredients to being a fun city to write about:
Impossibly beautiful locale, bonus points for cool architecture, bonus points for a body of water.
Deep, rich history—preferably with corruption, preferably with the kind of rich assholes that inspire characters like the General in The Big Sleep/the Big Lebowski in The Big Lebowski.
Vibrant art, music, and food scenes (or at least of legacy of these things)
I draw the traveler/tourist distinction because it’s easy to have a good time anywhere if you show up, don’t ask hard questions, and ask a place to play the hits. Especially when it’s always beach weather. It never doesn’t make my brain itch to be like “oh my God, I love it here, I’m in such a great mood, but also this is a fucked up, exploitative place that bulldozed neighborhoods full of people of color to make way for a baseball stadium and inspired art like ‘Heart Attack and Vine’ and American Psycho.” But hey, Brian Wilson said “Lay Down Burden.”
What can you say about a place that produces both John Frusciante and Anthony Kiedis?
Sorry you got an email,
Chris