California is much less interesting than you think - and it really does behave like 2 different states between north and south.
Los Angeles is generally looked at as the hub of the southern california phenomenon, and San Francisco as the hub of northern same.
Los Angeles/Hollywood is just as fake and desperate as you imagine it is, but it has a lot of very endearing qualities - the weird, illogical culture-mesh that occurs in certain art scenes is really rewarding and worth the price of admission. People with work ethic who cut through the bullshit shine like diamonds among the backdrop of seedy loneliness. LA is the kind of place you can see 15 seperate women in an hour with child's-fist-sized collagen lip injections, grab a delicious taco from a hideously dirty hole-in-the-wall mexican food joint, then zip over to the cemetery with a few hundred other people to watch a movie on the side of a mausoleum. The city is a phenomenon like a whirlwind that can swallow people whole and spit them out changed. There's a 70-piece hip-hop orchestra that plays around town pretty regularly that's kind of a fixture in my view of LA. The myriad art scenes are highly enjoyable for an outsider.
It is a nightmare to drive in LA because it is one of the most poorly planned cities on the planet. Left turns are living hell.
People do copious amounts of cocaine in southern california - it's almost completely normal.
Lower than LA County you have Orange County - which is absolutely nothing at all like the television show called the OC. They don't even film it in Orange County, it's all up in Venice Beach and other LA areas. (Though I think they do some Irvine shoots) Watch the movie Office Space - it's a much better summation of what life is like in non-LA Southern California for an enormous amount of people.
Orange County is largely about extremely lazy twentysomethings with dipshit senses of humor or deep mean streaks and former-hippie liberal-type entrepeneurs who have transformed themselves into greedhead environmentalists or post-80's clueless CEO-types. The 949 area code almost has its own exclusive culture of post-80's yuppie activity. On the hands-free cel phone while running into Best Buy on a lunch break to buy some computers. 38-year-old soccer moms in pink shirts and blue shorts in their H2's on the freeway grabbing their kids from the El Toro school district. It's 80's excess transformed through a 90's that, to them, was all about becoming PC and being spat out into a kinder, gentler excess in the new millenium. It's inordinately homogenous here - 2% black population last I checked.
Anyone who's looking for genuine intellectual stimulation in Orange County is generally unhappy to be there, in my experience. There are lots and lots of truly terrible bands here. People are still attempting to 'ride the lightning' of 3rd Wave ska to the bigtime. We have a great deal of truly casual sexual deviants here, which is nice.
I think I'm the only currently active 'lither from Orange County. I probably know a great percentage of people in Orange County who've read and taken something they value out of the Invisibles and it isn't a large number. If I wasn't so goddamn sick all the time I'd be in New York, or at least Long Beach, which has a strange mini-New York-in-California feel to it, though I may be projecting...
I don't spend too much time in San Francisco. It's the only place in the world I've gone where I haven't been invited places by friends because I'm straight. They have environmentally friendly buses that they have to get out and push pretty regularly and that suits them just fine. Leisure seems to be very high on the list of priorities for San Franciscans. And the city is about 100 times smaller than you imagine it is.
I don't know much about San Diego except that it's where I score all the good concert tickets when all the LA shows sell out. And that 4th and B is a fucking kick ass place to see The White Stripes, The Flaming Lips, or even Danzig. It's where I have strange conversations with comic book writers about once a year. It's extraordinarily pleasant there, if unremarkable besides.
California is only scary in the sociological sense. It is often beautiful here - our beaches mean something and they are a major source of comfort and pride for many Californians. Sexy is a loaded word. It is definitely weird here, though largely in non-awesome ways. California knows a thousand different ways to party, not all of them good. The City of Compton is largely innocuous, despite what you may have heard. City of Compton golf is a swell place to do 9 holes. I DO want two states - them northerners are diff'rnt from me. I voted for Arnold Schwarzenegger, as did thousands of other disenfranchised voters who wanted anyone but a regular politician in office. At least this way we can laugh a little more regularly. |
