Steve Sailer writes:
Los Angeles is coming back into style after a long stretch as America’s most hated city. L.A. looks great in La La Land, with most of the scenes filmed around sunset in the Griffith Park area near downtown. When I was young, all the energy was moving west toward the beach, but now, with the smog gone, all the young people want to live inland in the old part of town.
Demographically, Chazelle’s fantasy Los Angeles is much like Woody Allen’s New York or Paris: no Mexicans, Koreans, Persians, or Russians, just good-looking white Americans and dignified old black jazz musicians. To a semi-French artist like Chazelle, America will always be culturally white and black, and the post-1965 newcomers don’t much matter.
Rick McGinnis recently returned from a trip to L.A. with some great photos (which you can buy prints of btw).
He writes:
I used to hate Los Angeles, like most people from the other coast. That was partly L.A.’s own fault – the movie industry has been telling nasty stories about itself and its hometown since the silent era. I fell for the bad press and the sinister myths – until I actually started going there. That’s when I learned that the myths were almost all true, but that there was so much more to the place. Mostly, though, I learned that you can’t take a bad picture of L.A.
