City of Angels

TOUCHDOWN

I'd looked at my arrival to Los Angeles, the third-largest city in the United States in the country's third-biggest state of California, as a reacquaintance with a city who I had had a brief and unpassioned encounter with some 5 years before.

This time, however, LA and I would not just be a twosome- we had a third member of the group, and this time, it was Roxanne, who'd been living in this city for the last 6 months. On this occasion, this foggy and smoggy city and I would get to know each other better with the help of a third person. This time the conversation really would flow!

Approaching LAX from the south, the first landmarks you see are the sweeping but very urban Santa Monica, Venice and Marina del Rey beaches. When the plane adjusts its angle for landing, you are treated to a glimpse and you undestand where LA earns its bad reputation as a dense, tense, polluted city. Los Angeles- not a 'city' but rather a conglomerate of 88 suburbs, each a city in its own right- is the third-largest urban area in the world, with a population of 14 million. Smog settles over the city like a brown cloak; neatly organised grid upon grid of streets, a patchwork of project homes and strip malls constitute its urban sprawl, which continues north and east towards the Santa Ana Mountains. Intense for the visitor, an extensive network of freeways intertwines to carry the Angelenos around, clogged with oversized hummers and a variety of other petrol-guzzlers. It is on these freeways where most of the city spends its time, where a 15-mile (24km) journey can take anywhere up to an hour. (I experienced this myself).

WE GOIN' RIDIN' ON THE FREE-WAY

Freeway etiquette is fairly simple: don't observe the 65 mph (104km/h) speed limit, bear down upon slower drivers to force them out of your lane. If this fails, overtake without indicating. Driver courtesy is literally non-existant. Any civility or cordiality which I would normally extend on Sydney roads was greeted with shock, then disbelief, then a quick realisation that this was the only chance they would get to change lanes, followed by and finished off with a quick acknowledgment of thanks.

In a city where the average citizen spends 72 hours per year in traffic, there is a demand for car-friendly consumerism. It was not any less of a surprise, however, when in one of my many hours cruising LA's road network in Roxy's Honda Accord, I came across two nouveautes of "drive-thru": a drive-through ATM and a drive-through Starbucks. The pleasure of having a coffee and reading the paper while watching the world go by in a cafe has been completely ignored with the development of the latter.

CHAINS OF CONSUMERISM

Ask an American where you can buy a plug adaptor and they will respond "Radio Shack". Enquire where the nearest cafe is and they will shoot back "Starbucks". Can you recommend someone to clean my pipes? Call Mr Rooter . What do all of these answers have in common? They are all chains, multi-national corporations which dominate American consumerism, leaving smaller companies little or no chance to survive or even establish themselves. Americans therefore come to associate brands with certain things, rather than a type of store, the name becomes synonomous with the products it sells. And, as my dear Angeleno (or should that be Angelena) friend Roxanne pointed out "When you go out for a coffee, you have two choices. A small, nameless place where you've never been before and whose standards you are unfamiliar with, or Starbucks, which is the exact opposite. Which would you choose?" And with 11,068 outlets in the USA, the kids don't stand a chance.

WHERE'S THE LOVE?

While I may have painted a negative picture of LA, which would antagonise any proud Dodger-loving resident of this Southern Californian (or "SoCal" in the LA vernacular) metropolis, there must be something good to say. So where is LA's silver lining?

According to my research*, a large percentage of LA's population works in the entertainment industry. It's the city's lifeblood- Warner Bros, Universal Studios, Ellen deGeneres- all the big boys film in and around the Los Angeles area. The thousands of hopefuls who come to LA, each hoping to become the new "Jenny from

the block who used to have a little but hopefully she will get a lot" would surely have something to say. Is this city not where you create your lifestyle of the rich and famous?

Take, for example, Melissa George, who Roxanne and I spotted in Intelligentsia cafe in Silverlake, a hip, grungy suburb of LA. Melissa George is better known as Angel from Home and Away, the (unfortunately still) long-running Australian soap. We spotted Melissa (after Roxanne first nudged me and said "Do you know who that is? It's Elizabeth George!") in Intelligentsia, where a prerequisite for any customer is an iPhone and an Apple Macbook plus a certain air of nonchalance and being generally unmoved by most events, monumental or not. After we established who she was, we broke all the LA-cool rules. We discussed her career, in not-so-subtle tones, and every (if any) movie or television show we could remember her being in. I also relayed to Roxanne, from the corners of my teenage mind, the entire Shane-Angel storyline from Home and Away in the mid-90s.

Unfortunately for us, Melissa heard, and our discussion of her career high and lowlights was not received all too well. She relocated to inside the cafe. Fortunately for us she left her half-eaten ham and cheese sandwich, which I was able to salvage and sell on ebay for $2.59 (that's US dollars). So, some people really do make it in LA.

(*research n, v : attending social events in West Hollywood, e.g. pool parties and other such social gatherings, and asking "what's your job?" to half a dozen people)