>the rest of it seemed like suburban sprawl or
>Disneyland.
Disneyland is in Orange County.
> It is not that I dislike LA, I can think of far more dreadful
>places - it is just not my kind of place, I do not connect. Unlike NYC,
>which I loved from day one I got there for the first time.
That's the difference. New York or San Francisco you get as soon as you hit the sidewalk. Los Angeles takes longer. That's why people hate it when they come in for only a few days or even a couple weeks.
Next time come downtown or go to East LA, Koreatown, or MacArthur Park. Koreatown has the highest population density in the city and one of the highest in the country. MacArthur Park is where they found the mummified babies in the basement but there's a lot of life there above ground.
Former NYC police chief Bratton was police chief here until a year ago. His wife still lived on the east coast and they had a bi-coastal thing going while he was chief here. He used to complain that there was no place to eat when she arrived here late at night. He obviously never looked in Koreatown.
It seems Bratton, at least when it comes to nightlife, stopped gathering information about Los Angeles decades ago. So do a lot of other people.
One of the best recent books about the place (besides everything Mike Davis ever wrote about it) is by Norman Klein, a transplanted New Yorker who teaches at Cal Arts. It's called History of Forgetting:
http://www.versobooks.com/books/klm/k-titles/klein_los_angeles.shtml
The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Haymarket Series) [Paperback]
Analysis, photography and fiction combine in a bracing portrait of LA
Publication June 1997 2nd Edn. : August 2008
Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an “anti-tour” of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb.
“Klein clearly follows in [Mike] Davis’s wake, but develops a distinctive focus on the erasure of memory in and about the city.” Times Literary Supplement
“Klein is a fine stylist, an engaging historian – is account of the way noir shaped the city is strikingly fresh.” New Scientist
“Norman Klein is full of ideas, brilliant and beautifully expressed.” Journal of American History
Norman M. Klein is a critic and historian of mass culture, editor of Fragile Moments: A History of Media-Induced Experience, and author of Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon from Verso. He teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.