The Loneliest City

Today, we are all lonely in Los Angeles, separated in our social isolation. But this is a condition that most Angelenos have been training for all our lives. As a city, LA is one of the loneliest. 

The LA skyline evokes a muted exchange, an urbanity that seems activated only from a distance. Films teach us to admire it from afar, shot in aerial view from the dusky peaks of Runyon Canyon or the winding roads of Mulholland. LA, a smog-clotted panorama rising up behind Griffith Park and James Dean’s cocked fists.

Many argue that LA isn’t a city at all, but a series of nodes, quintuplets sharing the same womb of arid landscape. When someone says they’re from LA, I rarely know what they mean. They might mean the San Fernando Valley, Torrance, Culver City or Glendale; they often mean one of the satellite enclaves that slope around a nebulous downtown. 

LA’s geography demands little of you. Its fantastical sprawl yields few chance encounters, few obligations of exchange (this contrasts sharply with cities like New York; Olivia Laing,