L.A. Is a City State
Updated at 11:54 a.m. ET on June 3, 2021.
Two weeks after my wife and I moved to Los Angeles, a large man pedaled up to me in a parking lot in West Hollywood. He was sunburned, caked in grime. His bike was sized for a 12-year-old boy. Perhaps it had recently belonged to a 12-year-old boy. The man skidded to a halt and growled, “If I made a movie called Revenge City, would you go watch it?”
I said, “What?”
“If I made a movie, Revenge City, would you watch it?”
It was early in the morning, just past sunrise. “Based on the title,” I said, “yeah, probably.”
“That’s what I thought,” he said smugly, and zoomed away.
No one seems to know what Los Angeles is, exactly: city of angels, revenge city, or something else. In 1925, Aldous Huxley called it “nineteen suburbs in to refer to both the city and the county, which in fact is composed of 88 separate cities. refers more broadly to what’s known as Greater Los Angeles—that is, the largest metropolitan region in the United States, stretching from the hills of Santa Barbara to the hinterlands of San Diego. It is colossal and miscellaneous: some 19 million inhabitants spread over thousands of square miles.
