Thread by @atduskgreg

100-tweet brainstorming prompt from @vgr. Somewhat surprised at the topic he chose for me. But things immediately started jumping to mind so, let's see...

https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1206665972066578432

@vgr They say “New York is a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.” The opposite is true of LA.

@vgr LA is elusive. It isn’t centralized. It doesn’t have one identity. And sometimes people mistake that for having no identity.

@vgr LA is a network of clusters of neighborhoods. The clusters are determined by geography and traffic patterns. Most clusters include neighborhoods with different demographics. All the most interesting stuff happens on the boundaries with these neighborhoods bleed into each other.

@vgr 4. If your life requires you to commute between clusters living in LA can quickly become highly unpleasant. (Started numbering thread)

@vgr 5. People think LA has no geographic constraints but it in fact does. And its expansion has recently hit them. It is filling in and becoming more dense.

@vgr 6. Only a fraction of the people who live in the LA metro area have “Los Angeles” in their address. It’s like mistaking Manhattan for New York.

@vgr 7. Amongst other things this geographical structure makes LA a fertile place for many kinds of weirdness. Scenes and projects can grow unseen and unselfconscious for longer here than they can in New York.

@vgr 8. In New York there’s always “that new thing” and everyone seems to already know about it. The cupcake place with the huge line, the museum or gallery show everyone is talking about, the new hip neighborhood.

@vgr 9. This sense of the new makes the city exciting and can create a sense of unity. A kind of collective mass culture the US as a whole hasn’t had since The Great Media Fracturing.

@vgr 10. It’s also fractal. Each community or industry in the city has the same accelerated gossip velocity. So if you’re in tech it feels like everyone’s talking about the same startup or technology. If you’re in jazz everyone talking about the same artists and stylistic developments

@vgr 11. The downside is this voracious hunger for the new leads to things getting plucked before they’re ripe. Ideas don’t have time to grow away from the main branch and mature. They don’t have time to convolute and get weird.

@vgr 12. New Yorkers tend to caricature LA as shallow. Partially because of the shadow of Hollywood. But LA gives people more niches to crawl into and get deep. As @bldgblog has written so eloquently “LA has no correct assumed mode of use” bldgblog.com/2007/10/greate…

@vgr @bldgblog 13. Another part of why LA appears shallow to New Yorkers is the cities’ differences in historical orientation. New York defined itself in relationship to Europe. LA defined itself mostly in relationship to itself (though increasingly LA is looking towards Asia).

@vgr @bldgblog 14. Hollywood really is disproportionately influential in LA’s self-imagination. And it is more obsessed with itself and inner-looking than any other industry or creative scene I’ve ever encountered.

@vgr @bldgblog 15. Because Hollywood’s goals are so clearly commercial it’s easy to assume that the people who work in it must be obsessed with money above all. This is not the case in my experience.

@vgr @bldgblog 16. There are a million easier and more reliable ways to make money than making movies or tv shows or music. What people in Hollywood are obsessed by is creative success defined as getting a large group of strangers to want to care about the thing you made.

@vgr @bldgblog 17. Every person I’ve met while working in TV has a deep love of movies and TV. Most of them also have very little sense of taste. Not that they have bad taste, mind you. They just basically equate “successful“ and “good”.

@vgr @bldgblog 18. Most pop-culture consumers don’t appreciate how incredibly difficult it is to get something made with the level of investment that goes into basically everything they consume.

@vgr @bldgblog 19. Professionals who engage with the process understand what an achievement it is to get anything at all past those gatekeepers. To convince someone to spend millions of dollars making something real that you just thought of and wrote down on paper. Astounding it ever happens.

@vgr @bldgblog 20. While undertaking such a Sisyphean task attempting to stick to your own taste is like begging for a bigger bolder to push up the hill. Taste and selective ness are a luxury of the already successful.

@vgr @bldgblog 21. I’ve seen a similar effect in tech startups, actually. Many people drawn to them out of desire to do something great. End up redefining great to mean “successful within the existing industry’s terms”.

@vgr @bldgblog 22. Overall I’ve seen more idealism about what they do from people in Hollywood than people in tech.

@vgr @bldgblog 23.

https://twitter.com/atduskgreg/status/1206704083345625088

@vgr @bldgblog 24. In both New York and LA a disproportionate number of startups are actually in media rather than tech. In New York those companies are perceived as a central part of the tech scene. In LA they’re seen as a peripheral part of the entertainment industry.

@vgr @bldgblog 25. Almost all social life in LA happens at people’s homes. In New York if you’re ever at someone else’s apartment you’re probably already intimate with them. Or about to be.

@vgr @bldgblog 26. Living in New York, particularly in your 20s, it’s easy to leave your house in the morning and be in public places continually until coming home at night to go to sleep. And to do this most days of the week, most weeks of the year.

@vgr @bldgblog 27. I remember when I first moved to The City having the specific impression that the part of my brain that dealt with faces was tired at the end of the day. I’d just looked at too many faces over the course of the day.

@vgr @bldgblog 28. It can be enervating and exhausting, particularly in winter when you’re constantly wet and cold. But after living there LA seemed lonely to me.

@vgr @bldgblog 29. In New York, particularly in winter, doing mundane tasks like shopping for groceries can become a series of nightmarish ordeals. The result sometimes being you feel like a hero for having accomplished them.

@vgr @bldgblog 30. This is another factor in the city’s sense of self-importance. While you’re doing it, just living in New York feels like an accomplishment.

@vgr @bldgblog 31. It’s easy to criticize New York for thinking of itself as the center of the world. But that permeating atmosphere is actually a perk of living there. It elevates and validates the way people tend to see themselves anyway.

@vgr @bldgblog 32. Both New York and LA tell powerful internal stories about themselves. This could be an important survival resource in the coming decades. World historically cities are much more stable structures than countries.

@vgr @bldgblog 33. Both New York and LA have identities that precede them being part of America. This part of California, in particular, was part of Mexico for longer than it’s been part of the United States. Not even to mention its incredibly rich native history.

@vgr @bldgblog Took a break to do the very LA thing of visiting the Magical Castle last night. But gonna pick this thread up now and continue the climb towards 100 tweets.

@vgr @bldgblog 34. Since moving away I’ve found New York a much more sentimental place to return to than anywhere else I’ve lived. Every familiar place feels alive with the emotions I experienced there. It’s overwhelming.

@vgr @bldgblog 35. LA, on the other hand, swallows personal history and erases it. Neighborhoods change character until they’re unrecognizable. Or they have no intrinsic character larger than your personal experience. When you’re different they’re different.

@vgr @bldgblog 36. Ironically LA’s history as a city feels much more specific and concrete to me than New York’s. Whether self-important illusion or reality, a lot of New York’s history has a claim at being America’s history. LA’s is self-evidently eccentric and specific.

@vgr @bldgblog 37. One of the best snapshots of LA history I know is @RememberThisPod’s series on the Manson murders. Perfect LA story of failed celebrity, sexism, utopian visions, sex, and violence. Will also make you fall in love with Joan Didion if you haven’t already youmustrememberthispodcast.com/episodes/youmu…

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 38. If Hollywood is the dominant industry in LA, finance is the dominant industry in NY. When Los Angelenos get together they talk about movies and tv. But when New Yorkers get together they talk about real estate, not finance.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 39. Finance has an enormous impact on New York’s economics but contributes nearly nothing to the city’s cultural or intellectual life.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 40. When I lived in New York I used to walk through the West Village and notice famous paintings through the windows of high end apartments. I noted down the addresses and used to imagine giving tours of them as if it was a museum. The Museum
Of Other People’s Art.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 41. New York is very aware of itself as An Important Global Art World Capital. In LA the fine arts always know they’re peripheral to Hollywood. This is good for the arts. It’s one of the reasons LA is a more interesting visual arts scene than New York despite being much smaller.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 42. My favorite arts institution anywhere in the world is the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City. David Wilson, the founder, is from Chicago. He specifically told me he considered moving to New York to open the museum. But chose LA so it would have time to mature.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 43. Also David’s wife, Diana, an important and under appreciated force in the museum’s history, hand-animated The Emperor’s lightning bolts in Return of the Jedi. Apparently hers were some of the last shots delivered. George Lucas once told her “the film is in your hands.”

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 44. Possibly the most controversial opinion of this thread: the cultural area in which LA is most obviously superior to New York is food.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 45. The core of the advantage is the incredible diversity and quality of ethnic food in LA. Particularly Chinese and Mexican. New York’s Chinese and Mexican food sucks.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 46. Jonathan Gold, patron saint of LA food, said “In New York, immigrants cook their food for white people. In LA, they cook for other people from the same place they came from. The former is better for the people. The latter is better for the food.”

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 47. It used to be that New York made up this difference through excellence in traditional French-style fine-dining. But LA’s higher end has gotten better and better. And is less conservative than New York’s.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 48. New York’s food world is structured in the traditional European style: huge centralized markets that feed the city’s restaurants. LA is structured like a lot of Asian cities: strip malls taking the place of village center food vendors.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 49. A few thoughts triggered by my trip to the Magic Castle last night. If you don’t know it, the Magic Castle is a private magic club and performance venue. An Old Hollywood institution.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 50. In LA travel times are 3 dimensional. It’s not just a function of distance between points but of when you travel. The same trip could take and hour and half at 5pm and 20 minutes at 1am. This is why Los Angelenos respond to questions about distance with answers about time.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 51. LA is good at reminding you that the movies and tv are part of a much older tradition of entertainment: the deep human need to put on a show. Traveling circuses, magic acts, freak shows. That history isn’t too far below Hollywood’s surface.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod 52. Also randomly ran into @MaxTemkin at the Magic Castle last night. That kind of serendipitous encounter is much more common in New York than LA.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 53. When I lived in New York I found any time I moved to a new neighborhood I went through a period of constantly running into people I knew on the streets. Theory: before you find all the side street shortcuts you walk on populous thoroughfares with higher chance of coincidence.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 54. The same qualities that make LA better at supporting The Weird make New York better at creating serendipity.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 55. A bunch of the most memorable experiences I had in New York (and some of the most life-changing ones) started with randomly running into people on the street.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 56. A book that grew my appreciation of New York was The Island at the Center of the World, a history of when the city was a Dutch colony before the arrival of the British. amazon.com/Island-Center-…

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 57. So many of the values we associate with New York (and America more broadly) were inherited from the Dutch and not the British: the obsession with capitalism, the relative acceptance of diversity, the spirit of cosmopolitanism, etc.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 58. Also the story of the early-governors of New York is incredibly dramatic. Worthy of an HBO series.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin Picking up this thread again for another push. Let’s talk about the weather.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 59. LA doesn’t have weather. It has natural disasters. Statistically speaking this is a good trade-off. A lot fewer people die in our fires, floods, and earthquakes than freeze to death in each New York winter.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 60. But, exactly because they’re rare, natural disasters freak people out. They shake people’s faith in the trustworthiness of their environment. That casts a big psychological shadow.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 61. I’ve observed significant long-term changes in LA’s weather twice. First, when I was a kid in the 80s and 90s, I watched the smog gradually disappear.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 62. I remember having days off from school due to poor air quality as a kid. In the morning they’d show a map of the region on the local news. Red areas would mean: kids shouldn’t go outside.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 63. Then gradually through the 80s and 90s that smog mostly went away. The result of California’s wave of environmental regulations in the mid 80s. School stopped being closed for bad air days. Kids’ asthma got less bad. It was noticeable.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 64. When you read about the Trump administrations efforts to roll-back California’s more stringent environmental regulations don’t think about partisanship or culture wars. Imagine air that makes you scared for your kids’ health. I remember what it looked like.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 65. The second change in the weather has been subtler and more subjective. I’ve felt it since moving back to LA four years ago. More consistent fires in more densely habited places. Seasons becoming more unreliable — a winter in which it just never rains. A general Weirding.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin 66. As @the_eco_thought says, it’s impossible to tell if I’m talking about the weather or global warming.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought 67. There was a lot of doggerel written during the recent PG&E fires about California somehow being particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change. Or of these effects somehow rendering a harsher verdict on life in California than anywhere else in modern society.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought 68. This is almost exactly backwards. California is the top agricultural producing state in the country. It has a wildly diverse array of ecosystems and access to incredible natural resources. It’s also a lot wealthier than much of the US. California is the best case scenario.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought 69. Even given those advantages climate change is going to hit California really hard, particularly our most vulnerable people. Imagine what it’s going to do to places with less robust resources. Places like West Virginia or New Hampshire that produce so little food locally.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought 70. In New York City produce feels like it’s already almost spoiled by the time you get it. An avocado is like an orchid.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought 71. I will admit to feeling some sympathy with California separatists. But only in my darkest moments of despair. Much more interesting is a vision of California as part of a 21st century regional coalition with Mexico and states of the American west, deeply connected to Asia.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought 72. In 2011, for a scenario planning class at @ITP_NYU I did a project on “the 21st century city state”. My final presentation imagined a conflict between California and an unstable republican president over marijuana legalization: urbanhonking.com/ideasfordozens…

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 73. New York feels like an anomaly within its region. And the city has been engaged in fairly continuous political combat with the state at least since the days of Robert Moses. Los Angeles feels like a (possibly wildly mutated) outgrowth of its surroundings.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 74. As a kid growing up in LA all social interaction involved driving and therefore the involvement of parents and pre-planning. The result being contemporary helicopter parenting arrived earlier here than elsewhere.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 75. Though I also spent endless amounts of unstructured time outside. Hitting leaves against the garage door with a racquet. Building lawn darts out of old nails. Drawing plans for a tunnel and secret hideout in my backyard. It was Extremely Suburban.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 76. It’s impossible for me to imagine what it would have been like to grow up in New York.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 77. But thinking back on it there are also elements of my childhood that couldn’t have happened anywhere else. For example I knew almost no one who wasn’t Jewish as a kid. Even though I grew up in Reform synagogue with a community that was very secular.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 78. New York was a mythical place to me growing up. My dad’s family was from Coney Island in the 40s and they talked about it in magical realist terms.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 79. They were all totally obsessed with the movies and Golden Age Hollywood but they were much more romantic about New York than LA as a place.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 80. I think some of this was the generational memory of my immigrant grandparents. A reflection of how magical New York must have looked in their eyes compared to the shtetls of the old world.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 81. It also made New York feel like the old world to me. It was the place of carps in bathtubs, hot dogs that cost a nickel, lesbian speakeasies, crystal set radios, the Catskills.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 82. The part of my LA childhood I’ve most romanticized is probably the Sherman Oaks Galleria. It was the mall from all those 80s movies and I lived right across the freeway from it.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 83. There was a tunnel under the freeway from the end of my block right to the Galleria’s garage. At some point my parents started letting me walk with friends. It smelled powerfully of piss. There were usually homeless people there escaping the heat. We used to run through it.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 84. The Galleria had this incredible arcade called Time Out. I played endless hours of the original Star Wars arcade game. And later on Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 85. It also had a Lebanese burrito place I loved and a Hot Dog on a Stick. It shows up in 80s movies constantly.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 86. Hollywood treats LA and New York completely differently as settings in movies. LA usually goes unremarked on. It’s the default backdrop. When movies are set in New York they usually go out of their way to point that out.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 87. A lot of people in New York now acknowledge the 70s as the city’s nadir. Los Angelenos, on the other hand, are in the grip of increasing romanticism about the decade here.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 88. Part of this is the current obsession with the 70s as a style — in clothes, film, music, graphic design — in which LA played a central role.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 89. More generally the present moment feels parallel to the 70s. A hangover from a period of utopian idealism turned dark, paranoia-inducing politics, the gas crisis, international troubles and US reputation in decline, a reactionary response to a wave of civil rights progress.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU Ok. After and extended pause to gather supplies and wait for the weather to clear I’m going to attempt to summit this 100-tweet mountain.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 90. I’ve been thinking about books that shaped my view of each of these cities. For New York, I mentioned Island at the Center of the World about the history of the Dutch colony before the British takeover. The other huge one is The Power Broker by Robert Caro.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 91. The Power Broker is one of those legendary intimidating doorstopper-sized classics. I expected it to be Great and Important. I wasn’t prepared for how incredibly absorbing it was as writing. When I finished it I would happily have read another few hundred pages.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 92. It’s a biography of city construction coordinator Robert Moses and a history of urban planning and political power. After reading it every bridge and tunnel and park in the city will look different to you.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 93. It’s harder for me to think of books that really capture LA for me. Fewer grand histories come to mind and more fiction and personal essays. Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress. Joan Didion’s The White Album. Eve Babitz’s Slow Days, Fast Company.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 94. Also Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders by Lawrence Weschler. A lot of people wouldn’t think of this as book about LA. But it is. It’s about the Museum of Jurassic Technology, to me LA’s most defining cultural institution.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 94. I read Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet do Wonders in an undergrad class on the history of museums. I came home and went to the MJT. Wandering through it I accidentally opened a private door and ended up in their workshop, a converted morgue that smelled powerfully of formaldehyde.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 95. I wrote them a letter about the experience and ended up working there for 2 years. The Museum is the perfect intersection of so many of LA’s cultural roads. Disney meets Ed Ruscha at a 16th century cabinet of curiosities that’s also a 1930s movie palace.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 96. Stumbling into “Stinky Hollow”, as I would eventually learn the museum staff called the ex-morgue, is the single moment I most associate with LA. Secrets inside of secrets.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 97. What’s my New York equivalent? My first winter break in the city and two weeks of the least responsibility in my adult life. Wandering through quiet snowy streets listening to the Game of Thrones audio book. Meeting a friend in a mob bar in the village for chess and whisky.

@vgr @bldgblog @RememberThisPod @MaxTemkin @the_eco_thought @ITP_NYU 98. In the present moment I hear an increasing chorus of attacks on cities, even amongst my generally cosmopolitan peers. Inequality has made them harder places to make a home. Baby boomers have bought everything worth owning. Their ecological foundations are visibly teetering.