Take That!

There's a great article about perceptions of Los Angeles, "Listen to the Locust" by John Powers, in the July 2007 edition of Los Angeles magazine. It can be found online at www.lamag.com.

Two paragraphs stood out:

Now, one understands the temptation to explain Los Angeles metaphorically, even mythically. It’s fun to think of cities as being larger than life. L.A.’s sheer vastness beggars our attempts to know it. Too huge and various for anyone to master, it has the elusiveness of modern experience itself. Indeed, Los Angeles embodies trends many people find most unsettling about contemporary life: the endless influx of people, the decentered sprawl that resists hierarchy, the ceaseless change instead of enduring memory (Bobby Kennedy was shot where?), the preference for pop culture over high culture (although Disney Hall straddles the two), and the obsession with self-definition.

and-

The very things that make this majority-minority city messier and more demotic also make it more interesting than ever. But don’t take my word for it. Ask Werner Herzog, the crazy-ass German filmmaker best known for Fitzcarraldo and Grizzly Man, who has spent a long, globe-trotting career in search of newness, epiphany, great ecstasy. He now lives here, and accepting an award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association last year, Herzog startled the crowd by calling this “the city with the most cultural substance in the United States.”