you’ll never feel at home in LA unless you keep moving

LA is huge.

imagine the biggest place you’ve ever been in and quadruple it.

that will just be the Valley, which you need to know if you are really to get LA.

then quadruple it again and you’ve got South Central,

which is where the secret soul of LA is. the actual heartbeat.

the fakers fly right over south central via overpasses or freeways , but if you live here long enough

and if you start meeting the right people you will go to a house party off Crenshaw

you will get your haircut on Florence,

you might even find yourself at a sample sale near Carson.

LA goes all the way to Long Beach and inside the weirdest dead ends of downtown.

everyone hikes Runyon, but if i was the failing New York Times and their laughing stock of an LA bureau here’s what i would do:

there is a stretch of LA from Santa Monica to DTLA thats as wide as Pico to the south to Sunset to the north.

i would refuse to run any stories from that stretch an zero from downtown.

i’d also ignore anything happening in the upper crust of Malibu, Manhattan and Redondo Beaches.

why? because unless we are talking about crime, 90% of so-called news and features by the mainstream press happen in that narrow band.

the Pulitzer Prize winning Jonathan Gold is beloved in LA because he uses the entire canvas, not just the same beaten path

he ventures, he explores, he speaks Spanish, he talks to people of all skin colors and religious beliefs.

LA is the home of more religions than any other city in the world.

it is the 2nd largest Spanish speaking city on the planet.

if all of your sources and all of your stories are about white folk, if all of your touchstones and goals and ideals are based in Caucasian ideals of the 1960s

then you aren’t really telling the story of LA of today.

i once dated a girl from canada who was blown away that so many billboards and handmade fliers were in Spanish

and how many brown skinned people there were on the streets

and Asians

and Jews.

she said, this isn’t what it looked like in “Clueless”.

if you truly want to cover this city, and most of all, if you really want to love this city, you have to move out of West Hollywood

you have to break up with your boyfriend,

you have to stop taking taxis

and most of all you should start driving for Lyft.

then you will start to see the real story that is this beautiful city of angels.