By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to a conference in San Francisco. I’m excited to visit college friends I haven’t seen in a while, and since I did spend a year living and working in the East Bay right after college many years ago, I do have some fond memories. But if truth be told, I’d rather be going to Los Angeles. Yes, you read that right. I prefer Los Angeles to San Francisco. This idea is hard for many people, especially of the East Coast academic ilk, to believe or comprehend. Let me try to explain.

It’s not that I want to pick a fight with the S.F.icianados out there. But in the immortal words of 5-year-olds everywhere, “they started it!” After I’d started graduate school in southern California, and moved to Los Angeles, my then-boyfriend now-husband and I drove up to S.F. to visit friends, and met friends of friends who asked, “ how do you like living in L.A.?” in such a way as to suggest that we couldn’t possibly like it at all. We tried our best to explain that it wasn’t as bad as they assumed, that we actually liked it, but we could tell they thought we were just trying to put a happy face on a sad exile among the culture-free mini-malls: how could anyone want to live in such an urban nightmare, rather than the Emerald City by the Bay? This encounter (only slightly irritating at the time) in which we felt we’d been put on the defensive, but felt too constrained by social protocol to protest too strongly, was the first of many such conversations that prompted my sweetie and I to reflect on this need of otherwise tolerant, educated people who most likely pride themselves on being open-minded and cosmopolitan to bash L.A. and fall back on the worst movie-clichés about a place in which they’d never spent much time. Later, when we moved back to the East Coast, the conversations were less about pitting L.A. against S.F. than a more generalized skepticism about how anyone could actually like, much less miss, living in la-la-land, and the questions and comments took an all-too-familiar form:
• Aren’t people in L.A. kind of superficial? (Yes, all 3.7 million residents are shallow, vacuous, celebrity-seeking cardboard versions of human beings, who have no greater ambitions than tanning and plastic surgery.)
• What’s there to do in L.A.? (Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No museums, no theaters, no symphony or opera. No jazz clubs or bars or bookstores or universities or galleries. No music scene to speak of. No parks or festivals or sports venues. Just tanning and plastic surgery. And porn.)
• Isn’t the traffic awful? (Oh god, yes. So much worse to be crawling at 40 mph on a 6-lane freeway or surface streets with left turn lanes than sitting inhaling carbon monoxide in the midtown tunnel or inching along a one-way street. I’d much rather take an hour and a half to commute 15 miles than an hour to drive 50.)
• Doesn’t the nice weather just get boring? Don’t you miss the seasons? (Uh…I can’t quite muster the sarcasm for this one. No, not boring. Autumns are nice, I admit. But I’m heliotropic, sunshine makes me happy.)

One person, who’d once spent a few days in L.A., summed up her distaste with, “ugh, the place was so plastic!” And so it goes. It seems pointless to try to reason with this kind of irrational, unexamined prejudice, yet my impulse is still to defend L.A. against its glib detractors, if only to protest the narrow definition of “real cities” that people seem unconsciously attached to.

To return to San Francisco for a moment, although it’s really more comparable to Boston (in size, temperament, ambiance), San Francisco seems preoccupied with measuring itself against New York City, with all its high-culture gloss and international significance, and apparently sees L.A. as its primary competition for the honor of standing shoulder to shoulder with the Big Apple. As such, it’s not enough that they love their city, San Francisco-ans need to make sure that everyone else loves it, too. And that’s what’s so annoying. As my husband remarked, “it’s not that I dislike San Francisco; I just don’t like the cult of San Francisco.” In the latest attempt at cultish devotion, S.F.’s new tourism campaign listing all that the city has to offer is “unofficially” called “not in L.A” (you know, because L.A. is a cultural wasteland). When people need to put others down in order to feel better about themselves, one assumes it must be rooted in some deep insecurity. So it is with cities. That the so-called S.F.-L.A. rivalry is really a manifestation of San Francisco’s inferiority complex is not just my theory: an article several years ago on the opening of the Getty Museum in L.A. suggests as much:

Most people I knew in L.A. didn’t bear the kind of hostility toward S.F. that S.F. residents seem to have no problems feeling toward L.A. It’s true that L.A. is not a visitor-friendly city in the same way as S.F.—you can’t walk from one quaint neighborhood to the next charming one, lined with colorful Victorian houses. The thing is, L.A. doesn’t try to be any other city but L.A.; it doesn’t seem to be suffering an identity crisis. But for those looking in from elsewhere, it’s less about the reality of L.A. than about what it represents, about how it seems to violate certain notions of what cities should be. San Francisco’s inferiority complex seems to stem from an implicit model of what a “real city” should be, a model that is essentially Eurocentric by way of the Eastern seaboard.

Urban historian Witold Rybczynski, in City Life: Urban Expectations in a New World, takes up this very question of why our (i.e. North American) cities are not like the cities of the Old World—most notably Paris—planned with some grand, aesthetic vision:

The movie-making references are almost too perfect. The democratic ethos of the American city’s extemporaneous building up and building out is yoked to the business of illusion that is such a defining feature of L.A.’s identity. Perhaps the talk about centers and hearts of cities that seem to define “real cities”—L.A. doesn’t have a downtown! L.A. has no center! L.A. has no soul!—betrays an anxiety about the makeshift, improvisational nature of most American cities that Rybczynski identifies. Even as America loves the spectacle and seduction of its own newness, it remains deeply uneasy about its own lack of authenticity, which L.A., by virtue of its illusion-industry, seems to embody, even flaunt, most blatantly.

Rybczynski elaborates on his claim about the cinematic quality of American cities:

Rybczynski’s point is not to bemoan this difference from the Old, but to explore how this restless, optimistic energy has led to the great experiment of American cities. And it seems to me that L.A. is most unabashedly an American city—with its seamy underbelly of corruption, dirty business, and squalor as brightly lit as its beautiful ocean views and palm-tree-lined boulevards. It lets the messiness of its growing pains, its shifting demographics, its wild cultural productions hang out.

It might be that this transient and restless quality is what appealed to me because I lived in L.A. in my 20s, my own most restless and unsettled years. It was a great place to be young, and later, to be in love; a great place to live well without a lot of money. Every kind of ethnic food at student-friendly prices, free jazz concerts at the L.A. County Museum, student discounts at most of the movie theaters, and spacious and affordable apartments—what’s not to like? When my husband and I met and started dating, we were both graduate students, far from our families, eager to make our own way, our lives open with possibility. The big sky, the wide roads, the sense of expansiveness seemed to mirror our own optimism as we looked ahead to our careers and our life together. At the same time, the city offered lots of little surprises, like treats hidden in pockets: in a dark, unassuming alley, a curtained entrance to a swanky bar; on the second floor of a non-descript mini-mall, a fantastic Indian restaurant, which later moved to bigger digs near a freeway on-ramp; for $20 worth of drinks, wonderful jazz and a view of the city from the Bel Age hotel; the serenity of driving along the near-empty freeways late at night.

But especially the driving. Something about the horizontality of the landscape, the open space, made driving feel liberating, the simultaneous motion and stillness almost meditative. The opening lines of Beck’s song “Golden Age,” from Sea Change, perfectly captures the force of my nostalgia:

Put your hands on the wheel,
let the golden age begin
Put the window down,
feel the moonlight on your skin,
desert wind cool your achin’ head
the weight of the world drift away instead . . .