LA’S ANNIVERSARY

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LOS ANGELES!

This month marks the birthday of one of the world’s most remarkable cities: Los
Angeles, or LA, as it’s often known. According to the official version of events, the
LA story began in 1781, at a time when California was still part of the Spanish
empire. On September 4th of that year a group of pobladores, or settlers, set out
from the nearby San Gabriel Mission to found “El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reyna
de los Ángeles sobre El Rio Porciuncula”, which means “The Town of Our Lady
Queen of the Angels on the Porciuncula River”. The pueblo changed nationality in
1821, when Mexico became independent, and again in 1847, when California
became part of the United States.
From these humble origins. Los Angeles has become – along with its east coast
rival New York – one of the world’s greatest cities. In the 20th century a Los Angeles
suburb, Hollywood, gave us the film industry, while LA itself became the place
where trends – everything from plastic surgery to skate boarding – began. In order
to find out more about LA’s contribution to modern culture, we spoke to Beth
Deitchman, a journalist who moved there from New York. She is one of the editors
of the NFT, or Not for Tourists Guide to Los Angeles, we began by asking her
whether the world’s impression of Los Angeles was accurate.
Beth Deitchman (standard American accent): I think, to a large degree, people are
influenced by what they see in the media and, because Hollywood is based here, that
tends to be the main image that people have. I mean, I think that a lot of people back
east think that people who live in LA are vegetarian, yoga fanatics, who are
complete space cadets and the more you live here, the more you realize that no,
that’s a very small segment of LA. Definitely there are those people who exist, but
it’s just an eclectic melting pot, at this point and what you really see when you first
get to LA is how many people are from other places. I think I’d lived here for four
or five years before I realized that I had a lot of friends who were actually native
Angelinos, which… when you first move here, you tend to gravitate toward other
people who are new to the city and LA is one of those places that draws people from
elsewhere.
But does Los Angeles continue to set trends?
Beth Deitchman: I think that it does continue to set trends with respect to things
like fashion or pop culture references. I mean, a sitcom will have a line that suddenly
becomes a catch phrase that`s part of the American vernacular. Or Paris Hilton will
be photographed wearing certain kind of dress and it turns Up in InStyle magazine
and suddenly people all over the country are dressing like that. So it definitely
continues to set trends on that level. I don’t know that we’ve had a sweeping
seminal change lately in how the rest of the world lives, LA was the home of the
skateboard culture and surfing and we haven’t really created a new sport any time in
the last couple of decades, but definitely it still continues to have a huge influence
in the rest of the nation.
CAR CULTURE

In conclusion we asked Beth Deitchman what she personally liked about LA:
Beth Deitchman: I love like big ideas about the city. I love that it’s a car culture. I
like the fact that I can have almost the entire contents of my house in my car and
they’re there wherever I go. I love the weather. LA gets slammed for the perfect
sunny weather, 72 degrees, year round, but I actually like that. And there is a change
of seasons, it’s just really subtle you don’t get the changing of the leaves. You don’t
get a real Christmas of the air, but you can’t beat the weather I got married in
November and I was able to plan an outdoor wedding because I knew it wasn’t
going to rain! And you don’t have that luxury elsewhere.
And people just seem more relaxed out here. It’s probably the fact that the weather
is nice and it is a pleasant place to live and we don’t have to climb up and down
subway steps and stand elbow to elbow with people on our way to and from work
and it just makes people a little bit more relaxed.