"I'd be safe and warm if I was in L.A.," The Mamas and the Papas sang 60 years ago. "California dreamin' on such a winter's day." It was the kind of place people dreamed of, even people who had never been there, when all the leaves were brown and the sky was gray.
A decade later, Billy Joel's "Los Angelenos" described a Los Angeles of "Midwestern ladies/High-heeled and faded," and "New York cowboys" in their "sleek new sports cars" that looks like a foreign country when viewed with today's eyes.
By the '80s, we'd all grown even more cynical. Randy Newman's "I Love L.A." came out in '83, and he couldn't sing the city's sunny praises without at least a mention of the filthy underside:
Look at that mountain
Look at those trees
Look at that bum over there, man
He's down on his knees
Look at these women
There ain't nothin' like em nowhere
In the end, though, Randy loved L.A., from the bums to the babes to... Century Boulevard? Yes, even Century Boulevard.
Today, I couldn’t tell you what L.A. means in popular culture — and that’s a weirdly disorienting thing to admit. You can't put your finger on a single event or a moment in time. Like a failing relationship, it just sort of happened while people were busy doing other things.
I don't have to tell you what L.A. is becoming. Just turn on the television or do a little doom-scrolling on X.
The riots tell only a small part of the L.A. story, of course. There's still plenty of magic to be found in the kingdom. Assuming you can afford it, that is. The days when that Neil Diamond line from "I Am…I Said" was true — "Palm trees grow and rents are low" — are long over.
Sorry for the earworm.
Speaking more broadly, I can't remember the last time I heard a politician or a normal human even mention the California Dream — which was just like the American Dream, but better, because it was in California.
The state had it all.
The wild creativity of Hollywood. The economic dynamism of the Bay Area. Wine country. Beaches. Skiing. The unrivaled productivity of Valley farming. Car culture. Aerospace. The Los Angeles music scene. Redwoods. Oil. Disneyland. World-class schools. Gentle weirdness. Growing infrastructure. And all of it wrapped up in sunshine and a relaxed attitude that belied all the energetic awesomeness.
If Los Angeles and California were never quite as perfect as popular culture painted them, it was shockingly close. It wouldn't have become the most populous state in the union — and in quick order, too — if it weren't so desirable.
So I won’t repeat the litany of what went wrong in California over the last 30 years, but I will say this. It wasn't California's resources or natural beauty that made it what it was — although they certainly helped by attracting the kind of ambitious and creative people who did make it great.
But thanks to politics, the incentives changed, and so did the people. The writing was on the wall when I left San Francisco in 1994.
Today, most of the news from California — riots, drugs, poverty, homelessness, poop maps, and an increasingly feudal economic stratification — is the kind of ugly that natural beauty can't hide.
The rich and powerful still have their shopping on Rodeo Drive and their San Francisco mansions out in Sea Cliff and Presidio Heights. For everybody else, here's your poop map and don't forget your helmet during riot season.
That's L.A. in today's popular imagination, and if the reality isn’t quite as grim as I’ve painted it, just wait — parts are shockingly close.
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