Michael Rosen-Molina Michael
Rosen-Molina thinks his city is better than yours. Tell him off at
[email protected].
When people ask me why I don’t like San Francisco, I
always say that it’s because a man with no pants chased me
through a fish market.
Perhaps I should explain.
I like L.A. Everyone else seems to hate this city ““ even
native Angelenos are almost unanimous in their distaste for their
hometown. In recent years, it’s become trendy to criticize
Los Angeles, dismissing it as a soulless wasteland, a blight on the
Southern California landscape.
Surely no other city has engendered such universal hatred. New
York’s grime gives it character. San Francisco’s
claustrophobic clutter makes it cozy. But no one seems to find
anything praiseworthy in L.A.’s famous urban sprawl, or its
mindless maze of side streets, or its lowest common denominator
cultural output.
At the same time, the people who feel the most intense disgust
at the Los Angeles landscape almost invariably heap lavish praise
upon L.A.’s northern neighbor, San Francisco, pointing to it
as the way that a city should be.
San Francisco seems the perfect yin to L.A.’s tarnished
yang ““ everyone loves it. I still fail to see how San
Francisco has managed to capture the hearts of so many visitors,
while Los Angeles only succeeds in turning their stomachs. I only
came to Los Angeles four years ago, and, although I was never a fan
of her chaotic urban planning or floozy Hollywood atmosphere, I
have a renewed respect for her after visiting San Francisco.
Los Angeles culture is a culture of the proletariat ““ it
gives the masses what they want and it doesn’t judge.
That’s why we came up with the idea for MTV’s
“Jackass” here. It’s a city that doesn’t
take itself too seriously.
San Francisco doesn’t have the same all-embracing
attitude. At first glance, it seems to be more accepting, simply
because all the hippies are still hanging around and the city
tolerates people who don’t wear pants (I’m getting to
that). At the same time, the city seems so convinced of its own
revolutionary hipness that it doesn’t need to tolerate
squares.
I’m told that San Francisco has changed a lot since the
’60s, and that the city isn’t entirely overrun by
counterculture types and beatniks, but there’s still a
thriving hippie culture, smugly clinging to a bygone era.
The whole city has an odd, surreal feel to it. It’s almost
like being locked in a carnival after nightfall: it looks fun and
glitzy during the day, but there’s something creepy lurking
just under the surface.
In San Francisco I went into a children’s toy store where
one cashier chain smoked the entire time. There was something
vaguely unsettling about that, giving the experience an aura of
defiled innocence.
I recently visited “The City,” as local residents
like to call it. As the only person without any facial piercings or
fringe pants, I stood out as a tourist. This is important as it
explains how everyone on the street was able to recognize me and
orchestrate an enormous private joke at my expense.
Shopfronts with signs that proclaimed “Bookstore”
turned out to sell T-shirts. Surly merchants blocked my entry into
several music shops, because, apparently, nothing disrupts business
quite so much as having a customer come in to look around.
Waiters ducked out of restaurants before I came in, obviously
because they just didn’t want to serve me and were just
hoping that I’d go away.
For most of the trip, I survived on convenience store
danishes.
The only people who were always on hand were the hippies. Even
though everyone assures me that they’ve long since gone
extinct, evidence to the contrary loitered on every street corner,
staring at me. I was used to being watched in L.A., but it’s
much more disconcerting when it’s harder to distinguish the
unbalanced vagrants from the general population.
Before I left Los Angeles, numerous friends assured me that I
could easily get around the city on the famous San Francisco public
transportation. This may be true, but the system suffers from an
epidemic of stingy ticket machines. After one greedy subway machine
swallowed the last of my change without spitting out a ticket, I
was forced to go above ground to search out additional cash.
I surfaced in the middle of a fish market, which, in and of
itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. Fish is a very valid reason
for having a market. To my eyes, the central attraction in the area
seemed to be a dazed-looking gentleman who wandered around sans
pants.
No one else paid him any attention. Common sense would dictate
that one should always avoid eye contact with a potentially insane
person, but logic really begins to break down when you’re
confronted with a man with no pants. I suppose he must have noticed
me because he followed me for three blocks, which was more
attention than I ever received from any waiter.
Meanwhile, the requisite gang of hippies watched, but,
thankfully, didn’t try to follow me.
I won’t bore you with details of my miraculous escape from
the pantless man ““ suffice to say that it involved going back
down into the subway.
Everyone tells me that, sure, of course San Francisco is going
to look bad if you just concentrate on the pantless lunatics. It
isn’t just the pantless guy, however, it was whole ambience
of the city.
I came back to L.A. and got pretty much the same treatment. But
at least T-shirt stores here are labeled as T-shirt stores and
waiters are actively rude rather than invisible.
I like the decaying urban sprawl, the spangled angels that have
mysteriously appeared on every street corner, the LACMA billboards
that turn fast food joints into art, and the ridiculous Hollywood
subculture. I like that we have a Washington Boulevard and a
Washington Place right next to each other, just to confuse
everyone.
I like that we’ve got smog and a Taco Bell on every block
and that our biggest landmark is just a big sign on a hill.
I love L.A.