'The Soloist' Chases an L.A. That Isn't There

Sharon,

You state that "It’s increasingly difficult to feel part of this city" and that is because you've chosen to become disconnected with it. As such, you should no longer write articles about something that you are out of touch with.

Enough with how bad the traffic is. I live in Brentwood and visit my family home weekly in - gulp - Glendale. It took me all of 25 min. last time with no traffic because I pick days and times where I'm gauranteed a stress free drive.

Concerts downtown and in Hollywood exist on weekends and matinee times too.

The city is vast and that's what makes it lovely and interesting, and wonderfully diverse. You embrace it or you pick your hub and miss all the rest or you move.

If you want to know this city, you will do it.

Sharon - as someone who lives on the Westside and has worked downtown for the past 22 years - I don't understand your apparent sense of alienation and helplessness about living and working in LA. As a reporter, aren't you supposed to be, like, able to figure out how to get around and overcome inconveniences to get where you need to be, see what you need to see, meet whom you need to meet?

Anybody who's punched the clock as a journalist in LA has done his or her share of whining about what a sprawling disconnected place this is, or can be. But it doesn't have to be. Last weekend, we saw a concert at McCabe's in Santa Monica, met friends for dinner and a movie at the Arclight in Hollywood, took a hike with friends in Runyon Canyon and had brunch in Hollywood afterward, and somehow still managed to do the laundry, grocery shop, cook dinner, watch "Masterpiece Theatre" and get to bed early enough to make it to work downtown this morning on time - all without suffering an existential crisis or moping about how we don't have the LA Times to tell us what to do and think and how to run our lives.

Yeah, we still read it - on-line and in our home-subscription print copy. And so do our teenaged kids. God knows it's not what it was - but you know what? In some ways, like the old joke says, it's a has-been that never-was. As Rip points out, many of us never needed or wanted it to be the sole or primary arbiter of our reality.

The fact is that downtown LA - and Hollywood too, for that matter - are more "happening" places than at virtually any time in the past 25 years. Oh, and by the way, my kids go to an LA Unified public school and there have been tremendous improvements there, too.

It really wouldn't kill you to travel east of Barrington now and then, you know?

This is a really nice piece, though I do take issue with one point. The penetration of the L.A. Times is not "notoriously low" or even all that low. Consider how many minutes Angelenos spend reading it in paper form or online and it whips every blog in the region. Penetration is quite a bit lower than it was, of course.

The problem with dropping the paper copy of the L.A. Times and going to the website, as I have done, is that the visual cues that point you to a new piece by Steve Lopez are gone, or at least not as powerful as they were on paper. I used to read him all the time, now I never read him. I hadn't even noticed until I read this piece.

CHRIS WILLMAN:
Your assumption is not necessarily correct. But feel free to expand on your take. If you're the Chris Willman from Entertainment Weekly, give it some "gravity" as you like to say. By the way, I'm encouraged that you're reading and commenting.

The LA Times doesn't have the penetration that it used to because it no longer reports the news objectively. Everything has a very liberal slant to it. If they still reported just the facts instead of trying to push the liberal agenda of their editors and owners, then I may still be reading the paper.

Gas isn't that expensive. Get in the car and drive around. Or take the subway. I agree that Waxman sounds like she can't be bothered to explore her own city.

It's just great to know there is a little depression in the frilly air north of Montana! For the record, L.A. has not felt any "connectedness" since probably the 1940's, when there was still mass transit, and the suburuban spread had not yet begun. (And by the way, can we retire this terrible word, "connectedness," and its faintly Oprah touch-feely New Agey hoodoo?) I never needed the Times to remind me of "diversity" (can we please retire this PC word, also?). All I had to do was look outside at the gang graffitti, or listen for gunshots at night in the neighborhood, or ride a bus, or go to a restaurant, or knock on my neighbor's door. "What was Los Angeles? Whatever the L.A. Times covered," you say? God save us that anyone would think the L.A. Times---which since the early 60's has sought to cover the world instead of L.A., should ever have "defined" this place. The fat, sprawling, unfocused Times, in fact, increased the factionalization of L.A. by awkardly pandering to its various ethnic regions, monied elite enclaves, etc. (And what the Chandlers did to foment suburban sprawl is another story.) It never, repeat never, covered L.A. as if it was one place. It was the nervous white liberal at the south-central BBQ, smiling too much. What you are discovering in your "increasing difficulty" with feeling part of this city is the same thing any thinking person discovers after living here long enough. There is no here here. There is no L.A.. There is no sense of everyone belonging to one place. There is no one place. There are sections and neighborhoods and immigrant-revived chunks of historic original L.A., and most of these places want little to do with one another. The people who think this is some marvelous social phenomenon of cultural coexistence are either young and puerile or monied L.A. Weekly/Silverlake types, for whom this is a big adult playground full of "cool" things to eat and see. As for Steve Lopez, he is, and has been from the day he came here from Philadelphia, an anomaly in recent decades---a sharp-eyed, traditional newspaper columnist who, unlike the rest of his newspaper, did try to look at L.A. for something it is not: a real city. He should have been running the paper.

NHBill - you think having to type five symbols is a serious impediment to posting?

Now to the article -

I don't live in DT LA nor do I have enough money to hold - or buy as singles - tkts to many events at Disney Hall; still, it seems to me that Ms. Waxman is lamenting the disappearance of an LA of which she was never a part nor cared to investigate.

You can read Steve Lopez online, you can tour DH for free, there are lots of interesting reasons to visit the Skid Row section of LA (or, God forbid, even volunteer there). Yes, the LAT is not what it once was but surely that is not the reason for the loss of connection amongst the citizens of LA. Hell, lady, you let rush hour traffic deny you the pleasure of Los Angeles below the line? Good thing you weren't one of the pioneers that had to trek across country or around the tip of SA to get here or one of the native peoples who had to survive in these surroundings.

Sorry, but I have no sympathy for those who talk about the disappearance of community but appear to be doing very little to support said community.

Luis B.: I assume the part of the Randy Newman song you fear "may never be recaptured" isn't "Look at that bum over there, man, he's down on his knees."

I was very moved by "The Soloist." I worked in downtown Los Angeles in the late 1960's, when mentally disabled people started to inhabit the streets as Gov. Reagan decimated the state's Dept of Mental Health. I liked your article, Sharon and share your hope that journalists like Lopez will hang in there.

Nice article Sharon...I worked on the show, and the portrayal of the destitute souls on skid row is dead-on but still hard to embrace. It's a part of LA that most people not only don't see, but don't want to see. I've lived here since the early 60's and I share your difficulty in feeling a "part of this city".
It's just not what it was then. I can't help but feel it is due in large part to the influx of immigrants (huge numbers of which are illegal) who are content to live apart and seek their own community. All very sad and not without huge economic impact.
To "NHBILL": there is a reason for the code and if you understood it you might be a little less self-centered. Regardless, there was a certain spirit in the Randy Newman song that unfortunately may never be recaptured....

Is Randy Newman still alive?

Oh, and maybe you just might get people posting here once in a while if they didn't have to enter a ridiculous code.