You're not really supposed to love Los Angeles. Or if you do, you're supposed to do it ironically: you can love L.A., but only in a Randy Newman kind of way.

Part of the problem is that nobody really knows what anyone's talking about when they say "Los Angeles." "Los Angeles" could mean anything from south of the Grapevine to north of San Diego. It could mean any spot in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, or Ventura--an enormous expanse of land that is home to over 17 million people. Your actual, physical experience of Los Angeles depends largely on your immediate neighborhood and the places you're able to travel by car. Forget the bus or the train; the chances you'll be able to get where you need to go with public transportation are slim. Jeff and I once shared an airport shuttle from LAX with a Danish family who came to do a quick Orange County theme park circuit and wanted to know how they might be able to get to downtown Los Angeles to do some sightseeing.

"Rent a car," we advised.

"There's no shuttle that goes that way?" the mother asked.

"Well, you could take an airport shuttle back to LAX and then take a cab to wherever you wanted to go from there," I answered, "but that would end up costing more than just getting a rental car."

"Could I take the train?" the father wanted to know.

I shook my head. "You could catch a cab, have them take you to the train station--which is about 20 minutes away--and then take a cab or buses to wherever you wanted to go, but that wouldn't be cheap, either. And you could spend all day just getting there and back."

I've lived here long enough to need periodic reminders of just how terrifying the prospect of driving in LA can seem to visitors. I forget how many people get that deer-in-headlights look when you give directions involving four different freeways. I forget what it's like to be truly afraid when nobody seems to be going slower than 80, or when someone who wants to go faster than that--there's always someone who wants to go faster--gains on you so quickly and menacingly that you mentally replay old hunting scenes from Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom.

I actually like switching freeways: it breaks up the monotony of a trip, makes things more interesting. My former smoking patterns no doubt reinforced this. I went from smoking a pack a day to a pack and a half a day when I began commuting between Huntington Beach and Claremont four days a week. The trip was about 45 miles each way; I spent ten hours a week or so on the freeway (and considered it a reasonable, albeit longish commute). Stuck in traffic? Have a cigarette! Running late? Have a cigarette! Sick of all your tapes? Have a cigarette!

Eventually, the frequency of my responses to nicotine's siren song left my lungs feeling like they had ventured into waters sullied by a drunken oil rig captain, so I made an arbitrary rule: my commute took me along three freeways, and I could smoke one cigarette on each of them. Changing freeways suddenly seemed much more psychologically rewarding. If I needed pampering on a harrowing day, perhaps I would have an extra smoke when I reached the interchange from the 57 to the 22--a spot referred to as the "Orange Crush." Then, I would think about how I wanted a soda, because I can be ridiculously susceptible to the power of suggestion. Truth ads on the radio didn't make me want to quit smoking; they reminded me that I'd like to be lighting up again, especially at this point in my drive. After all, I'd come a long way, baby!

As for the freeway culture--and it is a type of culture, with its own sets of norms; indeed, the freeway culture is one of the few things that nearly all residents of the greater Los Angeles area have in common--once you're in, that's that. Gooble gobble, &tc. You might not be particularly fond of the Caltrans nation, but its natives rarely rattle you in any serious way. Yes, yes, I almost got killed today. What are we going to do about dinner?

A couple visiting from Denmark with their three children could hardly be expected to head over to the Hertz office with casual alacrity. Some might be happy to do so, but these tourists were not. It's just as well: you don't simply hop in a car and go sightseeing in downtown LA. You don't go downtown unless you have something to do there, something specific. Maybe you're seeing a play or visiting a museum. Being goal-oriented is the only thing that will give you the fortitude necessary to endure the labyrinthine freeway structure leading in and out of that particular area, where the signs are rarely posted with information as simple and helpful as "101 N." Instead, they say something like "Harbor Freeway" and then, in lieu of an actual direction, they give the name of a city you may or may not have heard of. Moreover, some of the freeways have more than one name. The 10, for example, could be the Santa Monica Freeway or the San Bernardino Freeway. Depends on where you are. Were you given directions that list numbers but no names? Are you unfamiliar with the geography of the Southland? Fabulous! Have fun going too far north and ending up in the parking lot at Dodger stadium!

A word on this "Southland" business: yes, that's what people call it here. Or rather, people on TV call it that. Heather Havrilesky, a television critic for Salon, refers to it as the Southland! (with exclamation point). I assume she does so because local newscasters--especially Paul Moyer--seem to take inordinate delight in pronouncing the word, which most people outside the Southland! would never, ever consider using in reference to the West Coast. The Southland is sun tea and biscuits with gravy and Flannery O'Connor and rocking chairs on porches. It's Alabama. It's Mississippi. It's Louisiana. It's not California. The exclamation point perfectly conveys the Hollywood touch people here give an otherwise normal word. The emphasis is so self-important that it's almost charming, like Jon Lovitz's "acting!" It's absurd, of course, but absurdity is always penciled in for lunch here in the Southland!

But back to your downtown excursion. Let's see how it went: you got confused, and you didn't know whether you were going north or south. Eventually, you tried exiting the freeway and getting back on again going the opposite direction, only to find you were going the right way in the first place. You fought your way across four crowded lanes of traffic at least three times, and you checked out the parking lot at Dodger Stadium. What did you manage to see when you eventually got downtown? Or, if you were on your way out of the downtown area--getting out is way harder than getting in; I blame the Eagles--what did you see while you were there?

Probably not much: some 99-cent stores, a couple of El Pollo Locos, some small establishments with signs in Spanish that advertise forged passports and driver's licenses. Some bars where you'll see the same faces at 2:00 pm and 2:00 am, features blurred with drink and smoke. (Blatant disregard of the state-wide smoking ban is a dive bar specialty). A handful of tall buildings. If you did enough wandering, you might have seen some scattered examples of more unusual architecture. Many of them are interesting, and some are quite beautiful, but few seem to fit with their surroundings: they are the Best Actor, not the outstanding ensemble cast. And, like the Best Actor, these standouts seem rather removed, perhaps even a bit unreal.

Let me give an example. You might have heard of the Westin Bonaventure; I had heard of it before I ever saw it in person. Amusingly enough, the source of my introduction to the Bonaventure was Fredric Jameson's Postmodernism: Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I read selections from it for one of my grad seminars at Claremont, and I later returned to it when it appeared on the syllabus of one of my History & Theory classes at UC Irvine. It was slotted for the last week of classes, a time when my classmates and I were staring deadlines for all of our seminar papers right in the face. I chose to write on Postmodernism, and I honestly suspect I got an A on the paper simply because it was evident to the professor that I had actually finished the book. Completing your reading isn't generally considered noteworthy in graduate classes, but this is a decidedly big book, and the timing was bad, and Fredric Jameson's writing style is at best dense. Some of his harsher critics actually dismiss him as being altogether "unreadable." It's a mistake, because much of what he has to say is truly interesting. Of the four shiny towers that comprise the Bonaventure, he says this:

... with a certain number of other buildings, such as the Beaubourg in Paris or the Eaton Centre in Toronto, the Bonaventure aspires to being a total space, a complete world, a kind of miniature city; to this new total space, meanwhile, corresponds a new collective practice, a new mode in which individuals move and congregate, something like the practice of a new and historically originally kind of hypercrowd. In this sense, then, ideally the minicity of [architect John] Portman's Bonaventure ought not to have entrances at all, since the entryway is always the seam that links the building to the rest of the city that surrounds it: for it does not wish to be a part of the city but rather its equivalent and replacement or substitute. That is obviously not possible, whence the downplaying of the entrance to its bare minimum.

It sounds ridiculous, this idea that the Bonaventure is essentially a building that aspires to inaccessibility--until you go there. When you go there, you match up the address you had scribbled down with what you see in front of you, and then you drive around the building wondering how the hell you get inside. You might have to circle the block a second time before you realize that an opening in back of the building is actually the entrance to the hotel's parking garage. You descend a steep ramp, disappearing into the belly of the Bonaventure beast, and then you hand your keys to a valet who makes your car disappear.

Once inside, you find yourself in a lavish lobby with clear-glass elevators for each tower. Curiously, doing so doesn't seem to help you figure out where you need to go. Back to Jameson on this, who remarks on the ways in which the lobby seems intentionally disorienting:

What happens when you get there... can only be characterized as milling confusion, something like the vengeance this space takes on those who still seek to walk through it. Given the absolute symmetry of the four towers, it is quite impossible to get your bearings in this lobby; recently, color coding and directional signals have been added in a pitiful and revealing, rather desperate, attempt to restore the coordinates of an older space. I will take as the most dramatic practical result of this spatial mutation the notorious dilemma of the shopkeepers on the various balconies: it has been obvious since the opening of the hotel in 1977 that nobody could ever find any of these stores, and even if you once located the appropriate boutique, you would be most unlikely to be as fortunate a second time; as a consequence, the commercial tenants are in despair and all the merchandise is marked down to bargain prices.

I'm not so much interested in whether or not Jameson's description of the Bonaventure still holds true--or whether my own description of it still holds true, for that matter. The hotel might have changed since I last visited. If it has, the change is of no import. That's because what I'm getting at is not a singular description of what it's like to visit this particular hotel. What does interest me are the ways in which Jameson's impressions (and my own) of the Bonaventure capture an experience of space that is repeated elsewhere in downtown Los Angeles, and which, on a larger scale, is characteristic of the downtown LA area more generally. It's the experience of getting where you need to go and still not knowing where you are, of finally stepping into the center and discovering it's not the center at all--or if it is, being there isn't actually "centering," because the space somehow resists the bounding that would make it easy for you to translate your physical experience into a coherent conceptual map.

You probably won't be surprised to learn that I think this is crucial to understanding how "Los Angeles" can come to mean an expanse of several thousand square miles that contain more than 30 cities with populations of over 100,000 people. What do you do when your city doesn't have a center? You recenter, and then you recenter again, and again. None of these new spots is THE center of course, because there isn't one. But they continue to multiply as more people are drawn to the area, and this process of growth--the proliferation of urban simulacra--tends to happen along horizontal axes. The space spreads outward, not upward, sprawling in in a manner that has achieved its closest architectural realization in the strip malls so ubiquitous in these parts. They are links on a massive daisy chain.

I have all sorts of thoughts on what this might actually mean, and I might take up the train of thought later on. If I do, the cars on that train will look something like this: 1) LA: Not At All Chicago; 2) Some connections between sprawl, architecture, and individualism; and/or 3) The film industry and its function as the default conceptual "center" of LA. But now, I have to make some phone calls. There's a big storm, you see, and a good deal of water is leaking in through my chimney. I'm no seasoned homeowner, but I'm pretty sure that's not good.