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That song was one of my mantras, along with other songs of California (and there've been some classic ones), when I was trapped on an island for years and missing the wide open spaces of the West and even LA.
It's hard not to love LA, even if you've lived there -- and I find that native Los Angelenos are often among those who most want to escape the place (in my experience, it's a hard place to escape) -- because it kind of gets its hooks in you. As bad as so much is, so is there good. And then there's just the iconic. There may not be a lot of history on display in LA, but the place is loaded with iconic sites and sights. It's not what it's hyped to be (and yet, at the same time, it very much can be) and it's not really by any stretch of the imagination the Promised Land so many still see it as (and, yet, again, it can be that, too...just as the larger USA both is and is not what prospective immigrants believe it to be). It eats people alive. And it doesn't care. Teenagers still run there, thinking it's the most golden part of the Golden State, and they disappear forever. But it can still make dreams come true. Again, in that respect, it's quintessential America even though it always has been out of step with the rest of the country.
And maybe it's just that I understand the place (or places...for all intents and purposes "Los Angeles" really includes not just everything in LA County but Orange County, too, and there's a lot of diversity therein) but, for all its myriad ills and sickness, I think I'd probably take LA over even one of the nicer, picturesque, liberal cities of the East, like Boston. Not only do I feel a need to be nearer the Pacific, all things being equal, but I just don't understand those northeastern cities and they kind of remind me of the dank claustrophobia I feel in crowded olde Englande when I visit my family there. I'm not saying LA is better than Boston -- I'm sure that, were I to quantify the two cities comparatively, my own preference on paper would be Boston -- but LA (the West, really...if I had my choice of any part of the US I'd probably live somewhere in the coastal West but it sure as hell would not be in LA) is more 'home.'
Maybe a good working theory is that if Steve Martin's LA Story leaves you with a warm glow that's got nothing to do with the love story (for that matter, if even the opening montage does the trick), you love LA, too, even if you don't want to.
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