The "I Love L.A. For 30 Days Challenge"

(how could I NOT call it that)

For about a decade now, close chum & Los Angeles native Derek Lewis and I have had this running argument on whether L.A. is a "real" city. And by "real" I mean by comparison to other metropolises of the world that can be identified by their name alone without further elaboration unless you are movie producer (you know, the ones who feel the rubes of Peoria need England after London, Paris followed by France or Jessica Alba in anything that isn't going directly to cable). I have lived in two of these other actual cities (London & NYC) and have visited almost every major burg of both the US and Western Europe, so naturally I feel I have a base of knowledge of what constitutes a fully realized city. Lately, it is usually prompted whenever one of us gives a City Tour and discover how long visitors are spending here versus elsewhere. The one that really gets Derek's goat is when they come here for 3 days, then head off for a week in Vegas.
It was after the last round of texts over "Example #348 why LA is not a real city" (Disney Hall in DOWNTOWN cannot have concerts past 10pm because of the residents nearby. All 100 of them) that Derek rebuked me with comment that he couldn't remember one instance where I said one positive thing about the city I have called home for 20 years now. Apparently the closest he could remember was him mentioning the weather and me agreeing we pretty much have the entire world beaten by our weather.

So, I am going to treat this slight as a challenge. For 30 days that started on Sunday (when I thought of the first one and also because I know what day 30 - the 31st - will be), I am going to list the ways that the City of Angels endears itself to me . For this exercise, LA is defined not only by actual city limits, but what is assumed by outsiders to be part of it (like Santa Monica, Long Beach, Burbank, Pasadena). Which is pretty generous considering one of my points in our debate is that these areas aren't really L.A. As someone once put it, L.A. is forty towns in search of a city...