There was a terribly amusing piece by Shawn Hubler in this Sunday’s LA Times, in the Calendar section, about New Yorkers trying to adjust to living in Los Angeles. (There are never stories about Angelinos trying to adjust to living in New York. Ever. Why is that?) The funniest comments were by comic Marc Maron and his wife, comic Mishna Wolff. Wolff said, “When I first moved to L.A., I bought an ’84 Pontiac Fiero with stripes on the side, which I thought was really bitchin’, but it didn’t last. No one told me you had to put oil in it. No one tells you that stuff in New York.” Maron said that the only difference between New York and LA is “the leaves don’t fall in the fall here, and if they do, they’re palm leaves and they put a dent in your car.”
Oh, yeah, and we were interviewed for the story too. If you’re not a subscriber to the LA Times or its website, we’ll give you the part about us here.
Will you enjoy driving here? No, you will not. Not at first. Maybe not for many, many years.
“I hate the way the streets are laid out here,” sighed writer Stephen Saban, who moved from Manhattan 7 ½ years ago and is now editor of the gossipy WOW Report, at worldofwonder.net. “I hate that the sun blinds you in the morning and in the night because there are no skyscrapers to block it. Driving west, how can you see? Aren’t you blinded? Aren’t you? Why don’t you have an accident?”
Saban says that at first he sought to minimize the need to drive by settling in a centrally located neighborhood with a little buzz and a lot of commerce. The lesson: The New York formula for heat seeking is not so surefire in L.A.
“I ended up in an apartment in Koreatown,” he said. “It was going to be the ‘next big neighborhood,’ everyone said, but apparently I wasn’t going to live long enough to see it. So then I moved out of there to a little house with a backyard off Melrose, near Fred Segal. But then the landlord sold the house without letting me know. Now I live in a hellhole in Echo Park, another neighborhood that’s going to be the ‘next neighborhood.’ ”
