I fell in love with LA in 1982 when MTV came out and most of the music videos, it seemed, were shot in LA and filled with hot chicks.
Now I go to the beach and it is mainly short fat Mexicans wearing unsightly clothing.
* I grew up far from Los Angeles and was a kid in the seventies.
My impression of LA in the 60s and early 70s :
Great movies coming out of Hollywood- The Graduate, Burch Cassidy…, 2001, Planet of the Apes
My favourite TV shows as a kid Beverly Hillbillies, Gilligan’s Island , Star Trek, Brady Bunch, Dragnet ., were made there
Musically, the Doors , the Whiskey- a-Gogo , Beach Boys Eagles…
Sports – Alcindor , Walton Koufax .
Great weather, beautiful starlets and a place for creative free-spirits.
I finally visited LA ten years ago. I liked all the art deco and Spanish- themed architecture, loved the ocean and palm trees, but it seemed like I was just getting a glimpse of the past.
There were no beautiful blonde beach babes around. It seemed very much like a Mexican city and most of the white people around were tourists . People were telling me that the suburbs are all Chinese. Rodeo Drive was all Middle Eastern. Not a place I would like to go back to.
Hollywood will decamp from LA soon . It will only get worse.
* My wife’s young nephew from downstate Illinois, 6’1″ blond and blue-eyed, stayed with us one summer. He played on two soccer teams at the neighborhood park. The friendly Mexican team called him “Hollywood” because nobody else in North Hollywood looks like a Hollywood movie star anymore. (The surly Russian team just called him “You.”)
* I lived in Southern California, mostly Santa Monica, West LA, and Orange County in the ’60s and ’70s, and it was a paradise on earth in so many ways, and not just if you had a keen appreciation of beautiful women (esp. blondes). Unlike SF, which was settled from the ocean, SoCal was mostly populated by the midwesterners during and after WW II. If you drove through a Jack-in-the-Box, or a Carl’s Jr. or McDonald’s, you’d be greeted by a pretty teenage girl (of course, white) since in those days work at fast food places was deemed appropriate only for teenagers. UCLA (95% white) had a lot of blond surfer dudes, and at noon the coeds on the steps of the Powell Library looked like they were taking a break between modeling assignments.
LA a cultural wasteland? Hardly. Southern California has for decades had the world’s largest concentration of Ph.D’s, and in the 1960s-1980s, the days of Feynman, etc., probably also the largest number of Nobel laureates. How about Caltech (ranked 1st or 2nd in the world), UCLA (ranked 11th in the world), UCI, JPL, RAND, Raytheon, and all the other aerospace companies, and if you include San Diego (America’s Gibraltar) and La Jolla, then there is no other place in the world that can even begin to compare with SoCal in sheer brainpower. The Internet originated at UCLA in late ’69 in their Math building, for heaven’s sake.
There was a dark side, definitely. The shadow of the Vietnam war, esp. if you were eligible for the draft, weighed heavy on your psyche. There were War Surplus stores everywhere. Much of Hollywood, and LA toward downtown had a Bukowskian tinge to it, i.e., kind of run down like it never recovered from the Depression. In the downtown skid row district as late as the ’60s you could still hire a taxi girl to dance with, and massage parlors, mud wrestling places, and Pussycat theaters were everywhere.
* Southern California is still an amazing place to live if you have money. Amazing weather, surfing, hiking, attractive women, nightlife, restaurants. Perhaps the best place in the world. There are still lots of attractive blondes, though mostly in the wealthier enclaves.
The main change is that non-affluent white families can’t afford to live there anymore. It’s no longer the middle class utopia of the past. Unless you’ve got a family income of at least 150K/yr, you’re priced out of a middle class lifestyle.
Another change is that the sense of solidarity and togetherness has eroded. People are very isolated from one another. Most of the socializing seems to within extended family circles or cliquish groups of friends. There’s very little sense of community among the people.
It’s a nice playground for handsome playboys, party girls, trust fund babies, and Hollywood glitterati. For everyone else, it’s a nice place to visit (or even temporarily reside if you’re below 30), but I wouldn’t live there. Too expensive, too atomized, and too competitive.
* I’ve known a (white) woman in Southern California, typical of her generation, born in the ’60s, who had some college but basically partied her way through life in the ’80s and ’90s. In those two decades she could walk into an office, and get a reasonably well-paid low level job practically on the spot. Her good looks undoubtedly helped. That was the old laid-back California that so many of us loved in the ’60s, ’70s, and even ’80s although to a lesser extent. Then the Asian onslaught (in the ’60s there were very few Asians at SoCal colleges, except for foreign students from Asia), Hispanic immigration, and the IT revolution made life much more competitive for everyone, and now she’s back in college desperately trying to upgrade her skills to become employable again.
