I've lived in Los Angeles for 10 years, now. It took a good 3 years just for me to figure out exactly where in the city I was at any given minute. Somewhere in year 4, I found out there was a man-made lake in the city called "Silver Lake" and, after college graduation, several of the cool kids defected there. Myself not including, not only because I am uncool, but also because I don't like to be around hipsters and hipster priviledge. Right now, there is a specific hipster bee in my bonnet: calling Silver Lake "the Eastside" and calling anything uncouth enough to be west of Vine "the Westside." I only started hearing this phraseology over the past couple of years and it struck me as wrong and stupid immediatly but I couldn't exactly figure out why. Except that it did seem to me that with the with all the money those kids were saving on soap and shampoo, they could buy a frakking map and notice that right next to Downtown is a little thing I, and probably a million other people, like to call East Los Angeles or the infinitely more poetic "East Los." For the record, I've only heard this jokingly refered to as "East LA" by people who know the area from living there and not just seeing the moving "Born in East LA." Point is: it exists. And it seems incredibly anglocentric to pretend it doesn't. So I figured the reason I was reacting so poorly to these pastey hipsters calling their home turf "the Eastside" was because it seemed to whitewash an entire region and culture that they were not, and never going to be, a part of.
But this morning, I got another reason. A columnist in the LA Times wrote about being born in Hollywood and how in his young adulthood, "started telling people I was born in East Hollywood. I liked the gritty feel "East" added to its name." Bingo. If you have neither the talent nor the lack of family money to actually be a starving artist, add "East" to where you live and presto chango: you just got yourself some street cred!
Furthermore, if you travel south on Vermont to Jefferson, you are in "South Central," so if you then go north on Vermont to Sunset, I think you are in "North Central." BOOYAH!
And you got me all hot and bothered in The State of Annoyance.
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4 comments:
I need to know if this columnist's ploy actually worked. Because to me, "East Hollywood" means creepy. I don't know why, and I never really had a way to even come close to defining it until I knew what the term "David Lynch Hallway" meant.
Jameela and I both grew up on the rough streets of East Lompoc. True story.
East Lompoc? Is that what they're calling The Country Club these days?
Actually we moved to the Country Club in high school when my dad won some money in a law suit, but we were kind of outcasts. One of our old guy neighbors welcomed us with open arms though because he was just glad that "no n-words (censored for the kiddies) were moving into the neighborhood".
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