Disappointing essays on what Los Angeles is becoming in the 2010 years. I was really looking forward to reading this book as Ulin had earlier edited a literary anthology on writings about LA. This book rehashes older themes of the City of Los Angeles as constantly engaged in erasing and recreating itself. Destroying and putting up a false front for others to imagine ourselves as something preferable to what we are not. The essays get more tedious as the pages turn. This book seems like it was written to flatter all Ulin friends who he has dinner conversations with. That's the level creative thought you find here. Ulin does spend some time talking about developer Rick Caruso, who is a Catholic and philanthropist and his ideas about public and private spaces. Ulin gets everything wrong about what Caruso tries to accomplish but that just shows how deeply influenced by failed liberal city planners Ulin is.
Ulin is a New Yorker who has lived in LA for much of his adult life so he does speak with some authority about historical change in the area but he is also quick to dismiss much about which is singular to Los Angeles. He says, "...in New York, we take urbanity for granted,whereas in Los Angeles, we are still learning its vernacular." That may be true but you don't need New York to conceive of what Los Angeles actually is. The city is much newer that New York but grew independently of what happened on the east coast. Ulin wants to force a similar development of Los Angeles from that already undergone by New York. All New Yorkers want that, just like the English want New York to be London. Who cares? Different strokes for different folks. This book is frustrating since it's resigned to LA being a New York copy, a fake copy that all of New York can laugh at. I'll keep this book since I consider it my hobby to see what is written about Los Angeles, but you don't have to waste time reading it.