Anything but grading.

D just saw Crash. Here's my comment; writing it has kept me out of grading hell for at least an hour.
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Ah, LA I've only spent a few weeks of my life there (I didn't understand it). So I can only testify to the LA that exists in the cultural imagination of the Western USA. All western American cities, (some might argue all American cities) have spent the greater part of the last two centuries aspiring to be like LA. Downtown devleopers in Vancouver and Portland have tried to turn the tides, but they haven't been able to stop the sprawl; at best, they have created alternatives to sprawl. But the sprawl continues. It's easy to look at LA and say it's the perpetrator of the car-culture, but the truth is that it might just be the greatest victim.

Still, when I ask my suburban students to name some famous avenues, they don't come up with the Champs Elysees, Las Ramblas, Broadway, or Pensylvania. They won't in a hundred years come up with the important avenues in Seattle. Invariably, they will say Sunset, Melrose, Rodeo, Hollywood, and Vine. Obviously, there is some kind of love for LA alive and well across the lake from Seattle. Still, there's a lot of hate for LA too. All kinds, on all fronts. The car culture. The drivers. The cops. The smog. The lalaland superficiality (as opposed to our native latteland superficiality). The theme parks. The suburban isolation. I haven't seen Crash yet; I had it on good authority that it makes white people think long and hard, but it just reminds us brown people to be angry again.

I want to go to LA to visit J&M. I want to eat tacos. It would be fun to go with Ding-a-ling to eat chicken-n-waffles. Ooh, and I want J&M to take us to the crab place, and all the korean places she writes about. But my LA desires are all about personal connections; they have nothing to do with LA being the cultural capital of the western imagination.

Its funny how provincial we are, even as college kids. The UW Huskies went to the Rose Bowl three times when I was in college; and three times I passed up the chance to come home with my own LA story. As my friends piled into their caravans, they all shook their heads and said they were only going for the football.