Took the bike up through Highland Park. They’re right it doesn’t look like LA. Between the hills and the hwoah greenness with shade! trees!, which smelled right! and the tight-packed commercial streets with handpainted! frontages! in a variety! of styles including brick! that they took seriously! A canyon breeze that reminded you what air could be!

I mean I come from the east coast, we do all right. But! Now I totally appreciate the appeal of a part of LA that doesn’t look like Tijuana. Not as in “there aren’t latinos”, ha ha, this is LA, bitch, though more of them were hanging out talking with their yoga-pantsed asian girlfriends than Echo Park, so there’s that. But that it reminded me of the Catholic middle-ring suburbs just one step in from where I was, this modernist/vernacular mix, the kind of place where I could have a perfect chlorine hexagon sun summer (and I hear that’s the thing) - peaked roofs! Houses with yards that arent ranches or craftsmans! Did I mention the shade! Holy shit. Now I know why this place is hot and I haven’t even seen that much of the hillside houses.

Then I got lost and came down through Lincoln Park and some shit I don’t even know and saw THE most AMAZING cluster of buildings on the horizon, one of which in particular was like “holy shit that beautiful concrete gothic thing is surely a miniature in a Tim Burton film” but oh no it was County General/USC, it’s this amazing campus that has such mass but in each era of expansion they were like “oh god let’s at least render this horrific mass architecturally awesome in the current idiom”