Mesh Magazine

For our friends down south, we dig into the Mesh archives to bring you some thoughts on the City of Angels.

By Daniel Taylor
The thing about flying into Burbank—as opposed to the more upscale, metropolitan LAX—is that when it comes time to exit the aircraft, you don’t do it in the now-ubiquitous, sheep-through-the-chute fashion employed by pretty much any other airport I’ve ever been to. You get off that bitch like a foreign dignitary, like an international man of mystery: out the back door, down some steps, and into the open and sweaty tarmac asphalt. Though there were, unfortunately, no throngs of well-wishers or admirers waiting to greet me with waiving signs and screams of delight, there were still the looming, smog-coated mountains ringing the San Fernando Valley and the glimmering, toadstool high-rises off in the LA distance, welcoming me to, what the great 20th Century American Poet W. Axl Rose called, “The Jungle.”

One thing you notice about Los Angeles immediately upon arrival is how ugly you are. Unless, of course, you’re beautiful. But that’s very unlikely, given that 99% of the beautiful people in America live in the greater Los Angeles area. As some erudite Chicoan once explained to me “LA is just a collection the five hottest people from every small town in America,” a statement that, at the time, I thought was something of a joke, but now see is mostly based on fact. Getting a latte in a Santa Monica Starbucks, I found myself surrounded by people who 10 years ago were voted Most Likely to Get the Fuck Out of Here as Fast as Possible in the Bumblefuck High School yearbook and did exactly that, staking their claim in the Wild Westside of Hollywood and share-cropping copious amounts of effortless hipness and sheer natural beauty. And though it would seem that such concentrated physical attractiveness would give those amongst it a somewhat skewed idea of what beauty actually is, there are always a fair share of tourists, interlopers and passers-through, from which it can accurately ascertained that yes, they are indeed, still better looking and more fashionable than everybody else.
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