My friend Garrett – an official LA resident by way of college at NYU – helped with some of the LA-myths legwork via an email yesterday afternoon, the subject line of which was: “I was gonna post this as a comment on your post, but fig’d with that “LA correspondent” commend I’d give yo the first right of refusal to make it an actual entry before I posted it. Gosh this is a long subject line.”
Yes, this is why Garrett and I are friends.
Re: “The social life here is really disjointed”
Half true. You still have sprawling groups of friends, (distance wise even moreso than new york), but this makes it SUPER hard to get together a lot. Because you drive everywhere making big group plans tends to be a big production and as a result people are less likely to actually show up. As for the work-friends theory, also partially true. I like to complain (mostly to my New York friends) about how I only know people in the industry, but I think that’s largely because I forget that not everyone i know works in it — just most of them. In fact, I just spent a weekend in Vegas with 8 other people, and only three of us worked in entertainment (and that’s counting the unemployed grad student getting an MFA in
screenwriting!)
Re: “People don’t ask you what you do or where you come from, they ask you who you know”
I have never been asked this question. I mean, this is what really matters in this town when it comes to getting things done/getting a job/blah blah blah, but I’ve never been outright asked. The question is always “What do you do?”
Re: An insane percentage of the men are gay.
I don’t know if I can agree or disagree with this, because my view is going to be a little askew (I work with gays, live with a gay, hang out with gays, and have a gay boyfriend, so…) but I can definitely say that it probably feels like there are more gays because there are a significantly higher number of douchey straight guys (see Jessie’s Ed Hardy comment). That said, just because there are more gays doesn’t mean that most of those gays aren’t also douchey.
Re: An even more insane percentage of men seem gay on account of the “LA look”
No moreso than New York.
Re: “This town has a series Peter Pan complex.”
So true. And, I think, a negative for anyone looking to have a real, adult, non-crazy-making, healthy relationship.
Re: “It is far easier to live on far less money here.”
Don’t know if that’s true — I’d say it’s about the same. Sure, you get a bigger bang for your buck in the apartment department, but compare your $70 to $80 transportation costs a month in New York to your car payments/insurance/gas spending in LA? And remember what I said about sprawling groups of friends? Unless you’re lucky, as I am, that most of your friends happen to live/have moved within 5-10 minutes of one another, you’re driving a lot. My boyfriend lives clear on the other side of town. It’s like having a long distance relationship sometimes. But I digress.
Having been a starving college student in New York, I know that you can still eat well there on a budget; it’s pretty much on par. And for all that extra space to entertain (and believe me, i have people over all the time for TV), there’s a definite lack of free stuff. Or maybe that’s not true, but anything of that nature is definitely less at your fingertips. I had the ex boyfriend of a bicoastal actress friend of mine tell me that he liked LA better than New York because he felt more accomplished at the end of every day – not because he was doing more here, but that he had to work so much harder to get stuff done than in New York, where any sort of activity/restaurant/social even is more readily at your fingertips. Forget it. I’ll take easy any day. Especially when most people don’t seem to want to muster all that energy to do things here in LA, resulting in a definite increase in the potential that you’re going to get flaked on. Wait. What was the question?
And there it is. One friend’s opinion after a solid amount of time living in this city.
Re: my opinions on any of the above. Still TBD. But I did see Ryan Phillippe potentially scratch/pick his nose today from the Escalade he was driving next to my four-door KIA. So there’s that…
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Um. I love Garrett & I love your blog! I love that you two are friends! (Just had a small world moment…)
I also live in a place where it is necessary that one drives to have a social life; however, there is no real social life to be had here…not if you are in possession of a moderately educated (read: graduated eighth grade) brain. I’d take LA any day…
Love,
af