A Trip to L.A.

As I stare out from my hotel room in Los Angeles, I see a landscape of cool concrete, pinned down by palm trees. The sun seems to hang perennially high, and I think there is some kind of force, centrifugal perhaps, that buzzes about the city—even as I look out the window at 4 a.m. It may be illusory, but it is vibrant, emotionally tangible, and hot.







The feeling I get here in L.A. is that this a city like so few others. Maybe New York and Miami have it, too; and I’m starting to think that’s because they are the most post-modern cities in the country. L.A., New York, and Miami are the most ethnically diverse cities in the United States.







These are cities that sit on an "edge". They are squarely within U.S. borders, but their cultures are not so easily labeled as such. Sure, everyone is here to make it; they’re all reaching out for the American Dream, but that dream can no longer be widely equated with the simple white-picket-fence ideal of the yester-generation.







Mexicans, Peruvians, Cubans, Koreans, Japanese, Russians, Poles, Iranians, Haitians—people come from all over the world for an education, for opportuntiies, for jobs, for peace, for rights they can’t get in their home countries. Even people whose families have been in the United States for generations have changed their lifestyles and aspirations due to the multi-ethnic influx to this country. Everyone studies Spanish, Mandarin, Arabic; studying abroad has become de rigueur. What I feel is that the American Dream is now one that extends beyond the country’s borders, for both those who have chosen to come and live here, and those who were born here.







At dawn cars buzz up and down Franklin, Rodeo Drive, the Sunset Strip in search of it. It’s the beginning or the end to another day in Los Angeles.