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Los Angeles Times metro columnist Steve Lopez just had to pen a column on the latest round of misplaced New York Times journalism on L.A. The recent William Bratton profile that seems amazed the chief likes it here got Lopez going, along with the second NYT treatment — this time by Alexandra Jacobs — of Amy Wilentz's book, I Feel Earthquakes More Often Than They Happen. Though Lopez's larger rant is toward New Yorkers who come to L.A. only to not get the place, he avoids saying too much about, or even naming, Wilentz. Her husband, after all, is the LAT's op-ed page and Current section editor. He focuses in on Jacobs' use of the La-La Land trope and the laughably clueless observation that in a majority minority city "the dominant feminine paradigm remains bodacious, blond and brainless."
Memo to New York:References to La-La Land are as fresh and funny as references to the Big Apple.
Even if used ironically, they don't work.
Please discontinue immediately.
End of memo.
Lopez probably loses some readers when he writes that a typical transplanted New Yorkers' flaw is "they all keep reading the New York Times, too, not because it's better than local offerings but because it reinforces their misery." A little homerism is to be expected. Speaking of empty cliches, though, it wasn't too long ago (OK, five years) that Lopez played the "People's Republic of Santa Monica" card in print.