Lovers and friends

Los Angeles: A broken possibility. It's not a happy take, but it's the best this natural pessimist can do at balancing the city's hard present realities with some hope for a better future.

That was my baseline mood in so many years of living here: This place should be the world's best city, but it's a screwed up mess.

And yet: on late afternoon walks, when the sun starts to slant golden and a cool sinks into the air, I can so easily see what I love about it. It's the shimmering light on the smooth underside of a palm tree swaying gently in the coastal breeze. Old wood houses here and there that haven't yet been torn down. Scruffy gardens overgrown with succulents and fragrant flowering things, overseen by hummingbirds and lizards.

I love the cool winter air, the carpeted slopes of Mount Washington, and vintage cars beside vintage houses in vintage neighborhoods. I adore the stair streets that provide secret glimpses of quiet backyard cottages and lead to stunning vistas from towering hills. I love the neon, the bow-truss, the strip-mall ramen joint. I love Mount Baldy looming behind the jostling downtown skyline.

There are parts of the city that stir my imagination, like the green-carpeted slopes of Mount Washington and the neighborhoods on the east side and along the river that trace the city's original topography, its river, its rail lines: its original organizers of place.

I love Los Angeles because Los Angeles is California, and California is the greatest of the states. California is the future.

"Forget the damned motorcar," the great Louis Mumford said. "Build the cities for lovers and friends."

Can we keep what is wonderful about this place and chuck the rest? Can we make room enough for everyone in this vast sprawl of beauty and possibility?

I believe we can. And if we can do it here, we can do it anywhere. There's optimism in that golden air.