Los Angeles, a writer's challenge and glory

The Los Angeles Times determined we have 114 separate and distinct neighborhoods here in Los Angeles. The city has posted several hundred blue signs naming far more. L.A. is a mash-up of uncountable, diverse neighborhoods spread over 465 square miles; hard and soft, painted in colors from concrete gray and security bar black to putting lawn green and jacaranda snowfall purple; beautiful, mysterious, dangerous, welcoming neighborhoods, soundtracked by the music of more languages than you or I or even the Los Angeles Times can count.

In "The Long Goodbye," Raymond Chandler (speaking as Philip Marlowe) described Los Angeles as a city "no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness. It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is."

Meaning, L.A. is a city unique to each of us as well as a city we all create together.

Climb to the top of the Hollywood sign or gaze from the skyview seats above home plate at Dodger Stadium or hoist yourself onto the bench atop Runyon Canyon, and the City of Angels spreads her wings to the horizon. The hundreds of neighborhoods melt into a gently rolling forest dotted by skyscraper mountains where even the freeways vanish. This towering view of Los Angeles gives us the great, vast forest perspective in which we are all of one kind (Angelenos) and of one place (Los Angeles), but as with a forest covering a distant mountain, the individual trees — our neighborhoods — are invisible. If we want to know the rich flavors of K-town and Little Ethiopia, WeHo and Chinatown, Van Nuys and Compton, Brentwood, Boyle Heights and all the others, we need to leave the high ground and move into the trees.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-ca-robert-crais-20120422,0,2089164.story