LA vs. SF

There's also the whole Hyphy thing going down now, the stuff Serg is into.

Beyond that, we have NWA so we win obviously.

GIVE UP!

Now, Gimme some Yay Area love for:
SLY AND THE FAMILY STONE, CREEDENCE CLEARWATER REVIVAL, THE GRATEFUL DEAD, FLAMIN' GROOVIES, METALLICA , JEFFERSON AIRPLANE, SANTANA, TOWER OF POWER, GREEN DAY, MOBY GRAPE, DEAD KENNEDYS, SYLVESTER, THE TUBES, PRIMUS, NEIL YOUNG, CHRIS ISAAK, TUPAC, RANCID, SONS OF CHAMPLIN, ROMEO VOID, STEVE MILLER BAND, BIG BROTHER AND THE HOLDING COMPANY, DOOBIE BROTHERS, CAMPER VAN BEETHOVEN, BOZ SCAGGS, TOO $HORT, JOURNEY, DIGITAL UNDERGROUND, FAITH NO MORE, EN VOGUE, QUICKSILVER MESSENGER SERVICE, CHARLES BROWN, JONATHAN RICHMAN, HOT TUNA, DJ SHADOW, THE RESIDENTS, HUEY LEWIS AND THE NEWS, CHEER, COUNTRY JOE AND THE FISH, COUNTING CROWS...
FLIPPER
HAMMER
THIRD EYE BLIND
TONY TONI TONE
AMERICAN MUSIC CLUB
BOBBY FREEMAN
THE AVENGERS
KINGSTON TRIO
BEAU BRUMMELS
HOODOO RHYTHM DEVILS
SPEARHEAD
JELLYFISH
NEGATIVLAND
GRAHAM CENTRAL STATION
JOE SATRIANI
PARIS
JOAN BAEZ
ELECTRIC FLAG
ELVIN BISHOP
SAMMY HAGAR
SHEILA E.
COMMANDER CODY AND HIS LOST PLANET AIRMEN
GREG KIHN
THE MERMEN
THE RUBINOOS
DAN HICKS AND THE HOT LICKS
INVISIBL SKRATCH PIKLZ
COUNT FIVE
THE DUROCS
CLUB NOUVEAU
TRANSLATOR
RED HOUSE PAINTERS
POINTER SISTERS
SMASH MOUTH
IMPERIAL TEEN
IT'S A BEAUTIFUL DAY
DISPOSABLE HEROES OF HIPHOPRISY
COLD BLOOD
EDDIE MONEY
CHOCOLATE WATCHBAND
MONTROSE
4 NON BLONDES (Linda Perry)
E-40
THE CALL
PABLO CRUISE
THE UPTONES
OPERATION IVY
CONSOLIDATED, ERASE ERATTA, DEERHOOF, NUMBERS, ets etc

xp!!!haha

This is actually not true, but again except for hip hop, a few punk bands, a couple of good underground 80s acts and Sly & the Family Stone, pretty much all the good music came from down south.

Well, actually, Venice, Hollywood and Silver Lake are part of the city of Los Angeles.

It would have made better sense to say Compton (NWA)and Hawthorne (Beach Boys) for instance, which are other cities entirely.

hammer, 4 non-blondes, and the dead kennedys. wow.

however, as someone who moved from SoCal to SF, naturally it's my opinion that on all other, non-musical fronts, SF completely slays LA, which is an ugly, undereducated, crime-ridden, self-absorbed, smog-choked hellhole of unrestrained urban sprawl.

(I admit my pettiness about LA does stem a lot from growing up near there, and also from having to still go back regularly to see my family. the smog makes my eyes water and my nose run and my skin itch, it creeps me the fuck out)

But again, I just want to reiterate that this LA vs. SF fite only exists in the minds of people of the Bay.

x-post

Apart from the smog, the sprall, and having to drive everywhere, LA has great arts, great theater, great cinema, great museums, fun bars...it's definitely got its good side.

That's why you hate LA. You grew up in the 909! The air quality out there is much worse than in the LA basin itself, btw. And the traffic to get in or out of the Inland Empire? Yikes!

Also, I lived in the Bay Area for 10 years and never really noticed a huge difference in air quality vs. LA.

I was born in SF.

if i grew up in upland my opinion of la would be similar to shakey's.

sorry, nothing's ever gonna change - u'll always be a second-tier city compared to massive us. get over the dot.com crash blues and get something new to act pretentious about... and x-post - we don't even think about this "rivalry" until some whining sf misfit brings it up down here

I've lived here for 10 years and I have *never* seen smog in San Francisco.

But yeah, my reasons for hating LA are obvious and I make no bones about them. I like visiting my brother (who lives in Atwater Village, I think? by Griffith Park, off of Glendale) but def. not because of the locale. He doesn't particularly seem to enjoy it either, and often makes noise about relocating somewhere else, yet he never does... (actually this is true of pretty much all my friends in LA)

Hahahahahahahahahaha *wipes eyes* ha ha ha ha

Pretty clear which one is the bigger civic failure in my book...

(my brother hates Upland and avoids making the 40-minute trip there at all costs. can't say I blame him. at various times he had plans to move to NY, Oxford, other places, but the music publishing world has kept him in LA, I think)
x-post

If educated means smarter than your dumb ass, then yes we all are. That still doesn't mean we have to give a shit about your amorphous crap hole half of the state and where your damn boundaries are drawn.

maybe your brother doesn't know that more people take daily public transportation in los angeles than any other american city...but crowded colored foax on the bus on the eastside is never a media representation of LA... only blondes driving convertibles et al

Watts is city of LA.
Compton is not.
Van Nuys is city of LA.
San Fernando is not.
San Pedro is city of LA.
Torrance is not.
Bel Air is city of LA.
Beverly Hills is not.
Hollywood is city of LA.
West Hollywood is not.

Our police force does have a reputation for glaring incompentence, actually.

"maybe your brother doesn't know that more people take daily public transportation in los angeles than any other american city"

uh, back this up please. Remember the RTD strike a few years ago, when, um, nobody noticed? Went on for weeks, impacted business and transit not at all...?

x-post

Hey, isn't this in direct contradiction to what "special guest appearance" just claimed? Which LAer is right?!?!

-- Alex in SF (clobberthesauru...) (webmail), April 1st, 2005 3:06 PM. (Alex in SF) (link)

Actually, I think you're just a bit of a douche in general. I was being kind by not pointing that out. There are lots of crazy, loudmouthed people in every city, including SF, so there you go.

what, cuz they don't know how to order their own fajitas? Nothin the SFPD is guilty of comes anywhere close to the Rampart scandal. And that's just in the last decade - go back to the 40s-60s and the LAPD shit gets positively nightmarish.

x-post

if it's true 2nd largest is only appropriate for the #2 city in the country... and i wasn't sure Compton was ind'pt either, but knew Watts isn't. it's strange, the demarcations as such, since sometimes literal neighbors are unqualified to vote for the LA city govt, as in the hollywood / weho divide up here

but anyway, the point is that it's always SF ppl who start bashing LA first...we don't even care, but this topic is always initiated by your side. why would that be the case, if you weren't so insecure? we don't even care to think of any "comparison" until ya'll bring this up...seriously! LA is a bigger city and has bigger problems, and is also a bit younger... so give it some time. if you don't like it here, get out...but stop the attention-hungry hateration. plz.

OTOH, and I'm a conservatively dressed white man who regularly addresses police officers as 'officer', I have never met more humorless, aggressive, and megalomaniac police than in LA. They make the CHP look positively jolly.

x-post w/ teh dean man

"if you don't like it here, get out..."

I did.

x-post

x-post

"LA"

"I'm sorry."

I experienced this exchange many many times in SF. Terrible cliched/received wisdom/provincial nonsense.

How could Neil Young be considered for SF? Didn't he pretty much always live in LA? Ornette Coleman totally counts for LA since he put his whole band together from LA musicians.

Also: John Cage, Schoenberg, Beefheart, Zappa, Tom Waits, Tim Buckley, Gram Parsons, Germs, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, the Seeds, Paul Williams, the Mamas and Papas, Phil Spector.

I guess you can judge by where an artist was born but that's pretty irrelevant since most move to a big city at some point. If you judge by where they did their best work then a whole shitload of stuff falls into the LA column. There's this silly prejudice that the music scene in LA sucks because people are all hung up on this ridiculous notion of "the scene." Sure, that type of homegrown circle-jerk is missing from LA but you have to look at the larger picture.

"I'm sorry."

I hear this even more from people from the Northwest. It's completely infuriating.

More importantly NO FILM NOIR!

I meant that about the thread in general. People who argue the superiority of their cities are esssentially just indulging in a kind of dick-waving that's incredibly tedious. I think Spencer is right. LA and SF offer different advantages and depending on what you want, you live in one or the other but the traditional SF snobbery about LA is annoying, wears incredibly thin sometimes, and makes us look like we're either insecure or just snotty. I don't want to live in LA but my personal choice doesn't mean that the 8 or 9 million (?) who do live there are all douches. I mean c'mon, and if either side win this 'argument', do you really want the other side to pack their bags and move in? I don't think so.

the people i know who love la, including lots of bay area natives, tend to approach life with a spirit of love and tolerance. i don't know if that's the secret to enjoying la, or a symptom of it, but it's definitely a common thread.

as to whether or not this thread constitutes dick-waving, I agree that it does, but uh, I didn't start this thread (which specifically invited and encouraged said dick-waving)

I will say that one of my commutes in the Bay Area (Oakland to South SF - pre BART going there) was 10x worse because if the bridge is f*cked then guess what, you're f*cked.

specific parts are unattractive, sure, but to label the whole thing when it's so geographically variegated is baffling

Haha it's true. I am a bit of douche in general.

x-post

("nature"? in LA?!? that's a joke, right? apart from Amir's Garden I've never been impresssed by the uhm, natural splendor of the pavement and palm trees LA has to offer.)

Los Angeles is a favorite city among preservationists and architects. That's because
as other cities were trying to redevelop their downtowns by demolishing the old and
building the new, Los Angeles merely moved the downtown center further west along
with new construction and left the old downtown behind and largely intact. That old
downtown which includes the Historic Core, the Old Bank District and other historic
areas is a collection of approximately one thousand pre-World War Two art deco buildings and seventeen historic movie palaces, of which twelve line Broadway. These areas which has literally remained unchanged since the 1930s have become popular residential areas as well as favorite filming locations for the studios where it is quite possible to encounter film, TV, or other production activity, especially on weekends.

BTW, I love downtown LA.

architecturally there are a lot of gems in LA's crown, but the urban sprawl lowest-common-denominator architecture hasn't been good for it. SF has a number of architectural wonders - and I guess I just prefer the home-y Victorians and hidden staircases and houses shaped like keyholes and stuff like that.

God, I hate all of those palm trees in the Angeles national forest.

or gone surfing!!

WE WIN! YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!

it's true special guest, I've never done any of that (apart from hiking through the Angeles national forest and visiting the rose garden. I was a lot younger tho). I was just recently at the Getty and the smog totally obscured the view, it was fairly sickening.

and um, you CAN discover LARGE PARTS of los angeles by foot...you just have to devote an entire day to different sections! take a day and go dontown...walks its length and breadth from exposition to chinatown and tell me what heretofore unknown secrets you don't discover. the next day, park in midwilshire, and walk all through koreatown up to museum row...take the bus down wilshire if you get tired (but walking in this area is worth it! esp w/ all the strange restaurants..it helps if u have an asian looking friend w/ u if this is at night and u actually wanna go in some of those strip mall karaoke places, btw. i recommend this man named Chow ) the next day, walk all the down the walk of fame + the Strip, but explore the side streets which are crammed w/ cool shops and all those cinematic museums. the fourth day, do Venice - walk the length of the canals up to the boardwalk;in the afternoon when returning east, go to the Getty. the fifth, santa monica. the sixth rent a bicycle and explore silverlake / echo park (goup t o the angeles temple) and los feliz and to complete your week, drive down to long beach and stop and see the watts towers on the way.

skip rodeo drive - fuck that shit!!

xpost

Shakey you can't cover the whole city in a day

and no one even mentions all the bizarro non-touristy shit we have down here, like the Museum of Neon (downtown) the Museum of Death (hollywood but i think it's closed) the Museum of Black (south downtown) and the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice..which i still have to go to !!! and there are always new things opening like every weekend..it never ends. last saturday i discovered the most ghetto-fabulous hangout i never knew existed...this old time roller-disco with a bar + bowling alley (!!) on the top level. if any of u haven't roller skated drunk in the past 15 years, i highly recommend it.. this place ("world on wheels") currently has the lockdown on my bday this year inless i find something crazier

i think within los angeles' environs u can find a lot more to do than SF...esp if u add in all the surfing / skating / riding / shooting / graffiiting / outdoorsy stuff that nerds like me never even care for.

and especially if u r friends with a certain chaki_mc_chaka!

Except again you have to be in LA, which to go back to my original point, is a shithole.

"i have 4 friends in LA excluding Ned who are carless and love it. it's called not being scared of the MTA, people"

Wow! FOUR!

I think that's what the lesson here is.

The Museum of Neon Art also offers an incredible double-decker bus tour of LA neon at night that takes you through downtown, Chinatown, Hollywood, etc. Seeing LA from the top of a double-decker bus on a warm summer night (with alcohol!) is definitely a unique experience.

-- Alex in LA (power.strik...), April 2nd, 2005.
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I'm so fake, I live in Hollywood, what can I do

Also, SF architecture and the overall look of the city was 1000x better before the rampant spread of McLofts. Being in SF kind of makes me sad now. Then again, being on the Disneyfied Hollywood Blvd. makes me even sadder.

L.A. wins.

Lock thread.

That'd make such a great FAP! Isn't Sean Carruthers coming to town soon?

I wish there was a little bit more Huell Howser in all of us.

Also--REDD KROSS! REDD KROSS! REDD KROSS!

ALEX IN SF>>SF>>SUMMER'S EVE>>SIN CITY>>LA>>ALEX IN LA/VIC IN LA (Tied)