1302) It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.

Westbrook Pegler
New York World Telegram (11/22/1938) [CQ]

1303) Of all the world's storied thoroughfares, it must be confessed that none produces quite the effect of Hollywood Boulevard. I have been downcast in Piccadilly, chopfallen on the Champs Elysee, and doloroso on the Via Veneto, but the avenues themselves were blameless. Hollywood Boulevard, on the contrary, creates an instant and malign impression in the breast of the beholder. Viewed in full sunlight, its tawdriness is unspeakable; in the torrential downpour of the rainy season, as we first saw it, it inspired an anguish similar to that produced by the engravings of Piranesi.

S.J. Perelman
"The Marx Brothers" in
The Last Laugh (1981) [CQ]

1304) Writers who choose as a subject Los Angeles and its interminable suburbs do so at their peril. The most scrupulous observation yields nothing but cliche: freeways, blondes, the blistering smog, blah, blah, blah. This is because they have mistaken Los Angeles for a city. [...] L.A. is more akin to a theme park - Urban Sprawl Land - and its spirit of place is the isolating spirit of the desert, where, despite the wizardry of modern irrigation, nothing can grow and few things change.

Karen Karbo
"Of Mice and Men"
New York Times Book Review (9/10/1995)

1305) [Los Angeles] is in love with its limitless horizontality, as New York may be in love with its verticality.

Jean Baudrillard
"Astral America" in
America (1986, tr. 1988) [CQ]