I was thinking about how it is a sport in New York to dis L.A. You know, how they say this city is superficial, stupid, sprawling, etc. Even though they worship at the personalities altar of Arod and Trump. New York is far more obsessed with the right address, the right school, the right side of the park…than LA.

But just as Reyner Banham loves LA, I find that a lot of Europeans do as well. They don’t care that it sprawls, they come from suffocatingly gray cities with oppressive rows of worker housing. They don’t mind the superficiality, because it is fun and mindless, and they come from places where serious debates, politics and two thousand years of tradition dictate who you are.

Imagine a Brit from a cold, rainy, damp place who finds himself in Santa Monica. If he is smart enough to make good money, and finds a way to live happily, he can bike to the beach, sit in the sun, and live well.

It is true that we have an appalling amount of ugliness in LA. Our schools, health care, air quality and crime rate are in need of a major overhaul. But we also live in the most freewheeling city in the freest nation on Earth. A place where people become rich working on video games, or selling $80 t-shirts, or ripped up jeans, or writing dumb movie scripts….and we do it in our flip-flops, in tanned tattooed bodies and don’t give a shit about the rest of the world…mostly.

That’s why Europeans love LA. Because it is so………. un-European.