Edgy LA

I'm irritated. Perhaps it is because today has seemed a bit irritating in general - nothing specific, nothing earth shaking - just general malaise about the state of the world at large. I was looking at some posts during work, hoping for a few minutes of informative distraction before I dove back under the paperwork and I came upon this at LAist.com Dear Laist: Building Facades? - It seemed like an interesting question to me and I was looking forward to finding out the answer, so I read on... only to read an attempt at cleverness that read like a flippant answer. Seeing that there were comments to the post I decided to have a look further lest I be mistaken and the question was indeed a disingenuous one - what I found was both rewarding commentary and idiotic drivel.

First the good. There was this comment which was very informative and provided excellent links to the answer for the architectural question... Also, there were some pretty good general comments of support in opposition to the idiocy.

Now the irritating. I get to the end and find this vacuous bit of babble.

u dummies. antis answer was actually a cleverly written play on the in yr face, cheap pop-art influenced architecture that loren k asks about. living in LA is about having a killer attitude. its in the rawkstar faces and spicy corn and strong ass smoke. yr supposed to be a city full of assholes. if u wanna be "nice" go back to indiana.
[15] Posted by: guest | July 8, 2007 7:09 PM

Normally I would just mutter "idiot" under my breath and move on - but something about this in addition to the original post got me to thinking about verbalizing my thoughts.

There are those out there - not just in Los Angeles, every city has them - that are all so cozy in their smarmy smugness of savant pronouncements upon the truth. They know everything and are the final judges about what's hip. If they say something idiotic then they play it off as being contrarian - ducking for cover under the "on purpose idiot" defense. [Don't you get it?!? My stupidity was for the benefit of stimulating your thought! You're stupid for not getting it!] So what are the particulars in this case that irritated me?

• The lame, can't be bothered to write or spell English correctly "leading edge" formatting that says, "I'm one of the new wave! I'll catch you on the flip side with my Blackberry!" If one can't be bothered to formulate thoughts cogently about something, they should reconsider whether their thoughts are worth expressing in the first place.
• Not knowing what the hell they're talking about - the question is clearly not about something "pop-art influenced", but throwing "pop-art" without knowing what "pop-art" is/was will add hipster gravitas... It's just like name dropping at a party and equally as lame.
• The pronouncement of authority on what "LA" is - which reads to me like it was written by a rodent who got their cultural reference of Los Angeles from watching reality TV and other image marketing campaigns of what Los Angeles is supposed to be in order to market the image so they can sell a product or simply re-sell the image.
• The last fragment, "yr supposed to be a city full of assholes" is not inclusive of the poster, indicating that after all the bullshit, they do not consider themselves to be an Angeleno... and thus achieving closure of their circle of ignorance.

On the other hand, perhaps this post is all a well crafted ruse, explicitly designed to get someone like me thinking about Los Angeles and the ignorance exhibited about it as an actual place and it's actual inhabitants. Perhaps the ultimate goal in the long run is to make me question myself and realize that I know some, but not all there is to know, because Los Angeles is many things on many levels - simultaneously.