Good luck, Villaraigosa ...

So this is what Levy had to say about LA:

The Anti-City
A city is like a text, Roland Barthes once wrote. Just as there is a language of dreams, so there is a language of cities, more or less well articulated, more or less elegant or legible. I wonder, then, if the prototype of a city with a poorly developed language, the prototype of unintelligible, illegible discourse, isn't Los Angeles.

For after all, what must be true for a city to be legible?

First, it has to have a center. But Los Angeles has no center. . . .

Second, it has to have a border beyond which it dissolves or breaks apart. But Los Angeles has no border. . . .

Third, it has to have a vantage point, or several, from which it can, as in the Paris of Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, be embraced with a single glance. ... The fact is, these viewpoints do not exist. . . .

Finally, a legible city has to have a heart, and this heart must be pulsating. It has to have, somewhere, a starting point from which, one feels, the city was produced, and from which its mode of production is still intelligible today. . . . But this place, too, is nonexistent. . . .

For an illegible city is also a city without a history.

An unintelligible city is a city whose historicity is nothing more than an ageless remorse. And a post-historical city is, I fear, a city about which one can predict with some certainty that it will die.

And despite the fact that I agree with Levy's intellectual assessment, I liked LA! Especially the suburban life, despite the enviro-unfriendly car culture and the lack of non-mall neighborhood hangouts, despite the sprawl, despite the arachnids, despite the un-views of the mountains because of the smog. Maybe it was the shopping. =) Or the jacarandas:

City of Quartz, indeed.