Back on My Bulls**t: DTLA
California noir is giving way to California dystopia
Back on My Bullshit are intermittent, totally idiosyncratic travelogues. Don’t worry, I give standard recommendations below but this isn’t your mom’s Travel & Leisure city guide.
“Horrible, sucio y destartalado.”
Those were the three adjectives I used to describe Downtown Los Angeles in the family chat: Horrible, dirty and ramshackle. In the words of an infamous Californian, way harsh, Tai! There’s something about seeing it in English that takes away some of the sadness implicit in its Spanish iteration. In whatever language, though, that was my honest assessment.
I’ve never been a big fan of LA, but I’ve found myself traveling there more often than I ever expected. Not just to Los Angeles, but to the Downtown area specifically. When I was still trying to make it as a YA writer, I attended the annual SCBWI conference held at the JW Marriot Live (keeper of my seediest secrets lol) about three times before finally putting a rest to that dead end. I made a big point of tacking on extra days to my first trip to sightsee, but that was enough for me to realize this was a city I was going to have a hard time vibing with. There are only so many Scientology centers a tour bus can point to before I succumb to that reductive interpretation of LA as a fame-obsessed, superficial, slightly zany-but-in-at-troubling-way urban center.