{"id":1445,"date":"2013-04-02T16:10:18","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T23:10:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1445"},"modified":"2013-04-02T16:12:46","modified_gmt":"2013-04-02T23:12:46","slug":"a-los-angeles-primer-west-hollywood","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=1445","title":{"rendered":"A Los Angeles Primer: West Hollywood"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" title=\"West Hollywood\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kcet.org\/socal\/departures\/landofsunshine\/assets_c\/2013\/03\/DSCN2241-thumb-630x472-47680.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"500\" height=\"370\/\" \/><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>West Hollywood came into official being on November 29, 1984, 25 days after I did. But which of us wears our years with greater dignity? I strain to look timeless, but timelessness, improperly cultivated, slides easily into blandness; West Hollywood can rest assured, at least, that it runs little risk of that. A mixture of the uneasily dated and the insistently progressive, the tiny municipality \u2014 an &#8220;r&#8221; shape containing less than two square miles, surrounded on most of its edges by Los Angeles proper \u2014 would seem now to punch above its weight in most of the important modern rankings: food, no doubt; culture, in certain senses, yes; street life, seemingly so; homosexuality, most definitely.<\/p>\n<p>Urban theorist Richard Florida gives the homosexual population serious weight when gauging a city&#8217;s vitality, having gone so far as to order the metropolises on something called a &#8220;Gay Index.&#8221; This goes especially for cities driven by what he calls the &#8220;creative class&#8221; \u2014 engineers, scientists, designers, artists, media-makers \u2014 and thus it looks like no coincidence that West Hollywood labels itself &#8220;The Creative City.&#8221; A walk down its stretch of Santa Monica Boulevard, surely some kind of Gay Index in and of itself, presents rainbow-striped crosswalks at intersections, rainbow-striped city logos on police cars, and a variety of specialized bars and sex shops. But unlike, say, San Francisco&#8217;s Castro, the neighborhood doesn&#8217;t feel like a solemn monument to lost hedonism. By late 1984, Castro-style hedonism had taken its last rites anyway; West Hollywood, at least on certain streets, keeps living, keeps breathing, keeps chatting itself up. (Though not in a way everyone necessarily finds palatable. &#8220;The term &#8216;WeHo boy,'&#8221; as a friend and longtime resident of the neighborhood patiently explained to me, &#8220;is not meant as a compliment.&#8221;)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Read the whole thing <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kcet.org\/socal\/departures\/landofsunshine\/a-los-angeles-primer\/a-los-angeles-primer-west-hollywood.html\">at KCET Departures<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; West Hollywood came into official being on November 29, 1984, 25 days after I did. But which of us wears our years with greater dignity? I strain to look timeless, but timelessness, improperly cultivated, slides easily into blandness; West Hollywood can rest assured, at least, that it runs little risk of that. A mixture [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-a-los-angeles-primer","category-los-angeles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1445"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1454,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1445\/revisions\/1454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}