Learning from Los Angeles

I always like hearing accounts of Los Angeles in ways I haven't thought about the city before. Here is a snippet from my latest art theory reading assignment by Dave Hickey:

"So, for the artist or the citizen living and working in it, Los Angeles becomes less a drama than a casting call, less a novel than a telephone book, less a text than a dictionary; it is less a place, in fact, than a network of intersecting mythological journeys, or less a deployment of communal plazzas than a confluence of intersecting "strips." It is a world in which space unfolds irrationally in a sequence of vistas, after the manner of the romantic garden, or Ed Rusha's Every Building on the Sunset Strip. By comparison, you can conceive Manhatten, hold it in your head, read it like a book-a paginated codex. Los Angeles is inconceivable in this manner. Further, there is so little real past here, and so much fraudulent "high" concept, that that characteristic, deep, tilting, shifting space becomes the emblem of what is "real."