Colin Marshall
Colin Marshall is an essayist, broadcaster, and speaker on cities and culture. He's currently based in Seoul and at work on the book "A Los Angeles Primer: Mastering the Stateless City."
Despite making genuinely credible claims to importance in eating, drinking, and specialty shopping, La Brea remains, on a human being's scale, for much of its twelve-mile length, starkly inhospitable.
Say what you will about their limited reach; the Red and Purple Lines surely must rank among the cleanest, most comfortable, least urine-smelling systems in America. You may lose twenty minutes waiting on platforms, but you'll have taken a subway - in ...
The tiny municipality seems 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.
One can technically live an entire life in only Korean or Spanish - or indeed, only English - within these almost three square miles, but it would by no means count as a full one.
The always multiplying, subdividing, subjective experiences and perceptions of Los Angeles make for an infinitely more interesting city to write about than any single, objective place.