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Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
L.A. Affairs: Men who don't understand L.A. won't understand me. What's a city girl to do?
'I just hate L.A.,' Yassir said. Enveloped in the arms of the man I loved who valued monogamy and proudly introduced me as his girlfriend to every acquaintance, I felt an uneasiness. The statement felt personal — as if he meant to say 'you' and swapped it for 'L.A.' at the last moment. We're both transplants. Pre-pandemic, he lived in Hollywood for a couple of years, made the typical person-in-entertainment move to New York and returned to L.A. for work in late 2023. I arrived in January 2021 and started referring to Los Feliz as home about two weeks later, although I sometimes kept that fact to myself. Back then, I was quite apologetic in my love for L.A. I worried about appearing a certain way to fellow transplants, my parent's friends who'd only seen Santa Monica and any New Yorker I came across. Read more: L.A. Affairs: Nothing scared me more than intimacy — except L.A. freeways. But I had to face them both I wanted to dodge all the stereotypical perceptions about L.A. despite identifying with them. I didn't want to come off as image-driven, although I find solace in a stroll through the stores at the Americana at Brand, where I zip up skirts in the dressing rooms and spritz perfumes at the makeup counters. I also didn't want to be viewed as health-obsessed — I quite literally buy into Pilates classes and performance running shoes. Or be labeled a workaholic — I don't relax easily and often conflate my worth to my productivity. Or be accused of being a film snob — I'll skip a party in favor of a 35mm screening of a movie I've already seen. Early in our courtship, Yassir spoke romantically of New York's late-night diners and constant goings-on. I felt jealous, as if he were reminiscing about an ex. After we swapped college grievances and grocery shopping habits, a text exchange between us pivoted to his adoration for New York and his contempt for L.A. Instead of skating over the topic or conceding to his opinion, I texted, 'I understand L.A. has many faults, but I love it. And this is something you need to know about me, I am very good at loving and figuring out how to love.' Read more: L.A. Affairs: I was over dating in L.A. Then a charming co-worker came along It was a conclusion I had been circling for quite some time. As a 27-year-old, I'm still learning who I am and how I go about the world, but I'm improving. This was one of those personal truths that after voicing it to someone else solidifies its verity — and all in the name of Los Angeles. He responded, 'Huge green flag." Just like my friends, my family and Los Angeles, Yassir benefited from this trait of mine. I found him incredibly gorgeous. My industrious demeanor ceased on the mornings I spent with him. I just wanted to run my hands through his dark, curly hair and explain what the words of Los Angeles champion Eve Babitz meant to me. But I also looked up to him. Yassir spoke with cadence and clarity, enunciating all the syllables of 'definitely,' a word he said quite often. And he was definite about the world, especially Los Angeles. As a television writer, the city gave him much more opportunity and money than it ever offered me, and he still hated it. I felt like a child showing off an art project whenever I introduced him to my favorite places in L.A. Over eggs and waffles, I'd say, 'Isn't this restaurant amazing?' Or gesturing with my arms wide on a hilltop, 'This view of Griffith Observatory is pretty spectacular, right?' I said these things as if I were asking, 'Aren't I amazing?' and 'Isn't looking at me next to a bougainvillea spectacular?' His answers were always courteous smiles. I should have known. Read more: L.A. Affairs: I didn't know how to love. Then I came eye to eye with a majestic gray whale He broke up with me last fall after several months of dating, citing differences regarding our outlook on life. He specifically said I see the world with too much sunshine. Definitely too L.A. I partook in my usual breakup agenda. I made my heartbreak Beachwood Canyon's problem, walking and weeping to Amy Winehouse's ballad, 'Tears Dry (Original Version),' on the streetlamp-lined sidewalks. I went to my friend's couches in Highland Park, Los Feliz and Palms to cry a bit more. And I sat on my own couch, another 'Sex and the City' rewatch before me. But it was the words of a New Yorker, albeit a fictional one, that indicated my romantic path going forward. Episode 1 of Season 5 of 'Sex and the City' is titled "Anchors Away." It's the first in the series in a post-9/11 world. In a nod to the show's fifth main character, New York City, Carrie Bradshaw spends the day reckoning with her love for a city that often tests her spirit. However, after a potential love interest dismisses New York, Carrie catches a taxi away and muses: 'If … you only get one great love, New York may just be mine. And I can't have nobody talking s— about my boyfriend. … Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be.' With the devastating L.A. County fires following shortly after my breakup and the "city as a great love" breakthrough, I decided to love Los Angeles more openly, especially in my dating life. As is expected in the who/what/when/where of first dates, the question 'How do you like L.A.?' always arises. After Yassir, the men I've encountered often shrug their shoulders in a 'whatever' manner. Brunettes, blonds, mustached, clean-shaven, my patio-bar dates don't seem to get it, and their answers have alarmed me — their apathy almost as alarming as outright hate. Read more: L.A. Affairs submission guidelines How could a person feel indifferent toward a place so dynamic, so capable, so beautiful and so funny in its ways? A place with a history so lush it would take a lifetime to learn how we got here? Perhaps my similarities to L.A. don't end with the city's stereotypes. Men who don't understand Los Angeles will never understand me, and for that, they're unworthy of my deftness at loving. That's quite all right. I have a boyfriend anyway. This author is a freelance culture and lifestyle writer. She has written for The Times, A Rabbit's Foot, Little White Lies and other publications. She proudly lives in Los Angeles, and Franklin Avenue is her favorite street. She also runs a Substack: L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@ You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here. Sign up for The Wild newsletter to get weekly insider tips on the best of our beaches, trails, parks, deserts, forests and mountains. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
New York Times
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Could This Be the Funniest Book Ever Written?
Books of advice come in many forms: financial, spiritual, physical, philosophical. Novels too are books of advice, if read in a certain light. Eve Babitz understood, for example, that part of Colette's greatness is that you can open her novels anywhere and 'brush up on what to do.' There are only two advice books I've read more than once. One is Tom Hodgkinson's 'How to Be Idle' (2004). Its title is self-explanatory. The other is J.P. Donleavy's 'The Unexpurgated Code' (1975). Its title is less so. Donleavy's book is a sendup of the form that happens to be, possibly, the funniest book ever written. 'The Unexpurgated Code' turns 50 this year. It has dropped from sight, and yet here we are at a moment when the world could use it. It's a book to turn to when you need a little pick-me-up. It is Bolivian marching powder for the spirit. Its table of contents alone is more happily anarchic than most books in their entireties. Here are a few of Donleavy's 270 topics: 'Upon Placing the Blame for Venereal Infection,' 'Upon Embellishing Your Background,' 'Upon Being Unflatteringly Dressed in an Emergency,' 'Upon Your Spit Landing on Another,' 'Upon Fouling the Footpath,' 'Upon Heaping Abuse on the High and Mighty,' 'Upon Being Exorcised' and 'Upon the Nearby Arrival of a Flying Saucer.' Donleavy is best known as the author of 'The Ginger Man,' his tumultuous 1955 comic novel about Sebastian Dangerfield, an American student living in Dublin. (Sample sentence: 'All I want is one break which is not my neck.') He is also the author of many other novels, plays and books of stories. His novel 'A Fairy Tale of New York' (1973) inspired the title of the song by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl that helps make Christmastime bearable. Donleavy was born in Brooklyn, to Irish immigrants, and grew up in the Bronx. He was the son of a firefighter. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he spent the rest of his life in Ireland. He was rarely photographed in anything other than layers of tweeds, so that he resembled a walking advertisement for 18-year-old Tullamore Dew. Battered copies of 'The Unexpurgated Code' pass among admirers like samizdat. The reason isn't merely that it's funny. The book clocks the absurdities of human conduct like few others. It takes note of the chutes and trapdoors and ladders and ejection seats involved in all human discourse. It says: We're all miserable bipeds struggling for a bit of breathing room, so you might as well have a sense of humor about it all. If you have been excluded from parties you wish you'd had the chance to boycott, if you lack long shanks, if you dine too often at low tables at bad addresses, if you feel as dented as a discarded ping pong ball, if you are not a member of the dividend-drawing classes, well, recall that Philip Larkin advised in a 1941 letter that 'stupid ills need stupid remedies,' and turn to Donleavy. A few weeks ago, in a restaurant, I was snubbed — in front of my family! I found out later that it was an entirely accidental snubbing, and all is well, but it stung at the time. When I got home that night, still smarting, I consulted Donleavy. Here is a bit of his advice in 'Upon Being Snubbed,' which cheered me up instantly: 'Take solace from the fact that it is unlikely that you will ever be kidnapped.' You will not find such counsel in Miss Manners. You can flip to almost any page in 'The Unexpurgated Code' and be reduced to helpless laughter. If you are not to the manner born and feel the need to defend your lineage, Donleavy writes, rummage around in your past: 'Someone must have been something once.' He adds: 'If you have received a Red Cross Life Saving Certificate, riposte pronto with this information.' If you are stranded at a party with no one to talk to, 'this is a time to laugh lightly for no reason at all. Or for the reason that you have dumped your champagne in a flower pot and the plant keeled over. Ignore any askance looks.' A section titled 'Upon Making the Contract for the Rubout' is a favorite. Here is Donleavy: One of his imagined heavies is named 'One Fingered Legs Apart Vinnie.' Donleavy covers a good deal of standard etiquette-book topics — how to behave at the table, the hair salon, the theater, the class reunion, the bank and while sick. ('Sneezing is one of the best ways of widely spreading your germs if this is what the people around you deserve.') But it gets risqué. There are sections on orgies and masturbation and voyeurism and how to behave in a porno theater. There are also discourses on flatulence, notably as a method of communication between spies, on nose-picking and on the squeezing of pimples and blackheads. The latter maneuvers should be confined to people you know well, he writes, 'although it is also one of the fastest ways to get to know someone better.' There are many strange chambers in this nautilus spiral of a book. Some of the finest sections are on suicide, execution ('Relax and wait. Most things will be taken care of for you') and death in general. He recommends that, if you learn you have but a short time to live, you 'do not rush out to a night club or the latest celebrity joint and scare the hell out of everybody.' In your grief, do not jump onto coffins that are being lowered because 'with some of the cheaper materials they are using these days, your feet could go right through the lid and your possibly muddy shoes land with the most grossly embarrassing results on the corpse.' Donleavy's book is a subversive companion piece, of sorts, to Nancy Mitford's 1955 essay 'The English Aristocracy,' which alerted the terrified world to the distinctions between 'U' (upper class) and 'non-U' language. Donleavy's book feels Anglocentric, yet he told The Paris Review that Americans are snobbier than Brits. Donleavy's book is one for the world's underdogs, its confirmed pullers of social boners, those who sense they are too often taking a worsting from reality. It might make you indescribably happy. Indeed, there is a section titled 'Upon Encountering Happiness.' It reads, in full: 'Be wary at such times because most of life's blows fall then.'
