NY Times Delivers Mortal Blow To Anti-Los Angeles Claque

Peggy Clifford

Mirror Editor

   For years, conventional wisdom had it that Angelenos were beautiful perhaps, and sometimes fashionable, but profoundly shallow.
   Now, according to a story by David Hay in the New York Times, “the notion that Los Angeles has no brain is about as old as the city itself...with the city’s public and private universities, a slate of Nobel Prize winners, some of the country’s most creative artistic talent, a reservoir of scientific expertise at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute of Technology, these stereotypes were always more alive in the imagination, particularly on the East Coast, than in real life...
   “...(and) writers and scholars are now saying that a new influx of institutions and museums has helped make intellectual life more vital than in any other period in the city’s history.”
   Hay quotes Mike Davis, author of two books—City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear—which are highly critical of L.A. -- as saying, “On the West Side of Los Angeles there is now an intellectual and cultural life that is easily comparable to that of New York or Boston.”
   Hay also quotes Sandra Harding, director of the Center for the Study of Women at UCLA: “Los Angeles intellectual life is thriving. At the same time it is less elitist and no one is intimidated by the big names.”
   Hay cites the Institute for Humanities at USC, the Institute for Art and Cultures at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Getty scholars, the burgeoning seminars and literary salons, L.A.’s ranking as the biggest book market in America, among other things, as proofs of the sound health of the L.A. intellect.