LA IS HOW YOU GET TO LAX
I have no idea what LA is like today. This is history.
My whole long career took me to LA on business trips many times but never of my own volition. Most cities I visited for business excited me because I felt like I could figure out how to do my work and then find restaurants for business and then dive into the bars and music venues seamlessly when I could be on my own. Not LA. Not even close.
Workwise, LA seemed like a city where even the most ambitious people pretended they were slackers. Sunglasses in the office was a real thing. Leaving a meeting because, well, "surf's up" was not a joke. "I do advertising but really, I am here for beach volleyball" was spoken to me by an underperforming junior executive without an ounce of irony. Spending the first 30 minutes of a meeting talking about dinner last night was a real thing. Name dropping was not a cliche, it was a core skill. Nonchalance was an art form - sometimes used to set you up for a knife in your back.
My career was spent seeking out work environments where you could trust your co-workers to stab you in your chest while staring straight into your eyes. That worked fine for me. LA's killers tried lame passive-aggressive techniques. That was so confusing.
LA was a city where you had to drive everywhere even though traffic was always insane and the roads seemed random. The feeling of hating driving while also hating to be without a car left me feeling like a loser in a town where you must be a winner or die.
As a senior ad agency executive but an amateur in LA, I once scheduled a business meeting with my agency peers in a giant steel building at 2PM, followed by a meeting at a movie studio at 4PM, followed by a networking cocktail hour(s) at Shutters at 6PM. And, I was driving which meant I was also parking. Hahahaha.
My 2PM meeting nonchalantly started around 2:40 so I left in a panic at 3:15 only to be 40 minutes late to the studio meeting (deeply confused that nobody cared) and then giving up at the idea of ever finding Shutters once I spent 80 minutes on 101 and 405 during rush hour wondering which furious driver was going to shoot me.
Business meetings at movie studios are unique. If you want to arrive on time in the office of a movie studio executive, you need to get to the gate entrance 45 minutes before you will be able to get to the office even though the office is within 1500 feet of the gate. In fairness, however, the executive you are meeting knows this and their approach to meetings is to pretty much expect them to happen in the same morning or afternoon when they were scheduled.
I never met a studio executive or an ad agency executive in LA who was in a hurry, not once. I'm a New Yorker. WTF is going on?
I hate being late. It triggers my anxieties. I am always early except in LA where I was always late. The joke, of course - the joke that I never understood - was that being 20 minutes late to a meeting in LA was being early.
Away from work, whoa, I was so confused. Eventually, I realized that the thing to do was to stay in a motel in Venice Beach and then "suggest" a meeting at Shutters in Santa Monica. I felt like a genius because all of my driving was always south of the shit they call driving in the city in LA.
Shutters was an awesome hotel where all of the top creative people in the ad agency business would stay but, for me, it was too pretentious. Pretentious hotels make me feel like a loser.
Watching a creative team order shrimp cocktail by the pound as if they owned the hotel used to give me the shivers. I did not care about their expense account, I was just so intimidated by how comfortable they were while doing it.
Fancy hotels in other cities, I alway felt I could fake it as an important business man and then get the hell out. Fancy hotels in LA, every porter knew I was faking it from the moment they set eyes on me. Total misfit.
But, walking distance from a motel in Venice Beach you could find fantastic Mexican restaurants where I could dine alone, get awesome Mole sauce on my chicken and explore tequilas I had never seen anywhere else. And, zero chance in hell that anybody important would be there.
(To be clear, I was never in my life plagued by that negative voice inside your head telling you that you don't belong where you have arrived. I have plenty of crappy voices in my head but the kind of voice that says "you don't belong at Colgate University, you are a a fraud and you will be found out soon" - nope, that is one voice I don't struggle with. So, when I say that I don't feel like I belong in the penthouse room at Shutters, I literally mean that I don't belong there. I know for sure when I am a misfit. Pretentiousness gives me hives and Benadryl doesn't help.)
In most cities, I loved diving right into "downtown" but I think it was George Carlin who explained that LA is a dozen suburbs desperately trying to find downtown. I loved that quote because it made me realize I was not alone in my confusion.
Later in my career, an early stage investment banker installed me as a consultant to help a company he was deeply invested in. The company helped Hip Hop musicians leverage the power of social media by creating content that would go viral well before that became obvious and easy. These dudes rented AirBnb when it was a brand new thing and they took me around to places like the Bel Air hotel where we nonchalantly sat with famous rap stars. They got me stoned out of my mind before the most important meeting of the trip and that meeting was an over-the-top success for my client. Most important, the crazy but brilliant guy trying to build this business had rented a super fancy Mercedes and did 100% of the driving even when he was wasted.
As the old married white guy in the room with young, tattooed, multi-racial, sexually-complicated, ADHD personalities, I finally started to feel comfortable in LA. Why? - because the young stoned founder of the company was driving and damn was he good at it.
I was inspired to share all of these thoughts because tonight I heard this quote which Orson Welles said to Peter Bogdanovich: "Los Angeles is the only city where every road leads to the airport." BOOM! Exactly.
LA is what you do before you go to LAX. Brilliant epiphany.
Where was Orson Welles when I needed him?
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43Stan Wolf, Kevin Lee and 41 others