On Becoming an Angeleno

I have just started reading Mike Davis's history of Los Angeles, City of Quartz. It is dense and wastes no time and exactly the book I need to be reading after watching Ric Burns' documentary on New York.

Here is the epigraph, by Walter Benjamin.

"The superficial inducement, the exotic, the picturesque has an effect only on the foreigner. To portray a city, a native must have other, deeper motives - motives of one who travels into the past instead of into the distance. A native's book about his city will always be related to memoirs; the writer has not spent his childhood there in vain."