The past week was also NYU's spring break, and our downtown diarist found himself on a cross-country sojourn to the City of Angels. He has since returned eastward with harrowing and enlightening tales of Southern California.

Probably we should all move to California. Not for the sun or a chance in Hollywood—if we wanted clear skies and hope we wouldn't have come to New York—but for LA's impossible size. To the students of NYU and Columbia, this unabashedly fake paradise could offer a dose of honesty. The city is hideous, yes, and any beauty or culture it may have had in the 1950s has been eaten away by the smog and covered up by plastic surgery. But its landscape of strip malls and concrete, punctuated almost ironically by the occasional bunch of palms, is infinite in a way that Manhattan isn't.

It's not so much a metropolis as a collection of medium sized cities, each washed out in its own way. Between the traffic and the town's size it takes forever to get anywhere, but as consolation most of the places one goes are as dull as sitting in the car. Hurrying is impossible, keeping the youth of the city from pretending that racing down the steps of the subway is the same as being an embattled hustler.