The lyrics say that “nobody walks in L.A.”  That certainly has been true, in a city whose inhabitants were long hermetically sealed inside their cars...as if in a pneumatic tube shuttling from place to pace.  L.A. was for a long time, a place where as John Didion said, “the entire quality of life  accentuates it impermanence and unreliability.”

Today’s Los Angeles is a vastly different place.  A city of neighborhoods and of Freeways; a city both urban and suburban, a kind of hybrid that sits at the cutting edge America’s movement toward cities, while still trying to hang on to its suburban trappings.

In short, L.A. just might be some kind of cultural or urban capital of the 21st century  

Few appreciate and understand the city more than former L.A. Times book editor David Ulin. His new book is Sidewalking: Coming to Terms with Los Angeles.

My conversation with David Ulin: