Dig into the city's culture

By JOHN FLEMING
Published August 7, 2005

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For me, a big part of the fun of traveling to a city is dipping into its literature, music and film, and few places have such riches in this respect as Los Angeles. Here are some of the L.A. cultural artifacts I have been savoring lately.

Of the many, many movies about Los Angeles, Chinatown is definitive - a movie so great that I think it rivals Citizen Kane as the best ever made. Robert Towne's complex screenplay on the forces that went into the creation of modern Los Angeles ends not with a bang but a shrug and the dialogue: "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

And for an ominous vision of the urban future, the rainy, neon-drenched L.A. in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner is breathtaking. In downtown Los Angeles, you can see the film's location where Harrison Ford battled replicants, the Bradbury Building, 304 S Broadway, an atmospheric century-old place with glass ceiling over the lobby and wrought iron railings.

The Los Angeles Philharmonic is superbly represented on Naive and Sentimental Music, a CD of recent works by the orchestra's onetime composer in residence, John Adams.

The sprawling city's musical melting pot of pop, jazz, blues and folk is on display in Ry Cooder's concept album Chavez Ravine, evoking a neighborhood that was home to Mexican and other immigrant groups before it was bulldozed to make way for Dodger Stadium.

Inspired, in part, by F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished masterpiece of Hollywood, The Last Tycoon, film critic David Thomson makes shrewd connections between the movies and the city in his idiosyncratic book, The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood.