Los Angeles

The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world.

LA is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a community of white American immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than fifty thousand. Only on completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s did it really begin to grow, as a national mecca for good health, clean living, plentiful sunshine and endless acres of citrus crops. The biggest group of transplants were refugees from the Midwest, who created a new political ruling class to replace the old Mexican elite. The old ranchos were soon subdivided, the population grew rapidly, and the enduring symbol of the city became the family-sized suburban house (with swimming pool and two-car garage). The biggest boom came after World War II with the mushrooming of the aeronautics industry which, until post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted for one in four jobs.

The first-time visitor may well find Los Angeles thrilling and threatening in equal proportions; it's a place that picks you up and sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. While it has its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few old-fashioned urban plazas, what people really come here for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood , as well as the gilded opulence of Beverly Hills and Malibu .

Arrival
All European and many domestic flights use Los Angeles International Airport - always known as LAX (tel 310/646-5252, ) - sixteen miles southwest of downtown. Free 24-hour shuttle buses (line "C") connect with the LAX Transit Center at Vicksburg Avenue and 96th Street, where you can pick up local buses . Minibuses such as LAX Chequer Shuttle (tel 1-800/545-7745, ), SuperShuttle (tel 310/782-6600 or 1-800/554-3146, ) and Coast Shuttle (tel 310/417-3988) run all over town, delivering you to your door. Fares are generally around $20-30 (plus tip), with a journey time of between 30 and 45 minutes. Taxis from the airport are always expensive: around $25 to downtown and West LA, $30 to Hollywood and as much as $90 to Disneyland.

Nightlife
LA's clubs are among the wildest in the country, ranging from absurdly faddish hangouts to industrial noise cellars. The trendier side of the club scene is, as always, hard to pin down; check the LA Weekly before setting out.

LA has an overwhelming choice of venues for live music . Ever since the nihilistic punk bands - Circle Jerks, X, Black Flag - drew the city away from its laid-back west coast country-folk scene in the late Seventies and early Eighties, LA's rock music has been excellent, with up-and-comers traditionally getting their first break in clubs on the Sunset Strip. Authentic country music is also fairly prevalent, at least away from trendy Hollywood. Jazz , too, is played in a few genuinely authentic downbeat dives, though more commonly found being used to improve a restaurant's atmosphere. Reggae , though popular with many, is much less common. Salsa is pervasive among LA's Hispanic population, and is found in the male-oriented bars of East LA and increasingly in some of the clubs of the Westside. In many of these clubs, cover charges can vary widely, depending on the prominence of the headliner and the night of the week, so call ahead.

The comedy scene in LA has long been known as the national proving ground for aspiring funnymen and -women, and it's also a good place to catch live performances by established television names like Jay Leno and Drew Carey.

Feature films are often released in LA months (or years) before they play anywhere else in the world. Short seasons of foreign-language films are screened at the eight Laemmle Theaters. If you're after a golden-age atmosphere , head for one of the historic downtown movie palaces along Broadway, where the delirious furnishings may hold your attention longer than the all-action double bills. You can catch mainstream new releases in one of the many mall-based multiplexes, like the Beverly Center Cineplex, 8500 Beverly Blvd, West LA (tel 310/652-7760), AMC Century 14, 10250 Santa Monica Blvd, Century City (tel 310/553-8900) or the Universal City 18, at Universal Studios' CityWalk, San Fernando Valley (tel 818/508-0588).

Eating
LA eating covers every extreme: whatever you want to eat and however much you want to spend, you're spoiled for choice. Try to take at least a few meals in the more acclaimed restaurants, if only to watch the city's many self-appointed food snobs going through their paces. If you simply want to fill up quickly and inexpensively, the options are almost endless, and include terrific burger stands where you can scarf down mountains of fried favorites, and the many restaurant and bar happy hours where you can get a range of good, free food available for the price of a drink. LA is also littered with celebrity-owned outfits - like Steven Spielberg's submarine-shaped sandwich store Dive ! and Planet Hollywood (where displays include Forrest Gump's box of chocolates) in Beverly Hills - but the food is usually unremarkable, as many visitors soon discover.

Hollywood
If a single place-name encapsulates the LA dream of glamour, money and overnight success, it's Hollywood . Millions of tourists arrive on pilgrimages; millions more flock here in pursuit of riches and glory. Hollywood blurs the edges of fact and fiction, simply because so much seems possible - and yet, for most people, so little actually is. Those who do strike it rich here get out as soon as they can, just as they always have; the big film companies, too, long ago relocated well away, leaving Hollywood a blend of prostitutes and petty crimi-nals with visiting tourists and slumming hipsters - all under the shadow of grand old movie palaces and dive hotels.