Sorry LA, but your rivalry with New York has always been a bit one-sided, like Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, or Claude and ChatGPT. One party spends a lot more time thinking about it than the other, like the ex you tell all your friends you’re over, even when your ex barely remembers you were dating.
However, Los Angeles has competed for a while, even a decade. She held her own. Show. The Lakers started and ended 2010 with titles. The Kings won a pair as well. Technology companies have flourished on Silicon Beach. Art galleries moved west in search of cheaper rents. Hollywood was buzzing with the excitement of banners, the money flowing in, and quality coming out at an unprecedented rate. The International Olympic Committee said Los Angeles could host the Summer Olympics for the first time in 44 years. Downtown — downtown! — cool down.
Los Angeles Times — His former employer — has won Pulitzer Prizes for news writing, feature writing, and investigative writing. Los Angeles’ superiority suddenly became about much more than just the sun shining, as it always has, and as it will always continue to do, or the Dodgers beating an East Coast team in the World Series, as it always has, and will always continue to do. (Actually they didn’t do that at all from 1988 to 2020, but they’ve made up for lost time since then.) It was about a city that, after years of saying it was New York City, actually had reason to believe it was.
Not anymore.
This weekend’s scene for the Knicks – Knicks! – Going to the NBA Finals like the old Showtime only reinforced what we all know. Jalen Brunson handled the ball at the point, lifted his team and then sobbed down the court as if Magic Johnson, a giddy city and the entire basketball world in its thrall, placed the symbolic icing on an already very tall wedding cake.
Zahran Mamdani was cheering for the team and called their win “history”. Yes, a few months ago, New York got its first big-city mayor with millennial appeal, social media buzz, and a plan for the future. Los Angeles has this guy from Hills. Yes, king That man from Hills. But her best hope of opposition, from the progressive Nithya Raman, can feel a little Mamdani Lite. If current trends continue, she may not even win, because losing to the incumbent had the city on the verge of walking out of town a year ago.
As for those newspapers, New York Times He is as dominant as ever, while the Los Angeles Times Conflicts. there California PostBut this pairing seems wrong, like bagels and peanut butter, and it only reminds us of what’s true, like New York Post.
Even New York’s most famous political son isn’t around much, hosting birthday parties with UFC fighters at a park in Central Park.
To be clear, neither city is a bastion of equality or prosperity in the post-Covid years. In both countries, homelessness and mental health challenges receive insufficient attention, housing costs are skyrocketing and ICE are ever-threatening, wealth gaps are untenable, and crime, although declining, remains extremely high. However, Los Angeles tragically faces a greater potential for more climate disasters, adding to the problems.
As New York approaches the 25th anniversary of 9/11, the lowest moment in its history, it has also rebounded in unimaginable ways — with the now-happy company Nicks has brought, with the Tribeca festival of the past 10 days drawing one name in bold after another, and the festival De Niro co-founded to capture the city beyond the still-pulsing towers.
Do we need to enter the production exits in Hollywood? These streamers who flooded Los Angeles with productions are spending less every year, and what they film now goes elsewhere – to London, to Atlanta, to… New York. A TV writer told me he was lucky because he bought his little house in Los Feliz and paid for it right before the accident happened — whoever came after him took over as a roommate in Glendale. Don’t even ask how the actual crew members are treated.
I’ve lived in both Los Angeles and New York and enjoyed each for different reasons. But I can’t remember a more lopsided rivalry.
Then insult to all mischief: Taylor Swift. It looks like she and Travis Kelce will be spending the Fourth of July weekend getting married at Madison Square Garden in midtown Manhattan, just a few weeks after the Knicks’ magical walk into the venue. Yes, the American version of the royal wedding won’t be at the Hammer, the Hollywood Bowl or a beachfront villa in Malibu — it will be in the building above Penn Station. The country’s biggest music star, after jumping and cheering on the floor for the Knicks (with two of Haim’s Los Angeles-raised sisters, the horror), will return to that floor to say I do it, averting what could have been a West Coast takeback moment. Los Angeles knows this story well. He could not have imagined this in his wildest dreams.
That floor this post-basketball season, by the way, was a one-man show for the country’s biggest movie star, New Yorker Timothée Chalamet, who continues to pose in new streetwear with Josh Safdie, his New Yorker director from their film New Yorker. Marty Supremewhich they made history thanks to A24, their New York distributor, just a few months before achieving another major success, New York itself. The devil wears prada 2did the same with Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway from New York.
I don’t want to say that Los Angeles and big-budget entertainment studios are no longer important; Disclosure day It just had the biggest opening ever for an original film in Steven Spielberg’s career. Oh wait, he just moved to New York too.
What about Olympic Gamesshe asks. certainly, this It’s a tick in the Los Angeles column. That was — until it became known mainly for weekly headlines about whether its boss would resign over the Epstein scandal.
This Thursday, New York will hold the Knicks’ victory parade, before Taylor’s wedding, before the World Cup final, and before anything else. While Los Angeles is worried about who it can pick to get its mojo back or whether it should re-sign Austin Reeves. Talk about a tough summer.
But I haven’t lost all hope. Los Angeles, you have DiCaprio, Denzel, and Dylan (when he’s not doing ten states in nineteen days); You’ve got the Geffen Gallery, the Green Table Café, and a bunch of Kardashians. Soon you’ll have the Lucas Museum, which looks like a sausage, and the Super Bowl. You can turn it around. You needs To convert it. New York needs a foil. The Knicks playing the third-largest metro area in Texas in the Finals just doesn’t feel right. They should play the Lakers, like they did in the 1970s Finals. Also, even Spike Lee would admit that the Knicks have a way to go to catch up to the Dodgers and their six or three titles.
The World Cup has been an equalizer, with big matches in both cities, like the thrilling matchup between the USA and Paraguay at SoFi Friday and Brazil and Morocco at Met Life Saturday (and the final next month).
And I expect the 2028 Summer Games to be wild, with victorious athletes standing on podiums all over the city, and coliseum and SoFi hosting kick-ass celebrations. I mean come on, we can’t lose Paris.
