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Arthur Magazine's Jay Babcock told Jenny Burman yesterday more about his move to Brooklyn and also talks in the LAT's Soundboard blog about leaving Los Angeles. Babcock has shut down Nature Trumps, his blog about the Los Angeles River. From Jenny at Chicken Corner:
I lived in Atwater Village, beneath the police and tv helicopters, and amidst the almost-nightly gunfire and break-ins....It's devolving very fast now -- there are creeping crises (overdevelopment, journalism implosion, traffic, health care, schools, crime, bad police dept, general cultural dumbness and hostility to the Arts) that, short of catastrophe, are unsolvable given L.A.'s government structure -- and I finally figured a way out. I don't want to live anymore in the psychic death hole that is Carusoland. And I don't want to be there when the next earthquake hits, or when Griffith Park and the Hollywood Hills finally burn. Angelenos don't strike me as being particularly resilient. The city is terminal.
Sounds like a bad case of what ails him. Here he is in the LAT: "New York is just a more hospitable environment than L.A. ever has been or will be. L.A. is devolving quickly, and I think I got out in the nick of time. The L.A. Times is imploding, our public radio is terrible, the [L.A.] Weekly’s been devolving for years. Local media’s being run into the ground and I don’t think anybody cares. The public’s dumbed down and poorly educated."