Los Angeles Intersections (Folklore and the City)1* Los Angeles holds special place in the imaginations of people around the world. The global familiarity with the city is in large part attributable to the extraordinary influence that the film and television industries have had during the past eighty or so years. In these media, the city often plays significant (albeit largely uncredited) role as the backdropLos Angeles is the place where the story unfolds. Yet, for those who live in Los Angeles, the representations of the city in popular film and television rarely align with lived experience. Although the physical and the concrete manifestations of the city that appear on the screen may be familiar, the thickness of the city and its neighborhoods-places which are imbued with different meanings for and by different people (and groups of people)-is never captured in these superficial engagements with the city (Geertz 1973). Of course, few people who live in Los Angeles would claim to have an intimate knowledge of all its neighborhoods (both real and imagined) (Anderson 1983). Indeed, one could argue that such familiarity is an impossibility given the diverse cultural and economic backgrounds of the city's millions of inhabitants and the complicated spatial practices of these people that characterize each and every place in the city In this regard, Los Angeles is at once well-known-at least on superficial level-yet, on thicker level, unknown or possibly even unknowable. The object of fierce derision and intense glorification, Los Angeles can be viewed as constant and ever-changing series of contradictory interpretations of space: for some, it is city of dreams and for others, city of despair; it is at once city of extraordinary wealth and city of crushing poverty, city of culture and city of plastic, city of WASPs and city of immigrants. Referring to New York, Los Angeles' east coast counterpart (or perhaps antithesis), Michel de Certeau opines that it presents a texturology in which extremes coincide-extremes of ambition and degradation, brutal oppositions of races and styles, contrasts between yesterday's buildings, already transformed into trash cans, and today's urban irruptions that block out its space ( 1984, 91 ) . This same texturology can also be applied to Los Angeles which is, in many respects, the epitome of the postmodern city, a landscape filled with violent edges, colliding turfs, unstable boundaries, peculiarly juxtaposed lifespaces, and enclaves of outrageous wealth and despair (Sofa 1996, 448). Perhaps Los Angeles is simply an extreme example of the city in the late twentieth century/early twenty first centurya preview of coming attractions for other large cities. Or, perhaps Los Angeles is an entirely unique urban environment, situated at an intriguing confluence of historical events, cultural developments and transnational movements. Or perhaps it is both. Whether or not Los Angeles is an extreme example of future norm or unique urban space, it deserves the attention of folklorists who, given their experience with the analysis of situated, cultural expressions, may be able to contribute to untangling the extraordinarily complex web of signification that is expressed not only in the physical environment but also in people's use and interpretation of that environment. While the study of folklore has long been connected to the study of place, it has primarily been concerned with revealing how place affects folk lore-or how place is expressed in folklore-and not the inverse process of how folklore affects place. Much of the initial impetus for the collection of folklore came from desire on the part of European scholars to describe and to preserve the traditional expressions of rural peoples. These expressions were considered to be reflective of the national spirit but, because of the onslaught of rapid modernization, they were also considered to be disappearing rapidly. …