<\/p>\n
\n\tSorry L.A., but your rivalry with New York has always been a little one-sided, like Taylor Swift<\/a> 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\u2019re over even as the ex can\u00a0barely\u00a0remember you dated.<\/p>\n Still, for a while \u2014 a decade, even \u2014 Los Angeles competed. Held its own.\u00a0Showed out.<\/em>\u00a0The Lakers started and ended the 2010\u2019s\u00a0with titles; the Kings won a pair too. Tech companies flourished on Silicon Beach. Art galleries moved west in search of cheaper rents.\u00a0Hollywood buzzed with the excitement of streamers, money pouring in and quality coming out at an unprecedented rate. The International Olympic Committee said L.A. could host the Summer Olympics for the first time in 44 years. Downtown \u2014\u00a0downtown!\u00a0\u2014<\/em>\u00a0became cool.<\/em><\/p>\n The Los Angeles Times <\/em>\u2014 my former employer \u2014 thrummed with Pulitzer Prizes, for news writing, for feature writing, for investigative writing. L.A. supremacy was suddenly about a lot more than the sun shining, as it always has done, as it always will continue to do, or the Dodgers beating an East Coast team in the World Series, as they have always done, as they will always continue to do. (Actually they didn\u2019t do it at all from 1988 to 2020 but have since made up for lost time.) It was about a city that, after years of saying it was the new New York City, actually having a reason to think it was.<\/p>\n Not anymore.<\/p>\n The sight this weekend of the Knicks \u2014 the Knicks! \u2014 breezing through the NBA Finals like vintage Showtime only reinforced what we all knew. Jalen Brunson ballhandling at the point, lifting up his team and then crying on the court like he was Magic Johnson, a giddy city and the whole basketball world in his thrall, put the symbolic topper on what was already a pretty tall wedding cake.<\/p>\n Cheering on the team and calling their win \u201cHISTORY\u201d\u00a0was Zohran Mamdani<\/a>. Yes, as of several months ago New York got the first big-city mayor with major Millennial appeal and social-media buzz and a plan for the future. Los Angeles has that guy from\u00a0The Hills<\/em>. OK,\u00a0had<\/em>\u00a0that guy from The Hills<\/em>. Still, its best hope, the progressive Nithya Raman, is kind of Mamdani Lite. And, if current trends hold, she may not even win, losing to an incumbent the city was ready to run out of town a year ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n As for those newspapers, The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0is more dominant than ever, while The<\/em>\u00a0Los Angeles Times<\/em>\u00a0struggles. There is the\u00a0California Post<\/em>, but that pairing seems wrong, like bagels and peanut butter, and it only reminds of what\u2019s right, like the\u00a0New York Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n Even New York\u2019s most notorious political son isn\u2019t around much, hosting birthday parties with UFC fighters<\/a> on a lawn that blissfully isn\u2019t Central Park.<\/p>\n To be clear, neither city is a bastion of equality or prosperity in these post-Covid years. In both places homelessness and mental-health challenges are woefully under-addressed, housing costs are sky-high, ICE is always threatening, wealth gaps are untenable, and crime, though lowered, is still too severe. L.A., though, is tragically contending with\u00a0even greater odds\u00a0<\/a>\u00a0of more climate catastrophe, adding to the problems.<\/p>\n As NY approaches the 25th anniversary of 9\/11, the lowest moment in its history, it has also rebounded in some unimaginable ways \u2014 with the now-happy communion brought on by the Knicks, with a Tribeca Festival these past ten days that drew\u00a0one boldfaced name<\/a>\u00a0after\u00a0another<\/a>, the festival De Niro co-founded to pick up the city post-Towers still kicking.<\/p>\n And do we need to get into Hollywood production exits? Those streamers that once flooded Los Angeles with productions are spending less every year, and what they do shoot now goes elsewhere \u2014 to London, to Atlanta, to\u00a0New York<\/em>. A TV writer told me he was lucky that he bought and paid off his small Los Feliz house just before the crash \u2014 everyone who came after is taking on that roommate in Glendale. Don\u2019t even ask how physical-crew members are getting by.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve lived in both Los Angeles and New York and enjoy each for different reasons. But I can\u2019t remember the rivalry more lopsided.<\/p>\n Then the insult to all injury: Taylor Swift. She and Travis Kelce will apparently spend July 4th weekend tying the knot at Madison Square Garden right in the middle of midtown Manhattan, just a few weeks after the Knicks\u2019 magical run at the place. Yes, America\u2019s version of the Royal Wedding won\u2019t be at the Hammer or the Hollywood Bowl or a beachside villa in Malibu \u2014 it will be at the building that sits above Penn Station. The biggest music star in the country, after jumping and cheering \u00a0on the floor for the Knicks (with two of the L.A.-raised Haim sisters, the horror), will return to that floor to say I do, shunning what could have been a West Coast get-back moment. L.A. knows this this story all too well. And couldn\u2019t have conceived it in its wildest dreams.<\/p>\n That floor this basketball postseason, btw, has also been a one-man show for the biggest movie star in the country, New Yorker Timothee Chalamet<\/a>, who kept showing up in new street fashions with Josh Safdie, his very New York director from their very New York movie\u00a0Marty Supreme<\/em>, which they made history with thanks to A24, their very New York distributor, just a few months before another outsized hit, the very New York\u00a0Devil Wears Prada 2<\/em>, did the same with the very New York Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t want to say L.A. and its big-budget studio entertainment no longer matter;\u00a0Disclosure Day<\/em>\u00a0just marked\u00a0the biggest<\/a>\u00a0original-movie opening ever in the career of Steven Spielberg. Oh wait, he\u00a0just moved<\/a>\u00a0to New York too.<\/p>\n What about the\u00a0Olympics<\/em>, you ask. Surely,\u00a0this\u00a0<\/em>is a mark in L.A.\u2019s column. It was \u2014 until it mainly became known for\u00a0weekly headlines\u00a0<\/a>about whether its chair will resign over an Epstein scandal.<\/p>\n This Thursday New York will hold its victory parade for the Knicks, just before its Taylor wedding, before its World Cup<\/a> Final, before so much else. While L.A. worries about who it can elect to restore its mojo or whether it should re-sign Austin Reaves. Talk about a cruel summer.<\/p>\n But I haven\u2019t lost all hope. L.A., you\u2019ve got DiCaprio and Denzel and Dylan (when he\u2019s not doing\u00a0ten states in nineteen days<\/a>); you\u2019ve got the Geffen Galleries, Green Table Cafe<\/a> and a gaggle of Kardashians. Soon you\u2019ll have the Lucas Museum, which\u00a0looks like a banger<\/a>. You can turn it around. You\u00a0need\u00a0<\/em>to turn it around. New York needs a foil. The Knicks playing the third-biggest Texas metro area in the Finals just isn\u2019t right. They should be playing the Lakers, like in those 1970\u2019s Finals. Also, even Spike Lee<\/a> himself would admit the Knicks have a long way to go to catch up to the Dodgers and their three titles in six years.<\/p>\n The World Cup has been an equalizer, big matches in both cities, like the thrilling U.S.-Paraguay matchup at SoFi this weekend, and the Finals headed for Met Life next month.<\/p>\n And we can expect the 2028 Summer Games to be a banger, with California athletes standing on podiums across the city and the Coliseum and SoFi hosting kick-ass ceremonies. I mean come on, we can\u2019t lose to\u00a0Paris<\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sorry L.A., but your rivalry with New York has always been a little 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\u2019re over even as the ex can\u00a0barely\u00a0remember you dated. Still, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5504,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[4926,1749,3806,248],"class_list":["post-5503","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-fashion","tag-brunson","tag-knicks","tag-title","tag-win"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5503"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5505,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5503\/revisions\/5505"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tmbglobal.news\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}