The Valley is Home

Here's a good way to start off a Gentlemen's World

Dr. Dre Interview with L.A. Times

It's an interesting read. The most interesting part to me was dude lives in the Valley, with references to San Fernando Valley, Chatsworth, and Sherman Oaks among the number of places where Dr. Dre has chosen to situate himself throughout his career. I've mentioned before my seemingly primitive loyalty to the San Fernando Valley, particularly my home in North Hollywood. Although, I don't think I've ever had the chance to articulate it. Loyalty does not come without the assumption that the subjects that you are loyal to are better than any others. Honestly, no one can ever know or make the associations that you make with home unless you actually lived in the area. I hear rappers talk about Bankhead all the time, but I'll never know what it's like to live over there. I just do their dances. It may not be obvious or may be overly presumptuous, but there are certainly aspects of the SFV that make it an endearing place to live, besides the fact that Dr. Dre lives here.

1. The Valley is a celebrity

I don't know how other people feel when they have the life of their home city depicted. Do New York cats get excited when they hear a story set in New York? I know how I feel when I see a TV show or movie set in Los Angeles. It's not really a big deal because it seems like writers or producers like to play up the superficial side of living in Los Angeles, as if it were only possible to be that superficial in Los Angeles. Do you think that girls don't practice "The Hills"-style drama in those all-white Rustbelt schools? They do. It's just not as interesting. I especially know how I feel when the Valley gets depicted on film. It's an event because you're always going to question if the writers got it right. At the same time, the Valley on film has shown you how much the place has changed since it's an inception. For example, the Brady Bunch house, the Hysteria Lane neighborhood, and the Sandlot are all based on what the Valley used to be, when everything was white and hunky-dory. It is not like that anymore, but Hollywood has still decided that there are some stories that could only be told in this place we call home.

2. The Valley is incredibly diverse, both rich and poor

It started off as a white suburb, but cheap housing opened the floodgates for us Brownies, Blackies, Darkies, Yellowees, and Light-skinndeds. The Valley is basically an amalgamation of ethnic enclaves. The differences are obvious. You can tell which town gets more money, and which ones don't. You can also tell which ethnic group has decided to post up and stake their claim to the Valley. Armenians live in Glendale. Upper-middle class Filipinos are moving to Northridge. Burbank is white and has a lot money. Latinos live in Sun Valley and North Hollywood stays poor. I'm not saying it's a race war. I am saying that it is very diverse. It's this type of diversity that gives a resider a unique, yet common, experience.

3. The celebrities live here

I think a lot of celebrities have at lease one home here. One reason is location: it's only 15 minutes away from Hollywood. Like I mentioned before, because of the concentrated rich/poor status, celebrities get to live it up in the nice areas or scale it down in the poor areas. We got those Jamba Juice/Starbucks areas and those 3-good-taco-stands-on-one-block areas, and they're all pretty good.

4. Everyone is a celebrity

If you live in the Valley, your name gets thrown out there, even when you're gone. I would say it's a curse and a blessing. Everyone has a back story in the Valley. And everyone has a distinctive personality. You ever hear about someone being "quite the character"? Everyone's a character in the Valley. It's a lot different here in Berkeley. Everyone here is pretty much cut from the same mold: "Study hard, get good job, live stable life, and maybe." Ranging from subtle to outrageous, a lot of people from the Valley have decided to go against the grain in terms of personality types. Think about it this way. Would you rather live in a place where almost everyone you meet, has an interesting, whether villainous or heroic, hopeful or depressing, sweetly simplistic or confusingly complicated, story? Or would you live in a place like the O.C. where your own story would just end up drowning in a monotonous sea of white? Having your name tossed around, especially among people you dislike, sucks some times, but it's better than people not knowing who you are at all.

5. Some things can only happen here

I'm pretty sure a lot of intriguing stuff happens everywhere else in the world. If you watch The Wire, you can tell a lot of crazy sh*t goes down in Baltimore, Maryland. But I think that there are experiences here that you can't experience anywhere else. The proximity to L.A., the diverse neighborhoods, the places to eat, the act-way-too-cool attitudes, the celebrity sightings, the personalities, all couldn't be possible in a place unlike the SFV.

If you've ever seen My Block on MTV, they did a special on Chicago and Lupe Fiasco was talking about his hood. He talked about seeing crack dealers outside of his window and yet, he didn't become a dealer. On the other hand, he wouldn't be the man you see today if he didn't see those things. That's my relationship with the Valley. I'm a better man for seeing the things that I saw, taking the opportunities I took, and avoiding the things that should have been avoided. I don't know if I'm coming back. Maybe I'll move to the rich area. But I remember exactly where I came from. There would be no me without the SFV.

"But you graduate when you make it up outta the streets"

Kanye West - Good Morning