Is it a New York thing? Menand has reviewed Thomas Pynchon’s “Inherent Vice” for “The New Yorker,” and I think he’s generally got a handle on it — although I don’t concur with his assessment that it’s fluff, I understand how he might say so.

But I think he’s got LA and noir entirely wrong. From the middle of the review:

Pynchon’s novel is set in Los Angeles, which is by no means a departure from hardboiled tradition. This is partly because mystery writers have tended to be screenwriters as well (or wished that they were), and so have lived near Hollywood, and also because movie and television crime stories have been shot in and around L.A. for a century, since it’s cheaper not to travel. Marlowe and Archer both work in L.A. So does Walter Mosley’s detective, Easy Rawlins.  Southern California, in real life a place of few dark alleys and little weather, is bona-fide noir territory.

As Richard Rayner’s new book “A Bright and Guilty Place” shows, mystery and noir and Hollywood didn’t coincide because of happenstance and wannabe screenwriters but because of the cycle of crime, corruption and reform that was at the core of the city’s public life in the 1920s and ’30s. We have lots of dark alleys, thank you very much, and it’s exactly the contrast between the brilliant sunlight and our morally dank actions that gives noir its power.

Later, Menand writes that Pynchon’s protagonist, Doc:

does walk down mean streets (or the L.A. equivalent: bikers, drug dealers, sex-club performers, nefarious dentists) and is not himself mean.

Here Menand refers to the quote from Raymond Chandler with which he’d started the piece: “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean.” But Chandler was himself referring to Los Angeles, the city at the center of much of his work. The parenthetical should not read “the LA equivalent” but “the PYNCHON equivalent” — because the dentists here are no more nefarious than they are anywhere else.

Los Angeles is an enormous, complicated city, and I don’t know if anyone can get it exactly right. But it pains me when someone as smart as Louis Menand doesn’t seem to try, instead recycling old thin cliches.

On Friday, I was parked for 3 hours in a neighborhood full of wee million-dollar bungalows, surrounded by cars worth a lot more than my 9 year-old Toyota. Why, then, the asshole decided to crash through my back window with a rock is mysterious. The window-smasher didn’t get much: not my stereo, not the emergency five bucks in the glove compartment, not the change or the books.

The take: a 1995 SXSW giveaway canvas bag (my grocery/book bag); a black cardigan sweater that shed its sequins and bled black when it got wet ($5); a cream-colored vintage nightgown coverup with a scary bloodlike stain on the front with fur collar and cuffs ($5).

If there was a logic to the break-in, it must have been that fur. Anyone who’s seen fur collars in thrift stores knows they’re not worth diddly, but I figure the rock-wielder didn’t know any better. I’m bummed, though — I liked wearing those sweaters, and they’re too crummy to be sold and too little to be worn by just about anyone.

And the window cost me just shy of $200 to fix.

I live in a much worse neighborhood; I’ve been mugged here, and last year a homeless guy was burned to death a few blocks away. But never in broad daylight has my car been broken into in Koreatown. Or in the dark, either. It’s immensely frustrating to go to a good neighborhood only to be robbed.

With all of California facing a budget crunch, the city of LA is facing difficult cutbacks. The first round of funding cuts has been proposed — recommended by the city’s top budget official — and will be considered by the LA City Council on Monday. On the chopping block:

* $1.45 million from the $79-million library budget
* $800,000 from the city’s tree-trimming program
* $1 million from the crossing guards program
* $650,000 from the program to install more left-turn arrow signals at city intersections.
* A freeze on new hires at the City Attorney’s Office and City Controller’s Office, with limited exceptions
* $1.92 million from the Los Angeles Police Department program to replace older squad cars

Now I’m not a city budgeteer but I can see that the targets of many of these proposed cuts are things that are considered nonessential. And it kills me that in a big, difficult city like Los Angeles, where one in five children live in poverty, that anyone thinks that public libraries are nonessential.

Just yesterday I blogged at Jacket Copy about Andrew Carnegie and his libraries. Yes, Carnegie was a bad bad capitalist. But when he turned to philanthropy, libraries were one of his top priorities. Without his work, the US wouldn’t have a tradition of free libraries. And Carnegie cared about libraries because he saw them as one of the real ways that individuals could control their own destinies.

The new Malcolm Gladwell book, Outliers, seems to imply that individuals can’t. Fuck that. People are left out of the big fat clichéd-but-I-still-love-it American dream if we leave them out. If we cut off their resources — like free libraries.

I urge the City Council to not make any cuts at all to our library budgets. Period.

But if they must, here’s an idea: Make cuts to those in the wealthiest communities first.

Someone who lives in Beverly-Hills-adjacent Brentwood is better able to drive their car for library services than the bus-bound parents of kids in, say, El Sereno. People who live in Silverlake — where the median home price is still almost $600,000, more than $400 per square foot — can afford to buy the books they want. Leave the free libraries for the households earning the county’s average income of $36,687.

This would probably be politically stupid — affluent and engaged constituents might well protest losing library hours, library projects, library staff. But that just shows they want their libraries.

Libraries are important. And they should be available to the members of our community who have the fewest resources, the hardest fight, the farthest way to go.

Maybe you heard about the homeless man who was burned to death in Los Angeles last week. According to witnesses, a Honda Civic stopped; some teens or 20-somethings jumped out with a gas can, poured gasoline on the homeless man and lit him on fire. At this point these claims are alleged — no one knows exactly what liquid came out of the gas can (although the area later smelled of gas), no one knows the exact age of the young men who jumped out of the car, because they have not been found.

Local TV station KTLA reports: “One resident, who did not want to be identified out of fear for his safety, said he spoke to someone who allegedly witnessed the crime.” Why would a resident fear for his safety? Because the man fears retribution from the perpetrators, or their friends — there is, not surprisingly, speculation that the incident was gang-related.

The man was killed on 3rd Street between New Hampshire and Berendo, in front of a closed dentist’s office near a donut shop and the legendarily cheap and veggie-friendly Mariella’s burrito joint. He died three-quarters of a mile from my apartment, seven blocks away.

The LA Times aptly described the neighborhood as “a densely populated, diverse neighborhood west of downtown.” It’s not a bad neighborhood, and where I live is a slightly better pocket than where the homeless man camped out. But this tree — tagged by the notorious 18th Street gang — is halfway in between here and there. Tagging is everywhere in Los Angeles — but spray-painting a tree? How incredibly stupid and lame is that?

Just as stupid and lame as the skater kids that were trying to break off the lower branches of a tree this afternoon around the corner from my house. I was coming home from a coffeeshop and walked down the sidewalk watching 8 of them hanging out on the steps of a mini-mall, urging one on. He jumped, grabbed a lower branch, and when it didn’t snap off, tried wrapping it around the tree in an effort to break it. Two adults stood on the corner, watching mutely.

I’m the one who asked them what they were doing. Instead of running off when being challenged by an authority figure, they didn’t care. Shut up, they said. No really, I said, stop fucking with the tree. When the kid holding the branch didn’t let go, I grabbed his skateboard off the ground. Hey! he said, and his friends all stood up. I thought that would get your attention, I said, and gave the skateboard back. Leave the tree alone, I said. Go away hippie, one said (What I didnt say: hippie? I was punk rock before you were born, asshole.) What are you guys doing here, anyway? I said. Go back to Pittsburgh, one said, reading my shirt. Fine, I said, but first why don’t you take off. Leave the tree alone. They stood there watching me. Do you want me to call the police? I said. I skate, I don’t want to call the police, but I will. One guy — a nasty guy — he came up to me. I can’t remember what he said then. He was very close. He was not nice.

And I was getting scared. Seriously, 8 guys, none of them budging, just waiting for me to walk away so they could go back to fucking with the trees on my corner. The guy who had been fucking with the tree came up, standing as close to his friend, trying to deescalate. It’s cool man, he said. He caught my eye. He wasn’t nasty. I think he was older.

This is my neighborhood, I said.

This is our neighborhood, they said.

My iphone was in my hand. I started dialing and walked around the corner. The two adults were standing there, still watching, and they were afraid. I decided to call the LA info line to report a nuisance disturbance — I didn’t really want to call the cops — but was transferred to the police anyway. As I was on hold I stood on the sidewalk watching the corner; one kid and then another would poke his head around to see if I was still there. Eventually, they all came wooshing up as a group on their skateboards, and I ducked in the doorway of a sandwich place to stay out of range.

“If you see them again,” the police officer told me, “call us right away.” He didn’t understand — I don’t care about kids on skateboards, I care about kids on skateboards fucking up my neighborhood. Or their neighborhood. Which is exactly the problem.