I grew up in a town, a mile long and a quarter mile wide, overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Almost any photograph of the Manhattan skyline was taken from somewhere in that town. Those photographs represent the city as an image that could be captured in a single perspective. But that image contained countless stories: "There are nine million stories in the Naked City," went the opening to a television show, "and this is one of them." Within a few blocks, you could hear, in fact you would be told, stories like those that Doug McCulloh has to careen across the basin to hear. Stories mean different things in L.A. and images mean different things, because both are pretty hard to come by. "Here we are in the San Fernando Valley," began Bette Midler in a performance at Universal Amphitheater, "3 million people. 100 stories." That's a joke at the expense of suburban culture, but it also says something about the paucity, or perhaps even the irrelevance, of narratives in Southern California.

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