What Is It About Cities?

So the beloved and I were downtown recently, noting parts of the landscape that he recognized from playing Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. This was a hoot--how our respective interactions with creative works informed how we met the built environment of Los Angeles.

What a marvelous thing is a city! It is among my favorite things humans have created. Having grown up in a suburb myself, where everyone was adamant about both their Christianity and their fear of Chicago, I found the talk about the City of God in Revelations pretty hilarious. When earth becomes Heaven, it will be in the guise of a "highly dangerous" human creation, dangerous by its very design? I don't think that street paved with gold and filled with the glory of the Lord(?) will be at all "mean." I do quite like the idea that Heaven--in being Heaven exactly--will still be somehow "dangerous." (And what would that mean at that point?) I also think something vast and subtle is being expressed poetically and theologically by this big bad decadent city of Los Angeles--Weirdass Storyteller to the World--having been named originally for the Mother of God, a mention of St Francis of Assisi and yes, obviously, the Angels.

(My Spanish and my memory are not good enough to call up the original name for L.A., but as I recall, it translates as something along the lines of "The City of Our Lady of the Angels of That Little Garden That St Francis Liked So Well." Consult a wiser head than mine.)

To you who are better poets and theologians than myself--tell me your thoughts on this.