The angels who want to defect

摘要

When a city contains within its 300-mile boundary a coastline, several oilfields full of bobbing derricks, tracts of desert and a large forest, a mountain range is not the prodigious oddity it would be in most urban environments. Until now the Santa Monica mountains have been just one more aspect of the multi-faceted splendour of Los Angeles. Yet this east-west range may be the seam along which the city is about to split. A movement is afoot to break the San Fernando Valley, which lies to the north of the mountains, away from the larger portion of the city that lies to their south, creating two cities out of the one that exists today.