City Hall has more red ink than Nicolas Cage, the Dodgers are a mess, and our pothole-pocked, traffic-clogged roads are really the worst in America.

But make no mistake, we love L.A.

No town like it, from the Chinese delicacies of the SGV to the surfing inadequacies of Venice. And, reading the latest issue of GQ, it looks like crazy-man director Werner Herzog likes it here too.

Here's what the mag and him have to say about it:

For the record, the principal reason Herzog gives for living in Los Angeles is his marriage to the 41-year-old photographer Lena, his third wife. But I think he also enjoys people's surprise at finding him here. As he argued a couple of years back during an event at the New York Public Library: “The last half century, almost every single important cultural trend and technological trend originated from California–like computers, like the free-speech movement, like accepting gay and lesbian people as an integral part of society…on and on and on.” Los Angeles, he likes to tell people, is the only city in America with any real substance.

This coming from a guy who was once shot during a television interview, walked a thousand miles across the Alps to propose to his wife, and thinks self-reflection, yoga and modern psychotherapy are “as wrong as the Spanish Inquisition … “

(And he directed Bad Lieutenant – Port of Call: New Orleans, so, yeah).

Thanks Werner. Means a lot.

[Official site].

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