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Los Angeles' Instagram-loving mayor has his very own profile in Vogue this month. Here are the highlights, including the fact that Garcetti has a turntable in his office.
There is a "La La Land" reference in the first sentence of the profile.
They literally couldn't go one sentence without referencing La La Land. Is that all Los Angeles is to you, Condé Nasty? Although, in fairness, the mention is in reference to the reopening of Angels Flight (the film had a scene on the famous funicular, the legality of whichwas questionable).
(Courtesy of Lionsgate)
Garcetti has an Ed Ruscha painting and a turntable in his office.
The office is a light, airy room brimming with nifty things, from a huge Ed Ruscha painting and an old-fashioned turntable (“Nothing like vinyl, right?”) to a basketball autographed by Laker great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
He could have gone into showbiz.
Garcetti is apparently "a fantastic piano player,” according to his actor friend Evan Arnold, and he dabbled in musical theater:
When Garcetti went east to Columbia University, he pictured a future in musical theater. He wrote the school’s renowned Varsity Show for two years with Brian Yorkey (who would go on to win the Tony for Next to Normal), but he also discovered a fascination with human rights and geopolitics. After earning a master’s in international affairs, he wound up going to Oxford on that Rhodes Scholarship.
Garcetti and his wife Amy Wakeland are very different. For instance, she prefers a low-sugar diet and he prefers a low-fat diet.
“My husband and I are extraordinarily different people at every level,” she says. “I prefer a low-sugar diet; he prefers a low-fat diet. I like to look at my calendar three days out and have everything planned. He does not like to look at his calendar until he gets up in the morning. He’s big-picture, and I’m a perfectionist who wants every little piece to be correct. He’s, like, ‘I got the mood of that speech correct,’ and I’m ‘How about the data?’ When we talk about homelessness, I’ll say, ‘I was just looking at the data, and the percentage of women who are homeless in relation to men is rising in the city.’ And he will say, ‘Let me tell you about this woman Mary I was speaking to today on Skid Row.’ ”
Um. Garcetti's wife compares him to Leslie Knope on "Parks and Recreation."
Wakeland affectionately compares her husband to a TV character she adores: Amy Poehler’s “enthusiastic, Pollyannaish” Leslie Knope on Parks and Recreation, who shares the couple’s sunny idealism about public service.
We get it, Garcetti is kind of hot. Like hot enough to play the mayor on TV.
At the center of the action is Mayor Eric Garcetti, a fit, square-jawed, gently graying 46-year-old who so thoroughly looks the part that he’s played fictional versions of L.A.’s mayor in movies and on TV.
Before he was actually the mayor of Los Angeles, then City Councilman Eric Garcetti appeared as “Ramon Quintero,” the fictional mayor of Los Angeles on the TNT show The Closer. He also reprised this role on Closer spinoff series Major Crimes.
Your hot mayor still doesn't like using the term "Sanctuary City"
Much has been made of Garcetti's hesitance to actually use the term "sanctuary city." He's found various workarounds, including referencing Los Angeles as a "city of sanctuary." In this profile, he again uses the words "sanctuary" and "city," but never in that exact order, without some modifier. Here's the quote:
“This is a city that not only provides sanctuary,” he tells his listeners calmly. “We are a place that will go further and defend our immigrants.” He ticks off some of the ways he’s had the city go against official administration policy, from putting together a $10 million legal-defense fund for those threatened with deportation to formally asking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers not to use the word police when they identify themselves during their raids.
But this Vogue profile actually gets into that very issue. Snaps for Vogue!
Of course, not everyone thinks he’s gone far enough. Outside his election-night celebration, a few dozen demonstrators carried placards urging the mayor to “take a stand”—and officially declare Los Angeles a sanctuary city. In fact, Garcetti says, the issue is more complicated than a mere label. “If a sanctuary city means that our police department does not enforce federal immigration laws, then we are one. But declaring yourself a ‘sanctuary city’ also signals to a lot of people that you are protecting hard-core criminals, which I don’t and I don’t believe in.” The real work lies in forcefully making the argument about why Trump’s policy is a bad one.
He leans forward with a slightly dreamy look and wonders out loud whether Trump might somehow produce one of those counterintuitive breakthrough moments like Nixon going to China.
Does anyone know what Ed Ruscha print Garcetti has in his office? Email us, tips@laist.com.
