REPORTERS LOOK CLOSELY AT HOST CITY.

Byline: Dana Bartholomew Staff Writer

First came the Los Angeles civic lessons. Then came the whining when journalists got stuck in rush hour. Then came the downers close to dark.

With each passing hour, the tone of stories filed by the nation's press Saturday about Los Angeles and the Democratic National Convention downtown evolved from civic-minded to downright grumpy.

Many reporters seemed miffed - as well as mystified - by America's second-largest city.

The Associated Press, which emptied its Washington and state desks of 300 staffers to cover the DNC festivities, tried hard to wrap its arms around a city that simply won't be hugged.

``Define Los Angeles. Chances are it won't be easy,'' writes AP writer Tom Verdin in a lead-off to a story sent to papers across the country midmorning Saturday.

``Lacking a defining symbol and sprawling across cultural boundaries as diverse as its geographical ones, Los Angeles is as perplexing to outsiders as it is intriguing. It's a place of mythical proportions, embodied as much by Mickey Mouse as Rodney King.''

Los Angeles as decentralized sprawl. L.A. as epicenter of glitz. L.A. as capital of cultural diversity. L.A. as a power vacuum. L.A. as Hispanic political powerhouse. L.A. as white controller of the arts and civic centers.

Some reporters rehashed the terrible '90s - the Rodney King riots, the Northridge Earthquake; the North Hollywood shootout and ``the tawdry spectacle of the O.J. Simpson trial'' as the city's current symbols. Others focused on a city on the economic mend. Yet most were kind to the City of Angels.

AP reporter John Rogers gushed about everything in L.A. being only 20 minutes away.

``It's part of the beauty of being in Los Angeles that if you're hunkered down in the San Fernando Valley on one of those torturously hot August afternoons and you develop a sudden hankering to be at the beach,'' he writes, `` you can be there in 20 minutes.''

Unless, of course, there's traffic.

Humorist Dave Barry offered his own traffic report: ``I have rented a car and will be `on the scene' here, reporting all the news to you, just as soon as I figure out the freeway system. So you'll never hear from me again.''

Columnists, like the Democratic delegates in Los Angeles 40 years ago, whined about being stuck, in Barry's words, in ``hotels some as far away as Oregon.''

``It's so hot,'' groused Frank Cerabino of Cox News Service in his afternoon dispatch, ``Al Gore may just blurt out that he invented the air conditioner.''

At least one writer carped on L.A.'s Y2K celebration dud.

``Some view it as a city too lazy, too diverse, too dysfunctional or simply too spread out to throw a really good party,'' writes the AP's Rogers, one of the rare early filers who forgot to put sugar into his coffee.

``It's been called a city with all the personality of a paper cup - by Raymond Chandler, no less, who may have been the city's best writer.''

But it was the Philadelphia Inquirer's Nita Lelyveld, filing a Los Angeles story just before the dinner hour, who expressed the darkest description of Los Angeles' hospitality.

``Blame it on geography. Blame it on a laid-back Southern Californian apathy. Blame it on ever-lingering memories of the riots and mayhem in its past,'' Lelyveld writes in her article criticizing L.A.'s undecorated downtown and lack of ``rah-rah spirit.''

``Somehow, the nation's second-largest city isn't quite sure how to approach the Democratic National Convention descending upon it this week - whether to welcome the cast of thousands or run.''