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Los Angeles, in the author's dyspeptic view, is a city of pure illusion and artifice; it has cocktail lounges instead of bars, Angelinos are obsessed with sports and the Italian food is awful. A pop journalist and author of The Aesthetics of Rock, Meltzer left New York to live in Los Angeles in 1975. Taken in small doses, these slangy, semigrammatical pieces from the L.A. Weekly, the Village Voice and the underground press are sporadically amusing, but in the aggregate they pall. With titles like ""Napalm Newport Beach!'' and ``Voyage of the Dumb,'' these scribblings take readers inside rock clubs, a tattoo parlor, the L.A. County Fair, Watts, the Olympics and the dating scene. Meltzer's derisive contempt for Los Angeles comes off as sour grapes from a displaced New Yorker, and this journalistic collage is pretentious. (May)