"It's got the perfect L.A. vibe-music, fashion and Hollywood, without the attitude."

In a city where architectural landmarks serve as punctuation for run-on strip malls and shopping centers, streetlight banners help define neighborhoods. In Hollywood, now in the midst of a Times Square-like redevelopment, the banners promote the play "Art" with the original Broadway cast. Farther south, on the section of La Brea Avenue that slices through elegant Hancock Park - where Buff Chandler (Los Angeles's equivalent of Brook Astor) made her home fefore she died - they announce the "Dosso Dossi" exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Closer to the newly resurgent Miracle Mile, home to the ultra-hip Conga Room, they trumpet a Diego Rivera show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

In Silverlake, the banners leave nothing to inference. Signed by the silverlake Chamber of Commerce, they simply read, "Silverlake Rocks." Put aside preconceived notions of L.A., all ye who enter here: if your're hoping to see Rita Wilson and Tom Hanks out for a breezy Sunday brunch with the kids, don't hold your breath. Chiseled, tanned hardbodies wearing spandex and roller blades, a staple of Southern California iconography, just to not exist here. And the nearest Wolfgang Puck eatery is a goof five miles-and five-worlds-away.

"When we're looking at Silverlake," says Bibbe Hansen, a rock musician who fled here years ago after a stint at Andy Warhol's Factory to become a doyenne of the neighborhood, "we're looking beyond the obvious, oh-so-tasteful, oh-so-white, oh-so-West Hollywood, resting-on-your-Laurels Canyon." To describe Silverlake's style, Hansen reaches for a metaphor: "It's not for nothing that they say collage is the aart form of the 20th century."

If Hansen is right, Silverlake is ground zero for the art of modern living. In the largest sense, Silverlake style is an urban melange that draws most consistently from the edge of pop culture. Think Betty Page rather than Marilyn Monroe. Irving Klaw rather than Bert Stern. Allison Anders, not Nora Ephron. Russ Meyer, not Zalman King.

Its look is Patio Goth, an enthusiastic embrace of the innocent (generic adolescent styles) and the sinister (prodigious piercings, elaborate tattoos, hair that hints at the head full of quandary). It's not a pose in this neck of the woods, it's an open admission or even celebration of the dichotomy of the human experience. The Silverlake crowd is just as comfortable at a poolside barbecue as at a blood ritual by the local performance artist Ron Athey.

Silverlakers revel in being multifaceted. Hansen, who is pushing 50, is a veteran of the L.A. punk scene and continues to hone her music, playing guitar in Back Fag, a local band consisting of three teen-age boys, two white women in black face and a boy in drag-all fronted by a seven-fot-tall, African-American drag queen named Vaginal Davis.

"We put the fun in dysfunctional," Hansen says with a laugh, speaking of the Silverlake scene as one would a family. Actually, Silverlake is a family to Hansen, whose two sons, Beck (yes, that Beck) and Channing were born near by in Pico Union and still make their homes in Silverlake.

Hemmed in by Interstate 5 to the north, the Hollywood Freeway to the south, Los Feliz to the west and Echo Park to the east, Silverlake has always rocked. It was a hotbed of leftist politics in the 30's  and 40's; modern gay activism took shape here in the 50's with the founding of the Mattachine Society, and Silverlake's current representative to the City Council is a leftist lesbian named Jackie Goldberg...