Where We Are
“Where We Are” is about the place we call L.A. and the often avoided conversation Angeleños have about its past and its conflicted present. I believe places matter, but their intersection with our lives is often obscured or ignored. And if we reach out in longing, we grasp mostly clichés of a city that’s always painted in the colors of smog, that’s always seen from a height, from a seat in a descending jetliner, from a freeway overpass. From there, the city looks like a collection of absences: the absence of hierarchies, of a center, of any authenticity. Finally, we’re absent, too, displaced and wrapped in reveries of substitute cities more adequate to the demands of our desire. “Where We Are” questions, argues, reflects, and in other ways challenges these Los Angeles clichés. I’m not a historian. I don’t live in the City of Los Angeles. I don’t drive. My qualifications for writing about a place I love. ~ D.J. Waldie
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Where We Are:
The friendly docent who chatted with me seemed a little dazed at what it will require to take the Crystal Cathedral and turn it into a Catholic church.
Where We Are:
Southern California is being refigured by the imaginations of all of its interpreters. "Ghost" inhabitants are making their historical claims. Shadows are being illuminated by a new generation of authors, academics, and cultural critics.
Where We Are:
Shelter took on a new meaning under the threat of global thermonuclear war. Decades of uneasy peace have followed. "Shelterists" are sure that it won't last.
Where We Are:
Remaking the Los Angeles landscape balances risks and benefits. That balance has been part of the Los Angeles River revitalization plan. Can it be achieved for the Long Beach breakwater?
Where We Are:
Stone and glass. Anchored and slipping away. Wayfaring and rest, on a Palos Verdes bluff.
Where We Are:
The click-click-click-click of a sprinkler on the hottest morning of summer tolls passages into September.
Where We Are:
I'm not - to myself - an authentic Angeleño. But my status as a tourist in the country of wheels does allow me to be dispassionate about those who are drivers.
Where We Are:
The investigation is widening to include grand jury testimony by several state legislators. More records of contractors have been subpoenaed. Behind the corruption probe are the ties between small time politicians and big city political operatives.
Where We Are:
The makers of California's disastrous electrical deregulation scheme were convinced that the market they constructed was infallible. That corrupting belief led them blindly into the hands of market manipulators.
Where We Are:
Termed-out state legislators fill city council seats that would have been filled in the past by crusaders, activists, and community organizers. Conflict is muted in a body that has begun to look like an adjunct to Sacramento. And that's not a good thing.
Where We Are:
"All the world's a stage" was a cliché well before the glum Jacques, in "As You Like It," trots out his set speech on the Seven Ages of Man. For Shakespeare, however much "stage" and "world" were interchangeable, both were in a place he never entirely left.
Where We Are:
The files of "days" and "weeks" proclaimed serve to measure the past's fears and hopes, stereotypes and traditions, the bureaucratic and the tragic.
Where We Are:
"Ever" and "never" continue redrawing a presumed paradise on the city's body, never and ever meeting the demands of our desire.
Where We Are:
America's streets bristle with public conversations that aren't necessarily for you or me. Should city councils care?
Where We Are:
The world I know seemed to have fallen still.
Where We Are:
Science proves that Angeleños are slackers, easily distracted, and barely rational. But that's okay, because it's not our fault. The problem is our climate.
Where We Are:
The homely sugar beet begat development in both Los Angeles and Orange counties at the turn of the 20th century. The city of Los Alamitos began with sugar, but celebrating the beet isn't entirely sweet.
Where We Are:
Long Beach tops the nation in spending on ice cream according to some statistics. Meanwhile, city council members plan to silence the annoying tunes of the vendors who sell frozen treats.
Where We Are:
At the Vineyard junction between Venice and downtown in 1913, a Pacific Electric trolley slammed into two stalled trains. For one survivor, "The sights we saw ... were sickening and horrible."
Where We Are:
The new permanent exhibition "Becoming Los Angeles" opens on Sunday at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in Exposition Park. I had a small part in the press preview on Wednesday and got to say a few words about what "becoming" might mean to Angeleños.
SoCal Focus is a blog about the people, places, and issues in and around Southern California.
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