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
Where We Are:
That the Los Angeles region is pretty dense already is the counter-intuitive finding of a new Census Bureau report.
Where We Are:
The palm is definitely found; CEQA is severely questioned; Proposition 13's doubters have their own. And "where we are" gets a bit clearer.
Where We Are:
Messing with the wet concrete of a new sidewalk is a trope of suburban comedy -- Dennis the Menace meets exasperated workman. But what persists after is a different kind of challenge.
Where We Are:
Plastic? Disposable? Shallow? A palm tree at least 150 years old is a reminder that Los Angeles has a durable, authentic past.
Where We Are:
The breakwater that separates Long Beach from the Catalina Channel was one of the great works of construction in the 1940s. Today, the City of Long Beach is moving closer to taking some of the breakwater down.
Where We Are:
Once a corporate record of how Southern California was electrified, the Edison collection at the Huntington Library is now something more -- time machine, site of enigmas, and zone of investigation of the city's modern dichotomies.
Where We Are:
Commencement address delivered to the graduates of the Master's Program in Urban Sustainability of Antioch University Los Angeles.
Where We Are:
Architect Richard Neutra explored domesticated modernity in his mid-20th Century homes. House-proud collectors today pay a premium to own one. Now you can build your own "new" Neutra. But why?
Where We Are:
Looking at the "found photographs" in the Huntington's archive of Southern California Edison photographs and finding why the darkness is such chilling fun.
Where We Are:
Many of the images were taken by by G. Haven Bishop whose work, almost entirely unknown today, has the subtlety and richness of Julius Shulman's photographs.
Where We Are:
Would expressly shielding cities from liability lead to more dog parks? Lawyers, insurance providers, city council members, and legislators don't necessarily agree that it would.
Where We Are:
The "undecorated shed" that was the mass-produced tract house changed the American landscape, with consequences that are still to be fully appreciated.
Where We Are:
| Image from the author's collection Bill Deverell handed me a book the other day, with the recommendation that the author had put together a good story. The book is Building Home: Howard F. Ahmanson and the Politics of...
Where We Are:
Skid Row is a "Petri dish" for cultivating human misery. That now includes a strain of tuberculosis that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had tagged as unique to downtown. What began as a "health crisis" has become a "moral crisis."
Where We Are:
It's summer. Ladies are lunching and window-shopping. Limousines are lined up on Wilshire Boulevard. Chauffeurs are idling in front of Perino's.
Where We Are:
A professor of Architectural History takes my hometown tour, where the everyday nearly always fails to be ironic and the quotidian does not always disappoint.
Where We Are:
For a few hours this week, we (meaning our avatar Voyager 1) might had slipped the surly bonds of the solar system. It turns out we didn't.
Where We Are:
The Sahara mustard -- a fast-growing invasive weed -- has begun to crowd out desert wildflowers. Ecologies and economies are at risk.
Where We Are:
AEG is off the market, its leadership in disarray. What's to become of Farmer's Field? Only the NFL knows.
Where We Are:
How long, like a dull echo, does a killing reverberate? For a death in an onion field in Kern County, it's been fifty years.
SoCal Focus is a daily blog about the people, places and issues in and around Southern California.
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