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:
Out on the "great flat" of the Los Angeles Basin, winners and losers in dozens of city elections were tentatively adding up what their voters intended.
Where We Are:
The Woman in Blue Reading a Letter isn't about letters or women. It's about the domestication of gazing and the color blue.
Where We Are:
A question about a boulevard leads to a memory of a boy encountering some of the meanings of nature in Los Angeles.
Where We Are:
Bugs, bones, birds, and millions upon million more things fill the museum's collections, second only to the Smithsonian's. But there's nothing dusty about this 100-year-old archive of what was and what is Los Angeles.
Where We Are:
An alphabet soup of the promoters, players, and policies are shaping Los Angeles. It's not an appetizing mix.
Where We Are:
The highways of L.A. remember heroes, bureaucrats, and termed out pols. Overlapping and conflicting memorials glimpsed at 65 miles an hour are an imperfect memory, but the system can't be fixed.
Where We Are:
The persistence of things is part burden, part murmured dialog. Time slipping is our common condition, and we're never wholly new.
Where We Are:
Ghosts, gangsters, glamour, and grime are all part of the heritage of downtown's Hall of Justice. The iconic building from Jazz Age Los Angeles is being restored after nearly 20 years of abandonment.
Where We Are:
The distinction between east and west in Los Angeles has been a fixture of the city's landscape from the beginning. But does that distinction -- even though it persists -- shape what Los Angeles is becoming?
Where We Are:
The city's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance succeeded in turning empty office buildings into residential lofts. Downtown needs even more ideas for building tomorrow's city.
Where We Are:
The scandal of priestly abuse, abetted by silence, leaves priests and the faithful less able to minister to each other.
Where We Are:
Making something out of the American landscape, one house at a time.
Where We Are:
What would you chart as a guide to the city you know? Beaches, radio stations, Hollywood beauty salons, taquerías, swimming pools, the other downtowns of Los Angeles?
Where We Are:
As cars and trucks become more fuel efficient and more all electric and hybrid vehicles take to the road, states are seeing gas tax revenues shrink.
Where We Are:
The Getty's "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940 - 1990" and the Huntington's "Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream" consider how Los Angeles sought to be forever modern.
Where We Are:
The sight of an orange tree, laden with golden fruit on a cold winter afternoon, remains a guarantor of Southern California's mythic qualities.
Where We Are:
Cities are supposed to carry out the state's affordable housing mandates. Except the state has clawed back the money that's supposed to build the homes that working-class Californians need.
Where We Are:
No NFL team has expressed "serious interest" in moving to Los Angeles, and the game clock runs out in six weeks.
Where We Are:
Southern California has its own way of celebrating the New Year, by taking aim at easterners who might yearn to live -- warm and snowless -- in our presumed paradise.
Where We Are:
Social and political forces are shaping neighborhoods to become more dependent on walking and cycling. Greater risk is an unintended consequence.
SoCal Focus is a daily blog about the people, places and issues in and around Southern California.
I Am Los Angeles: Strings of Success
Sasha is content just to be living his life on his own terms, doing something he thoroughly enjoys: building and playing guitars.
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