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D.J. Waldie

D. J. Waldie (2017)

D. J. Waldie is the author of "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir" and "Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles," among other books about the social history of Southern California. He is a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Times.

D. J. Waldie (2017)
Apprehensions
I've walked the same way for decades and I still see some detail along the way that has been there all these years that I've not seen before.
Seduced by maps
All but the most utilitarian of Los Angeles maps through most of the 20th century had a divided purpose. They charted some aspects of the actual city, but they also fantasized a city of desire.
In praise of follies
At the corner of Hayden Avenue and National Boulevard in Culver City and across from the new Expo light rail line from downtown rises the near-rhyming Samitaur Tower.
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Packed
Art across town and across decades - juxtapositions of politics and painterly abstraction, of passionate commitment to liberty and books packed in a crate.
Bridge and tunnel
Noir-adjacent authenticity is elusive in the new Downtown, withholding. "A lot of nights there it looks like the Westside, and that's not why we moved down here," said one resident.
It's been a year
I'm leaving Lakewood City Hall after three decades.The sum of my years as a local government bureaucrat? A moral imagination.
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Persistence
Nearly everything else has been erased, except for the people of Los Angeles.
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Center of it all
Neglectful Angeleños seem to have left the matter of the city's heart up to others, Perhaps we should inquire what's in their's.
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Domestic bliss
In downtown Los Angeles, over 160 years, we've been domesticating the same neighborhood again and again.
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New York, New York
Everyone who reads is a citizen of New York, just as everyone who goes to the movies lives part time in L.A.
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What's our problem?
I met the other day with curators of the county's Natural History Museum who are working on a long-term exhibit that will try to explain what Los Angeles means.
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They don't know at city hall
Los Angeles is fatally stalled in a half-finished revolution.
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