The cover of D.J. Waldie’s “Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles” (Angel City) distills a collage of Los Angeles as a place of unbounded land, limitless dreams, personal reinvention and longing, all set against an endless blue sky. Waldie’s essays reflect his own native Angeleno’s view of a city “that is struggling with self-definition and has been for a very long time.” He will be offering insight, history and prognostics tonight at 7:30 p.m. at Village Books. Waldie, author of “Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir” and “Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out,” dissects the social, political and cultural body of Los Angeles. While he’s recognized for his knowledge and collective memory, he thinks of himself more as a “repackager” of the new interpreters of LA. His book reviews and opinion pieces appear in the Los Angeles Times, and other essays have been published in numerous magazines. The first essay in “Where We Are” was written in 1999, the most recent was written in the first months of 2005, but each chapter remains relevant for its depth of understanding and for providing an invaluable context. “It seemed appropriate to collect my essays on the environment, government reform, dramatic changes in demographics, the Los Angeles River,” he told the Palisadian-Post. Unlike other major cities, Los Angeles has always been hard to define. “We imagine that large, charismatic buildings such as Disney Hall and the cathedral define a community,” he ways. “They give it a certain style, stature in rankings of important cities, but won’t define what the city has become. I think something else will. “I have a feeling that something is changing about Los Angeles. There are the demographics and ethnic changes, but in reality, L. A. is finished. It is no longer possible to exit to the edge of LA.’to build a new Lakewood, a new Chatsworth. We’ve used up the available geography.” A good place to begin reading Waldie’s book is to learn the history of the river, which traces in several essays in the book. The Spanish, who claimed El Pueblo de Los Angeles, situated their outpost along the Porci’ncula which fed crops while establishing its wily, erratic behavior of cyclical flooding. As the city grew, the river became the hierarchical baseline’the poorer folk lived in the flood plain. While Anglo L.A. literally moved up the hill to lots on Bunker Hill, California Heights and Mount Pleasant, the Mestizo and immigrant residents lived at the foot of the hills, on bottomland that flooded about every 10 years. “When speculators subdivided the Adams district, Hollywood and Beverly Hills, the new suburbs conformed to the pattern already set for the Anglo city’go west, away from the river.” The far-flung city foreclosed forever the option that Los Angeles would look familiar, like New York or Chicago, with an identifiable center, cohesive transportation system and intersecting communities. “One of the truths of New York City is that you can go from Park Avenue to Hell’s Kitchen in a few minutes. You can go from wealth to working class to rough areas and come to understand something about all of them,” Waldie says. “Parts of L.A. are balkanized, walled off because of difficulties of connectedness.” In reconsidering our city, Waldie believes that it is our shared stories that bring us together. He offers history lessons that help clarify why Los Angeles is the way it is. And he notes changes that give a glimpse of the sort of city we are becoming. “We can’t talk about L. A. the way we used to. L.A. is not L.A. any more. It is a different place economically, physically. We no longer have the manufacturing and white collar economy that made the city in the past. The aviation industry is gone, there are no Fortune 500 companies headquartered here.” Waldie believes that the new city hasn’t come into view yet because we haven’t learned how to see it yet. “I don’t think L.A. will be a whole lot different in the years ahead, but there are some changes ahead that will help clarify.” The gradual process of reforming local government, such as the new city charter, neighborhood councils and local planning commissions, gives the impression that the city’s political leaders are trying to give voice to the disparate regions of the city. He is impressed with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and credits him with “bringing eyeballs back to local government,” with the caution that “I want his platform to be as energetic as he is.” Waldie tackles transportation, housing and environmental issues in his carefully crafted prose, which Patt Morrison characterizes in the book’s foreword “as deceptively and richly minimalist as Jackie Kennedy’s wardrobe.” A true L.A. apostle, Waldie lives in the house his parents bought in 1946 in Lakewood’the humble little suburb that epitomizes for him what Los Angeles promised and promises. “I am convinced that the suburban tract house of the region did and does represent an achievement of enormous significance. There was a moment in the American experience when the working class confronted a future of walkup tenement life. After World War II, millions of working class people came down from the fourth-floor tenement into a house. Millions of lives benefited from that opportunity.”
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