Where We Are

We’re not at home in America. And how could we be? How could we make a home here when what is called home is always framed – by convictions of agency and autonomy – in terms of other places or, increasingly, of non- places? Where no locale is immune from the certainty that the alternative – something more adequate to the demands of desire – lies just beyond the next bend in the road? (Which should not be confused with “Manifest Destiny” or the “frontier spirit.”)

We’re not at home in America, and not because of historical necessity or libidinal adolescence. (A full account of the acquisition of any American place is yet to be made.) We’re not at home, and being footloose is a symptom of American unease with the idea of home. We’re housed, surely. We’re at our desks. We’ve taken cover. We’re interned. But we’re not at home. A gift America has given the world is homelessness.

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Around five million Catholics live in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles (which includes Los Angeles County and Ventura and Santa Barbara counties). The archdiocese is commonly thought to have the largest Catholic population of any diocese in the nation . . . a population that is growing, despite the inroads made by evangelical Protestant churches in Latino communities.

Catholic Los Angeles is the “second city” to New York – historically the American diocese with the greatest political significance to the Vatican. From the perspective of Rome, Los Angeles is only a step behind in significance, partly because Los Angeles in the mid-20th century successfully transitioned the church from urban ethnic enclaves to suburban all-American assimilation.

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I have an intense recollection of a particular summer day. I’m very young and I’m playing hide-and-seek in our house with my older brother.

It’s that time in the evening in southern California when the air outside is still light, but shadows in the room fill completely.

The house we lived was small even then for a Californian house – less than 1,000 square feet – but because I’m small too, even this diminished space seems large to me.

I’m standing in the doorway to the bedroom I would go on sharing with my brother for another fifteen years.

The last of the light has almost gone from the room, as if the light had been condensed out of the air. And my knees actually begin to knock out of fear. I’m afraid of what isn’t in the room. I fear my own absence.

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Sometime in 1939 or 1940 a planner sketched out a concept for downtown. It would have assembled existing and new government buildings and oriented them toward the city plaza of the 1840s and the newly built Union Station.

Seduced by the neo-classical follies of fascist Italy, the plan put the old plaza in the clutches of a grand and brutal county administration building overlooking a Roman hippodrome. Only here, the chariots have been replaced by autos. Spring Street would have passed through portals in the encircling wings and been divided, just as in a Roman stadium, by an island. How anyone would have crossed this racetrack on foot is left unclear.

Olvera Street hangs off to one side, a block or so of “old Los Angeles” that had been recreated as a tourist attraction at the beginning of the 1930s.

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Because of the jet stream.

At about 30,000 feet (approximately where commercial jets fly), a band of fast moving, low pressure air above the northern hemisphere flows over large cells of low pressure and around high pressure cells.

Given direction by this invisible and mobile topography, the jet stream loops north and south and meanders east and west. And as the jet stream moves, low pressure systems below it – associated with disturbed air and storms – follow. In a planetary feedback loop, the faster the winds in jet stream above, the more troubled the air below.

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Bill Deverell, Daniel Lewis, and Peter Westwick, members of Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, ruminated on the end of southern California’s aerospace culture in a recent posting to LA Observed. They bookended a century of invention and innovation with the opening of the Los Angeles air show (January 10 to January 20, 1910) and the announcement in early January 2010 of the relocation of the Northrop Grumman headquarters from Los Angeles to the Washington D.C. area.

Northrop Grumman was not only the last corporate giant of the Age of Aerospace in southern California, it also was one of a dwindling number of major corporations headquartered in the Los Angeles area. According to LA Business Journal Editor Charles Crumpley, “When the Fortune 500 list came out last spring, Los Angeles County was home to 14 companies. . . . Since that list came out, DaVita Inc. announced it was moving its headquarters . . . and last week Northrop announced its departure. That brings L.A. County’s total down to 12.”

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The room you’ve just left. It remembers. It haunts itself with memories of you lest you not return. The ordinary world, at least in part. It remembers the aspirations of the builder of that half-empty office building from the 1920s near downtown. It remembers passersby in the pattern of the terrazzo entry that, carpet like, occupied the whole frontage of a movie theater that’s since become a Pentecostal temple. Even the landscape remembers, although its memories are harder to discern.

We assume, as part of the city’s dystopian mythology, that nothing remains of even the recent past in Los Angeles to draw us away from the insistent demands of the present. That’s partly true, as this posting by Curbed LA illustrates (highlighting some of the recently demolished memories of the city).

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I’m no national hyphenate. It would be an impertinence and a form of dress-up. (I wore a costume – cassock and surplice as a altar boy – and didn’t like it much then.) But my name is borderline Scots, and I’ve made the pointless trip to see where my great-grandfather was born in Dalkeith and his father’s grave in Lanark. Of them and their kind nothing remains except a tombstone, overgrown with evergreens when I saw it.

There’s no owning that. Everyone (named and unnamed) who might connect my ordinariness to theirs died long ago into other people’s memories or else dispersed to all the places where English was nominally spoken – Tasmania, Wyoming, Canada, Boston, Brooklyn, and Mauritius. They went to China, too, as a family of Presbyterian missionaries.

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The city seems to be going – although hesitatingly – to the zebras, and that could mean a safer city for walkers. Zebra pedestrian crossings are beginning to turn up at some westside intersections as a replacement to the ubiquitous two-stripe crosswalk. The vertical variant of broad-strip marking – there is a diagonal variant – has been in use on British streets since the early 1950s. The one on London’s Abby Road is famous.

According to studies, the two-stripe crosswalk (two full-length stripes perpendicular to traffic) can’t be seen by drivers from farther than 100 feet. A zebra-striped crosswalk is visible from greater distances. Also, the greater contrast of the wide crosswalk lines highlights the presence of someone crossing.

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