{"id":5481,"date":"2021-07-26T17:53:15","date_gmt":"2021-07-27T00:53:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5481"},"modified":"2021-07-26T17:53:15","modified_gmt":"2021-07-27T00:53:15","slug":"new-yorker-d-j-waldies-becoming-los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=5481","title":{"rendered":"New Yorker: D.J. Waldie&#8217;s Becoming Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\"><center><figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/DJ-Waldie-Becoming-Los-Angeles-small.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5482\" width=\"375\" height=\"479\"\/><\/figure><\/center><\/div>\n\n\n\n<blockquote class=\"wp-block-quote is-layout-flow wp-block-quote-is-layout-flow\"><p>In 1993, five years after Joan Didion left California for New York, an assignment for\u00a0<em>The New Yorker<\/em>\u00a0brought her back to her home state. Her subject was the Spur Posse, a group of young men in the Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood, who had received national attention after being accused of sexually assaulting underage girls. The\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/magazine\/1993\/07\/26\/trouble-in-lakewood\">resulting story<\/a>, published in July of that year, assesses the widespread \u201csense that something in town had gone wrong\u201d\u2014and unspools into a grim diagnosis for Lakewood and other downwardly mobile blue-collar American communities like it.<\/p><p>\u201cLakewood exists because at a given time in a different economy it seemed an efficient idea to provide population density for the mall and a labor pool for the Douglas plant,\u201d Didion writes, referring to McDonnell Douglas, one of the aerospace companies that had powered the expansion of Southern California\u2019s \u201cindustrial underbelly.\u201d The impending closure of a department store at the mall, Lakewood Center, and of the Douglas plant prompt her to question not only the town\u2019s economic prospects but its raison d\u2019\u00eatre. \u201cWhat had it cost to create and maintain an artificial ownership class?\u201d Didion asks. \u201cWho paid? Who benefitted? What happens when that class stops being useful?\u201d<\/p><p>Among the locals Didion interviews is Donald Waldie, the City of Lakewood\u2019s public-information officer, who was also a published author in his own right.\u00a0<em>The Kenyon Review<\/em>\u00a0had run \u201cSuburban Stories,\u201d a short work of Waldie\u2019s autobiographical fiction, the previous fall, and Didion includes a few lines from it in her report. \u201cHe knew his city\u2019s first 17,000 houses had been built within three years,\u201d Waldie\u2019s narrator observes of the protagonist, who lives in a California suburb much like Lakewood. \u201cHe was aware of what this must have cost, but he did not care.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n<p>Read the whole thing <a href=\"https:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/books\/page-turner\/d-j-waldies-sense-of-place\">at the New Yorker<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In 1993, five years after Joan Didion left California for New York, an assignment for\u00a0The New Yorker\u00a0brought her back to her home state. Her subject was the Spur Posse, a group of young men in the Los Angeles suburb of Lakewood, who had received national attention after being accused of sexually assaulting underage girls. The\u00a0resulting [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5481","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5481","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5481"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5481\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5483,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5481\/revisions\/5483"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5481"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5481"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5481"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}