{"id":682,"date":"2012-06-06T20:25:42","date_gmt":"2012-06-07T03:25:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=682"},"modified":"2012-06-06T20:25:42","modified_gmt":"2012-06-07T03:25:42","slug":"notebook-on-cities-and-culture-s1e25-paradise-of-the-ordinary-with-d-j-waldie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=682","title":{"rendered":"Notebook on Cities and Culture S1E25: Paradise of the Ordinary with D.J. Waldie"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright  wp-image-684\" style=\"margin: 5px;\" title=\"waldie\" src=\"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/06\/waldie.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"293\" height=\"358\" \/>Colin Marshall sits down in Lakewood City Hall with D.J. Waldie, author of books like <em>Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir<\/em> and <em>Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles<\/em>, collaborator on books like <em>Real City<\/em> with photographer Marissa Roth, and a 34-year employee of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lakewoodcity.org\/about_lakewood\/community\/lakewood_history\/\">City of Lakewood<\/a> as Public Information Officer and Deputy City Manager. They discuss the importance of Wallace Stevens&#8217; &#8220;work and walking&#8221; to his own writing; his advice to the latest wave of Los Angeles newcomers looking for solutions to the problem of how to live here; what it means to lead a &#8220;redemptive&#8221; suburban life, and whether &#8220;suburban&#8221; means the same thing to every writer; Lakewood and other rapidly built postwar tract-home communities as exciting, frightening experiments in living from which new democratic vistas could well; the meaning of Lakewood&#8217;s motto that &#8220;Times Change, Values Don&#8217;t&#8221;; how considerable variation can arise from built uniformity; his premise that there are no &#8220;good&#8221; places, and his ongoing interest in the question of what would happen if you fell in love with the place where you are; how knowledge of a place, if not quite love for it, can enrich the experience of that place; how the newest Angelenos seem to long to connect to and invest in their place; and how Los Angeles&#8217; resistance to its own history has contributed to bad choices over the years, leading to frustrations financial, racial, and otherwise.<\/p>\n<p>Download the interview from <em>Notebook on Cities and Culture\u2019<\/em>s feed <a href=\"http:\/\/colinmarshall.libsyn.com\/webpage\/s1e25-paradise-of-the-ordinary-with-d-j-waldie\">here<\/a> or on iTunes <a href=\"http:\/\/itunes.apple.com\/us\/podcast\/notebook-on-cities-culture\/id266539442\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>(Photo: Tom Johnson)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Colin Marshall sits down in Lakewood City Hall with D.J. Waldie, author of books like Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Where We Are Now: Notes from Los Angeles, collaborator on books like Real City with photographer Marissa Roth, and a 34-year employee of the City of Lakewood as Public Information Officer and Deputy City [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notebook-on-cities-and-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","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=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":686,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}