After an unexpected turn of events I found myself
suddenly leaving Europe after almost nine years. Needing a place to land
immediately I chose my old hometown of Los Angeles. It was always where I
answered that I was from, I had always assumed that it was home. It was a harder landing than I had
expected.
Though it is true that parts of London and Paris have gentrified
in the last nine years it is nothing like the scale of change in Los Angeles
over the same period. It was as though a city that had fallen asleep in the
1970’s had woken up to an amphetamine fueled rush of civic change. It was not a
superficial facelift as happens for the Olympics or a convention but a change
in the actual life of the city. Whole new neighborhoods had sprung up –not on
the outskirts of sprawl but in the once desolate center. New boulevards, new
sky-scrapers, new museums, new parks –a new public transport system. My arrival
in this unknown city was coupled with the loss of my grandmother’s home, my Los
Angeles anchor; a place where the passage of time really had managed to be
suspended. So instead of coming home it became as though I had moved to a city
that I might have visited on a vacation long ago. I set myself the task to seek
out reminders of the city as I remembered -or at least what the city looked
like in my memories.
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