Mahalobay

Los Angeles and the surrounding metro area… the city that our antihero Chuck Sorrel loves to hate, and where a good portion of our story happens. The locations and descriptions of Los Angeles in Abundance are born out of having lived and worked in the city and its surrounding areas for over twenty years. Santa Monica, West LA, Long Beach, Culver City and Orange County have all been home for parts of my life.

I have a complicated relationship with the city, and driving in LA still triggers vehicular PTSD. My experiences, collected over the years and aged like cheap wine, have been distilled into what I hope are words that can transport you to the City of Angels – to give you a sense of what it must be like to live there, if only for so many chapters.

One of the things that LA has taught me to see is how the city is a collage of citizen lives. Much like how geologists and archeologists can read the stories of the past from rock layers and buried artifacts, being able to discern the layers of LA allows you to read the inherent history in the surroundings.

For instance: on a single block of a street in Santa Monica, one can find a Midcentury Modern house, built in the 1960-70s and so lovingly looked after throughout the decades that it has survived into the 21st century. The houses next to it were maybe not as fortunate and perhaps fell into disrepair. When that property eventually changed hands, it was cheaper for the new owners to bulldoze the site and start again from scratch; and with a blank slate, they chose to raise an Art Deco house instead. Two houses down, different neighbors built a Monterey Colonial Revival style building, and next to them, corporate concerns built a garish boxy 10-unit apartment complex in lieu of a single family home.

This hyper-slomo scene plays out in every city, on every street in every corner of the world. Everything that is familiar to us today, came to be that way because of a complex interconnected web of personal interactions between people who made decisions – some of which have survived far past their own lives. Even though we may never know their names, we can see their part in the organic design of the present and imagine the rich and complex lives they might have led. The future is a patchwork built on the bones of the past.

Take a walk down your street sometime, or browse the streets of LA on Google Maps – see what the streets tell you.