If There Was Such A Thing As Chandlerland

Los Angeles, CA

Few cities are as fluid as Los Angeles. It redefines itself, as its people redefine themselves. Who you are today isn't who you were yesterday. New names, new faces, new bodies. This is where you go to be the person you aren't.

It is a city changed by outsiders. Few people are from here, even the ones who are. It has a sad disregard for its own history, chewing up real estate and legends in its never ending search for The Next Big Thing. Everyone has their own dream of the place.

Mine is stuck some time in the mid 40's. After the war, but before the freeways. When the L.A. River wasn't just some concrete trough. Before Bunker Hill turned to steel. I like to think of Los Angeles when Raymond Chandler wrote about it.

I ran into this article (Hat tip to Sarah Weinman for the link) in LAObserved by Denise Hamilton with historian Judith Freeman on Chandler's Los Angeles.

In her book, The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler And The Woman He Loved, Freeman writes,

"If there was such a thing as Chandlerland this was it, and each day I felt surrounded by a kind of shabbier version of that era, a strangely eviscerated ghost of the world I was trying to imagine. When you constantly change a landscape, you erase the collective memory of a city. How can you live without memory?"

And that's the question, isn't it? It's amazing to me that, even now, Chandler's L.A. is still around. I run into it, happily, in unexpected ways. A theater near MacArthur Park, a bar in Los Feliz, a posh hotel on Sunset. But it's dwindling amid the developments and high rises, the Starbucks and Pinkberries.

In twenty more years there won't even be that much. L.A. continues to redefine itself. Who it is today isn't who it was yesterday. But that's Los Angeles. Like being upset with a bear for trying to eat you. That's what it does, like it or not. It doesn't stop moving. It can't stop moving.

And sometimes I hate it for that.