Balanced as it is on the shaky, fiery rim of the Pacific Ocean, between "civilized" America and the most exotic of foreign cultures to the east, L.A.'s history is rich with bleeding-edge tech and peppered with drama - Rocketdyne and CG animation unfolded against a backdrop of earthquakes, riots and numerous trials of the century. The country's tilted, they say, and all the loose nuts roll west. Los Angeles has always embodied the old Confucian curse, "May you live in interesting times."
A fascinating new blog called 1947Project scrutinizes Los Angeles in one bold, bloody year - 1947 - as the edge city it was then and the edge city it has become today:
The mission statement by bloggers Kim Cooper (a third-generation Angeleno and publisher of Scram and Nathan Marsak (author of Los Angeles Neon) says:
Los Angeles in 1947 was a social powderkeg. War-damaged returning soldiers were threatened by a new kind of independant female, who in turn found her freedoms disappearing as male workers returned to the factories. These conflicts worked themselves out in dark ways. The Black Dahlia is the most famous victim of 1947's sex wars, but hardly the only one. The 1947project seeks to document this pivotal year in L.A., through period reporting and visits to the scenes as they are today.
Today's entry (posted at what appears to be 9:01 a.m. even though it's now 8:53) points to a UCLA radiologist's evaluation of the atomic bomb tests at Bikini Atoll, and an earlier one covers a perp confessing to the Black Dahlia slaying.
Nifty idea, with a promising start. I'll be watching this one.
Posted by: mack_reed on Thursday, March 24, 2005 - 08:54 AM
