All Over LA

Rebecca — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 07:01:26 +0000

I’ve toyed with the idea of writing an LA-based blog for years now. But, whenever I sat down to plot it out, I always thought of reasons not to write one.

My main argument was “Everything I could possibly say or write must already be somewhere.” At that, it’s probably been written with more pomp and eloquence than I could ever afford the subject. One visit to the history section of Los Angeles’ Central Library could prove the fact on its own. With books like “Los Angeles: Realm of Possibility,” “Los Angeles: A City Apart,” “Los Angeles from the Mountains to the Sea,” “Los Angeles, Biography of a City,” “A Short History of Los Angeles,” “Yesterday’s Los Angeles,” “Incredible Los Angeles,” “Imagining Los Angeles,” “Views of Los Angeles,” even, “Le Guide Francais de Los Angeles;” it’s all been covered.

In the blogging world, sites like LAist, LA Observed, Curbed LA, and blogdowntown have got most of the juicy news covered. And from a retrospective angle, Hidden LA has covered most of the lost, forgotten, or unknown. That doesn’t leave much for the casual blogger to cover.

Then again, I find I fit into a niche market of Los Angeles twenty/thirtysomethings determined to seek out the spots that made Los Angeles so glorious in its heyday. If you consider the rise ofSteampunk, the current Bringing Back Broadway Initiative, and a number of other restorative movements: we’re in just the right time and place to marry old LA with new LA.

In that vein, I suppose what I can write about is rediscovering the romanticism that made LA great. But more particularly, my journey to find and share the history of my city with my peers.
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I chose the title “All Over LA” for a number of reasons.

1. The are weeks, sometimes even days, where I’ve travelled from one end of LA to the other. Literally, all over LA.

2. If you broke the phrase down, it would be the word lover wedged between two palindromic LA’s “AL lover LA.”

3. Paul Madonna’s artwork column in the San Francisco Gate is called “All Over Coffee.” His use of images and phrases to make people consider or remember certain pieces of their own past ignites the feeling I hope people will have when reading the bits and bobs I post here.