Thursday, April 12th, 2012
When I was entering my teen years in the lower middle-class doldrums of Los Angeles, California, I was embittered by what I imagined was the misfortune of growing up in a place that was brutally ugly and devoid of either history or culture. Never mind that I was fifteen minutes from the Pacific Ocean and not all that much farther from wooded canyons and mountains and desert, my immediate surroundings were nearly identical ranch-style houses hastily assembled over razed orange and avocado groves, supermarkets, gas stations, fast food restaurants, strip malls, and vast parking lots.
