Other Works
Other Works
“L.A. Purple Night,” photograph by Ludwig Favre
Becoming Los Angeles
D.J. Waldie is one of the most artful authors writing about Los Angeles today. — Library Foundation of Los Angeles (2020)
This is a writer with an ear for the strange or majestic but also the tiny detail that scolds, inspires or clarifies. — Nathan Deuel, Los Angeles Times (2020)
Becoming Los Angeles (2020), a collection of essays by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos have seen themselves and their city and what embracing—or rejecting—an Angeleno identity has come to mean. He encounters the immigrants and exiles, the dreamers and con artists, the celebrated and forgotten who became Los Angeles. He maps the contours of compromised nature in Los Angeles and finds something of beauty and grace.
Becoming Los Angeles draws on a decade of Waldie’s writing about the intersection of the city’s history and its aspirations.
Holy Land
I love D. J. Waldie’s spare and devastating Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996 and 2005) for its formal discipline, and for some kind of magic it performs in seamlessly linking the intimacy of the author’s lived experience of his family home in Lakewood, CA with the sweeping history of postwar suburban housing tracts. – Jean Walton, author of Fair Sex, Savage Dreams (2018)
Although it's labeled as such, to call [Holy Land] a memoir does not quite do justice to the magic it works, invoking the numinous in the anonymous through an almost sacramental act of attention. – James Mustich, author of 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die (2018)
Waldie's meditation on suburbia finds the beauty in wonky detail and weaves a wholly unconventional narrative. I'd put this book up against the best of Baudrillard and Banham. – Jade Chang, author of The Wangs vs. The World (2016)
More than anything I’ve ever read, (Holy Land) captures the torment and tenderness of the mundane and how that is shaped by our environment. – Ryan Enos, author of The Space Between Us (2017)
Holy Land, a sparse, yet pointed memoir … has quickly inserted itself into the canon of modern suburban and cultural landscape studies. Holy Land grapples with race, class, and the contradictions of suburban production while simultaneously demanding that suburbs—and suburbanites—be treated with a sense of compassion and respect. – Alex Schafran, lecturer in Urban Studies, University of Leeds (2017)
Collections
Anthologies and monographs
Collections
Anthologies and monographs
What is Los Angeles? in Cities: Architecture and Society; 10 Mostra Internazionale di Architettura, Biennale de Venezia, Richard Burdett and Sarah Ichioka, eds., New York: Rizzoli, 2006.
Beautiful and Terrible: Los Angeles and the Image of Suburbia in Seeing Los Angeles: A Different Look at a Different City, Guy Bennett and Beatrice Mousli, eds., Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2007
Drawing on Water in Los Angeles in An Atlas of Radical Cartography, Alexis Bhagat and Lize Mogel, eds., Los Angeles: Journal of Aesthetics and Protest Press, 2007
My Place in California in The People and Promise of California, Mona Field and Brian Kennedy, eds., London: Pearson, 2007
Public Policy/Private Lives in Tell Me True: Memoir, History, and Writing a Life ,Patricia Hampl and Elaine Tyler May, eds., Minneapolis: Borealis Books/Minnesota Historical Society, 2008
City of Angels. City of Faith? in Los Angeles: Eine Stadt im Film/A City on Film – Eine Retrospektive der Viennale und des Österreichischen Filmmuseums, 5. Oktober bis 5. November 2008, Astrid Ofner and Claudia Siefen, eds., Marburg: Schüren Verlag GmbH, 2008
Rereading, Misreading, and Redeeming the Golden State: Defining California Through History in A Companion to California History, William Deverell and Greg Hise, eds., Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008
The House of God and the Gate of Heaven: From the Old Plaza Church to the Cathedral on the Hill in The Devil's Punchbowl: A Cultural and Geographic Map of California Today, Kate Gale and Veronique de Turenne, eds., Los Angeles: Red Hen Press, 2010 ISBN 978-1597091640
Where We Are in New California Writing 2011, Gayle Wattawa, ed., Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2011
Lost in Aerospace in Blue Sky Metropolis: The Aerospace Century in Southern California, Peter Westwick, ed., Berkeley and Los Angeles: Huntington Library and University of California Press, 2012
A New Suburban Beauty: Maynard L. Parker and Dreams of Postwar America, in Maynard L. Parker: Modern Photography and the American Dream, Jenny Watts, ed., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012
Union Station: Time and Again in Union Station: 75 Years in the Heart of LA, Linda Theung, ed., Los Angeles: Metropolitan Transportation Authority, 2014
Suburban Holy Land in Infinite Suburbia, Alan Berger and Joel Kotkin, eds., Hudson, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2017
Lakewood, CA in New California Writing 2011, Gayle Wattawa ed., Berkeley: Heyday Books, 2011
Language in the Landscape: The Emancipated Word in Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts, Jeffrey T Brouws, ed., San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2003
An Ordinary Place in My California: Journeys by Great Writers, Donna Wares, ed., Santa Monica: Angel City Press, 2007
Acre, Camelback, Colina, etc. in Home ground: Language for an American Landscape, Barry Lopez, ed., San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2010
It’s Immaterial Where You Are in Common Place: The American Motel, Bruce Bégout, Colin Keaveney, D. J. Waldie, Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2010
Other Media
Other Media
Exhibition Catalogs
"Facing the Facts". Close to Home: An American Album. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. 2004. ISBN 978-0-89236-771-9.
"It can go any way it wants, and I'll still be here. Ruscha, LA, and a Sense of Place in the West". Ed Ruscha and the Great American West. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2016.
"Homeward Bound". Karla Klarin: Subdividing the Landscape. Northridge: CSU Northridge Galleries. 2016.
"Suburban Landscape". Jona Frank: Model Home. Brunswick, Maine: Bowdoin College Museum of Art. 2022.
Exhibitions
“Positively 4th Street: (2018, Huntley Gallery, Cal Poly Pomona Gallery), consultant and contributor
“Some Lifestyle Options” (2016, Richard Telles Fine Art, curated by Jan Tumlir), contributor
“Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990” (2013, Getty Museum), consultant and contributor
“Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940-1990” (2013, Huntington Library), curator
“Unbuilt Los Angeles” (2013, A+D Architecture and Design Museum), consultant
“A Windshield Perspective: The Framing of L.A. Architecture and Urbanism” (2013, A+D Architecture and Design Museum), consultant
“California Design, 1930-1965: Living in a Modern Way” (2012, Los Angeles County Museum of Art), guest lecturer
“A Throw of the Dice: Artists Inspired By a Visual Text: (2003, University of California, Irvine), contributor
“Mallarmé at the Millennium” (1999, City University of New York; contributor), lecturer
Archival Film Research and Editing
The War from the Air (1975, Nova ▪ PBS)
Hitler’s Secret Weapon (1976, Nova ▪ PBS)
Will Rogers: America in the ‘20s (1977, Will Rogers Foundation).
Translation
Stéphane Mallarmé. Poem: A throw of the dice will never abolish chance. Translated by D. J. Waldie. Illustrations by Gary Young. Santa Cruz: Greenhouse Review Press. 1990. (Reprinted with an introductory essay by the translator in Parnassus: Poetry in Review. 2001; included in The Lost Origins of the Essay. John D'Agata, ed. Graywolf Press. 2008
An online exhibition of works derived from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés in celebration of 125 years since its completion in 1897. The exhibition includes D. J. Waldie’s translation. A description of A Throw of the Dice (with photographs of the Gary Young-Felicia Rice edition from Greenhouse Review Press) is highlighted in the exhibition.
Online
A miscellany of online essays, podcasts, and videos by or about D. J. Waldie
Online
A miscellany of online essays, podcasts, and videos by or about D. J. Waldie
The Tourist Automobile of 1902
How to look at Los Angeles: A conversation with D.J. Waldie, Lynell George and Josh Kun
Interview with Colin Marshall
D. J. Waldie on "Which Way LA?"
D. J. Waldie at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books
Tar Pit Death Trip at CicLAvia’s Wilshire Boulevard Stories
Language in the Landscape at Public Radio International
Rooted in Suburbia, Body and Soul, review by New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, 1995