interiority

Plural feels a little awkward here, so pardon the slight detour from the usual route. We invoke the we a lot around these parts, and we wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea about what we are doing or where we are coming from. The first-person singular should clear a few things up.

Sometimes, I get a little sloppy with it; on my daily drives around L.A., I’ll see something going down and clumsily fall into a linguistic trap: “People in L.A. love a …” or “L.A. loves a …” — fill in the blank. People in L.A. love a bad U-turn across a double yellow. People in L.A. love a treacherous red light run at an unprotected left. A valet-only parking lot. A flea. A collab. A farmer’s market knife sharpening station. A tall hedge. A heat lamp at night, regardless of the temperature. Obviously, I don’t mean to suggest that this is what everyone in L.A. feels or how they should feel. In actuality, the lazy construction of my banal observations obfuscates the energies that I’m trying to document.

Once the generalizations roll off the tongue and into the ether, they form a thick fog that clouds the official record. When that happens, the actions lose their aura, the POV gets lost, the brightness of specific experience dulls. The fictions shine through and become doctrine.

A place, in this case Los Angeles, becomes obscured by those who be acting like they know. You’ve seen the stupid transplant maps that get shared in your Slack channels and reshared on social platforms. I won’t dignify the memes, other than to say it doesn’t take much to ID a transplant. When they make their “bold” declarations, they out themselves as soon as they mention the so: “That’s so L.A.” “I’m so Cali.” For too long, the so-so’s have had too much control over the official narrative.

There’s a different tradition of storytelling practiced in L.A. — one that is less about you and I and more about we. The “we” tradition is more aspirational, more inclusive. By definition, it moves in more ways than one. The we tradition includes the “I” and the rest of the group. It is, as they say, a multi-POV situation.

What would the story of Los Angeles look like if the “we” tradition were the norm? This question is top of mind for those who task themselves with documenting what’s really going on in our city on the daily. There are many archivists in L.A. trying to show how we move, and what the interior of the city really looks like. They work to document, to catalog, to add context from the inside. Like the fiction writer, they help us access the inner thoughts that reveal the character of our hometown. They see the gaps and fill them in. They task themselves with bringing L.A. more into view.

And so, we present “Interiority.” This is us saying a fuller archive — the “we” POV — is what matters. The archivists we worked with have some stories to tell that will deepen the city’s collective memory. Stories that will open up space for more narratives to break through. That’s not all our archivists are doing, however. Some of them have made their contributions with the future in mind. No spoilers, foos — looks at rafa esparza and co. — but rest assured the “we” is the spiritual core.

You see the low low on the cover. Now is the time to learn what we are riding for.

Ian F. Blair
Editor in Chief

Image logo by Reina Takhashi For The Times