I will be travelling to San Francisco and Los Angeles in mid to late March. While there, I will be on the look out for memorial culture, especially in the form of places appropriate for sites-of-memory.de or commentary on this blog. If you know of any such places that would be of interest, especially in the South Bay (El Segundo, Redondo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach, etc.) or down town Los Angeles areas, please get in touch with me.

A first google search has turned up http://militantangeleno.blogspot.com, a blog commentary on a war memorial on a traffic island in Los Angeles. The memorial looks so wonderfully out of place! As the environment has changed around it, the memorial has come to look like something totally alien to its surroundings.

The blog entry offers some interesting commentary about the spatial development of the local area over the past several decades. It is a testament to the radical changes that have swept the whole city: The re-arrangement of commercial and residential space, the re-shaping of neighborhoods and local economies by freeway construction, etc. Los Angeles was a very different city less than one lifetime ago. In a sense, then, this memorial testifies not so much to the wars it has chiseled on its ediface as to the place in which it once stood, a different place, although it never moved.