>Time speeded up like 20s newreels spinning off
>their cogs. Nothing could be torn down fast enough, so that half a
>street would look like a brick movie set from another age, while the
>next half of the street was all solid glass and aluminum. Atonal works
>that were high modernist expressionism in the 20s where now stardard
>almost hack movie sound tracks to add a creepy feeling at special
>psychological moments, etc, etc.
I frequently drive through a tunnel (2nd Street tunnel) in downtown Los Angeles that runs under what used to be Bunker Hill. Bunker Hill was razed in the late '50s and for longer than the planners planned the place looked like an open-pit mining site. You wouldn't notice unless you've read about it, but when you look above the tunnel I'm talking about you realize there's nothing there. Norman Klein (see below) wrote it's as if a big bird of prey swooped down and made off with whatever used to be up there.
Then glance to the right and you see the southside of Frank Gehry's new Disney Concert Hall, a building that would be iconic Los Angeles if such a thing existed, but it doesn't because the process you're talking about doesn't stop.
Klein is someone you'd like I think. He grew up in Brooklyn and moved to Los Angeles in the '70s. He teaches at CalArts and writes a lot about the themes you're hitting on. You can tell from the title of his best known book, called "The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory"
Here's a review:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_n5_v25/ai_20582800