Photo of LA riots: http://www.urbanvoyeur.com/
a couple of months ago i was in downtown los angeles on business. it was probably the first time i had been downtown since i was a kid. i stayed in a beautiful old hotel (thanks, boss!) right on pershing square. a couple of things struck me the very first day. pershing square was filled with insane - and sometimes belligerent - homeless people. the area up the hill was encrusted with high rise bank buildings and a plethora of cultural institutions, including the new geary concert hall. Down the hill, on broadway, the street was lined with boarded-up deco theatres and decrepit Mexican utility and t-shirt shops. And, incredibly to me, right on the square, there was a subway station.
What is los angeles? It seems to defy characterization at times, encompassing every type of person and thing, but not dominated by any one. Spread over a vast basin between the beach and the mountains, its history is short, and bathed in Hollywood imagery. It is criss-crossed with freeways. Nobody walks. Everybody is tan and happy. It's the city everybody loves to hate.
About the same time I took my trip, a good friend gave me a book entitled "City of Quartz." The first of a trilogy of books on los angeles, it addresses some of the many facets that make l.a. what it is. Its author, mike davis, a former trucker, meatcutter, now a professor and an avowed Marxist, brings a lot of his own critical perspective to bear. At certain points he evokes an l.a. of concrete security walls, barbed wire fences, LAPD swat teams, corruption, and racism, all of which appeared two years after he wrote the book, in the riots of 1992.
the riots seemed like the fulfillment of davis' prophesy, but still, some of davis' research has been criticized, and I must say that I found some of his claims a bit unbelievable, or at least questionable. For example, in the introduction, its impossible for him to overstate the size and importance of the l.a. region:
"Stretching now from the country-club homes of Santa Brbara to the shanty colonias of Ensenada, to the edge of Llano in the high desert and of the Coachella valley in the low, with a built-up surface area nearly the size of Ireland and a GNP bigger than India's - the urban galaxy dominated by Los Angelesis the fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world."
The book is divided into seven chapters, beginning with a discussion of intellectuals' and artists' visions and versions of l.a., appropriate because "L.A. is probably the most mediated town in America, nearly unviewable, save through the fictive scrim of its mythologizers" (quoting Michael Sorkin). Dividing L.A.'s commentators into "boosters," "debunkers," and "noirs," Davis touches on how the booster-invented fantasy of the craftsman and Spanish colonial architectural style reflected the early 20th century "ideology of Los Angeles as the utopia of Aryan supremacism - the sunny refuge of White Protestant America in an age of labor upheaval and the mass immigration of Catholic and Jewish poor from Eastern and Southern Europe." Davis also details how noir authors' "petty-bourgeois anti-heroes typically expressed autobiographical sentiments, as the noir of the 1930's and 1940's (and again in the1960's) became a conduit for the resentment of writers in the velvet trap of the studio system," emphasizing the genre's "constant tension between the 'productive' middle class ([detectives like Phillip] Marlowe . . . ), and the 'unproductive' declasses or idle rich" who hire them.
Chapter two inspects the political and economic power structures that built and, perhaps, ruined los angeles. Constructed on land speculation, railroads, and eventually, shipping, agriculture and oil, l.a. really emerged as an urban center in the late 1800's and early 1900's, under the control of the downtown chandler and otis families, who owned - among other interests - the l.a. times. By the 1950's, the Hollywood / Jewish elites had solidified their power, and located on the Westside of town. By the 60's and 70's black and latino influence began to grow, culminating in the election of mayor Tom Bradley, and most recently, antonio villaraigosa. With political power now in the hands of historical minorities, and economic power shared with asian capital, l.a. is a city unique in that it is moving forward into an age characterized by shared and dispersed power.
The next chapters cover, respectively: suburban growth and the homeowner association-led backlash against it; wealthy residents' obsession with security; the battle between law enforcement and gangs; the catholic church; and the birth, death and rebirth of Fontana, an all-but insignificant city in most people's minds, but - not coincidentally - the childhood home of the author, which he dubs the "junkyard of dreams."
Although its hard to buy wholesale his hell-in-a-handbasket version of l.a., davis really makes the city's immense scale, impenetrable power structure, and ugly dark side live and breathe. And about halfway through, he managed to explain some of the bizarre and disjointed experiences I had on my trip:
"in other cities developers might have attempted to articulate the new skyscape and the old, exploiting the latter's extraordinary inventory of theatres and historic buildings to create a gentrified history - a gaslight district [in San Diego], Faneuil Market, or Ghirardelli Square - as a support to middle-class residential colonization. But Los Angeles's redevelopers viewed property values in the old Broadway core as irreversibly eroded by the area's very centrality to public transport, and especially its use by the Black and Mexican poor. . . . As a result, redevelopment massively reproduced spatial apartheid. The moat of the Harbor Freeway and the regarded palisades of Bunker Hill cut off the new financial core from the poor immigrant neighborhoods that surround it on every side."
Then comes the sledgehammer:
"The Downtown hyperstructure - like some Buckminster Fuller post-Holocaust fantasy - is programmed to ensure a seamless continuum of middle-class work, consumption and recreation, without unwonted exposure to Downtown's working class street environments. . . . [t]his is the archisemiotics of class war."
Perhaps, but perhaps not. And even if so, the more important question is: what of it? Or, what to do about it? Perhaps Davis answers some of these questions in the second and third installments of his L.A. trilogy, but my guess is I'll be enjoying more gloom and doom in book #2, "the ecology of fear." In other words, what Davis does, he does rather well. If you hate LA, you may enjoy "city of quartz." Although the author has claimed to have a deep and abiding love for the city, you wouldn't know it, other than from the breadth of his research. I do understand his point of view; LA is a pretty fucked-up place in a lot of ways, and those of us who have spent some time in the LA "urban galaxy" have probably had enough bizarre and disturbing experiences with the police, or years of simple, quiet, annonymous, lonely drives down a crowded freeway to sympathize. But as I get older, I have more of an appreciation for the sunshine, the feeling of being squarely between beach and mountains, and the post-traditionalist mentality. Davis has left out many of the things that make LA great: the sun setting over the ocean, the in-n-out burgers, the smiles (even if they are fake), the feeling of driving really, really fast down pacific coast highway or mullholland drive, the tall, gently swaying palm trees aginst a cloudless blue sky. To a native, reading "city of quartz" brings back a lot of memories, both bad and good, and at times, helps you realize why you see certain things the way you do. but to a non-native, you definitely want to take anything Mike Davis says with a grain of salt. i would recommend that grain include a trip to the area around pershing square.
