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Introduction:
Los Angeles
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"Unquestionably there is charm in all the bizarre and innumerable
novelties, such as lion and ostrich farms and Egyptian movie cathedrals;
in stuccoed wayside lunchstands and refreshment parlors built
in the shape of derby hats and ice-cream freezers; in the spectacle
of fat women rushing to fortune-tellers, and fat men playing golf;
in the boundless enthusiasm of the social climbers and nouveaux
riches. All of that, the farmers and the quacks, the tourists
and the realtors, the professional patriots and the boosters,
the beach resorts and the crazy architecture, make the whole section
a sort of outdoor circus."
--Morrow Mayo, Los Angeles (Knopf,
1933).
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Crest theater in
Westwood, Los Angeles
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IN
MAY (2000) I FLEW FROM NEW YORK TO L.A. and began a
3-week trip up the
West Coast -- from there to San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle.
I'd been to L.A. before a number of times,
but it was many years ago. In the meantime, I'd been living mainly
in two places -- Portland and New York -- where people are habitually
contemptuous of this city. In Portland, L.A. tends to be seen as
a polluted, ugly, urban hell-hole, a cautionary story of failed
city planning, and the source of innumerable yuppie refugees who
are crowding into their beautiful state. In New York, on the other
hand, a traditional East Coast prejudice against California prevails,
which views L.A. as a sort of airheaded and idiotic distant cousin;
a sprawling mess of a place which no civilized person could seriously
consider a real City, let alone deign to live in.
Or else L.A. is exoticized, praised
as a novelty item -- the word "colorful" comes up frequently
-- or in Morrow Mayo's words, "a sort of outdoor circus."
In New York terms, it's a larger-scale Coney Island, stuck safely
out of the way on the continent's other edge. |
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Alfred
Döblin, on L.A.'s lifestyle: "Indeed, one is much
and extensively in the open here -- yet, am I a cow?"
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Leslie Sacks Fine
Art, Los Angeles
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Mike
Davis' City
of Quartz, which I finally read while on my trip, brilliantly
analyzes the proverbial encounter between intellectuals and L.A.
-- whether East Coast academics, Hollywood writers, or European
emigres. "To move to Lotusland," he notes, "is
to sever connection with national reality, to lose historical
and experiential footing, to surrender critical distance, and
to submerge oneself in spectacle and fraud." For Davis, this
ominous rhetoric, which L.A. has so often inspired, is actually
a good sign, because it indicates that L.A. is "fertile soil"
for "acute critiques of the culture of late capitalism."
I
certainly appreciate those many acute critiques, ranging from
noir fiction of the '30s to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner.
But for my five days in L.A., I was mostly content to enjoy
the simpler, initial pleasures of this sunny and colorful place;
and to appreciate all the ways it differs from where I
live. It was a great pleasure to have a car and total freedom
to go where I liked, after two nearly uninterrupted years of being
a pedestrian in Manhattan. And it was sunny every single day,
temperature in the 70s. I kept thinking about how most of America
is far more like L.A. than it is like Manhattan.
Leslie Sacks Fine Art gallery, pictured
at left, was for me an entertaining example of this different
world of L.A. It apparently sells the work of such world-famous
artists as Miro, Hockney, and Chagall -- at this completely banal
commercial center, next to the Brentwood Bread Co. and the dry
cleaner. It was so weird after the tres chic gallery precincts
of Soho and Chelsea in NY.
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El Rey Theater, Wilshire
Boulevard, Los Angeles. (built 1928).
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The
next picture is one of many that I took by holding my $10 snapshot
camera at arms length and angling it out the window while driving.
This one sums up the L.A. trip for me: driving along Wilshire
Boulevard, a facade caught my eye so I picked up the camera and
snapped a shot without even slowing down; deep blue sky, and windshield
reflection of bottled water and all the junk I had piled on the
passenger-side floor (the luxury, denied to pedestrians, of traveling
amid your own comfortable mess). The building, I later figured
out, is the El
Rey, a beautifully-restored 1928 Art Deco theater and somewhat
legendary Rock venue.
L.A. was great. There was cool stuff
everywhere.
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"In Los Angeles
immigrant mental labor is collectivized in huge apparatuses and
directly consumed by big capital...Such relations of 'pure capitalism',
or course, are seen as invariably destructive of the identity
of 'true' intellectuals, still defined as artisans or rentiers
of their own unique mental productions. Snared in the nets of
Hollywood or entrapped by the Strangeloveian logic of the missile
industry, 'seduced' talents are 'wasted', 'prostituted', 'trivialized',
or 'destroyed'. To move to Lotusland is to sever connection with
national reality, to lose historical and experiential footing,
to surrender critical distance, and to submerge oneself in spectacle
and fraud."
"Yet this very rhetoric (which infuses a long
tradition of writing about Los Angeles, since at least the 1920s)
indicates powerful critical energies at work. For if Los Angeles
has become the archetypal site of massive and unprotesting subordination
of industrialized intelligentsia to the programs of capital, it
has also been fertile soil for some of the most acute critiques
of the culture of late capitalism."
--Mike Davis.City
of Quartz (1990).
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