NA

The first chapter alone makes City of Quartz a worthwhile read: Davis presents an idiosyncratic outline history of culture produced about Los Angeles, by what he calls ‘fabricators of the spectacle’—littérateurs, filmmakers, musicians and artists—engaged in a series of ‘attempts to establish authentic epistemologies’ for the city.

In the early 20th c., a group of writers and publicists (goaded by a syndicate of developers, bankers and transport magnates) created an ersatz history of Los Angeles that romanticized race relations and a fictional Spanish Colonial past, and promoted the power of sunshine to reinvigorate the racial energies of Anglo-Saxons. The imagery, motifs, values and legends of the Arroyo Set have been endlessly reproduced ever since. In the 1920s, a number of anti-romantic writers and painters and Popular Front-affiliated journalists worked to unmask the booster mythology and to recover the historical roles of labor and oppressed minority groups while originating observations that appeared decades later in the obscurantist vocabulary of cultural theorists.

The most influential counter to the utopist ideology came in the form of noir, first as fiction then on film, as the setting shifted from suburban bungalows to the ‘epic dereliction’ of Bunker Hill downtown. Beyond the conventional works, Davis includes in his capacious discussion of noir the fictions of John Fante, Chester Himes and John Rechy, the autobiography of Art Pepper, and Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence, described here as a predecessor to films like “Planet of the Apes,” “Omega Man,” and “Blade Runner.”

Huxley came to Los Angeles between the wars as part of a wave of pacifist and anti-fascist European exiles, most of whom—‘clinging to their Old World prejudices,’ as Davis tells it—responded to the ‘counterfeit urbanity’ of L.A. with melancholy, pessimism and/or panic. (One exception was Huxley, who embraced mysticism, health food and hallucinogens). It is amusing to find out that the whole Frankfurt critique of the “Culture Industry” is based upon Adorno and Horkheimer’s blinkered misreading of their first-hand L.A. ‘data.’

Toward the end of the chapter, Davis sketches a few notes on several ‘heroic’ underground cultural moments around Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman (elevator operator at the Bullock Wilshire), Jack Parsons, Kenneth Anger and others. The moments pass quickly, and with little discernible effect, as the 1970s and 80s were characterized by 'a mercenary, corporate-dominated arts dispensation' and an influx of celebrity architects, designers, artists and cultural theorists arriving for their adventures in hyperreality. pshaw ( )

Read this book and the follow up Ecology of Fear - enjoyed both. I would highly recommend both of these titles to anyone even remotely interested in the craziness which is Southern California. ( )

Los Angeles as one rarely gets to see it - the history, the politics, the architecture. It is the story of Los Angeles with an acute eye for the absurd, the unjust, and even the dangerous.

A quintessential text of the New Western History and the most important work on Los Angeles in the latter half of the twentieth century. ( )