arrival

I'm at the DMV early but without a book. Of all the things to forget, the book I was reading seems like the best thing to leave behind. I panicked a bit about forgetting a pen, but there was one that had evaded the pen purge of past October still there.

Some state/federal agencies don't care when your appointment is for, they let you in as soon as you arrive. Or at least, this is the case with the passport processing office. The San Francisco DMV doesn't seem to work that way; I've got a good 45 minutes to wait.

The book I meant to bring is Mike Davis's City of Quartz, an ambitious attempt to reify the forces that operate on and within LA. It's weird how some books either fit well into your current context or don't, at all. I feel like I've been hitting a lot of books at the right time lately. Like synchronicity but for "content".

I spent 24 hours in LA last June. While there, I walked the whole of Downtown, past the Capitol building and the LA Times. I met up with my friend Tow, short for Roberto, who lives there. He works as a social media coordinator for the Metro & took me to see the the big dig that they're doing for one of the new Downtown subway stations. We were walking around what I now know is Bunker Hill, which Eli Broad and Walt Disney have crowned with two monuments to "culture": a concert hall and an Art museum. (Tow let me in on a little localism: Broad is pronounced like "toad"). I went by the central museum, walked through the "Mexican" tourist town across from the train station, Union Station, the early 1900s train depot that I'd later return to to catch Amtrak's Coastal Starlight train North to San Luis Obispo, aka SLO (pronounced "slow").

From Downtown I caught the new blue line out to Santa Monica. It took forever, almost an hour, to ride the line from end to end. Looking back along the track (most of it is above ground), the Downtown district receded into the distance; the view remiscient of New York City's skyline from the PATH train in Jersey. LA is built on a scale that rivals only Houston, the US's other car-bred metropoli.

I spent enough time in Santa Monica to eat some tacos and get a feel for the overbuilt retail interests that lined the main drag, then headed out to the pier and down the beach. I hiked from Santa Monica to Venice, stopping just short of the long pier that jutted into the ocean just south of there.

Venice was my favorite neighborhood, even the Google office there seemed attractive, with surfboards lining the wall, just inside the gate. It was just the right blend of urban, hippie, and beachy.

So now I'm reading this book about LA, right? One that outlines the power structure and the lines of cultural influence. It hasn't gotten to the part about celebrity yet, but I trust we'll get there, eventually. Then, just this weekend, I watched the new OJ Simpson series, recently released to Netflix. The OJ drama takes place, of all places, in LA, capturing through a different prism the police tensions, endless highways (car chase with a Ford Bronco), the consequence of celebrity and notoriety. The story is incredibly LA.

There's more to say about celebrity, but I'll save that for later. My numbers just been called at the DMV, I'm here to trade in my New York license for a California one.

city of quartz, review of ch 1 & 2

i've just finished the second chapter of Mike Davis' strange treatise on L.A. and thought it would be worthwhile to get my thoughts out on paper before diving into much more of it, as the book is quite dense.

the first chapter traces the cultural hegemony of L.A., from the 1880's to the 1990s.  the second, called 'power lines', traces the sweep of power in the same period.  both chapters are densely packed with references to names and places, given up more as a reference to other work than as any way of explanation.  it makes it difficult to truly parse because the density of information that Davis' prose rides on top of. i'd almost rather that he would expand out his own writing, bringing the relevant stories and explanations into the book as a way of better pinning down, explicitly his point.  the chapters are packed because there is much to unpack -- characters, movements, waves of new money.

notice how culture and power are considered as separate spheres; there are power dynamics in play in culture, however.  perhaps a better term for the 'power' chapter is something along the lines of money-land-politic figures.  the family that owns the Times, the developer cabal, the Westside hollywood contingency.  the importance of promoting L.A. / SoCal as a desirable location because of property values.  as in, if you can drive demand for tract houses and suburban lots than the value of the thing that you already own is worth even more.

perhaps one of the most striking things is how strangely relevant the characters are today, on a national scale.  in the list of players of foreign money that flow into L.A. real estate in unprecedented amounts is one Donald Trump, with a multi-million dollar tower play in downtown LA.  there's Lew Wasserman, the "Supreme Being of Democratic fundraising in Hollywood".  i'm guessing there is much relation between this Wasserman of Democratic glittertown funds and the recently disgraced Deb Wasserman, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee.  a daughter, perhaps? or a close niece?  and if you've been following congressional opposition to Trump, surely you'd recognize the name Maxine Waters; she gets a passing mention in the Prologue (and as the index assures me, much more coverage in later chapters).

then there's the theme of Anglo supremacy, the unspoken but now pointed out rationale behind the siren song of the SoCal coast.  come to SoCal and embed yourself into a suburban White utopia. at least, that's how the land developers and tract kings peddled their wares to the Midwesterners that funded the first wave of migration thru the 1920s and 1950s.  there was more to it than white supremacy, but not much.  it's eye-opening to discover how much of the past is ever present.