City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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of Europe. Without necessarily subscribing to the ‘nightmare’ anti-myth of noir, the exile sense of Los Angeles was unremittingly pessimistic. Here was the ultimate city of capital, lustrous and superficial, negating every classical value of European urbanity. Driven by one epochal defeat of the Enlightenment to the shores of Santa Monica Bay, the most unhappy of the exiles thought they discerned a second defeat in Los Angeles as the ‘shape of the things to come’, a mirror of capitalism’s future.
It is hard to exaggerate the damage which noir’s dystopianization of Los Angeles, together with the exiles’ denunciation of its counterfeit urbanity, inflicted upon the accumulated ideological capital of the region’s boosters. Noir, often in illicit alliance with San Francisco or New York elitism, made Los Angeles the city that American intellectuals love to hate (although, paradoxically, this seems only to increase its fascination for postwar European, especially British and French, intellectuals). As Richard Lehan has emphasized, ‘probably no city in the Western world has a more negative image’.6 To repair this image, especially among the cultural elites, local corporate patrons have sponsored a third major immigration of intellectuals, comparable to the Hollywood-bound diaspora of the 1930s, but now dominated by architects, designers, artists and culture theorists.
As Los Angeles – propelled by financial, real-estate and military booms – has rushed forward to Manhattanize its skylines (increasingly with offshore capital), it has attempted to Manhattanize its cultural super-structure as well. The largest land developers and bankers have coordinated a major cultural offensive, whose impact has been redoubled, after decades of mere talk, by a sudden torrent of arts capital, including the incredible $3 billion Getty endowment, the largest in history. As a result, a wealthy institutional matrix has coalesced – integrating elite university faculties, museums, the arts press and foundations – single-mindedly directed toward the creation of a cultural monumentality to support the sale of the city to overseas investors and affluent immigrants. In this sense, the cultural history of the 1980s recapitulated the real-estate/arts nexus of early twentieth-century boosterism, although this time around with a promotional budget so large that it could afford to buy the international celebrity architects, painters and designers – Meier, Graves, Hockney, and so on – capable of giving cultural prestige and a happy ‘Pop’ veneer to the emergence of the ‘world city’.
These, then, are the three major collectivized interventions by intel-lectuals in the culture formation of Los Angeles: what I somewhat awkwardly abbreviate as the Boosters, the Noirs, and the Mercenaries. The Exiles, as a fourth, more parenthetical, intervention, have linked the indigenous process of city-myth production and its noir-ish antipode to European sensibilities about America and its West Coast. They have integrated the spectre of ‘Los Angeles’ into fundamental debates about the fate of Modernism and the future of a postwar Europe dominated by American Fordism.
It may be objected that this historical typology is one-sidedly slanted towards literateurs, filmmakers, musicians and artists – that is, toward fabricators of the spectacle – and neglects the role of practical intellectuals – planners, engineers, and politicians – who actually build cities. And where are the scientists, Southern California’s most precious crop, who have shaped its rocket-propelled postwar economy? In fact, the fate of science in Los Angeles exemplifies the role reversal between practical reason and what Disneyites call ‘imagineering’. Where one might have expected the presence of the world’s largest scientific and engineering community to cultivate a regional enlightenment, science has consorted instead with pulp fiction, vulgar psychology, and even satanism to create yet another layer of California cultdom. This ironic double transfiguration of science into science fiction, and science fiction into religion, is considered in a brief account of the Sorcerers.
It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the paramount axis of cultural conflict in Los Angeles has always been about the construction/inter-pretation of the city myth, which enters the material landscape as a design for speculation and domination (as Allan Seager suggests, ‘not [as] fantasy imagined but [as] fantasy seen’).7 Even though Los Angeles’s emergence from the desert has been an artifact of giant public works, city-building has otherwise been left to the anarchy of market forces, with only rare interventions by the state, social movements or public leaders. The city’s most Promethean figure – water engineer William Mulholland – was enigmatic and taciturn to an extreme (his collected works: the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the injunction ‘Take it’). Although, as we briefly note, residential architecture has episodically served as a rallying point for cultural regionalism (for example, the Craftsman bungalow of the 1910s, the ‘case-study’ home of the 1940s, the Gehry house of the 1970s), celluloid or the electronic screen have remained the dominant media of the region’s self-expression. Compared to other great cities, Los Angeles may be planned or designed in a very fragmentary sense (primarily at the level of its infrastructure) but it is infinitely envisioned.
Yet we must avoid the idea that Los Angeles is ultimately just the mirror of Narcissus, or a huge disturbance in the Maxwellian ether. Beyond its myriad rhetorics and mirages, it can be presumed that the city actually exists.8 I thus treat, within the master dialectic of sunshine and noir, three attempts, in successive generations, to establish authentic epistemologies for Los Angeles.
First, and at some length in the section called Debunkers, I examine immigrant writer Louis Adamic’s anti-romantic insistence upon the centrality of class violence in the constitution of the social and cultural landscapes of Los Angeles, an interpretation that was carried further in detail and scope by his close friend, Carey McWilliams. McWilliams’s Southern California Country (An Island on the Land) is analyzed as the climax – and terminus – of Popular Front attempts to unmask Booster mythology and to recover the historical roles of labor and oppressed minority groups.
Secondly, I survey the careers of several very different avant gardes (the Black Arts Movement, the Ferus Gallery group, the alternative Hollywood of Kenneth Anger, the solo flight of Thomas Pynchon) which formed a Los Angeles cultural underground during part or all of the 1960s. These collaborations (Communards) – broken up or expatriated by the early 1970s – represented the coming-of-age of the first L.A.-bred bohemia (indeed, in some cases, tracing their roots back to local high-school cliques of the 1940s), unified by their autobiographical search for representative phenomenologies of daily life in Southern California in experiences as different as those of Black jazz musicians, white hotrodders and gay bikers.
Thirdly, in a concluding section I sketch, in broad and very tentative outline, the fledging attempts (after an intellectual/cultural hiatus in the 1970s) to contest the current corporate celebration of ‘postmodern’ Los Angeles. I argue that neither the neo-Marxist academics of the ‘Los Angeles School’ nor the community intellectuals of ‘Gangster Rap’ have yet fully disengaged themselves from the official dream machinery. On the other hand, the cultural definition of the poly-ethnic Los Angeles of the year 2000 has barely begun.
THE BOOSTERS
The missions are, next to our climate and its consequences, the best capital Southern California has. Charles Fletcher Lummis9
In 1884 a malarial journalist from Chillicothe, Ohio decided to change his fortune and improve his health by going to Southern California. Unlike the thousands of other health-seekers beginning to discover the curative powers of sunshine, Charles Fletcher Lummis did not take the train. He walked. On his arrival in Los Angeles 143 days later, the owner of the Times, Colonel (later General) Harrison Gray Otis, was so impressed that he appointed Lummis city editor.
When Otis greeted the footsore Lummis, Los Angeles was just a back-country town (the 187th largest in the 1880 Census) tributary to imperial San Francisco, with little water or capital, and no coal or port. When Otis died thirty-five years later, Los Angeles was the biggest city in the West, approaching a million inhabitants, with an artificial river tapped from the Sierras, a federally subsidized harbor, an oil bonanza, and block after block of skyscrapers under construction. Unlike other American cities that maximized their comparative advantages as crossroads, capitals, seaports, or manufacturing centers, Los Angeles was first and above all the creature of real-estate