City of Quartz: Ajah!

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The days since my last update have been adventurous, taking me from one polarity of rhythm to the next, with a weekend that featured two incredibly fast and filled up days of work for yours truly, and a Monday that saw the short editorial “To My People” published on Abernathy Magazine! Finally, this Tuesday allows me some solid time to update The L.A. Storyteller.

I just got through the first chapter of City of Quartz, which featured a total of eighty-five pages analyzing everything in ‘Los Angeles’ from the rise of its bungalow homes in the 1910s to the eve of L.A.’s gangster-rap era as first led by NWA in 1990. Such a lengthy timeline of analysis makes it difficult to choose a part of the text which captures all of Davis’s excavation through so many different periods and their trades, but I’m just going to pick a few passages and navigate through them in the next few posts.

To start off, I’d like to explore Davis’s insight into the way that investors specifically designed and marketed L.A.’s downtown and West-side areas as ‘melting pots’, where the author pulls no punches when calling out those behind the appropriation of ‘culture’ in The City:

“The large-scale developers and their financial allies, together with a few oil magnates and entertainment moguls, have been the driving force behind the public-private coalition to build a cultural superstructure for Los Angeles’s emergence as a ‘world city’. They patronize the art market, endow the museums, subsidize the regional institutes and planning schools, award the architectural competitions, dominate the arts and urban design task-forces, and influence the flow of public arts monies. They have become so integrally involved in the organization of high culture, not because of old-fashioned philanthropy, but because ‘culture’ has become an important component of the land-development process, as well as a crucial moment in the competition between different elites and regional centers.”

Here, the passage invokes for me the way that places like the MOCA and LACMA have always seemed foreign for housing or ‘hiding away’ the pieces of L.A., as whether I’ve walked from the streets of MacArthur Park, where I’m swept by the smell of beans and cheese melting inside pupusas on the grill, or through Wilshire boulevard, as Koreatown greets me with barbecue restaurants, tofu houses, and Tom N Toms, L.A.’s culture has always been in the air for me.

Similarly, I think of how through the “bombs” of graffiti artists or the paintings of the old school Chicano muralists, L.A. for me was never a city to be framed in portraits hanging on the interior walls of ‘art centers’, but to be felt through its aerosol-laden brick and adobe walls out in the open, which speak to the city’s de-centeredness.

Perhaps most of all, however, to me any culture in Los Angeles has always proliferated in the myriad of English dialects which it’s home to, as I walk through the city’s neighborhoods to the chatter of ‘foo’, ‘bluh’, or ‘cuh’ vernaculars, among so many others.

For largely failing to acknowledge such homegrown characteristics, L.A.’s major museums have always been a downer for many of me and my friends, but until Davis’s text, the feeling was always subconscious. Now, with the insight of Quartz in mind, I finally have a context for the feeling of estrangement throughout so many of The City’s supposed representations. A lot like Hollywood, L.A.’s museums were never exactly meant for me or my friends to really ‘star’ or find representation in, but they were meant for us to ‘buy into’ like we do with the movies for which we ‘suspend belief’.

On the one hand, this is a challenge to accept, as coming to terms with the idea of living in a city that’s continually trying to sell illusions to me is frankly just difficult to digest. On the other hand: it’s an education like no other to see past the illusion, and I nevertheless recognize it as a fundamental way in which to learn how to respond to the seller.

As I continue with reflections on Davis’s text, I wonder how readers might react to such descriptions of The City. One thing’s for sure: I’ve never been more fascinated with the discussion as I am now, nor equipped with so much literature to draw from! Alas, it seems then, that The L.A. Storyteller, is really just The L.A. Geek.

With more soon,

City of Quartz: Oh man,

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Another great part of finally landing my hands on Davis’s Quartz is digging through all of the beautiful things that others have written about The City before The L.A. Storyteller. From the pages of Davis’s excavation, I draw from one of his quotations to share with J.T., which he takes from Morrow Mayo’s Los Angeles of 1933!

“Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn…endeavoring to eat up this too-rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat. It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population, for the simple reason that it has never had any urban character to impart. On the other hand, the place has retained the manners, culture, and general outlook of a huge country village.”

…And it’s so precious to meet the words of another soul fascinated by The City, through which time and space collapse for the timeless and spaceless realm of love; love for one’s surroundings, and one’s understanding of a world beyond them. I could have been born in Paris, or Mexico City, and I would have treasured it all the same. My affection for the place I call home is merely a human affection, for life that’s been around long before J.T., and which will remain long afterwards too.

In the meantime, however, it’s so great to see that L.A. was dealing with a ‘drought’ as far back as 1933. The truth is that the terrain on which The City was founded has always been a dry land, but that somewhere along the way either people forgot about the natural dry spell or flat out denied it in their insistence on living here. Los Angeles is indefinitely something of a living dream this way, or a fantasy that people hold onto because it’s better than ‘real life’ elsewhere.

For Mr. Davis and other writers, such ‘holding onto the dream’ marks L.A. as one of the last frontiers of late capitalism, where all of the fantasies of high living culminate into one great and strange experiment of freeways, beaches, individualism, and the sense of starting over and away from America, and even the rest of the world.

This assessment is fair enough, but for those of us who were born and bred in this city, L.A. is not the last, but just the first world of many more like it to come, where at some point in the process of living through a fantasy as people are living through a ‘drought’, people don’t just hold onto, but fight for their dreams. 

And if the last one hundred and twenty something years of L.A. show anything, it’s that no matter what society or year it might be, people will always need their dreams, as a life without them is meaningless. On the one hand, this is scary, since there are real and not fantasized issues that trouble L.A. like any other part of the world. On the other hand, it’s what keeps the great fight going, and I’ve got to be honest: I love a great fight. As Mayo, Davis, Fante, and countless other souls before me have fought with their words to ‘wake up’ The City, and as others will fight to do so after my time, it’s an honor to bring J.T. into what might most appropriately be called The Battle of Los Angeles.

With more soon,

City of Quartz: Opening Remarks [Extended]

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My brother and I might have been raised by a single mother, but we were raised to be educated, active, and resilient human beings, so I’d never really thought of my family and I as vulnerable people. When I take a moment to think about the economics we’re steeped in today, however, I recognize a thin line we have to walk through between poverty and insolvency. With Davis’s analysis in mind, that line is magnified. Continuing with some more reflections on the preface for City of Quartz, another passage strikes me as being particularly relevant. Once again, in his updated preface of 2006, Davis writes:

“As manufacturing employment shrinks, an already precarious low-wage workforce is further compressed into a limited spectrum of service-sector jobs in restaurants, hotels, offices, theme parks, and private homes. This service-heavy economy, based upon a myriad of poorly-capitalized small businesses, is especially vulnerable to fluctuations in economic weather…“

When the financial meltdown of 2008 stormed the market, Davis’s insight proved to be prescient. Like the Titanic, the first to lose everything in the crash were the laborers at the bottom of the ship, or people like the garment workers, warehouse bodies, and millions more who’d no longer have work following the recession even while they were barely managing to pay rent in the first place. The second group of people to lose everything would be those just a level above the laborers, or people like my brother and I, as heirs of an economy which had no safety net for their immigrant parents, and barely any safety net for us as their children.

For yours truly, however, in 2008 there wasn’t much of a crash for my eyes to assess. I was barely an eighteen-year old high school graduate then, and all I knew was I was going to college at the same time that the country was getting ready to see its first Black president; I was excited about the future, and hopeful that I was a part of a new era of American culture. Plus, my mother had left the garment industry to start and run her own small business a few years prior, so I believed that my family’s destiny was always going to be a little different from those around us.

Our destiny would be different in its own way, but not different enough to distinguish my mother’s struggle to pay the rent from that of our neighbors next door, who cleaned houses for a living. As Davis’s text points out, our ability to level the crash was fragile, and though my mother’s little newsstand on Santa Monica boulevard managed to survive the next couple of years of the sour market, a “profit” has never been more difficult for her to garner than it is today.

The truth is that business for mom is not growing, but reeling further into yesterday’s memories with each passing day. In turn, seven years after Hope for an era of American Change, the only thing that’s different for me and my family is that the task now lies on my brother and I to step up and weather the storm. I can live with this destiny, as my mother managed to live with the fact that she’d have to raise two young men in Los Angeles on her own, but I know that all of us expected more from our country. Yet with the clock ticking, each minute that passes wanes my mother’s tiny bones further into exhaustion. This makes my post-graduate phase less about crafting my own destiny than about inheriting my mother’s, and all working class people’s. She needs significant health procedures done on her teeth and on her feet soon, and as Davis points out in his preface:

“The working poor in Los Angeles have only marginally better access to healthcare than they might possess in Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.”

It’s true. As a recipient of Medi-Cal, like my mother before me, I know firsthand just how many benefits of the government’s health-care my family and I are actually able to access. Benefits include check-ups and diagnoses for our health needs, but the rest has to come out of pockets that are already drained.

Still, as Davis later points out in his preface:

“Wages in California have increased only for workers with a college degree…”

As I think about my education throughout the last couple of years, I believe firmly in my ability to gain a greater footing for me and my family to make it through the next seven years. Unlike my naive optimism in 2008, however, I’m not holding on to any hope for a presidential bailout anytime soon. As I reflect on the market for what it’s been to me and my family throughout the last decade, I realize that any upward mobility, like its downward counterpart, takes place one step at a time.

With more soon,

City of Quartz: Opening Remarks

J.T.6 Comments

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City  of Quartz,

We meet at last. It’s taken me twenty-four years to reach Mike Davis’s legendary “excavation” of Los Angeles, and yet I know I’m right on time. Published just two years before rioting rumbled through the streets of South Central, the book is renowned for its unfaltering confrontation of the money and politics underpinning life, crime, and movement in Los Angeles. For this, the book is particularly special to yours truly, as it paints a unique portrait of worlds in The City that I walk through each day of my life. As such, my next few posts will be reviewing the book’s chapters in hopes of “carpooling” with J.T.’s readers on a journey with the author.

For some time, I’ve done my best to steer clear of politics with my writing on JIMBO TIMES, and yet I’ve always known I could only look away for so long. My writing has always been a world exploring contrasts, honoring what’s beautiful throughout the world, while also acknowledging what threatens its beauty. This is what makes it an honor to reach the pages of City of Quartz, as I know the book will play a significant role in shaping The L.A. Storyteller’s perspective.

In fact, it already has. Just a few pages in, the book’s very preface has already helped me to identify a key aspect of my relation to The City. I’m reading the re-edition of Quartz, published in 2006 with an updated preface from the author, and I think a great starting point for reflection can be found in Davis’s assessment of then-Mayor Villaraigosa’s impact on the city.

“After a municipal election (2005) sadly devoid of new concepts, genuine passions, or substantive debate, Los Angeles at last has a mayor -Antonio Villaraigosa- with a surname that resounds with the same accent as the majority of the population. The election of Villaraigosa – once a fiery trade-union and civil-liberties activist – should have been Los Angeles’s ‘La Guardia moment,’ an opportunity to sweep city-hall clean of its old scheming cabals with their monomaniac obsession with gentrifying Downtown at the expense of the city’s blue-collar neighborhoods. Instead…the former rebel from east of the river is now the jaded booster of a downtown-renaissance that promotes super-cathedrals, billionaire sports franchises, mega-museums, Yuppie lofts, and drunken Frank Gehry skyscrapers at the  expense of social justice and affordable housing…“

Even before Davis’s mention of Villaraigosa, I’m almost immediately reminded of L.A.’s 2013 race for Mayor between then-councilman Eric Garcetti and City Controller Wendy Gruel, which finished with the lowest voter turnout in L.A. history. In fact, according to the L.A. Times, “Garcetti’s complete tally was 222,300, just 12.4% of the city’s registered voters. That was well ahead of his opponent, City Controller Wendy Greuel, but a smaller vote total than any incoming mayor since Frank Shaw in 1933.”

I was in Davis, California when the elections were taking place, but even from afar, I observed a contest that showed hardly any concern over the city’s housing, education, or transportation crises. Like Villaraigosa before them, both candidates seemed nearly oblivious to the worlds facing the people of Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, or the neglected black and Latino students of L.A.U.S.D.

Garcetti spoke of “revitalizing” L.A., but for who? In the two years since his election, his time in office has merely been an extension of Villaraigosa’s liasoning to developers and other displacers with a stake in L.A. property. Just last year, despite heated protests from riders, Garcetti voted along with the Metro board to raise the fare on Metro’s ridership, the vast majority of whom – as cited by the L.A. Weekly – barely earn “an income of roughly $20,000 a year and more than 80 percent [of whom] are minorities, according to a Metro survey in 2012.”

Naturally, proponents of the fee hike pointed to rising operating costs for the Metro system, but as several leaders opposing the vote made clear, Metro’s board cited rising costs while failing to acknowledge their inability to attract new, wealthier riders over the last few years. In turn, their vote placed the costs of their under-performance on the backs of their already financially-strapped patrons.

As if to catch my drift, apart from the election at the time, the preface of Quartz also delves right into transportation, providing material for readers to place the relevance of Metro’s recent decision within the larger spectrum of L.A.’s transportation crises:

“Right now [in 2006], locals pay a ‘congestion tax’ – ninety-three hours per commuter per year lost in traffic delays – that is the highest in the United States, and twice as high as it was in 1982. In the worst scenario, it can double again in another decade.”

And here, I think readers can see why I’m so excited about the book: in the opening alone, Davis shows concern for the city like a driver exiting the freeway determined to find the origins of the traffic that stifles it. Taking a stand on the pathway overlooking the congestion, Davis is ready for a change. Walking down the street in my journey with L.A., I recognize the author as he stares down at traffic, and join him in observation. Together, Davis’s preface tells me that both the reader and writer can find key roots of the gridlock, and in turn, key roots of the response.

I look forward to sharing more of what these responses look like with City of Quartz soon, and I hope readers look forward to hearing them.

With Love,