“Although awash with garbled pseudo-scientisms and racial allusions, [Anton Wagner’s] Los Angeles (1935) offered an extraordinarily detailed panorama of the city’s districts and environs in the early depression…particularly Hollywood’s elaborate, but doomed, attempt to generate a Europeanized ‘real urban milieu’:
‘Here, one wants to create the Paris of the Far West. Evening traffic on Hollywood boulevard attempts to mimic Parisian boulevard life. However, life on the boulevard is extinct before midnight, and the seats in front of the cafes, where in Paris one can watch street life in a leisurely manner, are missing…'”
Here I’m reminded of something I heard in my writing workshop with VONA at Miami, when a fellow writer mentioned how on first getting to L.A., the place felt “like a country town.” I remember being so struck by her words, as before then it had never occurred to me just how much the city feels like a village nestled out in the wilderness! Somehow, I’d gotten so caught up in the concrete and density of L.A. that I viewed it purely as a metropolis, when its origins clearly still mark it as a nexus of hills, canyons, and other dry land that just had concrete plastered all over it one day.
In fact, when I think about it the place isn’t even radically different from the pueblo in Southern Mexico where my mom originally hails from: a tiny little town in the mountains with its own miniature twists and turns through the landscape like the streets of Los Angeles.
What’s more, Wagner’s take on the ‘[missing] seats in front of the cafe’ furthers the point of L.A. as a teeming and even chaotic sprawl of mass, since unlike the streets of say, Manhattan, for example, which are flat and therefore prime locations for seats and tables on the street, Hollywood is landlocked amid the swirl of Sunset boulevard and cross-streets that curve strangely into one hill or the next. This makes it difficult to set up seats and tables in a way that is uniform and therefore synchronous with an overall aesthetic, or as Wagner points out, in a way that successfully mimics Parisian boulevard life. Of course, as for the midnight or two am curfew, I can’t quite explain how it came about in L.A., but somehow I have a feeling that Davis will cover it in his elaborate excavation.
Once again, then, I think I’m geeking out! I feel like my knowledge of L.A. only expands with each analysis, and like the information can only play a key role in determining the next twist and turn for The L.A. Storyteller, especially as a new year approaches.
So from its beginnings, L.A. after it was forcibly brought into the union was a place for the rich, by the rich, all of whom wanted to sell Los Angeles to…the rich. Mike Davis examines a couple of major institutions and their forerunners as follows:
“I begin with the so-called ‘Arroyo set’: writers, antiquarians, and publicists under the influence of Charles Fletcher Lummis (himself in the pay of the Times and the Chamber of Commerce), who at the turn of the century created a comprehensive fiction of Southern California as the promised land of a millenarian Anglo-Saxon racial odyssey. They inserted a mediterraneanized idyll of New England life into the perfumed ruins of an innocent but inferior ‘Spanish’ culture. In doing so, they wrote the script for the giant real-estate speculations of the early twentieth century that transformed Los Angeles from small town to metropolis. Their imagery, motifs, values and legends were in turn endlessly reproduced by Hollywood, while continuing to be incorporated into ersatz landscapes of suburban Southern California.”
Here, I don’t have to look far to find the ‘comprehensive fiction’ Davis describes, as memorabilia of L.A.’s “idyllic” lifestyle are abound:
Free Harbor and Glorious Southern California are brought to you by the L.A. Public Library, while California this Summer was found through the California State Library.
In Free Harbor (1899), the L.A. ports of 1899 are overseen by a flock of little white angels, who promise great things to come for the land neighbored by the ocean and overseen by triumphant sunlight. In similar fashion, Jubilee‘s trumpet signals the rise of an American dream in California’s ports, from which freedom and eloquence naturally follow.
California This Summer (1934) makes similar gestures, as the poster captures a world with a little bit of everything, including a state of beaches, lush and green hills, and even mountaintops to quietly conquer as the fair lady with the sunhat does. Life in the portrait looks simple and untainted by the dirt of cities and the congestion of crowds. A perfect summer vacation. Never mind the Native people who once made their lives amid such mountains.
Glorious Southern California (1907) exhausts the point. On one side, the ocean waves signal the life of unchartered waters, while below, the life of cacti and other plants serve to welcome dreams of real estate and other property in an open frontier.
As Davis notes, all of the posters promise Anglo-saxon or white purity, making no allusion or reference to the Spanish-speaking brown cultures which gave California its name, nor the pockets of indigenous civilizations throughout the state which were pushed out to make way for the influx of newcomers.Instead, real estate moguls figured out that depicting a world of endless sunshine and openness would be a draw, and they were absolutely right. As Quartz reveals, such images of Southern California would be endlessly reproduced in Hollywood throughout the decades that’d follow, and well into the present.
It reminds me of a similar trend in my neighborhood at the moment, where apartments are sold as real estate agencies as being based in Silver Lake, when in fact they’re actually located in ‘East Hollywood.’ As a neighbor pointed out to me recently, “when out-of-towners arrive into their new apartments from Seattle and other parts of the country, they’re surprised: there’s no lake, and the apartments are much smaller than they thought, so they just leave, and the cycle starts all over again.”
As more footage of the late Sandra Bland’s final hours of life spiral further onto the desks of talking heads and other media outlets, I think it’s important to acknowledge the ability of a film to desensitize and distort the abuse of a human being.
We live in an age and culture where we’ve seen so much abuse on screens in film and television that at certain points it’s merely a spectacle to observe, regardless of whether it’s ‘real’ abuse or not. For this, the comfort provided by the distance and space encapsulated on a screen provides us with a sense of detachment, which is empowering to a degree, but also dangerous.
It’s empowering because we can see and analyze an abuse taking place in a film, but dangerous because we cannot feel the physical and cognitive abuse experienced by the people being filmed. Thus, while some of us might be considerably horrified at seeing a fellow human being treated like an animal on the screen, the feeling of horror provides us with a false or minuscule understanding of the lived experience of having one’s body violated by the hands of an attack in such a way.
The lived experience of having one’s body violated by anyone is a harrowing sequence of traumatization in and of itself, but in the case of police violence, this horror is exacerbated by the fact that the inflictor of that trauma is sanctioned by an institution that literally surrounds and leaves no way out for your escape.
To name just one such instance: When police take you into custody, they attack you not just with their own imposing bodies in uniform, but with the bodies of concrete walls that limit your eyesight, and with the bodies of voyeuristic police cameras watching your every move, and with the bodies of cold steel handcuffs that weigh down your wrists, as well as other instruments that enclose themselves upon YOUR BODY.
We can’t and will never understand such abuse by watching a film or reading a description of it; we can only feel it to understand it, and even that understanding will be limited by the frequency at which we experience such abuse.
Here, it should noted that Black people in America have faced more of this type of psychological, political, and ultimately physical violence than any other group of people since – to quote the great Angela Davis – “the time the first Black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.”
At the same time, while it’s fundamental to acknowledge how the color of our skin is extremely important in determining our treatment at the hands of our government, it’s my opinion that racial makeup is still second to the size of our pockets and the wealth controlled by our heritage. To paraphrase Chicago’s Alvin Lau on the success of Tiger Woods: If you’re rich, you don’t have to worry about stupid shit like this.
This is where it gets complicated: as an increasing number of white middle class Americans continue to fall into the cracks of poverty with people of color they once presumed they were ‘above’, the current trends of police and state violence suggest that the rights afforded to such white Americans will also suffer impoverishment.
In California, the vast majority of people victimized by the power dynamic of this country over the last few decades have been black and brown skinned bodies, but there are myriads of poor white bodies in the state and across the country that have been imprisoned as well, and it’s not because of the color of their skin, but because of the scarcity of resources with which they’re able to defend themselves as poor people standing in the way of a government that feasts on poor people.
In turn, at the same time that we become increasingly tolerant of the violent defense of this dynamic when it’s captured and viewed on screen, our country is witnessing the concentration of wealth into fewer and more vicious hands than before.
And in the humble opinion of yours truly, unless we recognize and support the Americans fighting for a better way for our country now – those Black and Brown people organizing – this power dynamic is just the tip of the iceberg in the land of the free and the home of the brave of the future, one piece of violent footage at a time.
Another great part of finally landing my hands on Davis’sQuartzis 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.
