"L.A.'s Essence": Coda

IF WE WERE having class this week, I would have pointed your attention to a dust up that's occurring in real time out here in the journo-world. The New York Times has been publishing a series of pieces by Verilyn Klinkenborg about Los Angeles, many of which haven't been sitting well with us "laid back" folks.

It's not so much what he is saying in these delicately appointed pieces about L.A. -- it's what he isn't saying, and the tone. There's always the tone.

Last Sunday, the Times published an editorial "Haunting Los Angeles" in which Klinkenborg explains that he is at a loss to understand Los Angeles' essenece: "The iconic glimpses don't help me in my quest -- not the sudden view of the Hollywood sign I get from the Hollywood Freeway, not the view of downtown almost floating in the sunset from Pasadena. Every now and then, I turn a corner and think that something essential is about to be revealed. The feeling intensifies all the way up Venice Boulvard into Culver City, and then I'm on National taking one of those curious hidden freeway entrances and suddenly the feeling vanishes"

Vanishes.

Klinkenborg, for all of his hesitation in his impossible quest for Los Angeles' essence concludes:

"If I had an extra lifetime to live, I'd live it here. I don't mean one lifetime lived, in the usual way. I mean a lifetime living within a block or two of the insurance shop on Venice Boulevard with the wrap-around neon facade. Another watching cars turn off National onto the 10 . . . . Perhaps then I could grasp what always escapes me here. Then I'd know whether it was worth looking for in the first place."

It's the final line that has created the dust up -- "worth looking for in the first place..." that has set off bells and has become an impetus for posts, tweets and columns this week (see Hector Tobar's piece in this week's L.A. Times.)

What it all said to me was exactly what we've been trying to move toward in this class. Many of you know the essence already and can articulate your corner, your street, the intersections, the essence -- without qualification or apology.

Go forward.

You know what you're looking for. And it doesn't escape you. It's in you.

-- L.G.

(photo credit: Robert Adams, courtesy the Getty website)

A.O. Scott on Chinatown --

A few weeks back, the New York Times' film critic, A. O. Scott looked at Roman Polanski’s 1974 film noir “Chinatown.” Mr. Scott calls the film, which explores corruption in 1930s Los Angeles, “much more than the sum of its parts.” He says that Mr. Polanski “pushes beyond the conventions of the genre to give us a stark encounter between a powerless individual and monstrous evil.” Please share your thoughts on “Chinatown.”
-- L.G.

(photo credit: cinemaisdopedotcom.)

Survey L.A.: One Building at a Time . . .

FOR THOSE OF you interested in going even deeper, the City of Los Angeles has embarked on an expansive project to ensure that Los Angeles' built history is properly counted and cataloged.

Survey L.A., a project launched by the city's Office of Historical Resources, is an expansive, multi-layered endeavor that christens the city's first comprehensive preservation program.

Eighty-five percent of Los Angeles's structures have not been cataloged. Unlike most big cities, Los Angeles hasn't had an organized and systemized way of keeping track of what's on the ground. Survey L.A. is training and paring teams of architects, historians, students and volunteers to traverse the city and catalog each and every structure. The idea behind this effort is to begin to understand Los Angeles's history through the various structures (and the various uses of those structures over time) Ken Bernstein, head of the Office of Historical Resources told me during an interview for an L.A. Times story I was working on that one of the primary impetus of this program was the constant "11th hour fights" to save historically significant buildings from being torn down under the cover of night. Once a building is counted and cataloged in the database it will be easier to find out more about what its historical relevance is without scrambling at the last minute.

Moreover, Bernstein hopes, is that we begin to understand our city's history through its neighborhoods, subdivisions, industries and distinct melange of architecture. For those of you who might like to participate in learning about your city literally from the ground up click here .
Below is part-one of a series of three videos that will tell you a little more about the project.
-- L.G.

Hidden L.A: Crime, Chandler & Clifton's

HIDDEN LOS ANGELES' Lynn Garrett, didn't forget to send along the video of crime in 1930s Los Angeles. You'll find it here on her site.

Here some little intro bits . . . "

a really great 30 minute long documentary (shown in 3 parts) about iconic author Raymond Chandler’s take on the corruption of Los Angeles in the 1930s… a paradise infiltrated by dope fiends, smut peddlers, schemers in low places and high, crooked cops and crooked politicians…

And she adds in an email to me:


The 1930s documentary I was recommending to the students about LA crime in the 30s (it features the story about Clfford Clinton’s house being firebombed too)

Enjoy!


-- L.G.

Sense Memory: After the Heat

ANOTHER LIFE AGO, it seems, I had to leave L.A. -- flee L.A. would be more precise. The big, sprawling city became claustrophobic -- or at least that was how I saw it at the time. I was finishing my degree, interning for a magazine, selling books at a Century City bookstore now long vanished. It was the latter that was getting to me. Not the routine of the bookseller job; that was pleasant -- shelving books and talking with other clerks about ideas. But the people who came through the doors with pressing needs -- that was wearing. Because the store was adjacent to so many talent agencies, entertainment management glass-and-steel high-rises and a major motion picture studio, there were days that the very air seemed to be sucked out of the entire store -- the entire open-air mall itself -- with demands and temper tantrums and never a thank you. It was a "new breed" of Hollywood and it had big hair, big shoulders and super-size egos.

I'd had enough. I concluded, "L.A. was different. Had changed." I packed up and headed north to San Francisco to try on life there. I enrolled in school and for the first time as an adult didn't have a car. It wasn't as dislocating as I thought, rather it was liberating. I wandered all over that beautiful jewel of a city, across its fabled seven hills. Most weekends, I'd just pick a direction and walk, just to see what I might find. I lived on the southwest end of San Francisco, in the Sunset where I often saw the sun for a mere three hours a day. At 3PM, the fog would float in and hunker down a top the city like a big down comforter. The air smelled damp, metallic and brackish.

I missed the sun. Not the intense heat of late summer, but the hint of real warmth and the gold tones and shadows that late-afternoon sunlight brought with it. But too there was something else missing.

My first visit back to L.A. was in the Spring. A mini-heatwave was upon us. I stood in a friend's backyard for a party; her backyard, a loud, brilliant tangle of bougainvillea and sneaky morning glory. But what hit harder than the fuchsia and magenta petals curling up the trellis or my friends' faces and their stories told in their familiar cadences was something on the air. Literally. The breeze carried a subtle perfume, sweet but not too, floral but cut with sharp spice. Also, there was a hint of smoke. A bitterness. It hung in the air, only disturbed by a breeze. It took me a bit to realize that it wasn't something someone had dabbed behind his or her ear or something cooking on the grill, or something burning, L.A.-style off in the not-too-far-off distance.
It was chaparral, ground-cover -- sage, rosemary. It was a explosion of night-blooming jasmine overflowing a nearby flower-bed. With the cool night coming on the air was full of scent notes, a mix so unique to Los Angeles. Nothing brought the city back to me, my connection to it, as much as this. I was home: the fading light, the cooling breeze after the heat -- and those aromas. L.A.'s scent rubbing against all of us. Claiming us. Lingering.

-- L.G.
(photo credit: flickr creative commons)

Read L.A.: Los Angeles on the Page

I OFTEN SHRUG out of being pinned-down on what L.A. books are my favorite. So this list merely represnts books that, to me, nail some aspect of Los Angeles that I find resonant. A few of them I have returned to time and again ("Day of the Locust" "Hope of Heaven.") The titles are nonfiction and fiction. Photography, poetry etc.



Here they are, in no particular order:
Hope of Heaven -- John O'Hara
The White Album -- Joan Didion
What Makes Sammy Run? -- Budd Schulberg
Mildred Pierce -- James M. Cain
Day of the Locust -- Nathaniel West



Devil in a Blue Dress -- Walter Mosley
Dreams from Bunker Hill -- John Fante
Playback -- Raymond Chandler
Chavez Ravine 1949 -- Don Normark
Days Without Weather -- Cecil Brown
The Other Side -- Ruben Martinez
A Single Man -- Christopher Isherwood
Low Down -- A.J. Albany

Out With the Stars -- Jim Heimann
Tapping the Source -- Kem Nunn
The History of Forgetting -- Norman Klein
The Nowhere City -- Alison Lurie
Imagoes -- Wanda Coleman
Days Between Stations -- Steve Erickson
In a Lonely Place -- Dorothy B. Hughes



-- L.G.

Hidden Los Angeles Visits LMU

TOMORROW NIGHT, W. Lynn Garrett will speak to our class about her adventures putting together the Hidden Los Angeles website and its Facebook fan page. Take a spin here. Hidden L.A. is a site dedicated to "embracing the depth beneath the shallow" -- which has been "Telling L.A.'s Story's" focus this semester as well. Please come with spirited, deep questions about the region.
-- L.G.

The "Anti-Tour" -- Beneath the Myths

WE HAVE REACHED the part of the semester where we are now looking at remapping, re-imagining L.A. in a different way. The boosters had their moment; so too, the writers from elsewhere. The historians arrived with expectations; the fiction writers with dreams that soured then shriveled. We've read journalists who have tried to crawl under the myth, read voices from those who have lived their lives along the margins of the official L.A. story. Now, the city is again remapped as the L.A.'s core has become valuable. With gentrification comes "erasure" add to it lives behind walls, lives in a bubble. What happens then to community and the stories communities create and re-tell? What will L.A. be if is "written over" yet again? What are the stories you plan to tell about your L.A.?

A postscript on Norman Klein...
In the late 80s, word got around about Norman Klein and something he began to call his "Anti-Tour." A critic and urban historian and theorist who teaches at California Institute of the Arts, had begun taking his classes on "anti-tours." Klein had purchased a crumbling vestige of a grand house in Anglelino Heights (which is a small neighborhood that is Echo Park adjacent) and word had it that it was a former gang house, which meant that sometimes slow moving cars would slink by at any given time. He writes of that time:
"It took twelve years to restore [the house]. . . . [I] discovered I had a lifelong fascination with high urban decay and with gradual uncovering of urban ruins. By 1986, I was running a series of lectures about the level of public neglect and bad faith in Los Angeles, entitled, "Beneath the Myths." I started taking students on what I called anti-tours. I would stop at locations where no building existed any longer, tell them what had been there once: a movie studio, a whorehouse, whatever. We would get out, look around and agree it was gone all right. I showed them as many interiors as I could find, but only if they were inhabited; no museum artifacts allowed."

Those lectures were the working notes and foundation for his book, The History of Forgetting

-- L.G.
photo caption : from Norman Klein's "L.A. Slideshow"

More Dreams from Bunker Hill

THIS WEEK, the corner of 5th Street & Grand Avenue moved up in the world.
The City of Los Angeles is formally naming the intersection after the author of Ask the Dust and Dreams from Bunker Hill. It's a symbolic choice of course, as 5th and Grand sit at the foot of the old neighborhood, Bunker Hill we've been talking about and looking at in class. It was where he once lived -- and suffered. It was also a quick walk to the Central Library, a place that the author haunted. Years later, a young poet happened upon his books in the stacks, and they in turn inspired him to become a writer. Charles Bukowski would champion Fante for the rest of his life.

For those interested in a long-look back there will be a bus tour, John Fante's Dream's From Bunker Hill, on April 17 sponsored and hosted by the Los Angeles Visionary Association. Check here for details.
-- L.G.
(photo: Fante's Bunker Hill duplex, credit: fishbowl, l.a.)

Read L.A: Ruben Martinez's Territories

LAST CLASS, Professor Ruben Martinez, who is the Fletcher Jones Chair in Literature and Writing here at Loyola Marymount University (and my longtime colleague), spoke passionately about his time served here in Los Angeles as journalist, poet, performance artist and pundit -- and how at one point all of that seemed to have merged. He also spoke eloquently about race and class; about communities and causes that had been marginalized by the media; about how a writer finds his/her voice while attempting to describe life from the inside out, make the invisible visible.

Post session, I asked him to share a few of his favorite/resonant texts that deal with Los Angeles. Pulling from various sources and disciplines, he didn't stick to the page as you'll see.

Top-of-the-head response from a quick email:

ask the dust , john fante
white album, joan didion
chavez ravine (the album, the play, the book of photographs)
& of course city of quartz, mike davis

- L.G.

Zoot Suit Riots on American Experience

FOR THOSE of you interested in delving in a little deeper PBS is airing a documentary on the Zoot Suit Riots on March 1st at 9pm. Check your local listings. Here's a brief synopsis:

In August 1942 the murder of a young Mexican-American man ignited a firestorm in the City of the Angels. In no time at all, ethnic and racial tensions that had been building up over the years boiled over. Police fanned out across the city in a dragnet that netted 600 Mexican Americans. Among those accused of murder was a young "zoot-suiter" named Hank Leyvas -- the poster boy for an entire generation of rebellious Mexican kids who refused to play by the old rules. As he and sixteen other boys headed to trial, the mood of the city turned violent. The deck was stacked against the defendants, and a verdict of guilty would spark a series of brutal riots. The convictions were ultimately overturned, but the city and its inhabitants would be forever changed.

-- L.G.

Photo Credit: American Experience, PBS

The Profile: Ebert on Movies

THIS, of course, is not quite about L.A. but it is about the "factory" that makes its home here: Hollywood and movies. Last night we talked about the arc of the profile and I shared some samples of stories with the class. I'll be sending you links to other well-crafted, lyric, provocative, moving profiles but I wanted to post Chris Jones' Esquire profile about film critic Roger Ebert's battle with cancer here and, today, Ebert's own response in the Chicago Sun-Times, his hometown paper. Below, a sample that speaks to what we discussed about observation and a writer's choices (note the comment about the "commissioned portrait"):

It was also well written, I thought. "When I turned to it in the magazine, I got a jolt from the full-page photograph of my jaw drooping. Not a lovely sight. But then I am not a lovely sight, and in a moment I thought, well, what the hell. It's just as well it's out there. That's how I look, after all. . . . . My theory was that if Chris had an article to write it was not my place to write it for him as a favorable press release about myself. Let him write what he observed. Oliver Cromwell is said to have commissioned an official painting of himself, "warts and all." He apparently never said any such thing, was misquoted a century after his death, and his official portrait showed no warts, but never mind: He should have said it."

-- L.G.
photo caption: Film crtic, Roger Ebert
photo credit: Esquire magazine

Poor Man's Shangri-La

THIS IS the project that provided the working framework for artist Vincent Valdez's mural; the saga of Chavez Ravine unfolding, panel by panel along the body of a lowrider (yes, it was a lowrider) ice cream truck. Completed in 2007, the truck, El Chavez Ravine, was commissioned by musician, Ry Cooder. We'll discuss the neighborhood, Chavez Ravine, and the project a little bit more down the line but here are some song samples, drawn from the album, that tell the story of an old Los Angeles neighborhood, now vanished.
The song, "Poor Man's Shangri-la" is an aural establishing shot, if you will, of a time and place in Los Angeles more than fifty years ago and a dramatic story of eminent domain.
The lyrics unscroll below. Pay close attention to Cooder's storytelling devices, how he places you in a time, place, era, moment with specific details --

"Tell you 'bout this friend of mine that you don't know
He lives way up a road that's lost in time.
Don't know his name, or where he's coming from,
Only thing you know, he's a real gone cat,
This friend of mine.

He don't have no uptown friends, or drive a Cadillac,
But he's got cool threads and a beat up car.
All his downtown friends like me ride around in the back
'Cause he's a real cool cat, yeah he's a real cool cat,
This friend of mine.

La Loma boys will run with you,
Do anything that you want them to,
If you need a friend 'cause you're feeling blue
Palo Verde girls never let you down.

Na na na na na, living in a poor man's Shangri-La.

Firme guys in their firme cars,
Underneath the moon and stars.
The city lights way down below.
What's that sound? What's that light
Streaking down through the night?
What's it mean? It's a red cloud over
Chavez Ravine.

Orale, UFO, come gliding low.
Se cayo up Chavez Road.
Space Vato, square cat.
Say, "Caramba, partners, where's the party at?"

I heard about the cool jerk, and the alligator,
Tokay wine, Mary Jane, and Lil' Julian Herrera.
I want to learn to dance, make romance.
These La Bishop girls might take a chance.

My friend says, "No, be cool, bro.
If you want to dance slow,
Learn to ask a mi hermana con respeto."

UFO got a radio.
Lil' Julian singing soft and low.
Los Angeles down below.
DJ says, we got to go.
To El Monte, El Monte, pa El Monte.

Na na na na na, living in a poor man's Shangri-La"

Here's an evocative PBS slideshow showcasing a collection of photographs made by Don Normark in 1949.
Where does the music take you? In a nutshell, what other L.A. songs transport you to a time or place?
-- L.G.

(Music Credit: Lyrics by Ry Cooder/William Garcia/Gene Aguilera Hi-Lo Shag Music [BMI]/Wagamita Music [BMI] Carmelita Music)