November 2008 Archives

Where are we? We're in a lot of books. Books since 1990 about Los Angeles (although most of them are really about L.A. and many of those are really about southern California - spelled with a lower-case “s” these days; capitol “S” was a marketing thing, to distinguish us from them, meaning San Francisco). In one of these books I was criticized (but mildly and only in an endnote) for being insufficiently solicitous of theory. For being the Los Angeles Times go-to, actually, for resistance to theory-as-subject when otherwise talking about L.A. For a preference for history-as-story when talking about us. (An unraveling thread winds from a preference in 2008 for the evaporation of story into theory back to Henry Adams’ regret and confusion in 1908 that his story of himself had become of so little use in the making his theory of history, was worse than useless actually, because he had failed to keep pace with the “acceleration of history,” as Adams called it.)

Theory versus story sounds like an academic argument, but academic arguments frame how public policy is developed here. Consider sprawl and the metrics that define it in the making of policies about, for example, what your neighborhood should look like. Seen from an altitude that encompasses an entire metropolitan region, the Los Angeles region is more densely settled than the New York region despite the hyper-density of Manhattan (because the New York region takes in the sprawling suburban acres of less settled communities outside the city). Or take a slice into the endless working-class suburbs of L.A. - small houses on mostly 5,000-square-foot lots. They’re much denser than similar working-class suburbs of Minneapolis, Atlanta, or Denver. They’re as dense as or denser, for example, than model “new urbanist” communities, although of course they don’t look like them.

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Where are we? In the movies. In the quick, cheap, hurly-burly silent comedies and melodramas made in L.A. between 1909 and 1929. In the light of L.A. . . . the dialectical light that the insensitive nitrate film stock required then. Lawrence Weschler, in a 1998 piece for the New Yorker about the light in L.A., quoting the painter David Hockney: “As a child, growing up in Bradford in the north of England, across the gothic gloom of those endless winters, I remember how my father used to take me along with him to see the Laurel and Hardy movies; and one of the things I noticed right away, long before I could even articulate it exactly, was how Stanley and Oliver, bundled in their winter overcoats, were casting these wonderfully strong, crisp shadows. We never got shadows of any sort in winter. And already I knew that someday I wanted to settle in a place with winter shadows like that. In fact years later, when I staged The Magic Flute, it’s that aspect of the story that I keyed onto - this journey from darkness toward the light, how the light pulls and pulls you. It certainly did me, anyway: the light and those strong, crisp shadows.” In a darkened English movie theater, the winter darkness outside, and Hockey sees a shadow of Los Angeles light or, perhaps, more an instance of preserved L.A. light, and he imagines himself here. As a boy and from time to time, he lived an hour or two in Los Angeles in a darkened theater, long before he arrived to live here as a young man, drawn by the light.

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