August 2009 Archives

Robin Rauzi in an essay in today’s Los Angeles Times finds her way finally to the Watts Towers. Perennially facing one catastrophe or another, the towers might be the perfect metaphor of Los Angeles – a place that many see as a bright but broken assemblage of disordered bits ready always to fall into ruin. The towers are labeled “baffling” in the headline to Rauzi’s piece, which is true enough about the city for some Angeleños as well.

Add that Sabato (Sam or Simon) Rodia arrived, built the towers, handed them over to a neighbor when he was finished, and then left Los Angeles forever. If you imagine that Los Angeles is always reached from the east, Rodia’s story might serve as another metaphor for the city – a place where you arrive after arduous travel, find insubstantial pleasures, ultimately find the city wanting, and finally abandon.

But if Los Angeles isn’t the terminal city of the East, but the leading edge of everything south of us, then the metaphor doesn’t work.

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Symptom: the unbuilt subway that would take riders from the core of downtown west, past an invisible separating line.

That line isn’t diagnostic of our unease. Every city is a puzzle of lines through personal geographies. On my own block, I almost never walk on the west side of the street, even if westward is my destination. I’ll cross at the end of the block. Why? I don’t know. Habit or distrust of the unordinary. Forty feet away for 60 years, and there’s the other side of the street, which I know by sight as well as any 1000 feet of suburban street might be known. But I rarely go there.

Not the dividing line – which could be drawn anywhere, which has been redrawn repeatedly in the city’s history – but the unbuilt subway. The missing subway is symptomatic. It stands for what Los Angeles has not wanted, and it has little to do with public transit. What we do not want is a mingling and hybridization of our geographies. A miscegenation of space.

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Sam Zell, fractious operator of the Los Angeles Times, is poised to walk away from the paper (and the rest of the Tribune Company), according to news reports today (08/18) that were quickly denied by a Tribune Company spokesman.

A reorganization plan being pushed by the company’s creditors targets Zell specifically for removal, which helps explain why Zell would be ready to depart now.

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Among the many things tossed too carelessly on the ash heap of history was the war of Capital and Labor. Their violent, turn-of-the-20th-century battles are not even half remembered now. But the glum slab of the Los Angeles Times building on Spring Street does.

The antiunion rallying cry of “True Industrial Freedom,” is still carved into the Times building’s red granite façade. Dedicated in 1935, the Times building is more than an office building. It’s a memorial cenotaph for the 21 non-union pressmen, linotype operators, and editors who were blown up on an early October morning in 1910 and flung into fire and collapsing masonry.

The dynamiting of the Times was the war’s decisive engagement. After it, the emerging political force of American Socialism was mostly wrecked, and not just in California.

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Dates and locations have changed – from January to February to August 15 and from Bixby Park along Ocean Boulevard to a sprawling grove of eucalyptus trees at Long Beach Recreation Park to – this year – the lawn bowling clubhouse not far away. And, inevitably, the attendance is different, too.

The annual Iowa Picnic in Long Beach in the 1920s gathered an estimated 150,000 attendees (according to Carey McWilliams). So many, that immigrants from the 99 Iowa counties gathered in large clusters under county-specific signs pinned to the palms and elms of Bixby Park. The transplanted Hawkeyes shared potluck and met the friends of friends back home and their shirttail relatives who had joined them. Politicians elbowed their way to get to so many potential and contented voters – it was better than radio, even. And not just candidates for governor of California, but Iowa hopefuls came too, since thousands of well-off Iowans vacationed in Long Beach each year just to come to the vast Iowa Picnic.

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This is another in a series about places in L.A. This place is the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in front of the museum’s recent acquisition: Manuel de Arellano's 1691 Virgin of Guadalupe.

Guadalupe: a place in Extremadura that was translated to a low hill in Tenochtitlán. The name means wolf river – Wadi Lupo – in promiscuously mixed Arabic and Vulgar Latin, the language of Moorish Spain. There is an “original” Virgin of Guadalupe, the goal of pilgrims from the Middle Ages on. Her story is of flight from conquering Moors, hidden burial, miraculous recovery, and enlistment the Spanish reconquista. The Virgin of Guadalupe of Extremadura is black.

The Virgin of México is dusky. Virgén morena. A woman dark as a Moor. Her provenance – though centuries old – is less protected by myth than her Spanish counterpart. Ecclesiastical doubters initially questioned the authenticity of her appearance, doubted even the reality of Juan Diego (called Cuauhtlatoatzin in pre-baptismal Nahuatl). And if he was not the downtrodden laborer of popular imagination (he was said to be landowner or even an Aztec prince), at least he represented the survival of indigenous Mexico, although a Mexico already changed. Something not fully the object of conquest, something even victorious.

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More than 15 million Americans became Californians between 1940 and 1970 – the great years when the state was retailed to the nation as the perfect mix of Arcadian ease and technocratic energy. The greatest paradox is, of course, that the success of these Californians in having so much has turned into so much loss.

Well over two million middle-class Californians have immigrated to “greater California” in recent years – to Idaho, Oregon, Nevada, and Arizona. Their leaving might be the inevitable backwash at of a restless population or symptomatic of something worse. Did something missing in our history or in our character as a people speed them on their way, with their disposable incomes and flawed but real habits of community building?

For Joan Didion, the state’s renowned exile, there is in California “a dangerous dissonance, a slippage between the way we perceive ourselves and the way we are.”

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