The Future Imperfect in LA: Why Los Angeles is one of the oldest cities in the world
The Future Imperfect in LA: Why Los Angeles is one of the oldest cities in the world
By Norman M. Klein
Let us begin this essay on LA aesthetics with a visual prologue. In many classic noir films, circa 1950, we could open with an overhead shot, Los Angeles aestheticized in one of three poses:
1. At night: Diamonds on Black Velvet. The grid of the LA Basin on a black field.
2. The afternoon: Gliding thirty feet above the footprint of downtown. The ziggurat of City Hall dominates, like a shepherd.
3. The morning: We discover the shoreline, from the rocky Palisades above Santa Monica Bay. To coin a phrase from Keats, LA becomes the end of the American continent, in „wild surmise".
These three establishing shots were very glamorous again in 1950˜utterly inaccurate, and most of all, only views from the outside. They are not a city that is inhabited, only imagined. To properly understand the future of the arts in LA, we have to remove the collective myths left by tens of thousands of films and TV shows. First of all, the postmodern era has long since ended. Its obsessions with the hyper-real and with simulation seem naive today. But in Los Angeles, the hyper-real was never anything but a tool for business and power anyway. These overhead shots are merely Hollywood identifying itself as an outsider to LA politics; and also as a plantation economy here, merely harvesting the light.
The history of „simulation" in LA has a very different point of origin, very different implications. As of 1890, Los Angeles was a struggling village (population 50,000). By 1913, it had blossomed ten times over, quite literally into a giant farm-town alternative to the industrial metropolis, to a Chicago or New York. Then by 1945, LA industrialized totally, during the Second World War.
Thus, Los Angeles grew in reverse order and without the help of cinema- from postmodern to pre-modern to industrial. And today, it is anyone's guess what to call Los Angeles. In 2007, it remains, despite its suburban image, the largest manufacturing hub in the US. It is the second largest city in Mexico, the third largest in Korea, the largest in Armenia, and so on- the immigrant Byzantium.
This contrary urban process gives artists in LA a distinct advantage. And it owes less to the film industry than one might imagine. Los Angeles is the ancient Rome for media, branding and hype. Simulation is an old local tradition here, older than the movies. Within that tradition, one common thread holds all the LA fakes together, from 1890 to the present. It is called boosterism, a term from the American railroad economy (circa 1890), about local businessman trying to pool money to stop railroads from wiping out their town. But in LA, the local yokels advanced boosterism fifty steps further. They boostered the entire United States. They outran the Southern Pacific railroad barons. They outgrew the damn San Francisco railroad „octopus".
From 1890 to 1930, the power of marketing here was controlled by a fierce oligarchy, who even dominated city hall. The image of the city was guarded relentlessly, like an arsenal, or oil reserves. First, in 1890, the oligarchs, formed the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, to save the town from bankruptcy. This soon became the premiere marketing tool for industry, fantasy and politics here- boosterism. From the mayor's office to the LA Times, land syndicates marketed every drop of fantasy possible, literally sold the climate, built whatever imaginary picture brought investors. Finally, by 1912, the ads reached movie producers in New York. But in Los Angeles, the hyper-real was never an escapist policy; it was just business; and normalcy. It was how the city engineered its growth from a village of 50,000 in1890 to an oil and farm capital- population one million by 1923.
I often say that the only city where glamour truly holds no magic is Los Angeles. We notice a movie star studying fresh fruit at the supermarket. No one would think of interrupting. This star is obviously just back from rehab of some kind-- puffy eyes, thirty pounds overweight, recovering from a miserable divorce. You already know tech people who worked on their movies anyway. What is so glamorous about buying fruit? Worse still, last year, this very star was on location near your bedroom window, for a scene in a forgettable movie. The producers hired rent-a-cops to push resident around like mafia wise guys. You were to park, and when- as if something culturally important were happening. It ruined most of your weekend. Movies? So what!
The real overheads are not very cinematic. Last March, a helicopter buzzed through downtown LA, chasing a simulated criminal. It was copying the „ghetto birds" that ruin your sleep in poor neighborhoods (never in rich ones)- roaring like garbage trucks in the middle of this night.
But this was a TV commercial for Verizon telephone. The noise was „like a bus revving its engine outside your window", said one downtown resident. „It was inescapable".
From March to July, over forty movies and TV series are being shot in downtown LA. Over 30,000 people are affected, not to mention the 250,000 cars and people who pass through downtown every day. The city desperately needs the revenue. School construction is twenty years behind. Traffic congestion promises to grow up to ten per cent by 2010. Emergency rooms in hospitals are imploding, now that one of the key hospitals, King Harbor may be closed due to criminal negligence. No city runs well. LA is simply the aorta for at least thirteen million people, in the tenth largest economy in the world. Simulation is capital, simply put.
In LA, the film industry arrived as an afterthought anyway- after boosterism, lured by booster advertisements that crossed the country all the way to New York. As I mentioned earlier, movie companies arrived from New York after 1912, because they noticed that fantasy was already a flourishing industry here. LA was already "hyper-real" in travel magazines, in newspapers, at state fairs. Real estate branding dominated how and where roads and trolleys were built.
Boosterist oligarchs made sure that anti-union, anti semitic, anti-Mexican, anti-black policies were boostered out of sight. They want to make conservative white Protestants feel particularly at home. Conservative midwest farmers seemed the ideal business partners. Boosters set up a gigantic air meet in 1910, to lure new industries as well (380,000 people showed up!). Indeed, here was the ideal city for someone with a business head for fantasy.
Of course, these controls never quite operated as planned. Mexican, and Jewish populations grew steadily after 1910; blacks after 1942 . LA became precisely what the oligarchs were most afraid of, as well as well as the giant metropolis that they planned for. That offers a valuable lesson for 2007, for what our matured globalist economy is delivering. The hyper-real in LA has always been a tool of oligarchs, rarely much more. Every worthwhile fantasy is worth money. And it can destabilize an economy as easily as industrial capitalism has.
As a result, Angelinos know how "real" a fake can be. Business experts audit the hyper-real here. The artificial is inventoried, as much as oil, trade with China. Tourism, simulation. Branding is not that different than pork bellies. Movie openings are discussed in the Business section of the LA Times every Monday, like stock reports.Los Angeles pioneered what came to be called hyper-reality, the metropolis built around consumer spectacle. There are few cities that rival its long history, as the origin for the imaginary (I am reminded of Venice or Rome). Robert Venturi used to compare LA and Vegas to the Piazza San Marco in Venice. But did he understand why lay behind the facades. The truth behind the hyper-real is very homely (heimlich), in a charming sense. LA media glamour is simply another plantation economy. They harvest desire here, unabashedly. But less than ten per cent of the jobs come from media.
So artists in LA tend to be unique specialists in media manipulation. Media is no different than working the stockyards or assembly plants. Artists here can speak honestly, and easily about the hyper-real- so easily that they are just as comfortable detailing how poverty and neighborhood life operate like boosterism. Glamour is like of plumbing; it the sound of a truck backfiring, another material fact in our daily life. Fantasy is marketed; high concepts are as solid as a bridge here. Collective memory is converted by real-estate developers into scripted spaces, into themed investments, what I call a social imaginary.
And like all forms of modernity, the hyper-real is unstable, very changeable. Over the past decade, the "hyper-real" industries have shifted direction yet again. After 1994, movie effects and movie editing went utterly digital. This is more than glitz. But at the same time, the most serious investments came from trade with Asia- at the harbor. Movies are advanced computer software. They are designer branding. They are real estate as a gas. In LA, real estate is always at the center. Many streets are named after movie personalities, often because that is where these stars invested.
The latest real estate boom began essentially in 1998, first in San Diego, then pushing north. Prices have tripled in many parts of LA County, in some cases gone up five times. The boom ended late in 2006. The deflation of prices continues. By the time to adjustments are over, we will see a transformation in the next stage of „simulation" in how consumer scripted spaces are set up. The boom has restructured neighborhoods, widened the gap between rich and poor, and shrunk the size of the middle class. It is a tool of globalized social redistricting; because, indeed this has been an international real estate boom, driving up prices in Sydney, in Munich, in London, in Shanghai; and particularly along the California coastline, now the most valuable real estate in the US overall.
The engine for this torrent of real- estate buying was "branding." In other words, 1998 to 2006 was a globalized booster campaign. The LA style of boostering finally entered the bloodstream worldwide. In effect, the world discovered the LA trick all by itself, as if by evolution, like Darwins tortoises but much faster. As in LA, a deep cynicism about media glamour is replacing the older "sexy" attitude. Suddenly, LA becomes a laboratory again; but not simply for media glamour also for decompression from nineties simulation. The nineties utopian consumer nonsense has worn thin. In LA, that silliness wore out forty years ago.
In LA, no one pretends to be superior to boosterism either. Very few preach condescending about consumer marketing. We are all implicated. In LA, the object of desire is an object. Artists learn work very comfortably on whatever new grammars about the hyper-real hits the street. They are post-structural structuralists.The risks beneath the glamour continue to grow. As mentioned, hospitals and schools are practically in meltdown. A ten year drought has begun, according to scientists. The traffic conditions would cost hundreds of billions to genuinely repair. Maintenance is about all that is possible. As a result, the city of LA is breaking apart into three urban blocs: the old eastern, river city; the overpopulated beach-town suburbs; the even more overpopulated valleys.
At the same time, the Latino majority is taking power, turning LA into a new species of city in the US- not more Mexican, something quite unique. After all, New York never wound up looking like Poland or Sicily. The cultural politics are shifting as well, with echoes in the arts.On the east side of the city, dozens of new galleries have opened in the past six years. But new experiments in media and architecture keep bumping into the old booster hyper-realism. At USC, for example, computer gaming and new media special effects are sponsored by the military, by science foundations, as well as studios. As I often say, with the computer, artists now paint with a machine gun.
All this adds up to less „glamour" not more. The cynical ironies that make LA "utopia" make for comic tragedy, sharply ironic statements. Artists see very directly how desire is manufactured for the world economy, in the architecture, in the themed outdoor malls. At the same time, since artists are living increasingly in what are still east side slum districts, they cannot help noticing the ironies-- how poverty is hidden and revealed, inside this "hyper-real." They also see the "real" media future taking up shop here (media engineering, genetic engineering). This is, after all, the eastern capital of the Pacific world. The harbor is far and away the largest in the US.
Asia ends somewhere in Long Beach, past the refineries, north of the Trestles (where surfing was essentially born fifty years ago), up from the border with Mexico, south of the breadbasket that feeds much of the country. What a clumsy endless adolescent is Los Angeles, always the city of the future fifteen years too late, always embarrassed by its crudeness. But for artists in the era that is emerging, LA is like crossing the street to watch the world explode. The explosion is social, cultural, ethnographic, architectural, ecological. And it has been roaring for so long, and camouflaged so expertly and ridiculously for even longer, one can only laugh at the pornographic silliness of the place-- and also its honesty about the hyper-real, a city of neighborhoods more than fantasies.
"It" (as in booster marketing) never quite works; but it never stops working. LA is always the shoe that never quite fits. Or is that increasingly how artists must see all cities in the West? Of course, the LA lesson is now globally understood, as boosterism spreads to five continents at least. Are all urban centers now over-promoted shells, filled with nostalgia, museified phantasmagoria, and a future that seems to belong to everyone but us? Can we see past the smoke?
Tags Essays Los Angeles