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In yesterday's LAT Book Review, David L. Ulin considers the newest study of Los Angeles by Cal Arts professor Norman M. Klein, a novella and accompanying CD-ROM called Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986.
What better way to evoke a city of unsettling distances than in flashes, snapshots: the glimmer of blue water on a canvas, three minutes of guitar fury in your car? Place one of Hockney's swimming pool paintings alongside, say, a song like X's "Johny Hit and Run Paulene," and the juxtaposition tells you all you need to know about L.A., where illusion and reality bleed together in a strangely discontinuous collage. Even the best L.A. writing works like this, eschewing the larger story in favor of smaller, more interior visions, as if the city were accessible only in glimpses, if it's accessible at all.Norman M. Klein has made a career out of mining the impressionistic territory of memory from a cultural and an individual point of view. A professor at Cal Arts and the author of "The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory," he sees L.A. as a landscape of amnesia, in which the past is either a burden or nostalgic, depending on how one puts it to use.
It works for Ulin.
In the process, he has created a work that is both fixed and fluid, accessible and distant, much like Los Angeles.
Speaking of L.A. history, Sunday Calendar had a piece on the farewall party at the abandoned Perino's restaurant on Wilshire by the Windsor Square-Hancock Park Historical Society. The restaurant, once L.A.'s finest, will be mostly torn down this year (after an auction of furnishings in March) for apartments. Tomorrow night, the Modern Committee of the Los Angeles Conservancy is having its meeting at the old landmark. The building is a Paul R. Williams remodel of an old Thriftimart store that itself was designed by the firm of Morgan, Walls and Clements, which did a bunch of important Los Angeles buildings.
That first Perinos link is Calendar section of LAT, no good for non-subscribers.
Posted by: happyharry at January 19, 2004 05:35 PMOops, and perinos.net people confuse east/west. The restaurant was originally east of its current location.
Posted by: happyharry at January 19, 2004 05:50 PMklein also is an instructor at art center college of design in pasadena, where one of the classes he teaches is called LOS ANGELES HISTORIES/MYTHS. from the course description:
L.A. was a postmodern city by 1890, & has remainded for generations "the most photographed & least remembered city in the world." Students in this class will trace the historical trends that have shaped these contradictions.
Posted by: chris at January 20, 2004 12:36 PML.A. was a postmodern city by 1890
Choke--kaff--wheeze...please tell me that's your typo. It would be interesting to find that LA was postmodern even before modernism.
"the most photographed & least remembered city in the world."
That's catchier, if equally woefully inaccurate. Tokyo, Sao Paolo, and Shanghai are much more difficult to remember than LA. I would guess that the Griffith Observatory, the Hollywood Sign are LA iconic to most cosmopolitan peoples around the globe. What stands as Tokyo, Sao Paolo, Shanghai's icon? Yet all these cities are far larger than LA.
Posted by: joseph at January 20, 2004 02:23 PMwell, as for the 1890 reference, very well possible that it is a typo, I got it of campusweb, artcenter's notorious student intranet.
as for the least remembered city, I actually believe that is quite accurate. I had a completely different image of LA when I moved here from europe (a mere three years ago). I moved here in november and didn't even pack a sweater, believing it never got cold in socal. the perception someone who hasn't lived here has of LA (especially that of europeans) is drastically different from what LA actually is like.
Posted by: chris at January 20, 2004 03:47 PMChris ~
And that's true of places as close as the Bay Area. Drastically different.
It seems people around the world stubbornly insist on believing the hot, flat, "dude myth" suburbs of the San Fernando Valley or Orange County are (mountainous, urban, Mediterranean climate) Los Angeles. Or the Mojave Desert . . . .
Yet the same people understand that the Bay Area's Silicon Valley, Berkeley, Oakland, Sausalito, Mill Valley, the Napa Valley, San Jose are not San Francisco.
My neighbor from Australia, here in our typically cute but funky West Hollywood/Hollywood bungalows that should be on historical preservation lists, is a UCLA graduate school Urban Planner for the MTA. We're both frustrated and amazed by the stubborn global myths about our adopted home. (We love L.A.!)
If I see Los Angeles called a "desert" one more time . . . .
(IMHO, all things L.A. Noir are closer to the truths than anything else. Still the stubborn myths persist. There are reasons . . . . )
Posted by: Stephanie at January 21, 2004 11:21 AMoh yeah, the myths.
do you know those bel air images of the huge palm trees along residential roads? that's what I thought all LA was like. the valley? never heard of it. the difference between what one thinks LA is like (judging from nothing but movies) and reality is striking. I found it really strange to move here and suddenly know all those places I saw in films. for some time, it actually ruined my movie experiences.
Posted by: chris at January 23, 2004 02:34 AMIt gets yours up to the top dude! The girl will enjoy it!
Posted by: cialis uk at July 14, 2004 03:22 AM
of LA Observed
"Impressionistic" is usually a polite way to say "wide of the mark." Here, I'm not so sure that layering Hockney next to X tells us "everything we need to know." In fact, I'm not so sure it tells us anything at all, other than a young artist once came here to draw muscular boys and stayed anyway, and that while Compton bands were beginning to rap about police power and CIA-led drug rings, one average white band grew up here that actually a cut a single about that most scintillating of political topics, date rape.
"Smaller, interior visions?" That's pretty much "postmodernism", anywhere on the planet, far from unique to LA.
Posted by: joseph at January 19, 2004 02:57 PM