New form of L.A. history

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.