Vintage L.A.: The Facebook Page

JUST A quick post to turn your attention to the Vintage L.A. Facebook page. It's a treasure trove of long-looks backward at L.A. -- not so much in its innocence, but rather in its fast-foward display of persistent reincarnation. Maintained by another L.A.-booster, the page moderator encourages fans to contribute photos, scans, scrapbook ephemera from their personal collections. Images abound. It's fascinating looking at some of the landmarks that don't change, but the vast recasting of everything around them. (Check out Grauman's Chinese in the background of this picture.)

It's easy to get lost in a game of "so, what's there now?" So careful, while it's a great ride on old roads, back in time, it's definitely a time suck.


(photo via vintage l.a.)


L.G.

"L.A. Stories" - Genius Loci -- "The Turquoise Cottage"

 

LOS ANGELES, for all of its blemishes and broken dreams, is still a place full of hope.  It's a place that was built by strivers, those "know how" and "can do" folks whose determination seldom dimmed -- even if their energy or opportunities sometimes did.

Growing up here, during a long long season of painful civil unrest, I saw this optimism persist in small symbolic ways.  The image that sticks with me, even today, is probably to most simply part of L.A.'s wallpaper, something you wouldn't even look at twice. But for me, it locates me instantly --   tells me that I'm home; reminds me of why people worked so hard to get here and gave up so much to stay. The Cottage.

In scores of neighborhoods threaded across the basin, a very particular modest bungalow-style domicile sprouted up like a weed. They were single-family homes with postage-stamp lawns and a little piece of backyard. Often, the prouder owners ran white picket fences around them; those in for the long haul planted lush gardens of hibiscus, star jasmine, birds of paradise. The more ambitious hung hummingbird feeders from the eaves and the occasional swaying wind chime. The most quaint ones, the one's that are engraved on my memory,  were painted the colors of Jordan Almonds, creamy whites or pastels -- pink, yellow, green -- and of course the brilliant "look-at-me" turquoise.

The turquoise cottage recalls  a certain era -- the 50s and 60s -- and with it its promise of self-sufficency and optimism -- and of course a sense of tropical whimsy.  It was the era before L.A. launched into a succession of chapters of protests, riots, white flight, rezoning, bussing -- in other words, a complete re-imagining.

Some things are better, others worse -- depending on what side of the line you stand: But one can still find vestiges of this particular piece of retro Los Angeles and the dream it promised -- stretching from the beach communities to East L.A. Someone's grandmother or great aunt or sister's mother-in-law knows all about a turquoise  cottage that a friend or brother or mother used to live in. A place you would go for tea parties or stand in the sprinklers on a hot day or simply stop and smell the ocean -- its salt and coolness carried on a breeze.

images: culver city, southwest l.a., south l.a. venice, palms,  photo credit: l.g.

Hidden Los Angeles Comes to "Telling L.A.'s Story"

I'M MOST excited to confirm that  our guest this week for our final class will  be W. Lynn Garrett who runs the website and Facebook page, Hidden Los Angeles, an online space dedicated to "going beneath the surface", an attempt to unravel the various stubborn stereotypes of Los Angeles.  It is a fitting way to close the semester,  as Garrett has been dedicated to writing a deeper story via interacting with her online community.

She's created an evocative virtual neighborhood -- one that in many ways is as lively, celebratory -- and sometimes contentious -- as the city is itself.  Angelenos have strong opinions about what their city was, is and should be and so, consequently, Garrett has often been among other things -- mediator, therapist and good old fashioned booster.  Daily she offers up a mix of quizzes, videos, mini-histories contests and between all of that frequently throws out topics for conversation across the L.A.' s virtual basin.  Since the site's inception, her motto has been, "Look Deeper" -- because, as we all now know, it's a full time job going head-to-head with these overriding myths that have come to stand as written in stone definitions for Los Angeles.

Take a spin around the site and its Facebook incarnation too to see what Garrett's got going this week.

Come prepared to ask her some questions about how she juggles this huge task and how she keeps all the information fresh or what signifies *her* L.A. She's delightful. You'll enjoy her.

--  L.G.
(image via hidden los angeles)

Arteries of Memory: Quintero Street

SOMEWHERE in my 20s—about the point when lots of things collide – I realized that every surface I traversed seemed too slick, too glossy. It felt as if I was perpetually ready to slide.

That’s what L.A. can do sometimes.

I needed some traction.

At this turn in the road, I had lived three or four places in the vast super-structure we call Los Angeles. And when not in the city proper,  I always found a spot just along its very edges, just steps from the city limits, the shifting dividing lines. Early on, I’d learned how to negotiate the city the way some of my Southern relatives knew how to filet a fish – lifting away the un-needed parts, even more careful about the jagged edges that could do harm.

What was left? a city within the city – my collection of back roads, hangouts, after-thought neighborhoods and hush-hush shortcuts.

That’s how I ended up on Quintero Street.

If I had been looking for Quintero, I would have never found it. It’s both the embodiment of L.A. and its antithesis. The street was a narrow ribbon of asphalt that angled 90-degrees. It had some years on it and thus was redolent with character; everything was ripe and overgrown -- from the bursting loquats to the wild, brilliantly hued vines of bougainvillea that rustled in the wind like ceremonial headresses. This edge of Echo Park played host to a junk-drawer collection of hodge-podge architecture – most of it ugly – a smattering of Dingbat apartment buildings, sagging bungalow courts and its crowning former-glory – an exhausted Victorian house, that looked as if it had simply crawled to the curb to rest its cracked foundation. That falling-down relic also housed a mysterious cloaked and hooded itinerant, who wandered  the neighborhood at all hours with a sling-style knapsack, whom one friend of mine dubbed "Echo Park Man."

That was the L.A. part of it.  The not L.A. part of it, was its very steep San Francisco-esque hill, that gave both the pedestrian and the driver a strange sense of vertigo simply trying to cross the short width of road. The incline was so steep that the first three feet of the passage up the sidewalk isn’t a "walk at all, but a crumbling concrete staircase – giving the brave foot-traveler enough time to work up his or her nerve.

  Everything was set at an oblique, down-the-rabbit-hole angle, due to the hill's dramatic grade. The perch, however, allowed for a crow’s nest-style view – the city end to end from the Civic Center to Catalina Island. Not to mention, the glimmer of Echo Park Lake and the light-reflecting roof of Sister Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple, down below, just as Sunset Boulevard made it's dramatic Downtown-tipped curve.


I fell hard. As soon as I glimpsed Quintero Street -- its ruin and its weird whimsy I knew I was onto some new semblance of home, a new understanding of Los Angeles.  It was an absurd looking, really. But I had a clear plan, I could keep watch on my city, the city I was thinking and writing about and perpetually crisscrossing – this impossibly large, wild sprawl of a city, that refused to be pared down to a simple sentence.

I settled in and the street told its own stories without much prompting: insistent police helicopters and search lights scrawled the skies; busses that ran all night; 5am rooster crows made alarm clocks unnecessary; and of course, depending the season the odd wind that would pick up the sound of cheers and applause from Dodger Stadium (apocryphal or not, it made one wonder if this was why Echo Park is called thus?). I woke in the morning to different languages: French, Chinese, Spanish, Romanian, German. And too, from beneath those same doors, came the scents of cuisine from all those origins -- roasted chicken, saffron, garlic,  scallions, simmering cabbages.

Come summer, I walked to Dodger games with my writer friends -- often not to watch the games at all, but to sit outside under the bruised, purple sky. We'd hike there, above Elysian Park, talking about books and bands, working our way through old ruins of uprooted houses. We'd meet work friends for the Lotus Festival down by Echo Park Lake. This was an L.A. that had nothing to do with Hollywood or the music industry or dinner at Spago or lunch at Boa or drinks at SkyBar – or whatever was next or primed to be.  It was workaday, down-to-the baseboards life,  full of folks with dramatic there-to-here stories and also haunted by ghosts of another time. Here,  I was able to find some hint of that old/vanished L.A. I’d read about in books or heard of in family stories. That specter of Los Angeles that only seems to hover in the background of family photographs. This was the Los Angeles you’d sometime glimpse in a quick few frames of an old movie – a city with space and moving at a far different pace.

It wouldn’t be until after I moved away, that I would learn that that street, I’d just happened upon, was most likely named after one of the 44 mixed-race pobladores who founded the City of the Angels.

I wasn't just chasing ghosts -- I'd hit a bull's eye.

If there is a part of the city where,  consequently, I feel I've left part of myself, it's here: somewhere in those yellow weeds, the flame of bougainvillea, the sharp scent of honeysuckle, the singing drunk who would bellow his story to the night.

There’s a part of me that didn’t want to leave, but the arm of gentrification has sharp elbows and soon enough, I wasn’t waking up to Chinese and the smell of scallions, or the persistent  rooster crows, but late-night parties that tipped into dawn, as a new set of watering holes for the post-Spaceland set, opened up along this far-from glamorous edge of Sunset Boulevard: Sliver Lake was  "moving" east, and so Echo Park’s edge was now its selling point.  Like so: A new reclaimed neighborhood is born.

Anytime I’m on that edge of the city, I have to slow down as I pass Quintero Street, and glance up the hill. The Victorian is long gone and there are some out-of-place steel and burnished wood  jutting up where modest stucco and terracotta bungalows used to be. The hill's crest, you can’t make out from the boulevard: in a certain way, it's like looking through the wrong end of the binoculars. That view,  of the possibilities, is to look down hill from above: You don’t gaze up and back. You look forward, feet planted firmly, eyes trained toward L.A.'s rewritable future, to best compose your chapter in it.

(images, echo park, l.g.)

Cityscape: Which One is Real?

FOR many the notion, "streetlife in L.A." is an oxymoron.  Transplants comment often about how the sidewalks roll up so early here, or how we Angelenos will drive around the block to visit a friend, when really we could simply walk, or take six separate cars to one party when we could simply carpool in one.

Last week, we saw "D-Fens" trudging across a strange map of Los Angeles which in many ways  bent both the city's geography and its story. As well, the narrative fed the prevailing lore that "nobody walks in L.A." Indeed, the idea of a lone man walking the corpus of the city was evidence alone that he was mad,  or so thought the scrambled band of police officers tailing him.

Invented street life is another piece of L.A.'s odd story  We have  a lot of destination walks scattered around the Southland -- Third Street Promenade, City Walk, Americana and most recently L.A. Live As one of our guests, David Ulin, pointed out about the Grove, in the Fairfax District: "It's so strange that a place that people go to walk has a wall up against the real street, blocking its view of it."

All of it begging the question: "Why?"

I snapped these photos a few nights back at different ends of the city as I made my way from event to event and ultimately home. One is a "real" street and one is not. But even the "real" street doesn't look real. And I suppose that too is part of L.A.'s story.



photos: L.G.

Survey LA: One Building at a Time

FOR THOSE OF you interested in going even deeper, the City of Los Angeles has embarked on an expansive project to ensure that Los Angeles' built history is properly counted and cataloged.

Survey L.A., a project launched by the city's Office of Historical Resources, is an expansive, multi-layered endeavor that christens the city's first comprehensive preservation program.

Eighty-five percent of Los Angeles's structures have not been cataloged. Unlike most big cities, Los Angeles hasn't had an organized and systemized way of keeping track of what's on the ground. Survey L.A. is training and paring teams of architects, historians, students and volunteers to traverse the city and catalog each and every structure. The idea behind this effort is to begin to understand Los Angeles's history through the various structures (and the various uses of those structures over time) Ken Bernstein, head of the Office of Historical Resources told me during an interview for an L.A. Times story I was working on that one of the primary impetus of this program was the constant "11th hour fights" to save historically significant buildings from being torn down under the cover of night. Once a building is counted and cataloged in the database it will be easier to find out more about what its historical relevance is without scrambling at the last minute.

Moreover, Bernstein hopes, is that we begin to understand our city's history through its neighborhoods, subdivisions, industries and distinct melange of architecture. For those of you who might like to participate in learning about your city literally from the ground up click here .

Below is part-one of a series of three videos that will tell you a little more about the project.

-- L.G.

DEPARTURES -- L.A. STYLE

FOR those of you digging deep into the city proper, trying to get at its elusive heart, local public television station, KCET has been putting together a series of online projects that feature the City of Angels in hyper-local closeup. From the slip of water sliding through a concrete bed we call the L.A. River and the personal stories we find laced along freeway over-passes, pylons and garages via street art to Venice's skateparks and Chinatown's historic treasures, the project, "Departures," attempts to tell the story of L.A.'s diverse and disparate communities -- from the the point of view of the people who live, work, organize, raise-children, plant gardens and plan to "never leave here"; boosters in their own vivid, idiosyncratic way:

Juan Devis, Departures' director of production and program management, recently visited LMU's campus as part of the English Department's LAy of the LAnd conference, sitting in on a panel on new media, blogging and the city as subject. Devis discussed the challenges of covering a city as diverse and constantly-changing as Los Angeles. He also said that the Departure's crew is looking for volunteers to help cross the expanse of the city -- to seek-out, interview, research and gather information about the nooks and crannies of the city that get left out in the larger telling of the city's story. For journalists working in L.A. over many decades, this has been one of more frustrating aspects of mainstream media -- a tunnel-vision style of reportage that doesn't fully educate the reader/viewer about the complexity of Los Angeles , rather confirms the stereotypes that often continue to float by as truths.

Check out their site here to see the range of subjects and communities that the project has already explored. If you'd like to lend a hand as a volunteer you can contact Devis via the site or come speak to me for details.

-- L.G.

Arteries of Memory: Pico and Sepulveda

FOR THOSE of us of a "certain age," this not-so-pretty intersection is infamous. Not because it was some sort of crossroads of the stars (Sunset and Vine) or a spot where something violent or unfortunate Florence and Normandie) occurred. This largely nondescript and often-clogged intersection is famous for not being famous at all --but rather for being elevated in stature by one pretty silly but infinitely catchy song. Here is DJ and music historian Dr. Demento doing the intro and spinning the record on his weekly radio program: "The Dr. Demento Show"

Every Sunday night show on KMET 94.7 FM, Dr. Demento, (AKA Eugene Barrett Hansen), a radio DJ of quirky cult status, took over the "Mighty-Met's" otherwise hard-driving Album Oriented Rock programming to play novelty songs of another era. One of the staples was this spangly, Latin-tinged 1947 number, "Pico and Sepulveda," by Felix Figueroa and his Orchestra. "Figueroa" was really an Hollywood bandleader named Freddy Martin, as rumor had it, the nod was to the big neon Felix the Cat that advertised Felix Chevrolet which rose along the Figueroa corridor near USC at Jefferson.

It was, in many ways, more than a little poke at the booster promise and Hollywood dream narratives. It's fun and frothy and by the 70s and 80s it delivered a different sort insider wink.

And yes, teenagers of a certain bent would huddle around the radio, once a month, the good Doctor promised, to hear this loopy song about a stretch that was so nondescript one could absolutely see, precisely as "Felix" croons, that it would certainly be the site where "Nobody's dreams come true . . . ."

And here is a more contemporary take on this song; a video by "The Forbidden Zone" -- check out the name of the newspaper he's reading:

-- L.G.

J. Michael Walker Visits "Telling L.A.'s Story"

THIS past Wednesday,  poet and visual artist, J. Michael Walker led us back in time: both through the lives of the saints as well as wandering back through his research and collecting process that provided the foundation for his project, "All the Saints of the City of the Angels."

If time had permitted,  I'd hoped he'd be able to talk  a little bit two other  city-rooted projects he's recently completed: An intricate map of the Metro Gold Line, that links downtown L.A. to Boyle Heights and into the San Gabriel Valley. As well as a portrait of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's young and dynamic conductor, Gustavo Dudamel. His website, however, provides a little window-in on these projects as well as information on past installations and public art commissions he's won.  You can wander around here to check it out.

And he wanted to thank you all for your good questions and your interest.  He enjoyed getting you all in a circle, thinking about the stories and the art.

-- L.G.

You Are Listening to Los Angeles

EARLIER this week I heard a fragment of a segment on Marketplace, a show about finance and business which airs over the Pasadena public radio station, KPCC. But instead of stock averages and updates on the Nikkei averages, what floated out of the speakers was this sort of ethereal, ambient synth noise, all downtempo atmosphere, but on top of it was a live radio/scanner feed via LAPD --  in real time. There is something actually pretty lovely about this weird, incongruous grouping -- a 21st Century Music for the Spheres that syncs-up with the white noise and monotone status updates phoned in via remote. It's a conversation starter and a nice party mix actually. The project is aptly titled:  "You Are Listening to Los Angeles"  Click here to be transported somewhere down there on that glowing grid. 

photo: observatory view by Marcy Reiford via flickr creative commons)

Arteries of Memory: The Streets of Los Angeles

IT'S a given: Certain thoroughfares in Los Angeles are so famous that it is nearly impossible to think about them without conjuring some larger-than-life, cinema-screen-size association.

That's what happens when your city is a movie set.

Mulholland Drive is known for its edge-of-the cliff beauty, its startling gemstone-lights views, but also for its snaky treacherousness if traversed with a potent combination of high speed and willful carelessness.

Nowadays, Sunset Boulevard feels less like a destination and more like an aging myth we still revisit and retell because we've become so accustomed to that ritual. Immortalized in movies and still the marquee draw on the double-decker tourist bus routes, the 24-mile stretch hasn't lost its power; it still beckons, luring the hopeful -- many of them teenage drifters who arrive in vast numbers via Greyhound or risky hitched rides.

You don't need a GPS to find some of the more well-traveled, high-profile roadways. Most everyone can point you to Hollywood Boulevard and its faux glitter Walk of Fame. Pacific Coast Highway, which stretches out, luxuriously along the gentle curve of coastline, offers its own set too-good- to-be-true promises. Looming just above that east/west thoroughfare, you'd find Laurel Canyon Boulevard, a winding rustic road, it's higher reaches associated with a certain era of barefoot and fringed Southern California musician. Much further east and angling south, Central Avenue powers along the city's working-class spine. In a long-ago incarnation -- before its reputation was scared by insurance red lining, poverty and violence, a short stretch of it played host to the West Coast's golden age of premiere jazz sounds.

Because we Angelenos spend so much time in our cars, traversing roads that carry us from one edge of the city to the other, the streets we travel most over time begin to gather complex, personal meaning. They recall a certain moment in our lives, a particular escape route or perhaps signify a road that was a route to a significant life transformation.

Even in our traffic-distracted state, we watch them change: they become narrowed or broadened or "beautified." They get closed-off and turned into gentrified "walk streets." They go from being secret shortcuts to being outed by Caltrans' fluorescent-orange flags and detour signs as viable alternate routes for any and all to plunder.

No matter. Somehow, they always seem to remain "ours."

Over the next few weeks, under the "Arteries of Memory" banner, a few guest bloggers will be reminiscing about city streets -- some famous, some infamous and some hidden slivers of afterthought -- and the side-roads of memories that they travel to when they find themselves passing over them.

You too might have an L.A. street that speaks to you, that transports you to a destination that isn't just a physical place, but a series of memories, a thoroughfare that evokes , stories, sounds, textures. Maybe you'd like to join the mix too. (It would be your extra credit "close-up.")

(please pitch via email, thanks.)

-- L.G.



(top photo: hollywood hills downward, by clinton steed via flickr creative commons
bottom: hollywood walk of fame via http://www.wildnatureimages.com/images%202/060309-015..jpg)

Erasure -- Chavez Ravine

SO we've been talking about how one person's "beautification" or "gentrification" is another's eviction notice and life-altering nightmare. It can scar generations to come.

In light of that uneasy legacy, a few years back, musician, Ry Cooder, turned his attention to the lost L.A. neighborhood we've been talking about, Chavez Ravine.

Instead of re-animating the tangle of streets on a blank page, he tried to sort out a way to make the old neighborhood -- and the rich culture that grew up in it and around it -- bloom again in a series of songs. He went back to the source and found musicians -- bandleader, Don Tosti, Lalo Guerrero (the "father of Chicano Music") and Little Willie G. (of Thee Midniters) -- to not just share remembrances of the time, but to shape and shade the recording lending their voices, instruments and arrangements.

The result was an album, Chavez Ravine, that told the story of the now vanished neighborhood -- its neighborhood rituals, its people, its music, its struggles with the city father's and power brokers, the result of eminent domain -- and of course -- hundreds of families and their displacement and, ultimately, the rise of Dodger Stadium.

Below you'll be able to listen to a couple of cuts from the project. They are bookends -- the first sketches the neighborhood as it was "Poor Man's Shangri-La" ; the second is told from the POV of a former-resident recalling where his family's house once stood "Third Base, Dodger Stadium"

This is storytelling, a study of voice. Songs take us places, the best songs do, because they articulate something specific that we can hang on to. Pay close attention to the specific details that gently place you in the moment -- a very specific time and place.

-- L.G.

The Exiles

LAST night we watched Kent Mackenzie's short student film, "Bunker Hill -- 1956," a meditation on the notion of gentrification and erasure as we've been discussing in class.

The video below is the trailer from the longer film that grew out of it, The Exiles, a documentary that follows a group of young Native American men and women through the streets of Bunker Hill right around the moment of the neighborhood's twilight.

It's definitely worth checking out for more of that vanished L.A. vibe -- and the DVD is even available at LMU's library.

-- L.G.

The Militant Angeleno

TROLLING around the web, I noted an item that L.A. Observed posted last week via a site called, "Militant Angeleno" about the changing appearnece of street signs in L.A.

We Angelenos notice such things. We endure so much change that, well, it makes us a little more than prickly about the things we expect will remain fixed and constant:

The things that identify us, quite literally our markers.

Road signs.

The M.A. begins his post, thusly:

Have you noticed the new Los Angeles City street signs lately? The Militant has!

You can find them along the 1st Street corridor in Downtown Los Angeles, in the Civic Center and Little Tokyo areas. The aluminum signs are slightly larger than the current city street signage and have "wings" on the top and bottom, displaying the City Seal on the top wing and the block number and direction on the bottom wing.

These signs aren't all that new; they were first spotted in June of 2009, like the Main Street sign pictured above left. You would have expected The Militant to do a post on the signs back then, but he was too lazy-ass to do it. wasn't sure whether it was some sort of "pilot project" (as the City is prone to doing) or whether this particular signage style was supposed to be unique to the Civic Center. Some more information was needed.

This week, though, The Militant noticed more of these signs popping up - this time outside the Civic Center, like this sign on 1st and Alameda.

When he first saw the signs nearly two years ago, he thought they were kind of strange, mainly because of their UFO/Chevrolet logo shape, but admittedly, they have grown on him. They're large, and have larger lettering, which means they are more visible to motorists and pedestrians (and cyclists, too, of course) alike. Second, they are the first Los Angeles street signage to acknowledge the City of Los Angeles outright. Very important in this region of nearly 90 suburbs, satellite cities and unincorporated areas, of which street signage is the one of two tell-tale ways to know exactly which city you are in (calling 9-1-1 and seeing which police department shows up is the other, but The Militant doesn't recommend you do that...).

It's a great post which goes on the outline the history of the street signs here -- eras, shapes, colors. Finishing that post, I found myself skimming through other posts and appreciating not just prism but the voice: passionate, humorous, specific and informed by fact and history.

Check it out.

-- L.G.

(image "shotgun-style street sign," credit: keith justin gallagher via flickr creative commons)

East of West L.A.: Kevin McCollister's City of Angels

OUR guest this Wednesday night will be Kevin McCollister -- the eye and imagination behind the website, blog and book -- East of West L.A.

I first encountered McCollister's work via a friend who thought there was "something about it" that I would connect with. McCollister was photographing Los Angeles, but a Los Angeles that looked, my friend said, "out of time."

When I sat down to take a deeper look, paging though the images on his blog, I saw what he meant. The L.A. that McCollister was photographing in a meticulous way -- on foot, every weekend, day and night -- was one that felt not simply unique but personal. Not personal to him -- but to the viewer as well.

Much of it is visual poetry.

I'm writing about McCollister and his blog, East of West L.A., for a new magazine called, Boom, published by UC Press. I spent a couple of weekends wandering around downtown Los Angeles with him so that I could get a sense of how he works. I was less interested in the mechanics -- shutter speeds, aperture, ISO -- more interested in how he related to the city as a subject, and how he interacted with the people who inhabit this place.

Many of the themes we have been exploring in this course -- migration, immigration, erasure, vanished L.A., -- shimmer up in McCollister's images of street musicians, drifters, abandoned lifeguard towers, emptied-out storefronts, rainy terra cotta walkways on Olvera Street. What he sees isn't the postcard or tourist book version of L.A. but something else -- something quiet or overlooked.

Here's an image from the second day we spent threading around Chinatown. Not what you would expect:

McCollister takes us deep into the city's psyche; he reveals the minute working parts: the train yards, the farmacias, the bus stops, the hints of things raveling at the edges. There's beauty in all of that hard work and survival.

Take a look at his website and the blog and come to class with one question for McCollister about his work, about his life, about Los Angeles.

-- L.G.

photos: Union Station and Sunset (Chinatown), by Kevin McCollister from his website East of West L.A. (used with his permission)

LA Day/LA Night

AS YOU might imagine, there are numerous pictorial books about Los Angeles, each striving to in some way to fix L.A. within the borders of the frame. One of the newer photo studies, LA Day/LA Night is an aeriel examination of Los Angeles in diptych. Photographer Michael Light takes on Los Angeles infamous bright, astringent light in an attempt to look at the city as if through an unblinking stare. He juxtaposes that "telling" with images that are shot after the sun has disappeared from the sky and thus exposes Los Angeles' other face, that shimmering sparkling blanket of light.

From the book description:

The greater Los Angeles area covers 4,850 square miles—the size of a small country—and holds almost 18 million people. Perhaps America's most massive human creation, it has been legendarily vilified and celebrated in equal measure since its inception. Is Los Angeles the face of the apocalypse, or an ultimate paradise at continent's edge—or both? With LA Day / LA Night, Radius Books continues photographer Michael Light's ongoing aerial examination of the arid American West by bringing together two opposing views of the city in a double volume set.

LA Day stares directly into the sun, washing the metropolis in blasted, relentlessly specific light. LA Night drifts over it in an ever-darkening electric dream, until the vast city below reverses and begins to signify the starry night sky vaulted above. Referencing Ed Ruscha, Peter Alexander, Julius Schulman, and writers from Philip K. Dick to Raymond Chandler, LA Day / LA Night continues Los Angeles' rich cultural legacy of examining its favorite schizophrenic subject—itself.

Note the Raymond Chandler and Julius Schulman references (Schulman shot the Case Study House photo some of you received in your envelope).


Also, the introduction was written by our recent guest, David L. Ulin.




-- L.G.

(photo: from the book la day/la night)

Noir City -- Hollywood: The 13th Annual Film Noir Festival

JUST wanted to let you all know that on April 1st, American Cinematheque kicks off its annual film noir festival in Hollywood at the iconic Egyptian Theater. We've been talking about L.A. as celluloid backdrop for crime, cynicism, corruption during the 40s and 50s, and this series appears to be offering a big dose of all of that -- but of course in stylish, Hollywood fashion -- stunning shadows in crisp blacks and whites.


From the website:

The venerable NOIR CITY film festival returns for its 13th year, presenting an astonishing array of rarities mostly available ONLY on the big screen. We’ve scoured studio archives to assemble a feast of film noir that can only be consumed in its original 35mm format, in the glorious darkness of a vintage movie palace!
This year’s program features several new prints preserved by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, including rarities HIGH WALL, LOOPHOLE, THE HUNTED, STRANGERS IN THE NIGHT and THE DARK MIRROR. In fact, 23 of the 28 films in the series are not on DVD! This may be the last chance to ever see these extraordinary films on a big screen.

Check the Cinematheque's website for details on dates, times and prices.

--L.G.
photo via american cinematheque

A Travel Guide to the Past

YOU might just want to check out this little time-machine jaunt: University of California Press recently republished Los Angeles in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the City of the Angeles.

On his blog, L.A. Observed, Kevin Roderick reports:

My favorite new Los Angeles book — the one I took driving with me on Saturday — is a guidebook from the distant past . . . [the] guide . . . works 70 years later as historical snapshot of Los Angeles the way it was at the cusp of World War II — neighborhoods, places of interest (the ostrich and alligator farms on Mission Road), recreation (45 bowling alleys), literature and familiar restaurants like Musso & Frank and El Cholo.

For those of you who are interested in spending a little bit more time in L.A.'s booster past you'll find some of that atmosphere, no doubt, but as well, the book does more than glance on many of the themes we've already explored in class -- boosterism, vanished L.A., the nascent film industry, Julius Schulman and Raymond Chandler, just for starters.

For more of Kevin's post and a great photo tour of Downtown L.A. and its built history -- go here.

I've already ordered mine, I'll let you know what I think in the weeks to come.

-- L.G.

L.A.: From the Page to the Screen

THE OTHER night, I was able to check out an early screening of Lincoln Lawyer. It's based on a novel by former-L.A. Times crime reporter, Michael Connelly, who was present for a Q&A following the feature.








What was striking about the film was how right it felt -- from the color of sunlight and scruffy neighborhood hangouts to the slinky post-soul music chugging out of the dashboard radio. Echo Park in its ripe, decrepit beauty never looked so accurate on screen. As we were all filing out for the evening, one viewer commented: "They cared." --
meaning, evoking a Los Angeles beyond the standard two-sentence pitch made a difference for those of us who love this city despite its blemishes.

For a big dose of the city in full bloom, I highly recommend it.
It opens today.

Road Work: The Changing Face of the City

IT'S become a familiar sight for all of us: Unending road work and unforeseen lane closures on the freeways or major surface streets we require daily to take us from one post in our lives to another.

It's frustrating, to put it mildly.

I was off to meeting the other night and, of course, even by scheduling a little extra time all parties were a bit late. But surprisingly, we all arrived about the same amount of time late -- a first. And a typical L.A. qualification. What did it? The 405, as usual, was a mess. One-mile-per hour for long, long stretches. I'm so used to traversing the 405 at night that I hadn't really noticed the work that has been done on the "retaining wall" -- on the northbound side just beyond Westwood. I was struck by the materials they have used. Rather than a cinderblock eyesore made pretty by some sort of standard-issue ice-plant, these walls are made to look as if this behemoth of multilane road was simply cut out of the earth's core. I didn't have my camera at the ready to shoot but the walls looked something very much like this:




Seeing it just made me think what sort of story will be carved out of this new wrinkle in the city's physical profile, what myth will grow up around this fast-road that pushes along side the old Sepulveda Pass--some history someone will invent based on what they may perceive to be something old, some antique stretch of road.

-- L.G.

top photo: the 405 @ venice, targophoto, via flickr creative commons