File spoon-archives/avant-garde.archive/avant-garde_1999/avant-garde.9911, message 17


From: "mladd" <mladd-AT-gateway.net>
Subject: Re: Psychogeography of Berlin
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 1999 08:01:06 -0800


Fontana is in San Bernardino County.
-----Original Message-----
From: Ann Klefstad <klefkal-AT-cp.duluth.mn.us>
To: avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu
<avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu>
Date: Thursday, November 04, 1999 9:17 PM
Subject: Re: Psychogeography of Berlin


>
>>
>> Current reading: The City - Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of
>the
>> 20th c. Soja and Scott eds. LA both attracts and repells me. I'm
>determined
>> to understand it.
>>
>>
>The value of Los Angeles to me was that it was a seemingly infinitely
>expandable field that one could not "understand"--that there was always a
>contradictory aspect turning up. Just when you thought you understood the
>flats near the studios in Hollywood, there's Pasadena, then East LA, then
>Monterey Park, then City of Industry, then Silverlake, then Gardena, then
>Santa Monica (the most paradoxical of all in ways, esp given its proximity
>to Venice), then Compton, Fontana, Watts--and the pristine hiking trails in
>Griffith Park, where you can camp out, not seeing another human for days,
>if you dare, because bodies turn up, but it's so lovely, and in the middle,
>between downtown, Hollywood, and the Valley . . .
>
>The higher you go up the hills, the more colors of green there are, because
>green is a commodity in LA and income levels rise with the hills.
>
>Magic is commonly sold in most neighborhoods (palmists, botanicas,
>crystals, high colonics--)
>
>It's the place where most images seen by the entire nation are produced.
>All tv, most film, much other derivative media, etc. And it's absolutely
>nothing like the rest of the country. Any of it. What happens when the
>primary visual culture of a country is produced in a place utterly
>different from it? As if all of Italian film and tv were produced in
>Vatican City, by clerics.
>
>But it's largely populated by people from elsewhere, from Nebraska, New
>York, Teheran, Hong Kong, San Salvador, who rapidly assimilate. And that
>assimilation is so largely driven by little personal habits--never having
>to change your wardrobe; losing the ability to count years because there
>are no winters; being insulated from intimate glances from strangers by
>one's car; listening to the radio a lot.
>
>One is struck by the utter insiderness of all relevant information yet the
>openness of things, very odd--
>
>You could go on listing like this forever, and when you were done,
>everything would be completely different again.
>
>You can describe LA but you can't understand it. Mike Davis (City of
>Quartz) sure didn't!
>
>AK
>
>
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>



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