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Llano – once a site of utopian socialist dreams, now another remote suburb of tract housing and social problems. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Davis explains how the glittering museums and cultural institutions that appear as benign, net-good uses of urban space are in fact monuments to capital that enshrine and enable racialized state violence. Indeed, such an outcome was the not-so-secret hope of such associations, many of whom cut their teeth, Davis shows, through local anti-integration organizing in the 1970s.
Neo-Marxist geographers as much as gangsta rappers remain part of this ‘official dream machinery’ (24). It wasn’t just to do with the freeways and the smog, and Hollywood – there was something very strange about it. This concern with the design of social space, the marginalisation of public space by redevelopment, and the imposition of security systems all marked the changing city by the end of the 1980s boom.
IN BED WITH MADONNA As a starter, lemme tell you this: there are no good or bad styles in the scene, only good and bad bands, sons of whores and friends. Indeed, one of the core contributions of Davis's text is his detailing of how criminalizing impulses and explicitly carceral functions have been woven into the dystopic geography of the modern city, where suburban neighborhoods and even once democratic public spaces are now increasingly privatized, securitized, and surveilled. City of Quartz opens with Davis’ speculation regarding Los Angeles’ potential to be a radical, left-wing city, as he sets the scene for the now defunct socialist utopia of Llano del Rio. As we shall see later, part of the logic of the 1978 tax revolt, which burned over the Valley in particular, was to equalize advantages between Los Angeles’s ‘captive’ white suburbanites and the residents of the Lakewoodized periphery’. While deadly serious about the subject matter at hand — that of the morally bankrupt elements of Los Angeles's political and cultural power structures and the harms their decisions propagate — his prose is often cheeky and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny.
His books include Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California, 2019) and Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Penn, 2016). Aside from that though, it's a welcome different approach from the usual hagiographic or hip postmodern analyses of conglomeration cities like LA. Wealth was based on real estate and a ruling white elite kept its distance from a very large and diverse population. A.’s growing suburbanization along with other developers and bankers like Eli Broad and Mark Taper (their names are all over downtown buildings).
They talk about bombs but the only ones they plant are coming out of their asses after having sold them to the rock tabloids. The epilogue and prologue are united where new names and faces draw the well built lines of the labyrinth sheltering windmills at the feet of which we once laid down our arms.
I also love that the first chapter is the literary chapter – the inventing, debunking, mythologizing of L. Southern California labour history is summed up in the decline of Davis’s birthplace, Fontana, in San Bernardino County to the east of Los Angeles. Mike Davis is getting increasingly vociferous about development and climate change, and in a way this is one of his milder books. City of Quartz, which was actually a PhD dissertation that he turned into book form, looks at all of Southern California’s issues, including water, and weaves them together into a road map for the 21st century, with lots of warning signs along the way. Environmentalism is a congenial discourse to the extent that it is congruent with a vision of eternally rising property values in secure bastions of white privilege.Her dissertation, Carceral Crisis: The Challenge of Prison Overcrowding and the Rise of Mass Incarceration, 1970-2000, examines the history of prisons, punishment, and prisoner resistance in late-twentieth century Pennsylvania. Now you choose the shackles of an illusion making you believe you belong to an elite grown by opportunism, pride and lies. It's quite well-done and very informative (at least to an ignoramus like me), but Davis goes overboard now and then in seeing a conspiracy to repress the poor behind everything.
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