Mike Davis (1) (1946–2022)

The first chapter alone makes City of Quartz a worthwhile read: Davis presents an idiosyncratic outline history of culture produced about Los Angeles, by what he calls ‘fabricators of the spectacle’—littérateurs, filmmakers, musicians and artists—engaged in a series of ‘attempts to establish authentic epistemologies’ for the city.

In the early 20th c., a group of writers and publicists (goaded by a syndicate of developers, bankers and transport magnates) created an ersatz show more history of Los Angeles that romanticized race relations and a fictional Spanish Colonial past, and promoted the power of sunshine to reinvigorate the racial energies of Anglo-Saxons. The imagery, motifs, values and legends of the Arroyo Set have been endlessly reproduced ever since. In the 1920s, a number of anti-romantic writers and painters and Popular Front-affiliated journalists worked to unmask the booster mythology and to recover the historical roles of labor and oppressed minority groups while originating observations that appeared decades later in the obscurantist vocabulary of cultural theorists.

The most influential counter to the utopist ideology came in the form of noir, first as fiction then on film, as the setting shifted from suburban bungalows to the ‘epic dereliction’ of Bunker Hill downtown. Beyond the conventional works, Davis includes in his capacious discussion of noir the fictions of John Fante, Chester Himes and John Rechy, the autobiography of Art Pepper, and Aldous Huxley’s Ape and Essence, described here as a predecessor to films like “Planet of the Apes,” “Omega Man,” and “Blade Runner.”

Huxley came to Los Angeles between the wars as part of a wave of pacifist and anti-fascist European exiles, most of whom—‘clinging to their Old World prejudices,’ as Davis tells it—responded to the ‘counterfeit urbanity’ of L.A. with melancholy, pessimism and/or panic. (One exception was Huxley, who embraced mysticism, health food and hallucinogens). It is amusing to find out that the whole Frankfurt critique of the “Culture Industry” is based upon Adorno and Horkheimer’s blinkered misreading of their first-hand L.A. ‘data.’

Toward the end of the chapter, Davis sketches a few notes on several ‘heroic’ underground cultural moments around Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman (elevator operator at the Bullock Wilshire), Jack Parsons, Kenneth Anger and others. The moments pass quickly, and with little discernible effect, as the 1970s and 80s were characterized by 'a mercenary, corporate-dominated arts dispensation' and an influx of celebrity architects, designers, artists and cultural theorists arriving for their adventures in hyperreality. pshaw show less

Los Angeles has been going through it. Deep droughts. A lot of rain. The constant expectation regarding earthquakes. Political unrest. And, of course, the wildfires.

This accurately reflects the situation in 2025. It also was accurate in the 1990s. And many times beforehand.

In 1998, Mike Davis published Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. In it he gives voice to disaster in Los Angeles, both in reality and in imagination.

He ran through the gamut of disasters which show more Los Angeles has, does, and will continue to experience. He spoke of the flooding which can attend to the “Pineapple Express,” which we now understand as atmospheric rivers (ARs), and detailed the many floods which the Los Angeles Basin has experienced over the past century and a half. He addressed the rampant urban expansion within the Los Angeles Basin, how and why it went down, and the consequences which attend to it. His famous longform article, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, is presented in its fullness, not merely a discourse on the Santa Ana winds and the inevitability of major fires like the Palisades and Eaton Fires, but also embedded within it a discussion of the many urban fires within slums in the history of Los Angeles which tend not to get the same press. The author then presented his personal research into the history of tornadoes in Los Angeles: their very real existence despite all attempts to redefine them or suppress knowledge of them, the patterns they follow, how no one has died from them in the past century (extraordinarily), and how they will persist despite everyone thinking we do not get tornadoes in Los Angeles. He also spoke of the wildlife within the mountains and how we relate to them. He provided a masterful exploration into all the various ways Los Angeles has been destroyed in literature and film and what those stories say about how Los Angeles was perceived and those who came up with them. He concluded by considering Los Angeles’ unique “official nightmare,” Blade Runner, and what seemed like, in the late 90s, the ways in which society in Los Angeles would continue to degenerate.

The author’s cynicism overall does him well until at the end, for whereas the 21st century surely has seen a lot of challenges for Los Angeles, it has not quite turned out to be Blade Runner just yet.

This is a powerful and prescient compilation of essays, and one very much worth reading for those who wish to understand the dark side of this paradise. It should not be a surprise when a lot of these things happen. We just do well to mitigate our risk to the best of our abilities, be prepared for the likely disaster prospects, and negotiate life in this environment appropriately. show less

A very interesting book--tracking the history of the car bomb from the time of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial until pretty much today.
Davis as well keeps tracks of milestones--where the ante is always inevitably ratcheted up. The fact as well that it has not just become a weapon of the weak (or as he calls it 'the poor man's air force) against the strong but increasingly as well a tactic of the strong (in particular their secret services--CIA, MI5 for instance) against the weak. In particular the show more CIA under the leadership of William Casey during the Reagan administration schooling thousands of anti-Soviet Afghans and outside Moslems fighting against the Soviets on the tactical uses of such have since come back to haunt us--the planes crashing into the twin towers on 9-11 being seen as 'car bombs with wings'. Interesting as well to read about the Stern gang targeting British soldiers and Arabs in Palestine as the first use of the car bomb as a weapon in the Middle East. Whatever entity starts the ball rolling seems to eventually have it boomerang back upon itself whether it's freedom fighter, terrorist or nation state. In the case of Islamic fundamentalism today seeming to taken on an uncontrollable life of its own amongst numerous loosely aligned groups. We find ourselves these days just about in a whack a mole state with no clear exit strategy.

As much as a world leader--such as GWB 2 use to be--might choose to ignore an inconvenient fact and go on ahead with policies that ignore and exacerbate existing problems or create new ones to blithely ignore--spinning versions of events for p.r. while going full bore ahead with an agenda set on enriching himself and his friends while ordinary citizens are left to bear the brunt of the blowback. Well as just another ordinary citizen that's where ignorance gets you--though as I see it it's practically impossible to keep up with everything going on--blissfully and willfully going on like everything is on the up and up does not make you innocent. We live in a chaotic world and it's best to bone up on chaos theory and leave God to the fundamentalists of all stripes for all their simplistic metaphysical theories to explain why this has got to be like this and that has got to be like that. In the meantime the rest of us could start by getting real and demanding more of our government to act in accordance to what it's supposed to stand for--supporting the freedom of people around the world to live in a way that they freely choose (and not necessarily to become clones of us)--either that or choose to stay out of the way and do no harm.

In any case--Davis's books is very much worth reading. Not altogether unlike Chomsky (at his best) in terms of content and structure. Anyway I'd definitely recommend it. show less

A panoramic look at the failure of labor rights, preservation, and racial equality all told through the physical infrastructure of the city.

This book is dense and winding. I listened to it as an audio book the past three months and realized I had to just let the thing wash over me. Davis doesn't write a straightforward history of Los Angeles, instead driving through avenues of historic situations in roughly chronological order to illustrate the particular theme of each chapter. Each chapter show more is about a specific area (except the one on Catholicism, my favorite chapter), and it's only while you're halfway through that you start to see the forest for the trees. This book is a remarkable achievement and rightly a classic of urbanist theory.

Growing up and living here again it's nice to finally learn about all the places I see daily. The fact close to no one here knows about the history of the city sadly illustrates the part of his argument that this place is a fucking shithole show less