Street Level: Los Angeles in the Twenty-First Century

199 Pages·2014·1.02 MB·English

by  Rob Sullivan

Street LeveL: LoS AngeLeS in the
twenty-FirSt Century
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Street Level: Los Angeles in the
twenty-First Century
rob SuLLivAn
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
© rob Sullivan 2014
All rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.
rob Sullivan has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to
be identified as the author of this work.
Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
wey Court east 110 Cherry Street
union road Suite 3-1
Farnham burlington, vt 05401-3818
Surrey, gu9 7Pt uSA
england
www.ashgate.com
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Sullivan, robert e., 1952-
Street level : Los Angeles in the twenty-first century / by Rob Sullivan.
pages cm
includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4094-4840-2 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-4094-4841-9
(ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-0638-5 (epub) 1. Sociology, Urban--California--
Los Angeles. 2. Los Angeles (Calif.)--Social condtitions. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)--
Economic conditions. 4. Los Angeles (Calif.)--Civilization. I. Title.
hn80.L7S85 2013
307.7609794’94--dc23
2013015212
ISBN 9781409448402 (hbk)
ISBN 9781409448419 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN 9781472406385 (ebk – ePUB)
V
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Introduction 1
Part I: Contra thIs and Contra that
1 “The Greatest Blonde of Them All” 11
2 The Carceral City 43
3 The Postmodern City 61
4 The Non-City 83
Part II: street LeveL: Los angeLes In the twenty-FIrst
Century
5 Twenty-First Century Urbanism 97
6 Real L.A. 125
7 Cultural Capital 151
Conclusion 171
Bibliography 173
Index 187
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Acknowledgements
Thank you to everyone at Ashgate for their kindness and support, especially
Valerie Rose and Pam Bertram, John Agnew for his continual encouragement
and invaluable advice, Greg Goldin for the generosity with which he shared his
profound knowledge of all things Los Angeles and the wit and intelligence with
which he critiqued a draft of this book, and, finally, my family, for their patience
and love … Mado, Casey, Quinn, and Sam, this book is dedicated to you.
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Introduction
In the summer of 1965, the artist William Leavitt arrived in Los Angeles from
Boulder, Colorado. Leavitt, originally from Kansas, was 25 years old when he
came to L.A. and had recently graduated from the University of Colorado, where
he had been a member of the Reserved Officer Training Corps. In August of 1965,
Leavitt was called up by his National Guard unit to assist in the quelling of the
upheaval that had exploded in Watts. Leavitt reported to a studio in Hollywood
where the reserves trained in front of the false fronts of movie sets for the very real
encounters that lay ahead in South Los Angeles: “The thinness of the deception
was thrilling to the young artist” (Griffin 2011).
This opposition of the virtual against the actual, the fictional against the real, the
façade of glamour utilized as a training ground to prep young reserves for the riot
raging in the streets, encapsulates much of what is emblematic about Los Angeles.
Starkly posed juxtapositions, disjunctive architecture and disjointed events, the
thin artifice of what is taken as culture as opposed to the overwhelming veracity
of what is assumed as the real—the overtly odd and the paradigmatically ordinary,
the famously bizarre and the stunningly banal, the everyday dullness of the “folks”
versus the extraordinary incandesce of the stars: these are the metaphors by which
Los Angeles is often explained and for a very good reason, as these extreme poles
do seem to signify much of the essence of this city.
And yet the city outdistances whatever metaphors are applied to it. Perhaps
this is so because Los Angeles exists both in and between the oppositions used
to describe it. For instance, retrieving the anecdote about William Leavitt, it is
not simply that L.A. is either the virtual city of stage sets or the burning city of
riots and uprisings, but that it is both of these and something else as well. The
city exists in the real and the virtual and between those diametrically opposed
extremes too. In other words, Los Angeles is not something that can be easily
caught, inspected, and then presented, as if one had finally grasped its irreducible
core after a scholarly quest for this particular manifestation of the urban grail.
Such irreducibility is probably true of most cities, or maybe even of all cities,
if one believes, as I do, that urban life (and life itself) continually resists any
definitive definition (as it constantly generates contradictions and paradoxes).
But, L.A. being L.A.—and therefore vast, polycentric to the point of formlessness,
magnificently awful as well as hypertrophically beautiful, dismal as well as
stunning, dreary as well as fabulous, persistently woeful as well as preternaturally
wondrous—may resist any final definition more sedulously than any other city on
earth. In this, the city seems to take on anthropomorphic qualities, as it seems to
be obdurate in its capacity to deter and defer definition, cunning in its ability to