Wojtek
On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 3:16 PM, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>wrote:
> At 11:48 AM 8/18/2010, Wojtek S wrote:
>
>
> the rest of it seemed like suburban sprawl or
>> Disneyland.
>>
>
>
> Disneyland is in Orange County.
>
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>
> It is not that I dislike LA, I can think of far more dreadful
>> places - it is just not my kind of place, I do not connect. Unlike NYC,
>> which I loved from day one I got there for the first time.
>>
>
> That's the difference. New York or San Francisco you get as soon as you
> hit the sidewalk. Los Angeles takes longer. That's why people hate it when
> they come in for only a few days or even a couple weeks.
>
> Next time come downtown or go to East LA, Koreatown, or MacArthur Park.
> Koreatown has the highest population density in the city and one of the
> highest in the country. MacArthur Park is where they found the mummified
> babies in the basement but there's a lot of life there above ground.
>
> Former NYC police chief Bratton was police chief here until a year ago.
> His wife still lived on the east coast and they had a bi-coastal thing
> going while he was chief here. He used to complain that there was no place
> to eat when she arrived here late at night. He obviously never looked in
> Koreatown.
>
> It seems Bratton, at least when it comes to nightlife, stopped gathering
> information about Los Angeles decades ago. So do a lot of other people.
>
> One of the best recent books about the place (besides everything Mike Davis
> ever wrote about it) is by Norman Klein, a transplanted New Yorker who
> teaches at Cal Arts. It's called History of Forgetting:
>
> http://www.versobooks.com/books/klm/k-titles/klein_los_angeles.shtml
>
> The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (Haymarket
> Series) [Paperback]
>
> Analysis, photography and fiction combine in a bracing portrait of LA
>
> Publication
> June 1997
> 2nd Edn. : August 2008
>
> Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation
> of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines
> the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and
> fiction, the book takes us on an “anti-tour” of downtown LA, examines life
> for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as
> a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has
> recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb.
>
> “Klein clearly follows in [Mike] Davis’s wake, but develops a distinctive
> focus on the erasure of memory in and about the city.” Times Literary
> Supplement
>
> “Klein is a fine stylist, an engaging historian – is account of the way
> noir shaped the city is strikingly fresh.” New Scientist
>
> “Norman Klein is full of ideas, brilliant and beautifully expressed.”
> Journal of American History
>
> Norman M. Klein is a critic and historian of mass culture, editor of
> Fragile Moments: A History of Media-Induced Experience, and author of Seven
> Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon from Verso. He
> teaches at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles.
>
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