Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000
People make history as they make places that shape the future. Our present is encompassed by the ghostly presence of the past. Human actions inscribe and project beyond the deaths each generation. Acts of our ancestors haunt every landscape.
Los Angeles California is the product of countless individuals who shaped not only their own cityscape but eventually the fate of billions of people worldwide. Founded by conquering, imperial regimes, from the Clovis and Millingstone, to the Aztecan, Spanish, Mexican, and United States regimes, Los Angeles became a mighty node of military-industrial geopolitical power in the Twentieth Century, the century of the color line, mass culture, and world wars for oil, ideology, race, and religion. Ghost Metropolis narrates and maps the emergence of the Southern California region as a global powerhouse, through stories about the leading features of its social landscapes, through forty visual-historical essays woven into a cable with strands: Ab Urbe Condita; Social Landscapes; Manna From Hell; White Shadows; Segregated Diversity. These five essay strands culminate in the sixth, Richard 37th: A Study of Tyranny. Each strand overlaps and runs parallel in time with the others, collectively but selectively covering the entire period since first human habitation, along different dimensions (pathways through spacetime).
Los Angeles California is the product of countless individuals who shaped not only their own cityscape but eventually the fate of billions of people worldwide. Founded by conquering, imperial regimes, from the Clovis and Millingstone, to the Aztecan, Spanish, Mexican, and United States regimes, Los Angeles became a mighty node of military-industrial geopolitical power in the Twentieth Century, the century of the color line, mass culture, and world wars for oil, ideology, race, and religion. Ghost Metropolis narrates and maps the emergence of the Southern California region as a global powerhouse, through stories about the leading features of its social landscapes, through forty visual-historical essays woven into a cable with strands: Ab Urbe Condita; Social Landscapes; Manna From Hell; White Shadows; Segregated Diversity. These five essay strands culminate in the sixth, Richard 37th: A Study of Tyranny. Each strand overlaps and runs parallel in time with the others, collectively but selectively covering the entire period since first human habitation, along different dimensions (pathways through spacetime).
All cities have demons, but Los Angeles--the ironically, hopefully named "City of the Angels"--has more than most. For centuries, its rulers developed and reproduced autocratic, anti-democratic, unjust, and exploitive governing and economic regimes. As the latest conquerors, beginning in 1848, US Anglo-Americans built on these traditions to create the most important source of late-20th-century U.S. governing ideologies, militarism, and the mass manufacture of meaning on a global scale. Los Angeles has had an incalculable impact on billions of lives worldwide.
Ghost Metropolis reconstructs the historical architecture of a metropolis that produced the most powerful people and organizations that ever stalked Earth. Especially during its own golden age--an apogee of power from the 1940s to the 1980s--Los Angeles supplied the defining Nixon and Reagan presidencies as well as the dominating institutions of economic-military-political power: petroleum, aircraft, missiles, mass media. Los Angeles either hosted, caused, or shaped the signal global events the late 20th century.Past Angelenos inscribed their labors into the landscape: into the streets and structures and institutions of power. They also inscribed their lives into documents, ideas, images, laws, lawlessness, and into the hearts and minds of humanity. They left the scene, but their actions, good and ill, haunt every subsequent inhabitant.
Form follows function. The past is the landscape of what took place. The places of the past, or topoi, must be both narrated and mapped in order to be understood. Ghost Metropolis seeks to make the ghosts of Los Angeles visible, readable, knowable, and therefore accountable. To perform this function, Ghost Metropolis takes hybrid form, integrating textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print and online formats. It follows several models: Livy's history of Rome, Ab urbe condita (53 BCE); Plutarch's Lives (c. 100 CE); Cervantes's Don Quijote (1601-15); Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (1949).
Equally a textual (semantic) and a visual work, Ghost Metropolis is a 21st-century “Atlas” inspired by the Renaissance atlases of the 16th and 17th century: rich mixtures of typography, graphic arts, and cartography. Renaissance cartographers wrote graphic novels. The atlases of Gerardus Mercatur, Abraham Ortelius, Joan Bleau were also richly woven with narratives and analyses (in an imperialist framework, of course) My own Ghost Maps are extensions of this tradition, for humanitarian purposes, to be sure. This is also a work of the photographic and cinematic age. Ghost Metropolis draws these previous textual and visual traditions together into a multimedia work of storytelling and argumentation. The Reader's Guide, explains and maps the conceptual structure of paths and the weblike network intersections.
Contents of this path:
- Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
- Social Landscapes: Inscribing Los Angeles
- Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
- White Shadows: Hollywood's Global Production of Eros and Race
- Richard 37th
- Topoi: Hollywood Sign, Port of Los Angeles, Case Study #22, and Watts Towers
