Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon
Each generation of Angelenos, over thousands of years, inscribed their ways of life into the landscape. Enduring institutions accumulated like a coral reef in this ancient, ocean-facing landscape of valleys and mountain chains. Every group of rulers left its legacy, each built on the previous that it had over-thrown. The most distinctive elements conserved over many generations was an authoritarian political culture that reproduced extreme social hierarchies. It ultimately produced an American form of fascism in the 20th century and the New Right of the late 20th century, as Washington, D.C. was inhabited by two world-historic Angelenos: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
The "rule" of Los Angeles has been achieved not only through control of the territory and the determination of its built form, but also in the production of images, ideologies, and propaganda that justified the rule of the rulers. For this reason, Ghost Metropolis is a work of multiple genres: verbal storytelling, analysis, and explanation, but also of visual interpretation and visual communication. It takes the visual archive of the past as a major part of its evidence base, but also presents visualizations by the author to represent and apprehend the past of Los Angeles in its street-level, regional, and global scales.
Ghost Metropolis presents a case that the region has been ruled by ten regimes: The first was the long rule of Pleistocene mammalian predators before the arrival of humans, followed by nine human "regional regimes," from the Clovis people, to the 10,000-year civilization of the Hokan-Chumash people, through the two-thousand year reign of the Aztecan Tongva, ending around 1800, through the regimes of the Spanish, Mexicans, and United States conquerors. Each "regime" has imposed the dominant ways that immigrants have come to and settled in the region, how some groups have enjoyed privileges and powers, and yet every regime, while dominant, has also been unstable. The stories of Ghost Metropolis are of both rule and resistance, of dominant and oppositional cultures; of the ways that generations have inscri0ppbed power into a mighty place, and how those ruled by injustice have sought to shrug it off, to combat rule by vioance and reciam with rule of equality and demoracy. Ghost metropllis maps not only the successful triumph of a pernicious "pulp fascism" and the New Right from thsi region, but also many of teh movements that resisted it, and have managed to create great contributoins to humanity despite the deep inscription fo militarism, racism, and patriarchy into the landscape.
The climax of this story is the Uprising of 1992. The combined work of the governing and media production of global Los Angeles brought all of its past to bear in the racial apartheid that its rulers inflicted on the urban core and on the American Empire, from Vietnam to Chile, and that uprising ultimately proved teh tipping-point for a democratic renaissance the continue to the day this book is presented to teh public./
Call the last portion a "renassance" of reform and democratization. it is like any powrt-colonial and post-aparthed society. Instituional repar has been undertaken; structures of unaccountable power have been identified and attackec. The motion picgture inductry's "hoollywood so white and so male" the Furgusen wave of videotaped reforms, all growing from Rdney King. That defines the Epilgoe of teh book: the last act. Even my Funeral essay, should be about this contested period of reform.
The Counter-reformation is a neo-pulp fasciet regime, in the triumpt of Trumpism in the 21016 election. This is the Twilight of the Englightenment, the perdsisten tof pubp fascism, and the return to Nixoninan authrotaina disinformatoin.
Human freedom is something that always needs to be contained
The disequilibrium of each
tells stories about Los Angeles on scales from the personal to the global: its place and places in human history. These are tales of utopian ambition and achievement, the rise of a great and attractive metropolis. It also tells stories of exploitation, and the storage of injustice in the region's landscape, haunting it over many generations, generating world discord, climaxing in the LA Uprising of 1992. Los Angeles in the 21st century is better and greater global metropolis, but it has taken millenia to mature.
Drawn by its many attractions, Angelenos over the centuries invented new ways of being human, from mass, hybrid culture to surfing and space flight. Ghost Metropolis sings praises for the humane aspirations of millions of migrants who shaped the Los Angeles cityscape and eventually the fate of billions of people worldwide. Stories of hope, irony, and comedy, of neighborhoods, art, invention, and utopian landscapes are abundant throughout these pages, but Ghost Metropolis also maps the accountability that Los Angeles deserves for a major share of the malevolent conditions facing the human world in the 21st-century present.
Ghost Metropolis is an integrated work of verbal, visual, and spatial story-telling. The author seeks to understand and explain the rise of Los Angeles as a global metropolis--a very powerful place that shapes world history. All global cities have unique stories: from Istanbul to Venice, Paris, Tokyo, and Mexico city, are the centers of deeply historical regions, each is distinctive because of this. Ghost Metropllis attempts to tell an over-arching story about the was that Los Angles region came into being, developed through ten ruling regimes, from teh earliest human settlement 13,000 years ago, through the 21st century.
Studying Los Angeles is a multidimensional quest. Writing is most familiar, but our understanding of Los Angeles has taken shape not only in printed texts, but in the vast visual imaginarium of our contemporary epoch: the age of visual culture, mass media, mass communications, and globalism. As Ghost Metropolis argues throughout, the history of any metropolis is also the history of its region, the places of the Earth that it has produced and inhabited: the places and places inscribed by its people and its power. The visual representation of social shapes on the ground is the genre of cartography, which is strongly featured as integral to Ghost Metropolis. Because people exercise power is in specific sites, from the geo-spatial to the imagined, it must not only be recounted in semantic text but mapped in chronological, visual space. Ghost Metropolis attempts to contribute to the larger history of the globe by offering one account oLos Angeles's role inits creation. It attempts to contribute to the history of the United States by mapping the rising power of Los Angeles to create the nation's late-20th-century political regimes of the Nixon-Regan Era; and it tries to contribute to the history of urban places by mapping the inscription of aLos Angeles into the landscapes of the human hive of built form and transportation networks
The methods I have developed for this purpose are chrono-cartographic: attempting to visualize the chronographic inscription of social forms through layers of visualization.
Stories and studies in this spatial, visual, and verbal hybrid work range in scale from the street level to the planetary level, and from the events of a day to those of a thousand generations. Ghost Metropolis maps the past, from the ground up, from the distant past to the pressing present. While wide-ranging, it is not encyclopedic. It tells stories along many different lines toward the goal of explaining the reasons why, and how, Los Angeles shaped the present globe. Chronologically, Ghost Metropolis begins with a handful of hunters who vanquished the fearsome saber-tooth cat, claiming the region as a human domain. It ends with the titanic global crisis of the late 20th century, a crisis generated in large part by two Angelenos--Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan--who rose from LA to dominate the most powerful nation on Earth.
Contents of this path:
- Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century
- Inscribing Places: Blood, Boundaries, and Borderlands
- Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power
- Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power
- Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography
- Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes
