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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles from Clovis to Nixon Main Menu Regimes: Ruling the Los Angeles Region from the Late Pleistocene to the 21st Century Places and Paths of Los Angeles Manna From Hell: Power and Politics from Region to World Power Shadows: Visual Cultures and Mass Media of a Regional and Global Power Segregated Diversity: The Geosocial Formation of Social Justice in the Late Twentieth Century Richard 37th: Nixon, Los Angeles, and World Power The American 1989: Los Angeles at the Climax of the 20th Century Narrative Essay Bibliographies, Filmographies, Gazeteers, Indexes Credits Root

Methods

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Theoretical and Methodological Page

Should we tell political, social, economic, cultural, private or public cultural stories with any greater priority or order? I have chosen to tell my stories without regard for conventional priorities. My parallel "paths" travel through the spacetime of global Los Angeles chronologically, but not always from the same beginning or destination.

Because all human action takes and makes place, the the past is the set of all places made by everyone who lived in or passed through the Los Angeles Basin. The object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven genres ensemble. Readers may follow my maps along both textual and visual paths.

Ghost Metropolis is a regional and global narrative, covering, throughout, 130 centuries. Its basic premise is that there cannot possibly be a single narrative of so great a concentration of global humanity, over so many centuries. Thus, Ghost Metropolis presents multiple narratives: All people of a metropolis inscribe its history into a landscape that is produced and reproduced daily by them. In principle, there are as many stories to tell about a metropolis as there have been people living within them, and many more, of course, because every individual is busting with narratives.

As a historian, cartographer, and photographer, I have attempted, for more than a decade, to compose an account of Los Angeles that makes its great trajectories visible to a very wide audience. I have researched the region's history and its social and political geography deeply and broadly, and have composed my accounts of of the metropolis in forty-two narrative essays, some of them previously published mostly not. I have also created many visualizations of the past of Los Angeles, in still photography, photomontages, and several kinds of maps: "Ghost Maps," thematic maps, and large-format wall maps. These visual genres belong to visual narratives in this work. These visual works by the author were made while I was conducting archival research and writing my textual accounts, so they are visual attempts to see the past, made in parallel with the textual attempts to recount the past. So, I have braided the textual and the visual narratives together.

Following Cervantes, Mercatur, and Melville, I've constructed a large-scale work of many different components, and many different genres. Most of the components of Ghost Metropolis are, like the short stories Cervantes folded into Don Quijote, free-standing. Ghost Metropolis is composed of forty-two (42) narrative essays and many visual narratives. Visual media numbering several hundred belong to the genres: photographs, maps, montages, panoramas, and videos.

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Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 about | narratives | genres | methods | credits Ghost Metropolis is a global history of Los Angeles since the earliest human habitation, presented as a hybrid of textual, cartographic, and photographic representation, in print and online formats. It aspires to make the deep and global past visible in the limitless landscapes of present-day Metropolitan Los Angeles. Past actors inscribed their labors into the landscape and left the scene; their actions haunt every subsequent inhabitant--shaping later lives invisibly. Simlodon californicus, the saber-toothed cat who ruled the region until conquered by the first humans, is the original demon haunting El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora, Reina de Los Ángeles, The town of Our Lady, Queen of the Angels. The past is the landscape of what took place. The presence of the past is the inscribed form of human labor projected beyond the deaths of previous generations, haunting every global landscape. Historians make the ghosts of the past visible. Ghost Metropolis maps the past to give the living a guide into it, not merely for the sheer pleasure of reading narratives in text, cartography, photography, and video, but ultimately for the goal of accountability. The blood of countless generations stains the streets of Los Angeles. Ghost Metropolis seeks to make the ghosts of The Angels visible, readable, knowable, and therefore actionable. This work 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); Shakespeare's Richard III (1592), Macbeth (c. 1605); Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), and Fernand Braudel's The Mediterranean (1949). Equally 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. It owes a deep debt to the Renaissance cartographers: Gerardus Mercatur, Abraham Ortelius, Joan Bleau. My own Ghost Maps are extensions of this tradition. 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 interactive storytelling and argumentation. A work of verbal and visual storytelling, Ghost Metropolis is written in plain prose, it is free of theoretical terms or jargon of any kind. While it is built carefully on a broad theoretical foundation that I have published elsewhere, it is aimed at the broad educated public, to communicate well and not densely. Please visit the Reader's Guide, which explains and maps the conceptual structure of paths and the weblike network intersections. Preamble Los Angeles, California, United States of America, is the heart of the Southern California region, a global metropolis so huge and complex that its weight in world history would be impossible to calculate. This graphic history attempts to tell its story, since the beginnings of the city as a permanent settlement. Los Angeles has devoured millions of immigrants, harbored millions of residents, birthed millions more. It breathes in and exhales tens of millions of visitors daily and yearly through its ports, airports, and highways. Its gargantuan human population--16.5 million in 2000--is drawn from all continents of the Earth. These teeming millions stand atop the shoulders of the many millions who preceded them as settlers and sojourners, each individual altering the region in some way, small or large. These millions--since the age of Smilodon the sabre-toothed cat and the long-tusked Mammoths, through the Age of Aerospace, of which Los Angeles served as founding global capital--have been drawn to Los Angeles for the riches and freedoms and pleasures that it promises, and has promised, for thousands of years. Los Angeles has been the site of joy and beauty for many, but it has also been a deadly siren, devouring its lovers in chronic and spectacular paroxysms of repression and social violence. The ghosts of the injustices of the past haunt us in the form of institutions of unequal power etched into the landscapes all around us. Also surviving among these ghosts are the institutional beginnings of human rights, the echos to our ears and reflections to our eyes, emanating from past champions of justice. While Ghost Metropolis lies on the cynical side of historical appreciation, it also shines a spotlight on those who have contributed creative spirit to the future triumph of peace and justice, so that hope may endure for a metropolis that promotes the human rights of all.
Reader's Guide
about   |  narratives |  genres | methods  | credits

Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 is a large, multidimensional work about a very large and very old region. It is composed of hundreds of elemental textual and visual units in multiple genres. The reader is invited to travel through the historical Los Angeles metropolis along multiple paths and networks of textual, visual, and spatial narratives. Ghost Metropolis has a spatial-temporal-textual structure that is modeled on the metropolis itself.

Ghost Metropolis attempts to make the ghostly presence of the past visible, so it literally visualizes the past, as a three-dimensional form of mapping. Those three dimensions are:

1) the linear chronological narrative, recounting actions by actors
2) the visual encounter with the past in photographs, graphic arts, and motion pictures
3) the cartographic: visualizing the topography of human action.

Each of these dimensions is historical and chronological, but there is no single, privileged timeline or narrative.

Readers may follow many different paths through this work. It can be read chronologically from 13,000 years ago until the present. It can be read by narrative pathways that follow the course of a general area of social and political life. It can be read across subject areas, within the same chronological period. It can also be read via intersections and networks of tags, through and between the textual and visual narratives.

The forty textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into six thematic narrative paths. Those with a Blue Link are ready for review, because they have a sufficient visual companion narrative built-out.

All essay drafts in their most up-to-date versions are accessible, via the Narrative Essays path.

Principal Narrative Paths (Path Titles in Bold)

1) Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
Regime I: Clovis Conquest: First Peoples and Megafaunal Extinction. ~13,000 calendar years Before Present (BP).
Regime II: Archaic or Millingstone Era (~10,200 B.P. to 1 Common Era)
Regime III: Uto-Aztecan Aristocracy (1 CE to 1769)
Regime IV: Spanish Franciscan Theocracy (1769 – 1822)
Regime V: Mexican Latifundia (1822 – 1848)
Regime VI: U.S. Latifundia-Commercial (1848 – 1881)
   Regime VII: U.S. Industrial-Imperial/Porfirian Borderland (1881-1940)
   Regime VIII: U.S. Military-Industrial (1940-1992)
Regime IX: U.S./Global Networked Neoliberal (1992-Present)

2) Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
Inscribing the Boundaries of Power: The Production of Governing Spaces, 1781-2000

The Boom of the 1920s: Industrial and Residential Groundwork
From Footpath to Freeway: Circulation Networks
Making Democratic Spaces: A Visual Geography of Southern California Architectural Moderism, 1900s-1960s
Avenue Journey: Central Ave to Watts
Love with Strangers: The Los Angeles Counterculture and the Birth of an Art Capital
Crossroads of the LA Metropolis: The Four-Level Interchange and Bunker Hill
Postwar Suburbia: The Commercialization of Metropolitan Space

3) Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
Manna From Hell: Petroleum and the Inscription of Power
“Doheny El Cruel”: The Chihuahua Connection
Los Ángeles contra La Raza Cósmica: The Los Angeles Counterrevolution of the 1920s
Hell’s Angels: Air and Power in a Cinematic Metropolis
The Furies: Los Angeles Industrial Mass Killing In the Second Word War
   Space Station Los Angeles: From Peenemünde to Disneyland to Mars

4) White Shadows: Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
Infinite Landscapes of the Motion Picture Industry
Ahn Chang-ho and Philip Ahn
White Shadows in the South Seas
Dolores del Río and Maria Rovitz Ramos
Radio City: Cinema’s Sister
Tarzana of the Apes
Populism and Fascism in 1930s Hollywood
Hollywood’s White Hunters
Global Segregation: The Inscription of Racial Injustice from Mombasa to Culver City

5) Richard 37th: Global Regimes of Los Angeles
Richard the 37th: The Rise and Demise of Richard Milhaus Nixon, 1913-1994
Sympathy for the Devil
The Jaws of Smilodon, 1992-2010

6) Segregated Diversity: The Political Geography of Race
Segregated Diversity: Los Angeles County, 1940-2000
Placing Segregation: The Race-Ethnic Geography of Municipal Places, 1940-2000
Geopolitical Economy of Whiteness 1940-1990
The Political Geography of Race, 1940s-1990s
The Spacetime Transection: Pico-Whittier, Lakewood-Rosemead, and Sepulveda Blvd.

The location of each essay within these Narrative Paths is its "home position," because I wrote or revised most of them to belong to those series. But most Narrative Essays also belong to other paths or networks, reachable via numerous linkages within this weblike Scalar book.

The Narrative Essays that have have been woven together with a Visual Narrative can be reached via the Reviewer's Page.

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