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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 Mapping the Past: Theory, Methods, Historiography Path Credits Root

Narrative Paths

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There are far too many stories to tell about the global past of Los Angeles for any one historian to address, so I tell as many as I can, and these reflect my judgement about what stories are worth reading,and which are within my power to relate. Read these in any order that you wish, remembering that every Essay included in the following narrative pathways can stand alone, and many are included in several collections of narrative pathways.

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Networks Phil Ethington
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Reader's Guide Ghost Metropolis is a hybrid work composed of multiple genres designed to follow narrative pathways, and geospatial and visual forms of the past, structured along networks of intersections, both geometric and metaphoric. Because all human action takes and makes place, the object of Ghost Metropolis is to map the past into the present, using many interwoven textual and visual genres together, ensemble. It is a work of textual, visual, and spatial narratives and of the intersections among them. 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. 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 between subject areas on teh same chronological period, in chronosections. The forty-two textual essays of Ghost Metropolis are grouped into five narrative paths: Manna From Hell; etc. It can also be read via intersections and networks through and between the textual and visual narratives. Narrative Essays Textually, Ghost Metropolis takes the form of narrative storytelling largely on the model of Plutarch or Livy, but also on the model of Braudel. I have included forty-two (42) short "narrative essays," averaging 12 typewritten pages. Much shorter than a traditional book "chapter," these are "essays" in the tradition of Montaigne: literally essais, tries or attempts, to recount what took place and to explain, by mapping the networks of actions that constituted each event, the shape of the past. Narrative Pathways The Narrative Essays, in turn, are presented sequentially in different "Narrative Pathways." Cross-cutting groupings of narrative essays are re-presented in multiple pathways. In the narrative essay and narrative pathways I narrate and analyze deeds of the great and the powerless alike, to assess their contributions to the inscribed lifeways and regimes of power from their generation to our own, 21st-century generation. Visual Genres Photographs Still images recorded to photosensitive films and digital devices. Photographic Narratives Semantic-photographic stories. -Curated sequences of static images. Panoramas Sweeping views of multiple directions from a single camera position, forming a circle of varying wide-angle degrees, to a maxium of 360˚. Montages/Photomontages Assemblages of photographs and graphic arts, including cartography. Maps Pictorial cartography. A special case of annotated pictorial form, maps usually carry semantic symbols that index or reference a depiction of some region of the Earth’s surface. Ghost Maps Visually layered visualization of geohistoric development. Cartographic Narratives Curated sequences of maps. Video All motion pictures. All photographic representations produced with equipment designed to capture motion in discrete frames and to edit those frames and re-present them at rates too frequent to be detected by the visual perception and cognition of the human mind. Cinematic Narratives -Curated sequences of film stills or clips taken directly from cinematic sources. Does not include “production stills” taken by still camera equipment during the making of movies. Cinematic narratives are only taken from motion photography—in whatever format, film to digital. Audio -All soundtracks lacking moving images. Includes but is not limited to the subgenres of music, radio, recorded voice of any kind, from oral histories to dramatic narratives, and the sound-tracks of movies and videos of any kind.
Narratives
Ghost Metropolis is a work of spatial and visual, as well as textual storytelling, so the structure of the work attempts to weave these kinds of narratives together.

The six principal narrative paths that structure Ghost Metropolis are:

Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City)
Inscribing Los Angeles: Governing, Producing, and Living Landscapes
Manna From Hell: Petroleum, Militarism, Counterrevolution, and World Wars
White Shadows: The Power and Passion of Global Hollywood
Richard 37th: The Global Regimes of Los Angeles
Segregated Diversity: The Geopolitical Economy of Racial Landscapes

Narratives are paths with implicit spatiality: we travel paths and these journeys are the grounding for storytelling. Mapping the past alone does not convey the meaning of that which has been mapped, nor the contribution of each topos to the grand ensemble of a global metropolis. Narratives do that, linking events and action that made the region what it is.

Narratives are stories told sequentially, but they are not always verbal-textual. Stories were spatial before they were verbal, and every journey of humanity--highly adapted with binocular vision and powerful visual neural processing--has been a visual journey.

There are many ways to narrate. Ghost Metropolis presents these three main types:

--Narrative Essays (in Narrative Paths)
--Visual Narratives
--Spatial Narratives Narrative Essays Textually, Ghost Metropolis takes the form of narrative storytelling largely on the model of Plutarch or Livy, but also on the model of Braudel. I have included forty (40) short "narrative essays," each averaging 12 typewritten pages. Much shorter than a traditional book "chapter," these are "essays" in the tradition of Montaigne: literally essais, tries or attempts, to recount what took place and to explain, by mapping the networks of actions that constituted each event, the shape of the past. Narrative Paths The Narrative Essays, in turn, are presented sequentially in different "Narrative Pathways." Cross-cutting groupings of narrative essays are re-presented in multiple pathways. In the narrative essay and narrative pathways I narrate and analyze deeds of the great and the powerless alike, to assess their contributions to the inscribed lifeways and regimes of power from their generation to our own, 21st-century generation.
Ab Urbe Condita (From the Origins of the City) Hic, ubi nunc Roma est, orbis capet Arbor et herbae et paucae Pecudes et casa vara fait. Here, where now stands Rome, capital of the world, there were trees, and grass, a few sheep, and an occasional cottage. --Ovid, Fasti V.93 Strip the Los Angeles Basin of its world-spanning populations, its freeways, factories, ships, aircraft and spacecraft, streets and houses and factories and sewers and plumbing, its universities, multinational corporations and capital, and imagine a vast, fertile basin that has supported human societies for thousands of years. The tale of this transformation should be told on a scale matching the great work of the Roman historian Titus Livius Patavinus (59 BC – AD 17), Ab urbe condita libri (circa 27-25 BCE),"Books from the founding of the city [of Rome]," circa 27-25 BCE). Human beings in our Holocene epoch were latecomers, following millions of years of biological and ecological development in this Mediterranean climate. Across aeons of time, giant and fearsome beasts like Smilodon californicus ruled the site of this future metropolis. Late Pleistocene, nomadic Clovis hunters clashed with Smilodon and giant lions, wielding long stone spears on long lances to match the fangs of their competitors during what can only be thought of as the "founding" of human Los Angeles, akin to the story of Romulus and Remus: suckled by a she-wolf on the central site of Rome. Only a founding tale of human combat with the saber-toothed cat, blood of intermingled beast and human consecrating the City of Angeles, can match the legend of a mighty imperial city founded by murderous men raised by wolves. But every great world city has a unique story. After both Smilodon and Clovis hunter vanished, a single settled culture, known as the Millingstone People, thrived for about 10,000 of those years, succeeded by the Uto-Aztecans (Gabrielinos/Tongva), who ruled the Basin for another two thousand years. For more than 100 centuries, the basin was lightly settled by about 5,000 persons, scattered into dozens of villages. During only the last of these centuries—the 20th—Los Angeles became a great capital of world history. By the time it did, the great structures of life, power, purpose, and justice were already deeply shaped by the countless generations that came before. Livy's Ab urbe condita, a short account of a local region's journey from its deep past as a pastoral landscape, to a mighty metropolitan center of global power, it is the model for the kind of compressed history that I want to achieve in this thread, narrating the Los Angeles region as a landscape of power since its earliest human inhabitants, tracing the continuous, long-lasting impact of every previous generation. Region and regime once meant the same thing, both descended from the Latin regio, to rule. All power ultimately flows from a control over social relations within a specific territory, a landscape inscribed with the rules of the game of life--access to resources. Who decides who gets what and how? Who profits from the labor of others? Who were few who controlled the fates of the many, and how often could the many control their own fates? How did the interplay of power and freedom lift the fortunes of some and lead others to fall? This narrative path is heavily focused on governing relations of the state and society. In this emphasis it belongs to the tradition of Livy and Plutarch. Other narrative paths of Ghost Metropolis are cast in more recent traditions from the humanities and social sciences of our own, so-called "modern" times. My Ab Urbe Condita is an ancient history, presented to make visible the very deep past of Los Angeles. It moves very quickly through the entire time and space scope of Ghost Metropolis in order to bring the past and present together in direct manner. Much deeper stories, which explore the myriad intersecting pathways of the Los Angeles past, are presented throughout the other Essays.
Narrative Essays and Narrative Paths Narrative Essays Textually, Ghost Metropolis takes the form of narrative storytelling largely on the model of Plutarch or Livy, but also on the model of Braudel. I have included forty (40) short "narrative essays," each averaging 12 typewritten pages. Much shorter than a traditional book "chapter," these are "essays" in the tradition of Montaigne: literally essais, tries or attempts, to recount what took place and to explain, by mapping the networks of actions that constituted each event, the shape of the past. Narrative Paths The Narrative Essays, in turn, are presented sequentially in different "Narrative Pathways." Cross-cutting groupings of narrative essays are re-presented in multiple pathways. In the narrative essay and narrative pathways I narrate and analyze deeds of the great and the powerless alike, to assess their contributions to the inscribed lifeways and regimes of power from their generation to our own, 21st-century generation.