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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

Narratives

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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.

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This page is referenced by:

Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000
Note: This edition of Ghost Metropolis can be sampled with free access to this page, the Preface, Reader's Guide, Narratives, Genres, Theory and Methods, and Credits, and the entire essay Crossroads of the LA Metropolis: The Four-Level Interchange and Bunker Hill. Full unrestricted access to the entire forty-two visual-spatial-narrative essays, paths, and networks, is available for the price of 0.99 cents.
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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. The spirits of our creative predecessors, whose who did great and just things, are also celebrated in Ghost Metropolis. They haunt us as friendly helpers.Other spirits haunt us not with a retrospective dream, but as an ever-present nightmare: brought to us by the spirits of the unquiet dead, whose justice remains to be served.

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 present is the past of human labor inscribed and projected beyond the deaths of each generation, 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 accountable. 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); 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 storytelling and argumentation.

Ghost Metropolis is also a global history of a mightily influential global metropolis. Founded by conquering and imperial regimes, Los Angeles has shaped world history. The stories I tell are recounted at every scale: local, metropolitan, regional, national, and global. 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.

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