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

Reader's Guide

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      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 the 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.

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.

This page has tags:

  1. Ghost Metropolis: Los Angeles Since 13,000 Phil Ethington
  2. Narrative Paths Phil Ethington

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