Colin Marshall

Notebook on Cities and Culture‘s fourth season begins in just over two weeks, on Thursday, August 1st, with a series of in-depth conversations conducted right here with the cultural creators, internationalists, and observers of the urban scene in LosAngeles. Until then, why not consider tiding yourself over with a few essays from my forthcoming book, A Los Angeles Primer: Mastering the Stateless City? The good folks at KCET Departures (a Los Angeles-centric site operated by the big public television station in these parts) have been running an essay from it each week for months now, each based in a different part of the city, and thus each one examining a different realm of its world-in-microcosm.

“One can technically live an entire Koreatown life in only Korean or Spanish – or indeed, only English – within these almost three square miles, but it would by no means count as a full one.”

“Say what you will about their limited reach; the Red and Purple Lines surely must rank among the cleanest, most comfortable, least urine-smelling systems in America. You may lose twenty minutes waiting on platforms, but you’ll have taken a subway — in Los Angeles!”

“The place to stock up on canned green tea, buy a genuine futon, burn an hour at the arcade, eat a heaping plateful of Hayashi rice, or gaze upon the finest men’s style magazines: Little Tokyo remains all these, but does it, strictly speaking, remain Japanese?”

“The freeways fascinate in the same way the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinate: they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.”

“Built around one of the few traditionally strollable ‘cute streets’ Los Angeles has to offer, Larchmont Village has undergone an intriguing, if subtle, process of cultural fragmentation since the era of the Three Stooges and Raymond Chandler.”

“An object of fascination for the writers of ‘When Harry Met Sally’ to ‘The Simpsons’, restaurant critics to Yelpers, Ethiopian cuisine has its Los Angeles center on a single block of Fairfax Avenue. We can easily visit Little Ethiopia for a satisfying meal, but how, then, to assure ourselves of our ability to engage with a culture beyond paying for its food?”

“Neither urban nor suburban, Silver Lake, with its namesake reservoir and surfeit of fascinating houses, has become a space for style, wellness, and artisanal retail. But should we fear a rising monoculture?”

“Tourist guidebooks may direct Los Angeles’ visitors from abroad to the Walk of Fame, but just two miles east on Hollywood Boulevard, they’ll find a much more fruitful cultural experience — certainly a spicier one — in Thai Town, a neighborhood with less David O. Selznick and more Apichatpong Weerasethakul.”

You can read about these places and more at KCET Departures’ A Los Angeles Primer page, which posts a new essay each Tuesday. Naturally, I welcome any and all suggestions and pieces of feedback savvy readers such as yourselves may have to offer.

Call it cynicism if you must, but if I went to someplace called the “Arts District” in most North American cities, I wouldn’t necessarily expect to find art; in most cases, I’d expect to find nothing at all. The name smacks of official desperation, bringing to mind last-ditch efforts to rebrand blocks you’d never even walk through with an absolute minimum outlay of money or effort. You can envision the meetings: what revitalizes tired, dangerous industrial areas? Why, artists. And what do artists do? Arts, of course. And up go the signs. That an influx of artists in the sixties and seventies actually did bring Manhattan’s Lower East Side back from the brink of more or less literal destruction has put ideas into the head of other cities across the continent ever since. It brings to mind the Melanesian “cargo cult,” whose members supposedly built imitation airstrips out of wood and radios out of coconuts in hopes of therefore receiving the same deliveries of goods as did their departed World War II occupiers. The cargo cultists staffed their bamboo control towers and waved their semaphore leaves as imitatively as they could, so the story goes, but nothing ever happened.

It thus comes as a surprise that, in Los Angeles’ Arts District, something has actually happened, and, more to the point, continues to happen. Yet for quite some time, it seemed unclear whether it had or would. “Downtown was doomed,” says the narrator of Thom Andersen’s documentary “Los Angeles Plays Itself” of the city’s faltering core in the immediate postwar era. “In the eighties, it went vertical, and there was an attempt to promote loft living on its eastern margins, an effort advertised in a few films, but even artists found the new urbanism daunting.” We now know this area, between downtown proper and the Los Angeles River’s west bank, as the Arts District. Back in 2004, when Andersen’s film came out, the neighborhood already had its name, but evidently it still lacked its current regard. Less than a decade before that, the Arts District didn’t even merit an entry in Leonard and Dale Pitt’s encyclopedia “Los Angeles A to Z”, though the law that put artists’ residences in formerly industrial buildings above-board goes back to 1981. You may even now venture into the Arts District and find yourself unimpressed, but bear in mind the way we’ve framed so much of Los Angeles today: don’t look at what it is; look at what it’s becoming.

Read the whole thing at KCET Departures.