Los Angeles once had to defend itself against snotty Eastern culture critics, English novelists, and middlebrow gossip columnists like Herb Caen who, from Provincetown-on-the-Thyroid, condescendingly refers to "that city down south." The implication was always that Los Angeles, the world’s most spacious city, was in a Culture-and-Sophistication League with Dubuque, Rochester, and Provo, that it was basically "bush" and that by luck or by golly it possessed none of the brittle, knowing sophistication derived from real big city problems. from "The San Diego Freeway," an unpublished song by Dave Hickey Behind the palm trees and chrome I find a stucco home, And another factory. The city of L.A., it ain't the way the posters say that it'll be. So fucked a place has rarely been better written and, contrary to present discursive apprehensions, Plagens's belletrism performs a demonstrative service to his critical ethos. To defend his adopted city from encroaching optimism he chooses, rather, to measure the full mess from extremity to center and plumb the shallow histories of its asphalt face. Peter Plagens speaks with a proprietary and intimate knowledge of Los Angeles that neither reduces his role to that of regional gatekeeper, nor lapses into the vitriol that flows easiest from the pen. A year since first reading this review, in the arts library of the author’s alma mater, I remain utterly bewildered by its impassioned, personal rhetoric.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |