Domestic Left #62: Cities dream of the future
I am in New York City this weekend, seeing my kids and taking in the Whitney Biennial, the Highline, the legendary cocktail bar Death & Co. (don’t worry, the kids are both of responsible drinking age now), and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s “Monuments of Solidarity” at MoMA. It wasn’t explicitly planned as a Father’s Day weekend — that’s just when everyone’s schedules worked out — but it is a nice coincidence.
I imagine I will have more to write about the art, and the city of my birth, in future newsletters, but for this week, just a few things about a very different city — Los Angeles.
Below, I’m republishing the post I wrote after my first (and so far only) visit to the City of Angels as an adult. I hope my new readers will enjoy it, and that the people who have already read it will enjoy these, um, drawings, I suppose I should call them, that I made on that trip, the first inspired by the way that mid-height art deco buildings rise randomly from Los Angeles’s perfect grid of low-lying buildings, the others perhaps more abstract:
Also, at the end of the post below I linked to a playlist called “Time Spent in Los Angeles.” It had originally been just a bucket in which to collect music from or about or simply reminiscent of Southern California, or the fantasy of it, and on account of the haphazard nature of its creation, didn’t hang together particularly well. Some time after I published the post, I went back and actually tried to organize the playlist in such a way as to tell a coherent story (well, as much as playlists can tell stories):
Low Ebb, High Tide (Domestic Left #23)
Originally published October 14, 2022
Maybe I would have enjoyed Los Angeles more if the Joan Didion exhibit at the Hammer Museum had opened a week earlier.
I’m pretty sure everyone in the U.S. has some kind of fantasy of Southern California — and all fantasies, unless kept in the realm of fantasy or handled with extreme care, are bound to end in disappointment.
My fantasy of Los Angeles — like most people’s, I imagine — is rooted in movies that I watched as a teenager. Though in my case, it wasn’t the flashy Beverly Hills lifestyle that seemed to be the setting of every other movie in the 80s, but the offbeat romanticism of L.A. Story and the comedy-noir of Fletch. If I had been required to articulate it as I boarded my flight two weeks ago, I might have said that Southern California represents the possibility of being witty without being neurotic, the possibility that maybe all you need to chase away the cold and darkness is a temperate climate and constant sunlight.
* * *
I enlisted in the labor movement in the mid-90s, in the middle of its long decline. Los Angeles was one of the few bright spots, at least from the outside. The former bastion of the “open shop” movement in the early 20th century became, in the late 1980s, the birthplace of the “Justice for Janitors” campaign that reshaped the Service Employees International Union and, in many ways, the U.S. labor movement. In 1999, to much media acclaim, SEIU won a labor board election for 74,000 home-care workers there, the largest single numerical gain for the labor movement since the glory days of the CIO. Immigrants and service-sector workers, if they didn’t quite displace the hard-hat-wearing white man, at least claimed a central place in the labor movement.
While the “labor liberalism” that this birthed has been, perhaps, a mixed blessing for the labor movement (see Joe Burns’ book Class Struggle Unionism, which I reviewed for the UE NEWS earlier this year, for a good critique of SEIU’s brand of unionism), it was, at the very least, a relief from the sense of constant decline that pervaded the rest of the movement.
L.A. is also home to the Labor/Community Strategy Center, one of the organizations that helped shape my politics and thinking when I became exposed to them through the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance in the early 2000s. In particular, I was struck by LCSC theorist Eric Mann’s articulation, in some article or other, of the reasoning behind the organization’s focus on organizing a Bus Riders’ Union. Mann, a former rank-and-file militant in the GM plant in Van Nuys (which closed in 1992), said that, in Los Angeles at least, the buses were the only place where you could find the same kind of multi-racial working class that used to be found in large industrial plants — and therefore, that it was a strategic location for efforts to organize (or reorganize) the class.
* * *
I like to flatter myself that I’m pretty good at grasping places, through a combination of observation, historical knowledge or research, and, well, a certain amount of imaginative speculation. Which are the essential elements of most good travel writing.
In this, as in many things, Los Angeles defeated me utterly.
Didion described California as “a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension.” It’s a lovely piece of wordcraft, but I’m not sure it helped me understand much of anything I saw or experienced in L.A.
Probably the most comfortable I felt during my three and a half days there was on a city bus trip from the Arts District, through Central L.A., back to my AirBnB in Koreatown — in many ways, the least Southern-Californian moment of the whole trip.
Without the workers who commute on buses every day from the Latinx immigrant neighborhoods of Central L.A., which were filled in the 80s by refugees from the U.S.’s dirty wars in Central America, or from the Chicano neighborhoods of East L.A. and the Black neighborhoods of South Central, none of the boom of Los Angeles would be possible. On that bus you could, kind of, feel the latent power of the multi-racial working class that Mann talked about.
* * *
Over the last year or two I became intrigued by the Southern California modernist architecture of R.M. Schindler and Richard Neutra, and the social milieu in which they lived and worked (and for which they built houses). Both of them were Austrian emigres, and they worked at a time when Los Angeles was home to a fascinating collection of artists, bohemians, and “health seekers.” It was a historical community of which I had not really been aware, utopian but in a different way than the Bay Area radicals and musicians I idolized in high school, the prairie populists and socialists I studied in college, or the East Coast and Rust Belt communists who built the union I’ve spent most of my adult life in.
It was, in short, a different and fascinating bygone future, full of sunlit possibility, that wriggled out from under the “enormous condescension of posterity” and into my consciousness as I rode out the pandemic in the most overcast parts of the Northeast. I’d be lying if I said that didn’t play some role in my decision to take a vacation in L.A.
And, indeed, Los Angeles is full of fabulous modernist buildings, and Art Deco buildings (the future just prior to modernism’s), and modern glass-and-steel buildings built by the likes of Frank Gehry (the future of now, I suppose). But there’s something about the light, the way the sunlight powers through the smoggy haze, alternately grimy-gray or interrogation-bright, that makes every one of those buildings hard to look at now without simply being overcome with a sense of possibility foreclosed.
* * *
When I got back from my trip, my Twitter feed was ablaze with outrage at the leaked audio of racist comments made by several Latinx L.A. City Council members and an official from the L.A. Federation of Labor. The council members apologized; the Federation of Labor released a statement about the illegality of recording conversations without consent. I don’t know if it was Chekhovian, but I definitely felt a sense of loss alongside the outrage.
* * *
I started writing this on Sunday while waiting for my connecting flight in the Las Vegas airport. It was 9am and the bar was open, so I ordered a beer. It seemed like the appropriate thing to do.
As the short flight from California was making its descent, I looked out my window and saw a massive open-pit mine that seemed to be systematically disassembling a mountain ridge just west of Las Vegas, turning it into raw materials that, I presume, are necessary for our modern way of life.
Or, more accurately, it was disassembling a mountain ridge just west of another, untouched mountain ridge just west of the city, one that no doubt frames spectacular desert sunsets for everyone gambling or dining or just drinking beer in Las Vegas’s towers of fantasy, products of the most venal architecture imaginable.
* * *
It’s been a while since one of these newsletters has come with a playlist. In this case, the playlist was part of the inspiration for the trip that inspired the newsletter. So here, for your enjoyment, is “Time Spent in Los Angeles.”