Peter Lunenfeld - City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined

UNTITLED #1 (FREEWAYS) | 1994 | PLATINUM PRINT | 2 X 6 INCHES (5.7 X 17.1 CM)

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Joan Didion, The White Album

When I got off the plane at LAX three decades ago, I knew exactly two people in Los Angeles. One was a college buddy writing spec scripts for Star Trek: The Next Generation, the other a family friend working for the National Enquirer on the Michael JacksonandBubbles beat (Bubbles was then Michaels boon companion, and a chimpanzee). I had moved west for grad school, and for the first six months I couldnt tell what I thought about my new hometown. I bought a Volkswagen with an underpowered diesel engine from two Germans who needed to fly back to Berlin the next day. They started at two thousand dollars and settled for the five hundred bucks I had on hand. Two weeks later, I was the third car in the queue to make a left on yellowokay, when I was ready to turn, it was redand an LAPD motorcycle cop pulled me over. He looked straight out of central casting. Peering at my New York State drivers license through mirrored sunglasses and over a luxurious mustache, he said unsmilingly, Welcome to LA. Youll learn. He was right.

I learned that Los Angeles fascinated me on every level, from the way the last bit of sunlight flares out on a summer night behind the Santa Monica Mountains to how people on the West Coast wear their learning more lightly than I was used to. I learned the ways that constant good weather alters the psyche. I learned that the place Id moved to, hoping it would have so little history that I might have a chance to make some myself, instead rewarded constant digging and curiosity. I learned that the Formosa Caf, a bar on Santa Monica Boulevard, still had a floor safe under one of the tables, installed by famed gangster Benjamin Bugsy Siegel. I learned that thered been a utopian socialist commune in the Antelope Valley desert near Palmdale a century ago, and that there are cloistered nuns just below the Hollywood sign. I learned that the novelist John Rechy penned one of the first great novels about male hustlers out of his experiences in downtowns Pershing Square, and that the anarcho-communist Flores Magn brothers fomented rebellion in their native Mexico from Edendale, a long-forgotten neighborhood now absorbed into Silver Lake and Echo Park. I learned that Southern California has a wealth of architectural intelligence deployed on single-family homes and an anemic system of public parks, and that these two facts are not coincidental. I learned that San Franciscos Summer of Love could have taken place in Los Angeles if the cops and the sheriffs hadnt railroaded the citys best musicians out of town in the midsixties. I learned that John McLaughlin, one of the great hard-edged LA abstractionists of the 1950s, created such uniformly sized paintings because he bought his canvases prestretched from the art department at Sears.