Mike Davis

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“A Skybox In The New Los Angeles Stadium Will Afford A Wonderful View Of The City Burning For A Third Time”

April 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Watts, 1965.

Some of the best writing and thinking in the country right now is being done at the L.A. Review of Books. From an LARB article about lessons gone unlearned in Los Angeles, written by that prophet of doom Mike Davis:

“Indeed, L.A. labor, instead of leading the march toward prison reform and the ending of the war on drugs, now lifts its glass along with the rest to celebrate the legacy of Chief Bratton and the current liberal love affair with the LAPD.  At the same time, a new East Side civic elite (with much political but little economic power) sups from the silver chalices of the latest cohort of super-rich mega-looters (Ed Roski, Ric Caruso, Allen Casden, the Anshutz Entertainment Group, and so on).  That bankruptcy asset known as the Los Angeles Times continues its long tradition of bravely exposing graft on a miniature scale (the City of Bell scandal, for example) while giving a pass to the felonies of billionaires (almost everything having to do with downtown real estate or rail transportation).

I betray my age by noting that the current culture of comfortable corruption and jaded accommodation in City Hall — theoretical liberals doing the heavy lifting for wealthy Republicans — is smugly reminiscent of Tom Bradley’s last term.  If the analogy holds, then a skybox in the new Los Angeles Stadium will afford a wonderful view of the city burning for a third time.”

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“His Eminence In The City’s History Is Cast Almost Entirely As Shadow”

July 15, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I blogged recently about an excellent thumbnail description of Ben Katchor’s artistic heritage which ran on the Los Angeles Review of Books site, and that same site just published the first part of “The Ghost of Wrath,” a revisionist nine-part series about eminent (and hated) Angeleno Harrison Gray Otis that was written by Mike Davis. Otis is the original force behind the Los Angeles Times, and one of the chief “inventors” of modern L.A. The first few paragraphs:

“General Harrison Gray Otis is the wrathful gargoyle with a walrus moustache and Custer goatee who glowers down on us from the battlements of Los Angeles’s Open Shop era. The proprietor of Times-Mirror Company from 1882 to 1917, he was recently hailed in a PBS documentary as the ‘inventor’ of modern Los Angeles, both as an individual and via his descendants, the Chandler family.

Yet his eminence in the city’s history is cast almost entirely as shadow. Five or six serious books have been written about the Los Angeles Times and the Chandlers, but there is no published biography of the dynasty’s founder and leviathan. This is a major missing thread in the narrative tapestry of the current renaissance of Los Angeles history, but given the archival and literary obstacles in any potential biographer’s path, it is not surprising.

First, no one has yet excavated the pharaoh’s tomb. Rumors abound, especially in the tearoom of the Huntington Library, about family archives kept in a San Marino vault. But it is also possible that son-in-law and successor, Harry Chandler, destroyed many of Otis’s private papers when he ordered his own files burned after his heart attack in 1944. (Chandler might have been reacting to the literary and cinematic assaults on fellow-publisher and chief competitor, William Randolph Hearst.)

Second, any biographer has to tackle the fact that Otis was probably the most hated man in Ragtime America. His enemies ecumenically spanned a spectrum from evangelists to citrus growers, socialists to robber barons. Although chiefly remembered for his relentless crusade to destroy the labor movement in Los Angeles, Otis waxed most savage in his attacks on reformers within his own Republican Party. Progressive Republicans, in turn, repaid his vitriol with eloquent interest.”

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