LA Disaster Land

As with before, a New York Times article got me thinking again today. The terrible reality of the financial woes of journalism is becoming much more tangible to me. For over a century and a half the papers have kept America bickering, worrying, warring, investigating and reflecting. Above all, though, they've kept us thinking and talking about the world we live in and the communities that we are a part of. Other media have taken over many of these roles and the nature of how we interpret and inhabit our world is changing; this we know, it is the understood background hum to these "death of print" tirades and eulogies. Still, I can't help but believe that the more places we have to experience and inhabit public space (albeit here in mental rather than physical space) and that the more tools we have with which to examine our community, we are so much the better for it.

So, as I was saying, the Times got me to thinking. The headline on the homepage read: "In Parched City, Streets Suddenly Run Wet." Georgia may have grabbed some national attention for water shortages over the past few years, but only the irrigated cities of the West get to be called something as dramatic as "Parched City." Would it be one of the rapidly-expanding sun-belt cities? Las Vegas, that "dry" city on the shores of Lake Powell? LA, the legendary water-predator?

Then came the punch-line, "To the various natural threats that give Los Angeles an air of impending collapse, add a multitude of recent damaging water main breaks."

Lest, we forget, LA is not only that great thirsty desert at the end of the American real-estate dream, it is also that terrifying disaster world perched at the end of the continent. No matter to what heights of gleefully-inflated rhetoric Northern Californians up the ante of defining themselves as "not Southern California," LA is, after-all, America's favorite city to hate.

I can't decide where the loving hatred really lies in this article. It may be the simple nonchalance with which the Times bestows upon the city a perpetual "air of impending collapse."


Maybe its the bizarrely disconcerting photograph of the fire engine being swallowed by the earth against that most LA of backdrops, a tree-lined, bungalow and iron-fence suburbia. I can't help but think of Joel Sternfeld's ultra-detailed, large-format photograph "After a flash flood, Rancho Mirage, California" (1979).



Then again, it could just be the general, banal dread attributed to the Los Angelenos, Twittering over the patch-work destruction of their uneasy home. Throughout, the bursting water mains seem to be portrayed as natural disasters, as though the earth were exacting revenge on this water-selfish cancer. Yes, it is clearly an engineering issue: pipes fail after a century, especially when they are asked to do much more than they were designed to and they were hurriedly laid to keep up with the demands of hordes of Mid Westerners, clamoring to trade their earned and inherited land for a slice of paradise. But the author of this piece gives the water a haunting, predatory demeanor; it becomes a terrifyingly indiscriminate phenomenon of the gods if not nature itself that, it is insinuated, is eating the city alive.

Growing up in the land of "Not Southern California" I never understood just how universal this need to scorn and demonize Los Angeles was. It's as though Americans feel a direct threat to our national identity and ideals through the city's very existence. We are delighted by its products yet disgusted by it's presence. We hold it at arms length and even then wonder what even holding such a thing must say about us.

What is it about this place that so excites our passions? Is it the shameless glamor of the eternal spectacle grating against our Protestant plainness? Is it our inability to read the built environment of the sprawling metropolis? Is it the number of newcomers, foreigners and non-native English speakers lending it a flavor perhaps more complex though less well balanced than San Francisco's supposed cosmopolitan flair? What is it that so scares us? Do we fear that our country's dissolution will be wrought by the expansion of In-N-Out Burgers and Sam's Clubs?

Between 1909 and 1998, according to geographer and historian Mike Davis' "Ecology of Fear," Los Angeles was destroyed in major works of fiction and film a startling 138 times. 28 times by earthquakes, 7 from gangs, 49 from nuclear weapons, 10 by monsters, 6 by plagues and once (my favorite) by "Everything," to name a few.

This is not entirely alright. In fact, this may be fairly problematic. Replace LA here with some city that Americans are invested in. Some other unique urban landscape, unlike any other place in the world, where American culture and economics are invented and propagated. Oh, I don't know, let's say New York. Close to a decade after the 2001 terrorist attacks and a good fictional destruction of New York still leaves a bad taste in our mouths and a dirty feeling in our conscience.

Perhaps the fictional destruction of the city is a poor measure of our collective care for Los Angeles. Godzilla has made a play ground of Tokyo enough times to pay for as many miniature cityscapes as anyone would ever care to trample in a rubber suit, and do we love the Japanese any less? But it feels different in LA; maybe I am too close for objectivity. The destruction of LA, fictional, desired reality or projected future, seems too personal, too much like a vendetta against America's anti-city. Somewhere between our distance from LA and the process of reconciling the place of metropolis in nature (or nature in metropolis) we must confront the reality of the present, attempt some expression of empathy and create a joint vision of a better future. In short, we don't have to love LA as it is but I do think that we owe it to our idea of a national community to wish it well.

But, of course, these posts are all part of a process for me in which I wrestle with the Californian and Western questions that I feel I need to confront. They're for me, no matter what sweeping proclamations about society I may offer.