A Million Keys

Nothing is real, everything is possible.

The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of a great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of a good life outside the squalors of the European type of city, and thus a dream that runs back not only into the Victorian railway suburbs of earlier cities, but also to the country-house culture of the fathers of the US Constitution, or the whig squirearchs whose spiritual heirs they sometimes were, and beyond them to the villegiatura of Palladio’s patrons, or the Medicis’ Poggio a Caiano. Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside, and that, more than anything else I can perceive, is why the bourgeois apartment houses of Damascus and the villas of Beirut begin to look the way they do.

This dream retains its power in spite of proneness to logical disproof. It is the dream that appears in Le Corbusier’s equation: un reve x 1,000,000 = chaos. Unfortunately for Le Corbusier’s rhetorical mathematics, the chaos was in his mind, and not in Los Angeles, where seven million adepts at California Dreaming can find their way around without confusion. But since the dream exists in physical fact – as far as it can – its real failings are manifest enough to be well chronicled. But so too is the untarnished dream itself, at least in allegorical form. If Nathanael West’s Day of the Locust is the most visually perceptive account of its failings to appear in fiction, another locust book, Ray Bradbury’s the Silver Locusts (the Martian Chronicles) is the purest distillation of the essential dream, in spite of its Martian subject-matter.

The neon-violet sunset light that disquieted the sensibilities of West’s hero by making the Hollywood Hills almost beautiful, is also the light in which I personally delight to drive down the last leg of Wilshire towards the sea, watching the fluorescence of the electric signs mingling with the cheap but invariably emotive colors of the Santa Monica sunset. It also the light which bathes Bradbury’s Martian evenings. The lithe, brown-skinned Martians, with their ‘gold-coin eyes’, in Bradbury’s vision are to be seen on the surfing beaches and even more frequently on the high desert, where communities like California City sprawl beside shallow lakes under the endless dry wind, and are his Martian ecology to the life. If the famous vision of a totally automated house, that will go on dispensing gracious living long after the inhabitants have vanished, has a prototype in existence it is probably over in Sherman Oaks, and if you seek a prototype of the crystal house of Ylla, look among the Case Study houses or in the domestic work done by Neutra in the fifties.

There is even the unspeakable Sam Parkhill, patented title-holder to half the land of Mars, for all the world like a Yankee ‘Don’ newly possessed of some vast Spanish rancho; there are canals by which the crystal pavilions stand, as they were meant to stand in the dream-fulfillment city of Venice; above all, there are the dry preserved remains of the cities of an earlier Martian culture, like abandoned Indian pueblos or the forgotten sets of famous movies long ago….

From Reyner Banham’s Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies

Apologies for the long quotation, but it beautifully captures the surreal, otherworldly feeling of Los Angeles and other parts of the west coast. I depart for California Saturday- San Francisco not LA- so the west is on my mind.

Banham’s book, which came out in 1971, explored the architectural history of Los Angeles by distinguishing four ecologies- the beach, the freeways, the flatlands, and the foothills- which informed the development and structure of each locale. Banham’s narrative covered the territory of Los Angeles from the perspective of a car driving through the city, allowing the landscape to dictate its own chronology. This approach creatively elaborated the ideals and fantasies of a post war west coast and its realization architecturally. Banham described Los Angeles as “Martian” above and elsewhere- but the parallel could easily be made to describe the dreamlike architecture of post war suburban sprawl in other parts of the U.S. as well. To be somewhere and nowhere is an unsettling feeling indeed.


Ian Whitmore, Nowhere

Artist’s statement: Nowhere is the ambiguous, yet ubiquitous, space that holds our country together. It exists in our civic decorations and our commercial landscape as irresponsible and irrelevant ornamentation. We see these scenes everyday but rarely acknowledging any inherent purpose or aesthetic value. Critically, these photogrphs reveal the ironic and garish nature of the spaces that surround us. Aesthetically, these spaces are presented clearly and reverently, drawing attention to a deep sense of fallacy and the misrepresentation of what is real. These scenes are never as lucid or illuminated as they are within the photograph.


Ian Whitmore, Nowhere

Perhaps it’s no wonder then that my new favorite band, the Bubonic Plague, come from LA. Taking cues from another (old) LA band- Nervous Gender- their songs have an alien feel- off-kilter, short and bizarre.


Listen to Bubonic Plague + Fun Grave
Listen to Bubonic Plague + Dracula

But back to Banham. If Los Angeles is the prime exemplar of the new metropolis of advanced capitalist societies- an assertion Mike Davis has practically built his career on- then how does that translate to the virtual space? And vice versa? Another quote:

The world’s image of Los Angeles…is of an endless plain endlessly gridded with endless streets, peppered endlessly with ticky-tacky houses clustered in indistinguishable neighbourhoods, slashed across by endless freeways that have destroyed any community spirit that may once have existed, and so on….endlessly.

The sensation of endlessness paired with the surreal is obviously applicable to Second Life. This is something I thought about when I came across this project by Eva and Franco Mattes at the group show New Economy at Artists Space (which is excellent and closes tomorrow. So go now!):


For Synthetic Performances the avatars of Eva and Franco Mattes reenact historical performance pieces within Second Life. While they are clearly taking Marina Abramovic’s Seven Easy Pieces one step further- I find the pronouncement “nothing is real, everything is possible” both disconcerting and compelling. Rather, if nothing seems real, nothing is real, and everything is possible. This promise of possibility was something Banham romanticised- and it is quality that is routinely romanticised in accounts of the west in general. If anything, California’s place as an ongoing site for reinvention and mutability is inspiring (see: The California Files: Re-Viewing Side Effects of Cultural Memory ). It is also invariably linked to fantasy. As new cities emerge- on or offline- the precedence of Los Angeles looms.