Finding Mike Davis in L.A., Part I: On the Road with Peter Chesney

Davis, who died two years ago, remains incredibly influential in the U.S. and London left, which he influenced through his tenure at the University of California and his editorial position at the British New Left Review, respectively. Yet his vision was global, encompassing the political economies, supply chains, and urban structures of the global south in, among other works, The Planet of Slums (2005), where he wrote the famous lines:

“Sometime in the next year, a woman will give birth in the Lagos slum of Ajegunle, a young man will flee his village in west Java for the bright lights of Jakarta, or a farmer will move his impoverished family into one of Lima’s innumerable pueblos jovenes. The exact event is unimportant, and it will pass entirely unnoticed. Nonetheless, it will constitute a watershed in human history. For the first time, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural.”

Davis’s vision was that of a somewhat contradictory “particularist universalist.” He situated his subjects in their own time, geographies, societies, and contexts, while also embedding them in global networks of fluctuating financial capitalism, trade, and cultural interchange. A street in L.A. was both intimately itself and a node in a network of capital stretching across the world. 

While Davis wrote about dozens of places, everywhere from Lagos to Rio de Janeiro, he always returned to Southern California and Los Angeles: the city of his birth, and where he grew into a defining activist of the New Left. His writing on L.A. haunts the city just as much as definitive noir films like Chinatown or The Big Sleep.

There’s something of a cliché, if a true one, that goes like this: to really explore any city or suburb is to uncover hidden darknesses. This has been a wellspring of narrative imagination for artists, writers and directors in L.A., where the sun-drenched palm trees and the entertainment industry coexist with some of the most flagrant and prominent capitalist urban decay.

Indeed, L.A. shares the same problems as most U.S. cities: massive homelessness, corrupt elites, decaying services, poor infrastructure, and expensive housing. But here, in the “city of angels,” American neoliberal decay is thrown into particularly stark relief. Homeless encampments go up beside the glittering glass of the studio buildings, people overdose outside L.A.’s stylish art-deco City Hall, and the cultural environs of Venice Beach are repackaged and sold back to Angelenos at sky-high prices.

Through a series of extended interviews with L.A. figures influenced by Davis, these articles aim to create a “walking obituary,” tracing the evolution of both L.A. itself and the American crisis writ large by revisiting the same streets, buildings, and neighborhoods that Davis detailed in City of Quartz three decades ago. 

Parts I & II comprise interviews with historian Peter Chesney and novelist Matthew Specktor, focusing on the 20th-century literary and aesthetic history of the city.

[Ed. note: These interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.]

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Part I: On the Road with Peter Chesney

“The suburban church in Southern California has long been one of the Vatican’s most difficult frontiers in the struggle between traditional moral dogma and modern individualism. Now, the Los Angeles archdiocese is also cutting edge in geopolitical controversies over the ‘Latin Americanization’ of world and American Catholicism.”

(City of Quartz, pg. 326)

 

Peter Chesney is a cultural historian at Vanderbilt and a Los Angeles native. He is the author of the upcoming Drive Time: A Sensory History of the Car Culture from 1945 to 1990 in Los Angeles (manuscript).

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An L.A. Nexus

Peter Chesney: I’m Peter Sebastian Chesney. Ph.D. of History from UCLA, 2021. I’m here leading a tour, through downtown Los Angeles—visiting, in particular, two sites that are photographed as part of the City of Quartz. We’ll be visiting the Metropolitan Detention Center and Belmont Tunnel.

But first, we met at the steps of City Hall. I thought it would be appropriate to turn the corner from City Hall to an LAPD-related site in the city, not the one maybe that you expect not Parker Center—but rather one of these micro-memorials that LAPD has erected all over the city. This particular micro-memorial is to a police officer killed in the line of duty in 1980: Officer Charles R. Rogers. There are these little micro-memorials all over the city, any place where an LAPD officer has ever died on the job, or as they put it “killed on the job.” But I will also note that this is highly misrepresentative —Rogers was killed, in the sense, that he had a heart attack in court. I wouldn’t call that killed in the line of duty. So it’s a classic example of LAPD playing the victim, playing the martyr, in ways that are just completely misrepresentative. It is part of a politics of misrepresentation, a politics of the pretend, that’s just fundamental to copaganda.

The idea is that the police need to use media fictions, and simulation, to create a sense of need for them—to justify the fact that they dominate well over half of the city’s budget in Los Angeles.

[We enter The Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.] One of the things about L.A. leftists is that they won’t reflexively dismiss religion as a vehicle for social justice and liberation. In large part, because working-class people in this country are much more religious than they are in Europe. If you want working-class people in your movement, you can’t denigrate their faith or their ontologies. I’d say that the primary manifestations of democracy in the 20th century in the United States are rooted in people like Dr. King and his movement, and Cesar Chavez and his. These people are sanctified.

Samuel McIlhagga: There seems to be this American outgrowth of radical social democracy or democratic socialism coming from both the Protestant and Catholic traditions in America—in a way that is absent from the second half of the 20th century in the U.K.

PC: Exactly, Black Protestants and Mexican American Catholicism.

SM: But also a lot of radicalism and abolitionism in the 19th century among white Americans was attached to religion, right? Quakers, Presbyterians, Unitarians?

PC: There’s a guy named John Woolman, who’s a Quaker who did a speaking circuit in the colonial era, and he gave the same sermon over and over again, called a “Plea for the Poor.” I’d say he’s kind of the founder of leftism with a name and a face in what’s now the United States. He’s a white abolitionist. We got a service going on here. [A Latin Choir interrupts.]

SM: A Latin Choir?

PC:  This is a Spanish-language church.

SM: It’s noticeably full. I don’t think I’ve ever been in a church in Europe that has been this full.

PC: Haha, you’ve come in to visit a Marxist in Los Angeles and ended up in church.

SM: I don’t see too much of a contradiction.

PC: I’d say that the average profile, politically, of everyone here is to the left of the typical American voter.

SM: So the L.A. left has a deep liberation theology influence? Something of the Catholic Social Teaching paradigm about it?

PC: We’re just going down into the mausoleum.

SM: Was this church built in the 1960s?

PC: No, this was built between 2000 and 2005, by Rafael Moneo. This is a postmodern take on the cathedral, but complete with the repositioned St. Viviana relics—she is the patron saint of Los Angeles. They brought her here after she’d been in the basement of another L.A. church for over a century.

She’s an Italian. When they founded the Archdiocese here, they needed to have a saint. So the church went down into the catacombs under Rome and did what they do: when a saint is needed, they find a saint.  Rome sent it over to Los Angeles so that she could be interred here and protect the city. This is the spiritual hub of Los Angeles, I’d say. There are arguably a couple of other spots that have a kind of claim to that.

SM: An interesting dynamic in the City of Quartz is Davis talking about the WASP establishment’s mainline Christianity and their rivalry with affluent Jewish professionals during the 20th century. In terms of the current religious landscape, you’ve identified this working-class social Catholicism. In terms of the elite here, are they just predominately secular now? Or are they still mainline?

PC: The L.A. elite is pretty cosmopolitan, I would say.  There are people who are very serious about their Jewish faith or their Catholic faith. I’d say that Rick Caruso, for instance, went to a conservative Christian institution—the one where I’ve been teaching, Pepperdine—that’s where he got his law degree. He’s still earnest about his Catholicism. But I would say that you have to think about what it takes to get elected in this town. You have to make these displays, if you’re going to have any chance of winning the electorate here. I think people have genuine faith, but they also have performative faith, and these can be tracked together. They know how to find allies in the religious communities who are going to track with their politics. You can find somebody like Greg Boyle, who founded Homeboy Industries, and he can be your window into a multicultural Catholicism where this guy is known as “G” to the formerly gang-affiliated people who work with him.

But then we also have “troubles.” I’ve used that word quite deliberately.

SM: Do you mean in reference to Northern Ireland?

PC: Maybe paralleling—or alluding to NI. A second-level figure, one of the bishops of Los Angeles, David O’Connell, was just assassinated a few weeks ago. He’d been here for years—he helped broker peace between the Crips and the Bloods, just before the Rodney King uprising of 1992.

SM: So the church played a role in that?

PC: O’Connell had been tasked with rebuilding the mission that was burned down in San Gabriel. The San Gabriel mission was recently subject to arson. There have been questions about whether to rebuild it. He was put in charge of rebuilding it, and then he got shot in his home—a couple of years into that project. The person who’s been accused of the crime is his housekeeper’s husband. Potentially, it’s just a random thing, or a theft gone wrong. But there are a lot of people in this town who don’t want that mission rebuilt… An interesting thing to talk about in front of St. Vibiana herself—a bishop getting shot!

SM: What’s the history behind St. Vibiana? 

PC: This is a great example of fictionalization. Any time one goes into the catacombs of Rome—it’s amazing how quickly one can find a saint.

The guy who built this cathedral is a Pritzker winner.

SM: Was there ever a large Irish Catholic community in L.A.? It’s something Davis never mentioned in his ethnography in City of Quartz.

PC: I would say that it’s not as significant as in San Francisco. There is a very significant Italian American presence here. As far as other white ethnic strains: Yugoslavian, Croats, Russians, because of the early history of Jews in Los Angeles—a lot of Poles. To give you a sense of “where and how”—Yugoslavians built the freeways in Los Angeles. They were concrete workers. Italians, to some extent, are still very significant with Rick Caruso, himself being a great example of Italian American identity politics in Los Angeles. They had neighborhoods that were largely associated with Italian culture.

SM: And is there now an L.A. Latino elite?

PC: There’s a recent book called In Search of the Mexican Beverly Hills (2017) I think that says everything you need to know about the situation. With any kind of class formation, there needs to be a spatial basis for it. A lot of the wealth is rooted in public employment—there are some really high-income public employment opportunities here, which are one of the classic ways by which the feds, the state, and the city become a vehicle of redistribution of wealth in a community. And that’s a really good thing.

SM: It was mentioned to me that there has been factional infighting between Latino police chiefs and public officials, and African American unions, perhaps in a kind of divide-and-conquer mode whereby they’re at each other’s throats—rather than confronting the centers of power.

PC: Yes, we had this recent controversy where three Latino council members were recorded talking about the Black adopted child of a gay white man who is on the council and, you know, they said some really awful things. That shouldn’t be minimized—there’s a lot of anti-Blackness in the Latino community, a lot of antisemitism, and, for lack of a better word, anti-Indigeneity. There were complaints voiced, very explicitly, in that conversation about native people of Mexico and Guatemala, who these officials feel distanced from because they see themselves as white. Anyway, I bring that up just to say that, sure, it’s “divide and conquer,” but it’s also white supremacy, and the ways in which white supremacy becomes captured by new elites.

SM: In much in the same way that the Italians or Irish integrated themselves into a specific conception of Anglo-American whiteness?

PC: Exactly—but this is where my conspiratorial mind goes. How did they get this recording? Who uploaded this recording—many minutes of recorded conversation in the midst of a labor union. Who disseminated it? It seemed very conveniently timed, in terms of divide-and-conquer politics. It was around the time of the L.A. election—electorally, Latinos are kind of up for grabs as a voting bloc, between Rick Caruso, a serious Catholic anti-abortion leader. We had a contest between Caruso, who made an appeal to Latinos by literally referring to himself in a debate as “Latin.” The debate was against Karen Bass, this African American woman who was running for mayor. She obviously had a lot of support among white progressives and among Black folks in the city. But she really needed Latinos to win this election. Her standing with Latinos, I think, really suffered at that moment, because she condemned those council members, because there was no way to get around it. A lot of Latino voters remained loyal to these council people—to the extent of saying: “They didn’t know they were being recorded—is this fair?” A wedge was successfully driven. I have my suspicions that it was Caruso’s people who managed to get a hold of that recording. It could easily, of course, have been law enforcement, with whom Caruso aligned to a much greater extent than Bass, who had a mild “defund the police” position. The law enforcement officials in the city, obviously, endorsed Caruso over her. Who has a better capacity for listening in on a conversation, among a bunch of politicians, than law enforcement? This route will take us to the Metropolitan Detention Center.

When I’m in this underground room in the Cathedral,  I’m thinking a lot about magical urbanism. I’m thinking about the chapter in the City of Quartz where Davis talks about liberation theology. Liberation theology was alive and well in the 1980s in L.A. due to Father Luis Olivares and his response to the Central American refugee crisis and homelessness crisis—which was, of course, also an immigration crisis. No one was more homeless than immigrants in Los Angeles in the 1980s, in large part, because these asylum seekers needed to live off the radar. Having an address is not a good idea when you’re undocumented in this country.  Homelessness became a survival strategy. Olivares, of course, was not operating out of a church. He turned the courtyard of a cathedral into a sanctuary, as part of founding the sanctuary movement of the 1980s. He wasn’t doing that here at St. Vibiana’s either—he was doing it at the La Placita Church (Nuestra Senora Reina de Los Angeles) over by Olvera Street. There was this moment where this Catholic land became a place of refuge from immigration services, and that’s very obviously what sanctuary means—to use sacred land as a place where you can camp out and wait without being arrested because the police didn’t want to arrest people there.

[We enter the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building plaza.] This is the L.A. Federal Building.

SM: This is on the cover of the City of Quartz. No?

PC: Part of the complex is on the cover—but not this. This is the federal building, Roybal, named for a great Latino civil rights leader and Congressperson who got a federal building downtown named after him. This is one of those stories of social movement leadership getting co-opted. Roybal is a Chicano hero. It’s ironic, of course, to think of him even as being a Mexican American, because his relatives in the United States predate the formations of both the Mexican Republic and the United States.

He’s a Hispano of New Mexico. The spots are named for him because he was the first Latino for 70 years elected to sit in the L.A. City Council, and then he was elected to Congress. He bequeathed his Congressional seat to his daughter—who’s just coming out of Congress, Lucille Roybal. He was also inordinately successful at bringing money into Southern California, which paid for all of this. This is where they have citizenship ceremonies.

SM: And there’s a prison behind us! They have citizenship ceremonies in front of a prison!

PC: In front of a prison where you’re housed when you are up for deportation.

SM: That’s perverse…

PC: Most people don’t know what they’re looking at here. They don’t know that this federal complex is—that it’s at the heart of a system. I can tell you who works there: the DEA works there, and immigration works there.

They’ve also got public art here in the middle—this courtyard art is by Tom Otterness. Otterness is a punk artist who made his name by going to an animal rescue, getting a dog, and then, camera in one hand, and a gun in the other, he ties the dog up and shoots the dog in the head—he films the whole experience. He screened it as video art back in the 1970s. He got a lot of attention for that, controversial attention, but also a lot of public art commissions. You’re looking at the outgrowth of that dog sacrifice!

SM: A very California recalibration of radical culture… into the mainstream.

PC: It’s called the New World (1991) and it’s the story of a “revolution” with male labor on one side and female labor on the other.

SM: So what’s the point? Are they meeting in the middle?

PC: They meet in the middle with, as you can see, a kind of chaos, manifesting in this revolution of sorts.

SM: The middle of the fresco seems to contain intersex or multisex beings.

PC: There do seem to be many examples of that—right down to having a beheaded king, a one-eyed cyclopic figure with breasts in the middle, bearing a prophetic book.

SM: What’s the valence of a revolutionary circuit—a modernistic L.A. Bayeux Tapestry—next to a prison? It’s almost a kaleidoscope of postmodern Frederic Jameson-style forms.

PC: There are so many ironies here. This is a great place, but it is also a heavily policed space. On the day of the election in 2020, I had genuine worries that there would be misbehavior among state agents during that election. I thought it might be interesting to be near a federal building for that day. So I taught from Zoom in this courtyard on that day, because I had a class schedule during the pandemic. It was intriguing to be here to see how much security, how much military force there was in the space. This is also where the anti-ICE protests happened.

As you can see, that’s part of the prison they photographed for the cover of the City of Quartz. They were very thoughtful about when to photograph it. So they came at night, at a time when this building was brand-new. This is a 1988 structure. This idea of putting a high-rise federal detention center in the midst of a city is a real “what the fuck?” situation. Why would you do such a thing? But the reasons are obvious when you think about it: we were in the midst of this transition, from a time when federal detention was a rural phenomenon—something that would happen at, or near, military bases—to federal detention needing to be in the midst of cities. This was because the people who needed to get captured and contained rapidly were often city people. There are a lot of undocumented people over there in these various Mexican American neighborhoods.

SM: Is this for long-term inmates, or more of a holding capacity?

PC: I think it’s more for holding. There are some people who are in here long-term—because they’ve done things that mean they can’t be kept safely in the state prison system. For instance, they’ve killed a corrections officer, and there’s an assumption that the COs will retaliate.

I would guess political prisoners would also be in there.

SM: There is a weird irony here—there being a prison, which in itself is a perverse form of accommodation. But we’ve also got a Hilton Hotel directly in the eyeline of the prisoners.  When people have a citizenship ceremony here, there must almost be a cruel sense of “Choose Your Own Adventure”—a perverse version of the American dream. Do you end up in the Hilton or do you end up in the prison?

PC: Well, you end up in prison, and then you get released because you prove your worth to the government somehow. Maybe you testify against somebody else, and then they release you and give you citizenship. Or while you’re in that prison, detained and prepared for deportation, you say: “I have murderous skills from my experiences as a member of a death squad in El Salvador,” and then they release you from the prison, and they put you in the military. That’s actually like a classic mode of how to achieve citizenship—a dreamer’s story. Do you want to see the angle from which they shot the City of Quartz picture?

SM: Let’s go take a look.

PC: Of course, it’s got all the trappings of being a medieval fortress in its design—even though it’s completely 1980s and postmodern—something Jameson would have really run with.

You mentioned Fredric Jameson—and you should probably know if you haven’t already read the footnotes to Jameson’s post-modernism tome Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1989) that he comments on Mike Davis in his footnotes. They had many disputes. I don’t think that was a friendship that survived those disputes. What they ultimately disagreed on is the focus on buildings like this as load-bearing objects for understanding what postmodernism is. Davis is willing to put this on the cover of City of Quartz and write whole chapters like “Fortress L.A.” But Davis also did a lot of work with the grassroots. Jameson, I think, was more dismissive of there being a possibility of a grassroots movement or “street socialism” in the United States.

Paranoia in the Hills

“Fused into a single montage image are Fitzgerald reduced to a drunken hack, West rushing to his own apocalypse, Faulkner rewriting second-rate scripts, Brecht raging against the mutilation of his work, the Hollywood Ten on their way to prison, Didion on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so on. Los Angeles (and its alter-ego, Hollywood) becomes the liberalized Mahagonny: city of seduction and defeat, the antipode to critical intelligence.”

(City of Quartz, p.18).

PC: This is a landscape of denial.

This is “Lookout Mountain.” The reason it’s called “Lookout Mountain” is because they had an air base up here. It wasn’t an air base for launching planes—it was more like an observation station. But then they didn’t really need it anymore, so they turned it into a film studio. So a lot of our military filmmaking happened up here. This was the military’s branch of Hollywood—beyond the Culver City studio. Here they had an underground bunker where they did the editing. I’m gonna try to see if I can find it. A lot of the shooting and editing at this bunker was of imagery that was not for public consumption—it had to be deniable—footage of atomic bombs and other military tests. I might have passed it, though, because it’s so invisible.

SM: Why is it a landscape of denial? In the sense that it’s easy to keep secrets? That it contains hidden enclaves and exclaves?

PC: It’s this kind of suburban mentality of: “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  A landscape of denial is not just a landscape where you can have military secrets or defense clearance—but a landscape of denial is also a place where you can have swingers and people who have secret gay lives. But then it also becomes a landscape where a whole household of people can get shot over the course of a night and none of the neighbors calls in to report it.

SM: Because they either don’t hear it—being too far away, or they’re just minding their own business.

PC: Exactly. Like: “It sounds like there’s killing going on over there. Well, that’s Polanski’s house. There are all sorts of weird shit going on over there.”

SM: “Maybe they’re playing a movie.”

PM: “Maybe they’re doing a Sabbath.”

SM: “Maybe, there’s some kind of BDSM party, maybe they’re filming a new horror—who knows?”

PC: This situation is going to lead to a lot of cultural efflorescence. It’s also going to lead to situations where it can be taken advantage of, basically. I have serious doubts about the Bugliosi & Gentry version of the Manson story. Have you ever read it? Helter Skelter?

SM: No, but I’ve heard of it.

PC: It’s amazing. It’s well worth reading. Furthermore, it’s worth reading, you know, with a grain of salt. I don’t buy his thesis for the motive—that Manson was trying to foment a race war.  It doesn’t pass muster with Occam’s Razor—it’s too elaborate. The much simpler motive was that they thought that the guy who owned the place Terry Melcher, who was Doris Day’s son, they thought that he was going to get them a contract and get them a studio—that they were going to make it as a new Hollywood band. Melcher had got them all excited, and then he ghosted them. They retaliated. I think Bugliosi would have been thoughtful about how valuable the music industry was to Los Angeles and would have wanted to minimize fallout for them. I think that he found some stuff Charlie Manson said over the course of his many rants and raves. I just don’t understand why Bugliosi didn’t dig deeper into the careerist motivations. Why did he have to make it seem so crazy?

SM: This speaks to a deeper problem in Hollywood, I guess? 

PC: Exactly, these people really wanted fame and success. They got burned by the culture and the industry here.

SM: There seems to be a low-level miasma atmosphere in Hollywood. A sense that, among the sunny palm trees, there is a deep well of dark disappointment people feel.

PC: High rates of suicide, high rates of despair, psychological issues—people trying to stay young, people trying to hang onto fame that they had no business having in the first place. Often, people don’t earn it by talent, they earn it by random chance, and they feel like they’re being passed over. I think there’s a fantastic story to be told about that. But of course, it’s a story that gets told a lot. Hollywood loves to clap itself on the back. It has an awareness that it chews people up and spits them out. They almost celebrate it.

So what do you think? That’s Laurel Canyon. The real beauty of it, I will add, is that, back in the 1960s, this is a place where you could smoke weed, and the cops wouldn’t come up and bother you. This was a place where you had the privacy of the suburbs, but also the bohemianism of the city. As you drive down Laurel Canyon and you exit onto Sunset Strip, that was the beating heart of Los Angeles counterculture. What made it so that Los Angeles could have a counterculture like that, given that the LAPD shut it down any chance they got—you need the kind of texture that a historian is masterful at achieving.  I don’t think Mike Davis ever quite gets to this texture, in terms of explaining the Sunset Strip in the City of Quartz. It’s only when he writes that great article for New Left Review, which became the basis for a chapter in Set the Night on Fire. This is when Davis gets into what exactly happened on Sunset Strip that leads to the highly politicized situation—with the Sunset Strip riots and hippies who are watching the politicized youth of Watts thinking to themselves, “Wow, we can do this too!”

The reason the Sunset Strip becomes the beating heart of the counterculture in L.A. is that it’s not incorporated into Los Angeles—it’s not part of L.A. The LAPD has no jurisdiction in Sunset Strip. Today it’s part of West Hollywood, but back then in the 1960s, it was just county land. The sheriffs were the local police force. The Sunset Strip was a very low priority for the sheriffs—they were much busier in East L.A. Organized crime, the mafia, ran the Sunset Strip and West Hollywood. West Hollywood was entirely an unincorporated district. It was basically a mobster’s paradise, to the extent that Mickey Cohen spent his last days in this area. I’ve read him, quoted in the newspapers in the 1980s—he was still considered a civic leader, even though he was also an organized crime figure. This was a space where every kind of drug was being sold, where restaurants congregated, where art collectors congregated, and all the kinds of people who didn’t want to deal with the LAPD and regulators from the city of Los Angeles. Isn’t that an interesting list? Restaurants, art dealers, organized crime, gays and lesbians, and gay-serving institutions. I would argue that the strip club was invented along Sunset Strip—and that the “strip” in strip club doesn’t refer to stripping but rather The Strip.

SM: So we’re driving through an area that historically was a pocket of license in suburbia?

PC: What’s happening along here is a kind of intimate, sexual, and substance-driven creativity that’s reflective of a libertarian atmosphere. And so this is that other Hollywood. There’s the Hollywood of the ethnic enclaves, the ailing Barnsdale socialism, the Hollywood of the film industry, the recording industry, but here’s the Hollywood of…

SM: …Janis Joplin, The Mamas & the Papas, The Doors. Joan Didion is hesitant, shuddering at some beast “slouching towards Bethlehem.”

PC: I mean, she’s just nervous, as she should be, about where does it end?

SM: It’s like how Hunter S. Thompson talks about “the high-water mark” in Fear and Loathing—hitting the brick wall of a burnout counterculture that depoliticizes itself into hedonism.

PC: I mean, Davis thinks it’s political all along—but he might be seeing something that’s not there. I will say this: the principal artist of this region is Ed Ruscha. When Ruscha gets nominated to the Venice Biennale, he gets nominated by the President of the United States. He’s not nominated by Clinton, he’s not nominated by Obama. He was nominated by George W. Bush. I want to highlight that, because it’s like—is this depoliticization? Or is it actually a re-politicization towards conservatism? I’d say that, in the era of, you know, anti-masking and anti-vaccination being hippie positions…

SM: That has “mysteriously” transformed into a funny kind of libertarian conservatism?

PC: It just makes me wonder how conservative the bohemians were all along.

SM: Well, there is this inherent libertarianism to bohemianism that is liberatory, yes—but that can be co-opted pretty quickly.

PC: It’s very consumerist, too, and is very interested in things like, “not in my backyard” so it can be really anti-development. It’s very interested in free speech supremacy. It can dance along the edge of hate speech or, like, edge-lordism. That’s like one of the capitals of American standup comedy right there—along the Strip. Who performed here—Lenny Bruce performed here. As I drive along here, I also think about the Strip’s history, because this was an organized crime area, this was also a sex work district. This is the other end of Hollywood’s sex work story. There’s gay sex work on the east side, and then there are women available for pay up in the hills above here. The LAPD kept raiding brothels up in the hills. I’ve gone to some parties up there over the course of my years in L.A. where I think, “Oh, that liminal world of borderline brothels is alive and well.”

SM: Well, I guess this must be a sort of ruthless circular dynamic. A good-looking Midwestern girl or boy comes to L.A. to become an actor. But then, inevitably, the arbitrary logic of the market doesn’t work out. And what are you going to do next? From Hollywood to sex work?

PC: Or pornography? We’re really radicalized, in certain ways, in L.A.—those of us who are more on the libertarian-socialist end of the left, on sex work as something that should be decriminalized, but probably not legalized—because if you legalize it, suddenly a big corporation is going to take it over, making it even more exploitative. 

SM: A bit like how marijuana was captured by big business in California?

PC: A lot of us hope that we’ve learned from the mistake of going full-legalization. But decriminalization, combined with full social services, might work. There’s a really robust sex trade in L.A. It’s just the reality of it.

Going Underground

“I used the Belmont Tunnel because you could still break into it. It was a cheap stunt, but students always loved it, and they’d end up remembering it. You’d have to climb into this dark tunnel for almost a mile until you’re near Pershing Square, and then you’d turn the lights on for like two minutes… Kids would come out of it feeling like they were street-smart.”

(Mike Davis, interviewed by The LAnd Magazine, 2020).

SM: Okay, so where are we?

PC: We’re in Belmont Station, which is one of these low-income housing tax-credit era developments that was built on land belonging to the Pacific Electric railroad. There’s a large station here that fed a bunch of interurban lines that went out to Glendale, the Valley, and northeast L.A. They all intersected here and then went underground through a two-mile tunnel under Bunker Hill to Pershing Square.

Because there was a bottleneck—it ended up being one of the busiest parts of L.A.’s public transit system, from the 1920s into the 1950s. They finally decided to close Belmont in the era of the great dismantling of the inner urban sector. When that happened, they kept this tunnel on the off chance that they need to use it again for something.

SM: Ah, I can see a neoclassical facade here.

PC: This is from the old Pacific Electric infrastructure.  Here’s the tunnel, as you can see. So Davis went in here—he would take tours. I’m gonna take you in. This is the setting for many music videos in the 1980s and 1990s.

It’s locked.

SM: Ah, shit.

PC: But here are your L.A. radicalism tools in action. [Chesney swipes a credit card through the door latch. The door opens.] So here it is. Wow. And as you can see, it’s like an art installation of sorts. Wanna go in?

SM: Yeah.

PC: Be careful, it is quite slippery. Because it’s all mud. And it’s quite smelly.

Unfortunately, this tunnel is no longer usable, because of the Bonaventure Hotel. When they built the hotel, they sunk a pylon right through the tunnel. The pylon would probably take us about an hour to reach if we walked along the tunnel. This is because you can’t walk at full speed because of the darkness and refuse.

The tunnel fills up with trash pretty quickly, and maybe even people —so it’s worth being careful. I mean, as illustrated, it’s not that hard to get in here. All you need is a credit card.

As you can see, this is an art space. It reminds me a bit of those prehistoric caves, you know?

SM: Like the Lascaux Caves in France.

PC: It’s the kind of stuff that, I think, could be left over and found in the future. Because tunnels like this are built in such a way that cave-ins are basically impossible for thousands of years. For all we know, if layers and layers and layers of sediment were to cover this, eventually Belmont could be a pocket sitting underground for thousands of years.

It’s interesting, at least for me, to think about this cave functioning as a representation of cave art from our era for the future. In that future, humans might look at the Belmont tunnel and proclaim, “Look at how unsophisticated these humans are. This is how they were drawing, they were just making squiggly non-representational lines.”

SM: Or that they were hyper-verbal somehow and obsessed with text.

PC: I can see the above to be like the thinking that David Graeber has become so critical of in The Dawn of Everything. We might look at this graffiti as evidence of a lack of sophistication—when, in fact, these are incredibly sophisticated people, operating in an information-overload scenario.

SM: We’ve got the remnants of what looks like a 19th-century French armchair here.

PC: Just think about our voices echoing all the way to Pershing Square right now.

SM: So this was initially a subway—the ruins of L.A.’s public consciousness, of public infrastructure.

PC: That’s a great way of putting it.  After being uprooted mid-century, this becomes a kind of public art phenomenon.

SM: This graffiti was mostly done in the 1980s and 1990s.

PC: A lot of it is gang-related. Some graffiti ended up in the City of Quartz. I haven’t been able to find specifics, but I’m open to the serendipity of it all.

I’m sure that a lot of the most famous street artists, like CHAKA and Cisco, painted here. This was a space for, I would argue, rehearsal. This was a space for becoming a street artist who wanted to paint somewhere more visible and take on more risk. But, I’m also sure there was a sense of exclusivity, of gaining access to space, of not being afraid to come down here. What makes it a space where I’m not afraid to go or to bring you, is that we’ve got this private development—this fortress surrounding it.

As you can see, it took quite a bit to get here. This is the crown jewel of my L.A. touring.  This is not something that I’m going to teach many people to do, because it becomes a rite of passage. If you can figure this out, then you know this city. It means you’ve read Davis.

SM: It’s like a metaphorical threshold of something.

PC: Yet, I’m bringing you—a journalist! You’re gonna write the guide to get down here.

SM: I’m gonna be oblique.

PC: Okay, but you can let people know that they can contact me if they want to see it. How about that?

Look at the spray cans! Amazing! I mean, you should honestly photo-document fucking everything here. You know? Because I’m just really proud of it.

SM: It’s amazing.

PC: I think Belmont Tunnel is my favorite thing about the city, in certain ways, because I just can’t stop imagining what L.A. would have been like had this been repurposed the way it should have! 

This is the thing that Frederic Jameson misses in all his writing about the Bonaventure Hotel in Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. He praises us for becoming capable of navigating the Bonaventure. The hotel becomes symbolic of us keeping radicalism alive under late capitalism. It becomes symbolic of the fact that we are capable of overcoming the new constraints that are created. We learn from late capitalism—it becomes our tableau or stage.

But then Jameson misses things. He misses what the Bonaventure did to public transit by literally rendering this incredibly valuable space unusable for mobility. He misses that the Bonaventure is an ableist installation, that it is unnavigable for people with disabilities. He misses some of the things that went wrong in the Bonaventure; he doesn’t talk about how it became associated with organized crime, or how it became associated with transnational purchasing power, or how it was an event space that’s become symbolic of the intersections between capital and academia. They just had an Organization of American Historians meeting at the Bonaventure earlier this month. They’re going to have the Western Historical Association there, this October. So it becomes emblematic of how conference culture, capitalism, and academics become one interest.

SM: Are you saying that Jameson is right, in the sense that late capitalism can be a platform for playful resistance? But, also, he that he was too close to the postmodern moment, maybe? That he was incapable of mourning the end of collective social democracy or capacity for those things that have died under neoliberalism?

PC: That’s definitely part of it.

SM: I think there was a newness to late capitalism and postmodernity in the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. Ironically, it’s exciting that this is now wearing off.

PC: Now is a great time to reflect.

PC: But I think it’s also that he was so excited about finding the universal that he missed the particular.

SM: Particularities like this—oddities like this.

PC: He would have never known that this was under what he was walking over and criticizing. Jameson’s argument, I think, would have benefited from the Belmont Tunnel. But maybe it wouldn’t have fit into the New Left Review. 

I think this is the thing that Davis does better than Jameson. Davis gets into the nitty-gritty of it. He takes risks that Jameson never had to take.

SM: I have mixed feelings about Mark Fisher’s theoretical legacy. But maybe we can use the term “lost futures”—that this is a kind of buried sediment of potential. There are all these potentialities that are closing down—being buried in L.A.

PC: I’m sure that what’s going to happen, because of the rediscovery of the space by people like me, is that someone’s going to turn this into a gallery!

SM: That’s a deep contradiction there. Your good intentions might lead to this being turned into a commercial gallery.

PC: But right now, it’s nothing. It is an abandoned tomb. Maybe its repurposing would actually make it a vehicle for expression in the future.

SM: There’s certainly a tension between wanting to preserve a thing and the equal potentiality to kill the essence of a thing by preserving it in aspic.

PC: Do I want this to be discovered in 10,000 years as a time capsule from late-20th century, late second-millennium humanity? A little!

Maybe, by coming in here and breathing on it, I’m kind of ruining it. But I don’t know. I kind of want to add to it. I was tempted to go get some paint, come down, and paint. But I wouldn’t want to paint here because I don’t think I deserve it. But if you wanted to drive to Home Depot, buy some paint—

SM: I don’t feel like I should be adding to this.

PC: There are other places in the city where I like to paint.

SM: It kind of feels like the tunnel is of a moment. But then there’s also this elitist curatorial instinct in me that possibly shouldn’t be there. Maybe the graffiti artists of old would be like, “Fuck off, do what you want.”

PC: It would be fun to debate it, right? To open up a forum about its future.

[We climb out of the tunnel.]

SM: I feel like I could see a lot of the street artists just being like, “Stop being so fucking concerned. Just do what you do.”

[A local resident approaches us, walking over from a cook-out.] 

Resident: Hey, hey, hey.

PC: Hey, have you ever been in there? You wanna go? There’s a bunch of 1980s street art in the tunnel.

Resident: So somebody had actually told me about this—what is it, like, graffiti?

PC: This is old stuff. Then in the 1980s, it became the setting for dozens of music videos, and this Marxist from the 1980s that we’re both obsessed with also talked about the tunnel a lot.

Resident: Did you all see a tag that said “Serge” in there?

PC: I didn’t see a “Serge.” 

SM: What kind of music videos were shot down there?

PC: I don’t have them down—but you can look it up easily!

SM: And you were saying it runs for miles?

PC: I’d say like at least a couple of miles—it goes under the Bonaventure Hotel to Pershing Square.

Resident: Oh, for real? Pfft—it smells terrible, though. It might smell worse than out here. ♦