Finding Mike Davis in L.A., Part II: Memories of Santa Monica with Matthew Specktor

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 edited for length and clarity.]

♦♦♦

Part II: Memories of Santa Monica with Matthew Specktor

“The essence of the contemporary suburban worldview is precisely the inability to distinguish the historical significance of the sewage clogging Santa Monica Bay from the precious pile deposited by Rover in his favorite dog park. A California neologism of the 1980s perfectly encapsulates this ethos of untranscendable parochialism: NIMBY.”

(City of Quartz, pg. 204)

 

Matthew Specktor is a writer, screenwriter, and critic born and raised in Los Angeles. He is a former fiction editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books and the author of numerous novels.

♦

Matthew Specktor: Have you spent time out in California before?

Samuel McIlhagga: It’s my first time in California. As an English speaker from the U.K., you have an image, or a mythos, of California beamed into your brain from about the age of three. It’s similar with New York, actually. Your first time in New York does this too—this weird Freudian sense of unheimlich—having been here before, but not quite.

Getting the trains in California and hearing Ventura Boulevard and Halfmoon Bay, all these song lyrics come streaming back to one’s consciousness, having been disembodied.

Do you know the phrase “the map is not the territory”?  A lot of people around the world grew up with this map of L.A., but don’t really know the territory.

If you give me like a bit of a bio on your life and your links to L.A., that would make for an interesting start.

MS: I grew up here, I was born in 1966. I’m Older Gen X, I guess. I grew up with an antagonistic relationship to L.A., in a way. My parents were both in the film industry. I think there was an idea, in the 1970s and 1980s, that Los Angeles was a cultural desert. There was a sense of—if you want to be a writer, or if you want to be a person of substance at all, you have to get out of here.

SM: You see that in Bret Easton Ellis, Joan Didion, or Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird film. 

MS: Yes, Bret is my neighbor and my friend, and we talk about this all the time. That L.A. and California were places to get out of, and I think I was particularly close to the reasons it was a place to get out. Because my parents were in the film industry, that world was so close. Then I moved to New York. I lived in San Francisco, I lived in London. And then I came back here when I was 30. I realized, like, “Oh, it’s kind of amazing.” It’s not really a cultural desert anymore. It never was, in the sense that the visual art scene was here. I think, at this point, as opposed to 40 or 50 years ago. Although you can recognize Hollywood as a history unto itself. In many ways, as a mirror of the wider American experience. I write about that quite a bit.

SM: So you’re a novelist—and you used to be the lead fiction reviewer for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and a founder as well. So we can loop that in. What was your experience of Santa Monica, and how it changed over time? Through your parents’ generation and your generation?

MS: I’ll try to tie this to geography as best I can—to give you biography and geography in pairs. I think, in a lot of ways, that my parents’ own story, in a strange way, and mine too, are defined by the economic currents of the late 20th century.

My mom’s family had been in aerospace. She grew up here in L.A. and was born in 1936. Her family had some money, but had lost it, I think, by the time she was an adult. My dad was a child of Jewish immigrants, with no connection to the film industry at all. Almost a Sammy Glick type. [Glick is the main character of Budd Schulberg’s What Makes Sammy Run.] He was just a kid who had grown up middle-class in Beverly Hills and didn’t have any idea of what to do with his life.

Basically, some girl that he was trying to impress was talking about somebody she knew who was a talent agent, and my dad was like, “What’s that?” When my parents got married in the early 1960s, my dad was, and has been for a long time, an agent. In the later part of his career, he’d represented Robert De Niro and movie stars. But, when I was a kid, and really through my adolescence, he represented television actors. I think there’s this weird disconnect that Hollywood means, automatically, you grew up in a huge house, spending your whole time doing cocaine by the pool! And not really, in my case. They were certainly middle class—when that was an honest designation, they were middle class.

It still kind of amazes me that when they bought their first house, which is the one that I started growing up in, in West Los Angeles, they paid $35,000 for it. When you think of what houses cost here now, that just seems impossible, right? Then in the mid-1970s, when they moved to Santa Monica, I think they paid about $90,000 for a house, that last time I checked was a $6 million house today. Venice is interesting because it’s, on the one hand, an expensive neighborhood, but not entirely. There’s a large unhoused population in Venice. There are portions of it that are not so gentrified or developed. But the overarching vibe if you walk through Main Street or Abbot Kinney or the retail environment of Venice is that it’s rich people from top to bottom. Whereas, when I was younger, Venice was definitely a place where there were bohemian artists, people like Dennis Hopper were there. But also a lot of people of color; even then, it was still carved up by blocks.

SM: It seems like in California, you don’t really get a phenomenon that you see in New York, and, I think, also in London, where I’ve lived: of semi-gentrified areas. Areas where young graduates, artists, bohemians, young professionals who don’t yet have much money, living cheek-to-jowl with immigrant communities, people of color, white working-class communities, almost all on the same block, next door to each other.

In California, that doesn’t seem, so far as I’ve seen, to be the case. You go to Haight-Ashbury or the Mission in San Francisco or Venice Beach in L.A., and the areas seem very homogenous. You describe this past, when maybe L.A. was more fluid and dynamic. How did that change? You said Venice and Santa Monica was kind of a cultural wasteland, and then it wasn’t—is it now again?

MS: I think it’s a cultural wasteland, now. That part of Los Angeles, I think of it as a wasteland because it’s all really rich people.

SM: There’s almost a performance of bohemianism there. There’s, a sheen of it—a lacquer, but you can chip it off. It’s not very deep.

MS: A kind of upmarket bohemianism. “We have a bookstore!”

SM: Yeah, I saw the pastel-branded bookstores in Venice. It’s not like the bookstore is run by a slightly mad Army veteran who smokes inside, has a photographic memory of William Gibson books and five cats. Sorry, I’m drawing off of a Brixton experience there. Santa Monica and Venice were originally a community built around the aerospace industry, right? 

MS: Montana Avenue, which is the most posh artery that runs through Santa Monica—I remember, when my parents moved in, we were two blocks from there. And when we were there, there were all these kinds of dusty businesses that had been there since the 1950s. There were, and are, certain parts of the valley, in Burbank perhaps, which haven’t been completely upgraded.

I think about my childhood: I would go to school, and I would walk across the street from my school, and I would go to the little moribund bakery that had been there since 1951, and I would buy a loaf of bread for 10 cents. Everything then was mom-and-pop supermarkets. This sense of Santa Monica being filled with small businesses and small business owners, in this way that feels inconceivable in some strange way. The shops all had the names of the people who owned them. Which is actually kind of a large tell? Murrell’s Dry Cleaners, Miller’s Market: it was real mid-century stuff.

There was gang activity on the south side of Montana Avenue. It was a gang culture connected more to skateboard and surf culture than anything else.

SM: Right, you have the whole “Dogtown” culture of the 1960s and 1970s, then?

MS: That’s what it was—it was Dogtown, right? Those kids who were just a couple of years older than me—I knew them a bit. I was definitely not in their league as a skateboarder. So I was afraid of them. But I was afraid of them for good reason. Because they weren’t soft.

SM: There was this whole thing about “locals only” in Venice Beach during that period, right? With L.A. being marketed as an international destination, that neighborhood identity almost seems unimaginable, right? Tourists getting beaten up for surfing in the wrong place—that’s not the L.A. of 2023. 

MS: It was intensely territorial in that way. The term “Valley,” for instance, was a pejorative, you would call someone “a Valley” and it meant calling someone a loser. The idea was that the Valley was the suburbs—which is a weird distinction in Los Angeles, because it’s all suburbs, right? 

I feel like Bret Easton Ellis, who’s a year or two older than me—we’re always talking about L.A. as it used to be. But he grew up in Sherman Oaks. That’s the Valley. So our upbringings were sort of culturally similar, but also wildly dissimilar.

SM: You said your mom’s side of the family was in aerospace. That was something Davis talked a lot about in the City of Quartz, right? That L.A. was this hub, bringing in European intellectuals both in the humanities and the sciences. People like Adorno, Huxley. Caltech was a draw for Einstein. There’s also the RAND corporation, which intersects with the other two in interesting ways.

MS: The industry crumbled somewhat in the 1980s. It crumbled with the mergers, in some ways. Douglas merged with McDonnell, and Hughes Aircraft had all these cuts. My uncle worked for Hughes. It’s a weird thing. I think he had some sort of high clearance. It was kind of understood within the family that he was doing stuff that we couldn’t really know about. Which, I assume, would have been weapons. I can’t be hugely illuminating because he couldn’t really talk about it. Other than that, my mom’s uncle Neil had developed a prototype—he was like a failed Elon Musk. Not that Elon Musk isn’t himself a failed Elon Musk.

SM: If we look at the suburban, Anglo, upper-middle class in L.A., which Davis talks about via the boosterism of the Chandler family… This brings in wealth from the Midwest and from New England, but it’s not an oligarchic wealth. It’s middle-class professional wealth on a small scale. That seemed to be the vibe in Los Angeles for a time. And now, walking around at least, it seems to be a lot more of a polarized city.  I’m interested in that change from a kind of suburban Santa Monica of yesteryear to a playground for the very rich, or a dumping ground for international money in property assets. 

MS: That’s what it is. That dynamic came in during the early to mid-Reagan years. It’s very weird. In 1983, that corridor of Montana Avenue, which had always looked like it was 1952—with the same 1950s-style malt shop that my mom had gone to as a teenager—all this was demolished, and someone put in a fancy cheese shop. The ultimate proper bourgeois shop. 

SM: That sounds like something that one would experience now with gentrification, but that’s happening super early in Santa Monica. 

MS: Yeah, really early. Even at the time, I was like, “Man, that’s weird.” I think there has been a systematic demolition of the middle class and the squeezing of the extremes. This is later, and more a metaphor than anything else, but it freaked me out—which is that when I worked briefly for 20th Century Fox in the 1990s, when I was in my late 20s. I can remember getting summoned to this corporate retreat where Peter Chernin—Rupert Murdoch’s henchman, the guy who ran News Corp—stood up and said, “No more middle-class movies.”

He said we can make movies for under $10 million, and we can make movies with a $100 million budget. The example he used at that time was Titanic. But under no circumstances can we make movies that are in between. And the first thing I thought was that he had just fired half the people in the room, including myself, and that nobody else in the room seemed to know it. To see a megacorporation deciding this—that’s more than a metaphor, it’s an economic enactment of a set of principles that have only expanded themselves ever since.

Obviously, the housing crisis that we have here in Los Angeles is not because there is no housing. It’s because of private equity and landlords buying all these properties and letting them out for insane, obscene amounts of money.

SM: And yet there’s still sustained demand, right? Which speaks to the myth of Los Angeles, I guess. Even speaking to older generations—like if I wanted a studio writing job at Fox now, in my late twenties, that seems impossible.

MS: It was a strange thing. I was not looking to become that. The opportunity to work in that sector was set before me. I thought, “Well, I can’t really say no to this, they’re offering me enough money.” More than I’m making doing anything else.

SM: One can look back to the trope of poor Americans being “temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Is there a part of the American Dream that makes it hard to constitute a middle class, or even a prosperous working class, in L.A.? That the dream is corrosive of solidarity?

MS: There’s a certain type of person that collects here, right? People who are aspirant in creative fields. I think any number of young people still think, “Oh, I could really make it happen.” I think the economic realities of being an artist are kept mostly hidden, even in many ways, from other artists. Furthermore, I know how narrowly I manage to keep the lights on around here. I still look at my friends who are a little bit more famous, or have more books and I think, “Surely you’re doing really well.” Yet, I suspect—not really. It’s that kind of assumption where people kind of go: “Oh, Bret Easton Ellis—he’s famous, that guy must be rolling in money.” Well, no. I mean, he does fine. But by comparison to L.A.—not at all.

Obviously, the problem is artists are not deserving of any special dispensation, they’re just like any other kind of labor, right? No one’s entitled to be a millionaire. Whatever glamor dreams you have that come with the idea of being an artist, those are worth getting rid of, because they’re useless. But I do think, sure, maybe there’s a certain kind of narcissistic, self-focused young person who thinks, “I’m gonna make it in the movies.” But I just wonder on what evidence they think that, because the economic realities of the movie business are such that the screenwriters’ guild is about to go on strike.

The reason for the strike is that streaming companies don’t pay residuals, and they are how people make money. When someone says, even if it seems like a lot of money, here’s $300,000 to write a script. You’re like, okay—but it gets carved in six places, and then you pay 25% of it to your agent, and then you pay your taxes. Then it takes you two years to write the script.  Well, that’s, fine. I don’t mean to sneeze at it. When you boil it down, one realizes it’s just about sustainable. 

SM: Cities have auras, to steal Walter Benjamin’s term. I think L.A.’s aura is glamor? And yet, actually, if you walk down Hollywood Boulevard—it’s kind of a shithole. 

MS: There are glamorous places. If you walk into the bar of the Tower Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, or you walk into the bar of the Château Marmont, that’s a little glamorous. But surrounding those glamor spots is stuff that’s quotidian at most. Streets that have a kind of lacquer that late capitalism places on retail landscapes. Everything looks like it opened five minutes ago, and it feels oversized, and it’s likely to be gone in six months.

SM: I’ve noticed a lot of stuff that would have felt very well-curated in 2005. “This is new, clean, and nice!”—as my parents might have thought decades ago. But it’s a style that is now so ubiquitous that one doesn’t notice.

MS: They’re rolling the dice on opening something. I just keep thinking of all the weed boutiques on Melrose, blocks away from me. They’re very large retail spaces. Rent on these spaces must be $30,000, $50,000 a month, whatever it is. These businesses, they spring up, and they disappear with a rapidity that didn’t used to be the case. 

SM: Does that create a sense of a lack of community? Where are you living now?

MS: I live in West Hollywood, which is weird. It’s interesting, because it’s very close to the Sunset Strip. There is some wealth here. I live in a mid-century two-bedroom apartment. Historically, this is the central gay and lesbian neighborhood in L.A.  It’s tremendously LGBTQ-friendly. It’s also very Russian—not like oligarch Russian, but like old Russian immigrant stock. Furthermore, it’s this odd collision of real old, tough-looking Russians and young glamorous people, usually with rich parents. There’s a lot of influx here, where the new 22-year-old down the hall has their parents buy them a condo.

SM: If shops and tenants are constantly changing, you don’t get to know your shopkeeper, you don’t get to know your neighbor.

MS: I would say it’s not completely gone, at least not in this neighborhood. Because you recognize the people that you see—it’s more walkable than some other areas; it’s not a suburb. I know the people at the coffee shop and at the supermarket and the couple of restaurants that we go to. Whether that amounts to a class-based solidarity—it probably doesn’t. At least not in a usefully organized way.

I don’t know where either in Los Angeles or in America you would find that. Except on Twitter, which is the wrong place for it—for obvious reasons. It’s a solidarity-destroying machine if ever there was one. The country’s national character and its founding mythologies are very hard to get beyond.

SM: Even when liberal L.A. people are rhetorically denouncing the American founding, they still buy into it in their assumptions about how the state should function and the reified categories of American life.

MS: There’s an essential libertarianism in all American politics. I can remember—this goes back to those days at Fox—meeting with an English friend, a playwright named Jez Butterworth. He came into my office, and he was really freaked out by the idea that “the pursuit of happiness” was written into America. What does that even mean? To institutionalize that idea seemed really perverse to him.

It’s there, in terms of the sense that no community good is worth the curbing or moderation of individual license to do whatever the fuck you want. I think about this all the time. I do not know that America will ever be able to get around that, in terms of everything: guns, healthcare. It increasingly inclines me to leave.

But again, one has to remember that labor organizing is a strong tradition in America also. We did have Harry Belafonte in L.A., who passed away this morning. My mom was very into that moment that Belafonte represented; she had been very into folk music and had been friends with Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie. That was the culture that she had not so much grown up in, because her parents were far-right John Birch Society people. But in her rejection of them, she turned in the 1950s to the left, when there still was a left. Before Ronald Reagan completed the project of hollowing it out.

SM: You can see that embodied in L.A., right?

MS: My dad was at one point a Republican, and he used a phrase that is a very common in America: “I’m socially liberal and fiscally conservative.”

SM: Like a Rockefeller Republican?

MS: Real nonsense! I was thinking, though—if you take my dad’s liberal Republicanism and my mother’s soft cultural leftism—that combination is how you arrive at late-stage Hollywood liberalism.

SM: Hollywood and California are the birthplace of a certain kind of politics. This is argument is made parenthetically in the historian Gary Gerstle’s “The End of the Neoliberal Order.” His argument is that neoliberalism is essentially a combination of the 1960s and 1970s New Right’s economic doctrines and the New Left’s social doctrines—while jettisoning everything else. You can see this in California. California is the home of Huxley’s Doors of Perception, the hippie movement, of counterculture, the acid wave, yippies, students for a democratic society. But it’s also the home of Reagan, the Claremont Institute at Stanford, Silicon Valley. It’s somewhere Friedrich Hayek comes to teach. There’s a sense of California birthing the future.

MS: I would go as far as saying Hollywood did it! Hollywood was the real origin of Ronald Reagan. Without Ronald Reagan’s life in film and television, there would be no presidential administration. Without Hollywood money and Hollywood support, there wouldn’t have a Bill Clinton, either. 

SM: That’s interesting. Can you expand on that? I didn’t know about Clinton’s links to Hollywood. 

MS: He mined a lot of money and a lot of support from people in the movie business and from friends and colleagues of my father’s. These are not household names, but a fellow named Mike Medavoy, a guy named Michael Ovitz, and Lew Wasserman, who was the architect of Ronald Reagan, these were the people that Clinton leaned on. What was integral to getting him elected was this perception of him as somehow younger and hipper than other contenders. 

When you look at the revolutionary movements of the 1960s, and you look at where the hotbeds are, you go straight to California, right?  I would say that the alternative path might have been Detroit. Which is, of course, the absolute antithesis of Hollywood. It is working class, it is industrial. It’s not an accident that when you look at the music and culture, it’s a certain way. If we had a counterculture coming out of the Rust Belt, it would not have looked like what we got—it would have been hard leftist. 

SM: Yet the bright-eyed counterculture of California also has its dark side. One of the things that Davis talks about is “noir.” There is this very clear history of cultural products, from Elroy’s L.A. Confidential to Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep. But then that noir seeps into Hollywood glamor and into the hippie counterculture. Obviously, we have the Manson murders, but also Joan Didion’s exploration of L.A. and this deep unease at the swelling chaos building below, which then erupts in the Watts riots, as well as the Manson murders. You see some of this in Quentin Tarantino’s retrospective Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. There’s darkness among the palm trees… 

MS: It’s always been here. I have questions about Didion as a witness to Los Angeles. I just think of her as being kind of a reactionary who came to this place and positioned herself as a kind of semi-insider, without ever quite understanding it all that well. I think in many ways, Eve Babitz is a more interesting study. But she’s also someone who represents, I think, a lot of the self-focused problems that we were just discussing: all the hedonism, but none of the capacity to organize. 

SM: Didion’s the scion of an old Sacramento family, right? That’s the other California reacting to whatever is happening in L.A.

MS: I wonder if the darkness of California isn’t of a different kind. There’s the darkness of institutionalized old money on the East Coast, where you have families putting on a good front, but of course, the two children are in different mental institutions. But it’s more slippery in California, because this is a place where people have a less stable sense of history. It’s always been a place where people come to invent, they change their names, they invent themselves here. That kind of slipperiness can lend itself to the darkness that attends California. People come out here to do something or become something, and then are disappointed. Out of that disappointment grows something squalid and unmanageable. ♦