this essentially deracinated city has become the world capital of an immense Culture Industry, which since the 1920s has imported myriads of the most talented writers, filmmakers, artists and visionaries

Southern California Country adumbrates a full-fledged theory of the singular historical conditions – ranging from militarized class organization to ‘super-boosterism’ – that made possible the breakneck urbanization of Los Angeles

They described the Culture Industry not merely as political economy, but as a specific spatiality that vitiated the classical proportions of European urbanity

Parochial power struggles between Downtown and the Westside have been overshadowed by new geopolitics and land economics, leaving the problem of who will rule Los Angeles in the year 2000 a surprisingly open question

This reformist vision of public space – as the emollient of class struggle, if not the bedrock of the American polis – is now as obsolete as Keynesian nostrums of full employment

Redeveloped with public tax increments under the aegis of the powerful and largely unaccountable Community Redevelopment Agency

the new financial district is best conceived as a single, demonically self-referential hyper-structure, a Miesian skyscape raised to dementia

pure heteroglossia could flourish: that is to say, where Chinatown punks, Glendale skinheads, Boyle Heights lowriders, Valley girls, Marina designer couples, Slauson rappers, Skid Row homeless and gawkers from Des Moines

up to 75,000 people took part in the uprising, mostly from the stolid Black working class

as drug treatment is filed in the same bottom drawer of forgotten liberal nostrums as youth employment or gang counseling