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Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles, by William Alexander McClung
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To those of us who look at Los Angeles and see no sense at all, Landscapes of Desire offers a vivid and rewarding account of the particular visions that drove the period of Anglo dominance in the Los Angeles region, from about 1850 to about 1985. William McClung's fascinating essay, supported at every point by wonderful illustrations, shows that Anglo settlers and developers wanted nothing more than to make sense of their surroundings, but that their two dominant paradigms were at war with each other. Anglophone Los Angeles, McClung says, has tried strenuously to reconcile two competing mythologies of place and space: one of an acquired Arcadia--a found natural paradise--and the other of an invented Utopia—an empty space inviting development. The collision between these two underlying ideals is still present in the ambivalence at the heart of the city's and region's understanding of themselves.
The Arcadian dream of nurturing inherited beauty entailed idealizing the region’s Hispanic past. Yet that past was simultaneously belittled by the utopian vision of arid landscapes watered into Anglo plantations and ranchos reshaped into cities.
From Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel Ramona to the work of artists David Hockney, Edward Ruscha, and Terry Schoonhoven in the 1960s and after, Los Angeles has been an arena of competing and often incompatible constructions of ideal place and space. Looking at architecture, landscaping, literature, historiography, painting, conceptual art, and such ancillary activities and crafts as booster pamphlets, real estate promotions, and citrus box labels, McClung presents a new and refreshingly revisionist view of the city’s growth. Examining designed spaces, including buildings, parks, freeways, and whole neighborhoods and communities, he gives readers a strong sense of the contradictions, failures, and triumphs that continue to govern L.A.'s image of itself.
Los Angeles Times Best Nonfiction Book of 2000
- Sales Rank: #1892067 in Books
- Published on: 2002-05-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .63" w x 6.00" l, 1.10 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 297 pages
From Kirkus Reviews
An extended argument that popular Anglo mythologies of Los Angeles, from roughly 1850 to 1985, have contributed to the citys persistent urban dysfunction is supplemented by a generally persuasive analysis of Los Angeles aesthetics, or lack thereof. McClung (English/Mississippi State; The Architecture of Paradise, not reviewed, etc.) locates the citys failure as an urban and suburban environment in a longstanding and unresolved conflict between its two predominating visions of itself: Arcadia and Utopia. The first implies a found paradisefertile, hospitable, beautifulto be preserved, the second a tabula rasabarren, dangerous, uglyto be improved by means of technology. McClung attributes many of Los Angeless defining characteristics (infamous sprawl, architectural ambivalence, common apocalyptic fears) to the citys misconceived self-perceptions. Part of the problem, he suggests, is that Los Angeles is so unclear about its heritageHispanic or Mediterranean?and confused in its desiresurban convenience or pastoral repose?that it has evolved in an erratic, rootless manner. McClung develops this premise in five chapters covering the citys architecture, painting, literature, urban planning, and early propaganda. His argument is strongest when he looks at the citys architecture and design and weakest with literature. But even his most astute interpretations leave the citys irreconcilable central irony mostly untouched: the dependence of modern Los Angeles on a supply of water first imported in 1913 from 250 miles away, in a monumental feat of the technological imagination whose purposeto improve this paradise to the point of habitabilityblurred arcadian and utopian ideals once and for all. McClung brings fresh illumination to a stubbornly incomprehensible place in this provocative, if intermittently narrow, addition to Los Angeles literature. (150 b/w illustrations) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"An important cultural study."--M. Catherine Miller, "Journal of the West"
From the Inside Flap
"An imaginative and provocative interpretation of the meaning of Los Angeles, carefully thought out and beautifully written."—Robert Winter, editor of Toward a Simpler Way of Life: The Arts and Crafts Architects of California
"McClung's sharp eye, and his ability to be both critic and analyst, combine to make this a book of real timeliness. It is unusual, and it is smart."—William Deverell, author of Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
I Love LA
By Geoffrey Fitzgerald
If you care anything about Los Angeles or are interested in how that unique American city got that way, you should read this book. Don't be put off by the fact that it is published by a Unversity Press. McClung has written an eminently readable examination of L.A., a city that bears analysis. For scholars he provides 40 pages of notes and credits at the end of the book, a courtesy that neither interrupts nor intimidates the average reader. Entertaining as well as insightful, the author clearly has had a love affair with Los Angeles, but has been able to objectively and eloquently analyze the object of his desire. McClung manages to reveal and explain a city that can confuse the novice. Like the city itself, McClung covers a lot of territory: art; architecture (the Getty to Disneyland, and Hollywood palaces to the Hollywood sign); city planning, or lack of it; literature (my favorite section which includes everyone from Chandler to Twain to Waugh to Didion and Isherwood, et. al). McClung has an impressive ability to "read" and explain architecture, especially useful for the reader like myself who otherwise would have underappreciated this measure of the city. McClung avoids cliche, explodes myths, and reveals obvious and discrete disappointments and enchantments of a complex city. This is a text for those who think they know Los Angeles, as well as for the rest of us. One gripe, and University of California Press please note: The book has some 150 illustrations - photographs, maps, fruit box labels, Disney cartoons and more. It should be coffee table size, and the illustrations reproduced in color where available. One hardly sees L.A. in black and white. We'll look for the improved format when the paperback edition is published.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Attacks Los Angeles Mythology
By Randall L. Wilson
Mr. McClung starts his book with a terrific insight about LA, California and even a strain of American mythology. Los Angeles is viewed as both arcadian, a paradise found, and utopian, a paradise created. For example, the natural beauty of the Los Angeles basin: the beaches, ocean, valleys with rich soil backed up against soaring snow capped peaks gleaming in the winter sunlight support the arcadian view. Hollywood, beginning with the famous sign that advertised a subdivision and later movies and the manufactured utopian landscapes convey an Los Angeles ideal of perpetual sunlight, swaying palms and expansive beaches.
While the two visions stand in conflict as to their creation, they unite in their attractiveness, in their unreal quality. A quality that was extended through architecture and particularly through literature. McClung has interesting things to say about architecture but the radicalness of his critique comes with his assault on the "Day of the Locust" view of LA as a shallow, fake, gleaming sheen that covers a brutish, violent primal core. McClung argues that these mythologies had little to do with the real LA and what made it a durable metropolis, attracting families for generations to make it their own.
His attacks on "Day of the Loust" and the literary cliche of LA is new to me and thought-provoking but also awfully defensive. Sure, a city isn't the couple of sentence used to describe it. Cities are much more than that and so is LA but does that mean there isn't truth to the myth? Or that the myth isn't helpful to understand a place? I think they are. I also think the LA myth and the California myth help us make sense of American mythology which contains the seeds of the others.
McClung's prose is readable and evocative as are the graphics he uses to explore his ideas. My biggest knock on "Landscapes of Desire" is that it doesn't take its initial idea about utopian and arcadian ideals far enough. He simply lays them out and then uses them to organize his illustrations but I think he could have done more. He could have shown the power of these myths and their inter-relationships as well as their implications for understanding American life and culture.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
simply one of the best books about L.A. architecture
By George R
This is a vastly undervalued novel treatment of LA architecture and urbanism. It is critical to understand the Anglo roots of LA through literature and art. He "gets" exactly how one after another attempt to find a canonic LA style was attempted without success. This is psycho-analytic cultural history of the highest order, with probing analysis of key visual artifacts, from early photos and revealing orange crate art panels to investigations of LA psychology through works by Ed Ruscha and David Hockney. You can not be disappointed by this fine book.
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