This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope.- Mike Davis
The quotation above - and the picture - are taken from an obituary in The New York Times: "Mike Davis, Who Wrote of Los Angeles and Catastrophe, Is Dead at 76."
I didn't know Mike Davis, but his obituary in The Times makes me think I did - I should have. We had a lot of common experiences, though I was definitely a Northern California guy. LA was a foreign country to me, during the time I was part of the antiwar movement, and supporting Students For A Democratic Society. Even though I was not really familiar with Los Angeles and Southern California, I avidly read Davis' book, City of Quartz, when it was published in 1990.
I am presenting the entire obituary below, because readers of this blog posting might otherwise be frustrated by The Times' paywall, should they like to find out more about Mike Davis. He is no longer with us, but you can still read his books!
Below is the full obituary, by Neil Genzlinger, as it appeared in The New York Times on October 26, 2022. The headline is my own:
You Can Never Discard Hope
Mike Davis, an
urban theorist and historian who in stark, sometimes prescient books
wrote of catastrophes faced by and awaiting humankind, and especially
Los Angeles, died on Tuesday at his home in San Diego. He was 76.
The cause was esophageal cancer, his daughter and literary agent Róisín Davis said.
Mr.
Davis, an unabashed leftist who once organized antiwar rallies for
Students for a Democratic Society and was arrested at several protests,
garnered considerable attention with his second book, “City of Quartz:
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (1990), in which he wrote that Los
Angeles “has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for
advanced capitalism.”
That book
examined the mythologies that had evolved about Los Angeles and Southern
California, thanks to noir movies, surf culture and Hollywood, and
contrasted those images with the harsh realities faced by thousands of
Angelenos, especially members of minority groups.
“What
we’re going to find out in short order is that for tens of thousands of
people, there’s only one rung of the ladder,” Mr. Davis told The Los
Angeles Times in December 1990, just after the book’s publication.
“There’s no place to climb up.”
That comment, and the book, seemed
particularly prophetic a little more than a year later, in April 1992,
when disastrous rioting swept South Los Angeles after a jury did not
convict four police officers who had been charged with assault in the
beating of Rodney G. King, which had been captured on videotape.
Mr.
Davis acquired a reputation as a seer, though in the preface to a 2006
reissue of that book he resisted that characterization.
“If there were premonitions of 1992 in
‘City of Quartz,’” he wrote, “they were simply reflected anxieties
visible on every graffiti-covered wall or, for that matter, every lawn
sprouting a little ‘Armed Response’ sign,” a reference to the home
security warning placards that become ubiquitous on the lawns of the
affluent in the 1980s.
Mr. Davis
turned to fires and other natural disasters in “Ecology of Fear: Los
Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster” (1998), which included a
particularly provocative chapter titled “The Case for Letting Malibu
Burn.” That book too came to be seen as prophetic, and Mr. Davis found
himself being interviewed every time devastating fires came through the
area. Though nature delivered the wrath, he wrote, hubris and greed
deserved the blame.
“Los Angeles has
deliberately put itself in harm’s way,” he said in the opening chapter.
“For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed
environmental common sense. Historic wildfire corridors have been turned
into view-lot suburbs, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas, and
floodplains into industrial districts and housing tracts. Monolithic
public works have been substituted for regional planning and a
responsible land ethic. As a result, Southern California has reaped
flood, fire and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as
unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in
the streets.”
Economics was a constant undercurrent for Mr. Davis. The fires that he warned about, he noted in a 2018 interview with the magazine Jacobin, not only were destructive, they also increased inequity.
“The
rebuilding just produces bigger, more expensive homes,” he said, “while
the trailer parks and the homes of people who didn’t have adequate fire
insurance through wealth are displaced.”
His
2005 book, “The Monster at Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu,”
talked about the likelihood of pandemics. Matt Steinglass, reviewing it in The New York Times,
called it a “brilliant, concise jeremiad.” Among other things, Mr.
Davis wrote in that book that pandemics would affect low-income people
disproportionately, an assessment borne out years later by the Covid-19
crisis.
Detractors questioned the
accuracy of some of Mr. Davis’s assertions and the hyperbole of his
prose. That criticism seemed to peak after he won a $315,000 MacArthur “genius” grant in 1998.
“A
lot of writers are tired of Mike Davis being rewarded again and again,
culminating in the MacArthur fellowship, for telling the world what a
terrible place L.A. is,” Kevin Starr, California’s state librarian, told The Los Angeles Times in 1999.
Supporters
said the critics were resentful that his books, unlike theirs, made
best-seller lists, and that he had achieved success without a Ph.D. Mr.
Davis said his political views were also a factor.
“I
understand having acquired a public stature and being someone with
unpopular ideas that I’m going to get attacked — being a socialist in
America today, you better have a thick skin,” he told The Los Angeles
Times. “There is a kind of intolerance in the city for people who say
things that went wrong haven’t been fixed.”
Michael Ryan
Davis was born on March 10, 1946, in Fontana, Calif., about 50 miles
east of Los Angeles, to Dwight and Mary (Ryan) Davis. He spent his early
years in Fontana before his family moved to the San Diego area.
His
father was active in the meat cutters union, and the struggles Dwight
Davis experienced made a strong impression on his son, who described his
father as a patriotic man who had faith in the inevitability of human
progress.
“By the end of his life,
he’d seen his union destroyed and his pension plan taken away,” Mr.
Davis said in 1998. “It’s hard to see your parents lose their beliefs.”
Also
formative was an experience he had at 16: A cousin took him to a civil
rights rally in San Diego organized by the Congress of Racial Equality.
“The
courage and moral beauty of what these ordinary human beings were
fighting for struck me,” he said, “and I have never forgotten it.”
At
about the same time, he became a meat cutter himself for two years when
his father became ill. He also began working for Students for a
Democratic Society, helping to organize antiwar rallies.
In his 20s he
joined the Teamsters union and drove a truck for five years. His routes
took him all over Southern California, acquainting him with its
geography and its varied communities, knowledge that would underpin his
writing.
He didn’t start on his path
to becoming a scholar until relatively late: At 28 he enrolled at the
University of California, Los Angeles, aided by a scholarship from the
meat cutters union. He eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in economic
history there, and also studied in Britain. After graduating he lived
in Britain for several years, serving as managing editor of New Left
Review, a Marxist journal. In 1986 he returned to California to teach at
the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Santa Monica.
That
same year his first book, “Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics
and Economy in the History of the U.S. Working Class,” was published.
The formidable title was off-putting, and so was the text. John Gabree,
in a review in Newsday, said that Mr. Davis “writes in the sometimes
impenetrable style of a social scientist.”
He
adopted a more reader-friendly approach in “City of Quartz” and his
later books, many of which made best-seller lists. They included “Dead Cities, and Other Tales”
(2002), “Planet of Slums: Urban Involution and the Informal Working
Class” (2006) and, most recently, “Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the
Sixties” (2020), written with Jon Wiener. Among Mr. Davis’s admirers is
Jay Caspian Kang, a staff writer for The New Yorker and a former opinion
writer for The New York Times.
“The best writers burrow themselves in the back of your eyeballs and color everything you see,” Mr. Kang wrote in The Times in June
after Mr. Davis said he was stopping cancer treatments. “Davis is that
for me — my California is the California he excavated through his
reporting, his scholarship, his activism and his unflappable moral
integrity.”
Mr. Davis’s wife,
Alessandra Moctezuma, survives him. Four previous marriages ended in
divorce. In addition to his daughter Róisín — from his third marriage,
to Brigid Loughran — he is also survived by a son, Jack Spalding Davis,
from his fourth marriage, to Sophie Spalding; and a daughter, Cassandra
Davis, and a son, James Connolly Davis, both from his current marriage;
and a sister, Janna Lazelle-Lake.
In an interview with The New Yorker in 2020, Mr. Davis was asked if he thought Los Angeles might experience another wave of violence.
“The socioeconomic conditions that
produced the ’92 riots are still with us,” he said. “The Rodney King
beating and police detonated it, but the riots came in the midst of a
recession and revealed a city in which hundreds of thousands of people
were living day by day, with no reserves.”
Yet he wasn’t all pessimist all the time.
“This
seems an age of catastrophe,” he said, “but it’s also an age equipped,
in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available
to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil rights movement, the
antiwar movement, you can never discard hope.”
oooOOOooo
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/26/books/mike-davis-dead.html
No comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks for your comment!