“Only catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, etcetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.” p. 66, White Noise by Don Delillo

“The City of Angels is unique, not simply in the frequency of its fictional destruction, but in the pleasure that such apocalypses provide to readers and movie audiences. The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault.” p. 276-7, Mike Davis in Ecology of Fear

“When Kathryn Bigelow, the director of Strange Days (1995), was asked why Los Angeles made an ideal setting for apocalyptic movies, she answered: ‘Perhaps because there’s so little history here.’ ‘It’s not a city,’ she added. ‘There is no center.’ And no identity except a ‘poly-identity’ suitable for ‘whatever you project onto it, a faceless place…blurred into one.’” p. 86 Norman M. Klein in The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory

“The city burning is Los Angeles’s deepest image of itself: Nathanael West perceived that, in The Day of the Locust; and at the time of the 1965 Watts riots what struck the imagination most indelibly were the fires. For days one could drive the Harbor Freeway and see the city on fire, just as we had always known it would be in the end. Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse…” p. 220, Joan Didion in “Los Angeles Notebook”

“Across the top, parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street, and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the faces of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die…” p. 200-201, The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West ["The architecture's really consistent, isn't it? French next to Spanish next to Tudor next to Japanese." Annie Hall/Woody Allen]

“There were evidences of the shock, not serious, but indications of the calamity that would inevitably destroy Los Angeles.” p. 104, Ask the Dust by John Fante

“Los Angeles was doomed. It was a city with a curse upon it. This particular earthquake had not destroyed it, but any day now another would raze it to the ground.” p. 102, Ask the Dust by John Fante

“Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.” p. 120, Ask the Dust by John Fante

“something in the human spirit rejects planning on a daily basis for catastrophe.” p. 146, Joan Didion in “Los Angeles Days” in After Henry (why we don’t plan for earthquakes)

“There was a song I heard when was in Los Angeles by a local group. The song was called ‘Los Angeles’ and the words and images were so harsh and bitter that the song would reverberate in my mind for days. The images, I later found out, were personal and no one I knew shared them. the images I had were of people being driven mad by living in the city. Images of parents who were so hungry and unfulfilled that they ate their own children. Images of people, teenagers my own age, looking up from the asphalt and being blinded by the sun. The images stayed with me even after I left the city. Images so violent and malicious that they seemed to be my only point of reference for a long time afterwards. After I left.” last page, Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

This entry was posted on April 20, 2007 and is filed under art/architecture, history/memory, lists, literature, los angeles, movies/photography, quotations.