Mike Davis

This new edition of Mike Davis's visionary work gives an update on Los Angeles as the city hits the 21st century "As central to the L.A. canon as anything that Carey McWilliams wrote in the forties or Joan Didion wrote in the seventies." –New Yorker “Few books shed as much light on their subjects as this opinionated and original excavation of Los Angeles from the mythical debris of its past and future.” —San Francisco Examiner No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, “Los Angeles brings it all together.” To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where “you can rot without feeling it.” To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide- ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias. In City of Quartz, Davis reconstructs LA’s shadow history and dissects its ethereal economy. He tells us who has the power and how they hold on to it. He gives us a city of Dickensian extremes, Pynchonesque conspiracies, and a desperation straight out of Nathaniel West—a city in which we may glimpse our own future mirrored with terrifying clarity. In this new edition, Davis provides a dazzling update on the city’s current status.

Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

City of Quartz

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In particular, the deafening public ilence about youth unemployment and the juvenation of poverty has left many thousands of young street people with little alter- native but to enlist in the crypto-Keynesian youth employment program operated by the cocaine cartels. 

Bullock observed that the last rational option open to Watts youth at least in the neoclassical sense of utility-maximizing economic behavior- was to sell drugs.

Peddling the imported high profit rock stuff to a bipolar market of financial consumers, including rich Westsiders, as well as poor street people, the Crips have become as much lumpen capitalist as outlaw proletarians.

City of Quartz quotes

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