City of Quartz, City of Gold

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In 2013 I drove across Los Angeles to watch South African-Canadian director Neil Blomkamp's Elysium at the Cinerama Dome. A devastated Earth! An impoverished population without health care or reliable forms of work, policed by robots! And above them, orbiting their planet, the wealthy people who abandoned them, living a perfected mortal life without aging or disease, protected against the void itself by a space station called "Elysium." That I should think of Mike Davis and his 1990 City of Quartz was overdetermined. To drive across Los Angeles is to traverse both large zones of structurally abandoned people and occasional "Elysien," those resource-rich, oft-gated zones where the fortunate reside. Maybe that's why the movie freaked me out more than I expected. Blomkamp's film and Davis's histories work with the same themes. While the film ends with a fleet of hospital drones flying from Elysium (shooting location: Vancouver) to Earth (shooting location: a poorer neighborhood of Mexico City) to dispense super-sophisticated biotech medicine to the needy billions, Davis's work, instead, speaks of the practical necessity of understanding the mechanisms of power in a city, and the absence of any deus ex machina beyond ourselves. That always freaks me out too.

When I saw Elysium I hadn't read City of Quartz in years. At the liberal arts college I attended in the later 1990s, we passed City of Quartz between friends, one of a handful of books you had to read. That's what young aspiring intellectuals do: we search for glimpses of our future possibilities in the work of others. And it was very typical of my cohort, as readers, to want politically committed scholarship. For some of us, skeptical of the value of detached scholarly inquiry, a work had to justify its existence by taking sides; a scholar had to explain themselves, and the luxury of time they seemed to enjoy, by offering up their texts as instruments of struggle. Just how we understood writing to flow into politics isn't entirely clear — like some of our professors, many of us simply held an under-scrutinized belief that writing simply is political, every published word equivalent to a sign held at a rally. I would later come to question all this, and to seek more subtle ways to understand the relationship between writing and political life. But one of the striking things about rereading City of Quartz decades later is that it shows how complexity and clarity of view can coexist with political commitment, which need not align every fact and argument in the same direction, as if they were iron filings organized by a magnetic field. The book transcends misreadings, including my youthful ones.

I only lived in Los Angeles for a few years, and these twenty years after City of Quartz appeared. Where Davis had written of a "few white-collars ventur[ing] into the Grand Central Market," I saw a gentrifying flood, of which I was a little droplet myself. Grand Central Market was no longer "a popular emporium of tropical produce and fresh foods" catering mostly to Mexican Americans; the place also featured newer shops tempting a more recently arrived, affluent clientele with offbeat European or Northern Californian cheeses, or really good espresso.1  ("There are no . . . fancy ingredients in this fare," begins the acknowledgements to City of Quartz.2) Contributing a few articles to L.A. Weekly's food section, I interviewed one of the founders of a Grand Central Market coffee bar, and he turned to me suddenly, mid-conversation, and said, "My identical twin is now attending a Walter Benjamin conference in Frankfurt." (He was not pulling my leg). Grand Central Market had changed, indeed. But Davis's observations about surveillance still applied; "the occasional appearance of a destitute street nomad in Broadway Plaza or in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art" still "se[t] off a quiet panic."3 The "bumproof" benches and spike-adorned ledges were everywhere; reducing the places a person could sleep rough. It was just that the lines of vigilant patrol had shifted, even as investment capital from New York and elsewhere "reinvigorated" "DTLA" with restaurants, some of which I eagerly visited, hoping to taste dishes recommended by my food writing hero Jonathan Gold, of the L.A. Times.

At the time when I saw Elysium I had been tracking Jonathan Gold recommendations all over town, slurping soup dumplings and breaking off big pieces of tlayuda. It was my way of learning to love Los Angeles. I also read, with great enthusiasm, Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. (Where had I first read that name? In City of Quartz, not that I initially remembered.) Banham celebrated the city for its sheer diversity and inventiveness, and even made a film, Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, which as of this writing you can watch on YouTube. When documentary filmmaker Laura Gabbert made her loving treatment of Gold and his version of Los Angeles, the 2015 City of Gold (my favorite documentary film of all time) she featured footage of the wonderfully bearded Banham, lecturing to a hall full of students about how "L.A. works," about how the freeway system and the disparate neighborhoods connect to form what Gold would call a "glittering mosaic." Not for nothing that in City of Quartz, Banham, despite his brilliant prose, despite his awareness of how the desirability of certain ecologies like the Santa Monica Mountains actually imperiled them, is clearly one of Davis's "boosters," helping to produce myths about the city that accelerated the logic of endless growth into the desert. Quartz makes up the bulk of all that sand.

But Gabbert's film offers nuance, not simple boosterism. In City of Gold views of Los Angeles clash: sun-drenched Golden Hour drives across the city in search of treats, and accounts of police raids on unlicensed taco vendors; un-moneyed entrepreneurs trying to keep their restaurants alive against the odds, and discussions of how gentrification cuts into the bone of places like Grand Central Market. Late in the film Gold reads aloud an older essay, his 1992 "A Neighborhood Just West of Downtown," a memoir of life in Koreatown at the time of the L.A. riots. If Gold's career involved the workaday service journalism of a food writer, telling readers where to find good things to eat, this was Gold in another mode, spiritually closer to Mike Davis as he watched his Korean landlords curing cabbage leaves on the back steps in the same neighborhood where their son was murdered — observing their effort to maintain a homestead on what could only be called challenging soil.

You could argue that Gold's stories of L.A. restaurants are about the contradictory impacts of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles gastronomy (to adapt Davis's "nutshell" summation of City of Quartz),4from migrant cooks to tuna flown in from Japanese waters, from Taiwanese cooking refracting the regional versions of Chinese cuisine, to a mole so dark it invites comparison to avant-garde art. The culinary possibilities that emerge from all this mixture and juxtaposition are endless. The difficult social question is how people can come together — if and when they come together — around the resulting contradictions, and work to overcome them. The answer is no simple "commensality," literally the sharing of salt; the answer is calling power to account for its effects on common welfare, as Davis did by naming the obscenity of children living in poverty in a wealthy country. Closely following the paper trails that lead to the story of how power works, Davis has always been clear that political organizing is an activity irreducible to ideological slogans, which so easily become the shibboleths of academic writing. I did not grow up to write books that emulate City of Quartz, I am a little sorry to say. If one of my personal regrets about myself is that my intellectual interests do not always flow from my political convictions, I think of Davis's work as a model of what that might look like. Whenever I find myself resting too easily on the idea that scholarship and activism are incommensurable genres, driven by different motivations, I think of Mike Davis, and of his synthesis of Marxist and environmental thought, and think again, think better.

Ben Wurgaft (@benwurgaft) is a writer and historian interested in philosophy, food culture, and the history and anthropology of science. His books include Meat Planet: Artificial Flesh and the Future of Food (California, 2019) and Thinking in Public: Strauss, Levinas, Arendt (Penn, 2016).

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