No news, no new regrets

This season, consider giving your loved ones the gift of City of Quartz by Mike Davis. It's the greatest of American stories, the story of Los Angeles. It's a story of commodification, suburbanization, anthropology, exploitation, cultural geography, and ecological disaster. It's the story of a place that has a higher concentration of science and engineering PhDs than anywhere else, and yet has absolutely no reputation for intelligence of any kind. A place without culture that has hosted many of the world's greatest minds and itself is the source of most of the consumable culture in the world. Here's a money shot from the book:

"Fused into a single montage image are Fitzgerald reduced to a drunken hack, West rushing to his own apocolypse (thinking it a dinner party), Faulkner re-writing second rate scripts, Brecht raging against the mutilation of his work, the Hollywood Ten on their way to prison, Didion on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and so on. Los Angeles (and it alter ego, Hollywood) becomes the literalized Mahagonny: city of seduction and defeat, the antipode to critical intelligence."

So give the gift of knowlege and understanding, give City of Quartz.