The playful, prophetic professor of pomo
Apr. 18th, 2007 11:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusI lovehate LA, I declared after a pleasant LA week back in 2001. "If I'm good I'll come back here. If I'm bad I'll come back twice."
During my week in LA I was reading Reyner Banham's 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies", which segments the Angelean experience into four ecological models: Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia. Banham later appeared on the inner sleeve of my "Otto Spooky" album, bearlike and bearded, pedalling his Moulton bike around London's Bedford Square (he only learned to drive when he went to LA).
Banham appeared on the Otto sleeve because designer James Goggin and I both love him. The reason I love him is because he was a remarkably lively-minded and likeable British cultural observer and essayist who was ahead of his time: a playful, prophetic professor of pomo.
Banham was a member of the Independent Group, whose "This is Tomorrow" show at the Whitechapel Gallery is one of the reasons I personally date 1956 as the Year Zero of postmodernism. Pomo, for Banham, was a "second machine age" which inverted the values of the first, putting things like air conditioning, electricity, lighting, tacky low commercial culture, temporariness, transitoriness and open spaces ahead of traditional Modernist objects of attention like buildings and high art.
So, this morning James Goggin emailed me excitedly. Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 52-minute documentary Banham made for the BBC's One Pair of Eyes slot in 1972, has turned up on Google Video. It's a ravishing treat for lovers of LA, Banham, and pomo.
It's also a period-piece. LA in 1972 is on the sunset cusp the 1960s. Developers are moving in to crush the freedom and boho variety of Venice Beach, and gated communities have sprung up in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots.
Banham sees many things I think of as vices as virtues. The way LA imposes its style -- via Hollywood -- on the rest of the world, for instance, makes him compare the city to the London of Shakespeare. For me it's simple cultural imperialism. For Banham, the car represents freedom. "Enjoy the pollution," the renegade cyclist recommends, "the best of it doesn't last long". Sitting in the car lot of a drive-in burger bar, Banham marvels with Ed Ruscha about the beauty of gas stations, a beauty which, since "Paris, Texas", has become a huge cliche. But Robert Venturi was still fresh in 1972 -- he'd just published "Learning from Las Vegas", and Tom Wolfe had just written his essay about LA's "electrographic architecture".
By the time I spent my week in LA, Banham had been dead for 12 years and all this pomo stuff was old hat. As a British person of a younger generation, I personally located many of the satisfactions and excitements Banham had found in LA in Tokyo, a city I'd just moved to, another sprawling, temporary-baroque, ultra-pomo place near the Pacific. But Tokyo had a public transport system LA hadn't known since it abandoned the street cars, and a density of information and vitality that LA couldn't match. A Moulton bike would be the perfect way to explore it, and there'd be lots to stop and see on the way.
But if we're now in a third machine age, one dominated by an Asia even further West than LA, "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles" is still a fascinating cultural document of the pleasures of the second. It's wonderful seeing Banham driving around in his guided "Baeda-Kar", inspecting perspex sculpture, or telling his Californian students that they live in El Dorado, Utopia. Then watching the sun sink into the Pacific, an electrographic billboard advertising LA -- temporarily -- to itself.
During my week in LA I was reading Reyner Banham's 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies", which segments the Angelean experience into four ecological models: Surfurbia, Foothills, The Plains of Id, and Autopia. Banham later appeared on the inner sleeve of my "Otto Spooky" album, bearlike and bearded, pedalling his Moulton bike around London's Bedford Square (he only learned to drive when he went to LA).
Banham appeared on the Otto sleeve because designer James Goggin and I both love him. The reason I love him is because he was a remarkably lively-minded and likeable British cultural observer and essayist who was ahead of his time: a playful, prophetic professor of pomo.
Banham was a member of the Independent Group, whose "This is Tomorrow" show at the Whitechapel Gallery is one of the reasons I personally date 1956 as the Year Zero of postmodernism. Pomo, for Banham, was a "second machine age" which inverted the values of the first, putting things like air conditioning, electricity, lighting, tacky low commercial culture, temporariness, transitoriness and open spaces ahead of traditional Modernist objects of attention like buildings and high art.
So, this morning James Goggin emailed me excitedly. Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, a 52-minute documentary Banham made for the BBC's One Pair of Eyes slot in 1972, has turned up on Google Video. It's a ravishing treat for lovers of LA, Banham, and pomo.
It's also a period-piece. LA in 1972 is on the sunset cusp the 1960s. Developers are moving in to crush the freedom and boho variety of Venice Beach, and gated communities have sprung up in the wake of the 1965 Watts riots.
Banham sees many things I think of as vices as virtues. The way LA imposes its style -- via Hollywood -- on the rest of the world, for instance, makes him compare the city to the London of Shakespeare. For me it's simple cultural imperialism. For Banham, the car represents freedom. "Enjoy the pollution," the renegade cyclist recommends, "the best of it doesn't last long". Sitting in the car lot of a drive-in burger bar, Banham marvels with Ed Ruscha about the beauty of gas stations, a beauty which, since "Paris, Texas", has become a huge cliche. But Robert Venturi was still fresh in 1972 -- he'd just published "Learning from Las Vegas", and Tom Wolfe had just written his essay about LA's "electrographic architecture".
By the time I spent my week in LA, Banham had been dead for 12 years and all this pomo stuff was old hat. As a British person of a younger generation, I personally located many of the satisfactions and excitements Banham had found in LA in Tokyo, a city I'd just moved to, another sprawling, temporary-baroque, ultra-pomo place near the Pacific. But Tokyo had a public transport system LA hadn't known since it abandoned the street cars, and a density of information and vitality that LA couldn't match. A Moulton bike would be the perfect way to explore it, and there'd be lots to stop and see on the way.
But if we're now in a third machine age, one dominated by an Asia even further West than LA, "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles" is still a fascinating cultural document of the pleasures of the second. It's wonderful seeing Banham driving around in his guided "Baeda-Kar", inspecting perspex sculpture, or telling his Californian students that they live in El Dorado, Utopia. Then watching the sun sink into the Pacific, an electrographic billboard advertising LA -- temporarily -- to itself.
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Date: 2007-04-23 06:48 am (UTC)I've never read anything by him. I take it his books are good?