The playful, prophetic professor of pomo

[imomus]

I 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.

Comments

[hexachrome.livejournal.com]

I must credit my LA pal and fellow Banham obsessive (and Moulton cyclist) Mark Owens (http://www.lifeofthemind.net) for digging up this beauty!

[realrealgone.livejournal.com]

a playful, prophetic professor of pomo

I misread that as 'porno'. It took a while for me to figure out that this wasn't where this piece was going.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

You know, I knew someone was going to do that! I thought the same thing when I looked at the headline.

Pomo and porno look the same, but that's okay -- I think they have a lot in common. And it's easy to imagine Banham as the love god / sociology prof in Alex Comfort's The Joy of Sex (http://www.goodbyemag.com/mar00/comfort.html) (published the same year this film was made), or someone in a Tracy Nakayama painting (http://images.google.com/images?svnum=10&um=1&hl=en&safe=off&client=safari&rls=en&q=tracy+nakayama&btnG=Search+Images).

[(Anonymous)]

China and India are a good 150-200 years away from even being able to compete with Japan and the United States, and that's if they completely revolutionize their socities starting... now. It's just a popular myth that they're going to overtake the world, and is used by politicians and economists here to scare our own systems from going off course. You shouldn't actually believe the scare mongering.

So, there's Japan and South Korea ... I'm not sure what else Asia has going for it right now.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

My crystal ball and yours don't seem to tally!

The rise of Asia is not a scare, but a fact. What it means is a multipolar world, and that's good for all of us. Because unipolar is fascist, and bipolar is just... depressing!

let's see your research

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

<< China and India are a good 150-200 years away from even being able to compete with Japan and the United States >>

Compete in what way? Are you not aware that many commentators expect China to explode in the next decade, because of its allowance of no-holds-barred stem cell research? That's where everything will happen. Then China, with the heady influx of wealth, will experience a cultural revolution on par with that of the U.S. in the late 60s. China will become enlightened. If they don't blast us off the planet first

Sorry I don't have cites, but neither do you, and I think you are way off

India will grow at a logarithmic pace. I have no idea what will happen with Japan, I expect momus to keep us informed there. My opinions on South Korea are ill-informed

<< It's just a popular myth that they're going to overtake the world, and is used by politicians and economists here to scare our own systems from going off course. You shouldn't actually believe the scare mongering >>

I'm not scared of China taking over the world, I can't wait. I would like to be there while it happens

Thought it said porn too

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

pomo schmomo let's have some porn!

hey momus, I'm a bit loopy at the moment, so forgive me if this is a trite idea, but I think it would be nice if you would do a Q & A Click Opera entry one day. We just get to ask you questions. I've got a few, two on cognitive issues and one about color, also, when's your birthday again? that I haven't been able to work into your daily essays. What do you think?

it will go like this

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

1. China 2015-2030
2. [not sure]
3. Singularity 2045

What's up for grabs is that middle period between China's dominance and when the machines solve all our problems

Re: Thought it said porn too

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I've been thinking the same thing, actually. I kind of plan to do it on a rainy day when I don't have any other ideas. But that rainy day never comes!

FOOD

[(Anonymous)]

Momus

where's the proper place to post about a previous post!? i'm very much in love with the 3 points supper blog you posted about! it has me thinking about my meals and YOURS! (you should have a post all about really good japanese recipes!) for now i would like to ask you and what is your favorite sake?
and what is your favorite meal? and what is the meal you make the most (maybe out of love or ease?)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

Very enjoyable program. It's easy to see how an Englishman like Banham who doubtlessly grew up amid the austerity of mid-century Britain would marvel at LA's high gloss and mobility. I do wonder if his opinion changed over time as the novelty wore off, and epecially when the fantasy aspect of early modern LA that is mentioned in the documentary declined into neglected marginalia.



As someone who grew up near Atlantic City's boardwalks, lights, signs, arcades, and amusement piers, I harbor a great affection for the fantasy aspect of vernacular culture. Homemade, mechanized papier mache creatures once seen in mom-and-pop minature golf courses are now all but extinct, and have been replaced by mass-produced, licensed characters which have no particularity about them at all. In this respect, I can't empathize with Ruscha's thinking at all.

That said, I think a mix of the vernacular and the mass-produced (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/141978.html) can yield some wonderfully fun results. (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/143182.html)

We are now left to wonder if there will be a similar program entiled "Nick Currie loves Tokyo". Or is that Click Opera's raison d'etre?

Re: let's see your research

[(Anonymous)]

I've spent quite a bit of time in China, and I'm rather terrorized by the idea of a ruthless, environmentally rapacious police state taking over the world. I'm not criticizing the individual Chinese citizen, btw. I have wonderful friends there, but they are essentially powerless. I was there during the Democracy demonstrations that sparked the Tiananmen Square massacre and was followed, watched, and my hotel was bugged. I was in no way involved with politics or agitation. My purpose in being there was completely innocent and coincidental. It really hasn't changed much beyond a select group of people at the top becoming very rich, rampant development, lung-choking pollution, and the formation of a growing (and compliant) middle class. The politics are still draconian:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9658200.

Re: let's see your research

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Surely any one system taking over the world makes for a kind of police state situation, though?

The nice thing about China's history is that they're the one major power never to have been interested in empire building.

And the thing to fear is the erosion of central government in China and its supplanting by the much more corrupt local government there. Things like climate change can only be tackled effectively by "draconian" directives from central government -- the government which had the balls, for instance, to tackle population by instituting a one-child policy.

[realrealgone.livejournal.com]

heh heh.

Reyner Banham LOVES Los Angeles... no, I mean, really LOVES it, good n hard.

Gracias

[suesahn.livejournal.com]

I love LA because i've lived outside of LA my whole life and it's a subject of mine and viceversa. I hate LA because of its air which penetrates deep, so deep I'd love to flee to Berlin. I love this flick of LA you've put up.

[z111.livejournal.com]

Reyner was a professor of mine at UCSC and in some ways, it was one of the two most life altering classes I ever had. And yet, if I told you how Reyner changed me, I don't know that it would leave much impression. But I will say that he had a way of shocking you into seeing the world in new ways.

I've never read anything by him. I take it his books are good?