*I'm in Los Angeles for the summer of 2011. This BLDGBLOG post reminds me of the area's essentially alien qualities.
*A good reminder, because I'm getting way too used to LA. After so much time in Europe, Los Angeles just seems American to me. Clearly LA one of the least American and most radically globalized of American cities, but I've lost my ability to get all gosh-wow and Reyner Banham about the place. Even utter LA freakscenes like the Lautner Chemosphere give me a nostalgic feeling, like a vintage postage stamp.
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/urban-speculation-in-los-angeles-and.html
*Last time I was in Los Angeles the place was nowhere near so broke as it is now. If there was any single factor that caused the place to mushroom into freakish proportions, it was continent-sized flows of superpower money. A future Los Angeles with the material prosperity of, say, Prague or Glasgow... It's hard to say what a place like that would be like, except for a whole lot of buses.
*It would be just as weird and la-la-land, but maybe it would be wall to wall Charles Fletcher Lummis – strident LA boosters endlessly campaigning to repair collapsing missions while building lopsided poetical homes out of arroyo boulders.
