SU N SH IN E

OR

NOIR?

(1990). Elaborating the themes of his epilogue to LA. 2000, Starr claims that Los Angeles was conjured out of the desert as a willed act of imagination by a visionary pantheon of artists, architects, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Although particular settings (for instance, Santa Barbara in the 1920s, the utopian beginnings of Los Angeles architecture, and so on) are brilliantly evoked, Los Angeles in the Open Shop era is depicted without a noir cloud on the horizon. There is no hint of class or racial violence, nor, for that matter, of any historical causality other than seminal individuals attempting to materialize their dreams. It is an account that begs comparison to the hagiographic brag books - so common in the early twentieth century - that depicted local history as the heroic activity of the leading men of business and industry. But Starrs evident concern is less to praise the forefathers than to encourage his contemporaries in the conceit that they too are fountainheads of the Southern California dream. Material Dreams, by convincing us that its heroes designed the citys past, offers a hubristic coda for todays mercenary intellectuals to claim that they are designing its future.159

EPILOGUE:

GRAMSCI

VS

BLADE

RUNNER

Los Angeles seems endlessly held between these extremes: of light and dark - of surface and depth. Of the promise, in brief, of a meaning always hovering on the edge of significance. Grahame Clarke160

If one were to attempt to distinguish the new Boosterism from the old, it might be said that while the Mission Revivalism of Lummiss generation relied upon a fictional past, the World City hoopla of today thrives upon a fictional future. If the imaginary idyll of padres and their happy neophytes erased a history of expropriation and racial violence, then the singing tomorrows of L.A. 2000 and the Central City Association are a preemptive repression of the Blade Runner scenario that too many Angelenos fear is already inevitable. As Adamic and McWilliams in the 1930s and 1940s debunked the white supremacist pseudo-history of the Boosters, so todays oppositional intellectuals must contest the mythology of managed and eternal growth. As always, that contestation will be primarily a guerrilla war across a diversity of terrains, from UCLA to the streets of Compton.

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