EVERYTHING NOW

Ruminations on the capital of the 21st century.

Los Angeles, at the center of the tectonically, culturally, and financially hyperactive Pacific Rim, has displaced New York as a place of innovation, change, and multicultural encounter. “It is enormously ambiguous,” writes Baldwin, to say nothing of being enormous: LA is not so much a city as an agglomeration of 88 cities, with a larger population than 40 of the 50 states and an economy that overshadows the GDP of most nations. Early on, Baldwin, a relative newcomer, admits that “I’m a little indifferent as to whether what I put down here has been thought by somebody before me, because it seems so likely; if anything, the deeper my research and reporting went, the greater my appreciation grew for others’ confessions.” Indeed, there’s not much new in these pages, which tend to the aridly bookish without the charm and good humor of the author’s entertaining Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down (2012). At one point, Baldwin quotes or cites three books in a mere 12 lines, which is at least intellectually honest: He’s not presenting anyone else’s thoughts as his own, an unusual bit of purity in the bricolage culture of Hollywood. On that note, the author is at his best when he tests commonly accepted tropes (“So Hollywood was and wasn’t ‘Hollywood,’ and Los Angeles was and wasn’t ‘Hollywood,’ and these things got confused”) and finds many wanting. The narrative takes on topical urgency when it addresses issues of racial and social justice: the steady decline in opportunity for minorities, the steady expansion of skid row, the steady militarization of the metropolitan police, which pretty well invented the SWAT team. Baldwin is worth reading on all those scores but only after one has ingested the works of Mike Davis, Reyner Banham, Gustavo Arellano, Joan Didion, David Ulin, and others.

A footnote to larger and more in-depth portraits of the City of Angels, though not without merit.