City of Quartz. Mike Davis

       PREFACE

      Authors are strange parents. Some never wean their offspring, preferring to keep them on their knee, forever close at hand. Others, like myself, punctually kick their progeny out the door, with orders never to call home. Apart from occasionally consulting a footnote or reference, I have not looked at City of Quartz since I sent the manuscript – the last relic of stone-age composition on an IBM typewriter – to my publisher in London in 1990.

      Recently I skimmed through the bulk of this rather strange book, with its cryptic title and relentless black-and-white photographs taken by my friend and get-away-driver Robert Morrow. I was particularly nervous about re-encountering a sprawling chapter called ‘Homegrown Revolutions’. This huge expanse of crabgrass, a discursion on homeowners’ movements and the politics of NIMBYism, took centuries to research. It required reading, late at night on microform at the library of York University in Toronto where I was teaching political economy at the time, the various local editions of the L.A. Times for a thirty-year period.

      As a result of these obscure labors, I became so attached to every sacred morsel of fact about picket fences and dog doo-doos that I failed to edit the chapter down to a reasonable length. I soon came to fear that I had made a suicidal mistake. ‘No one,’ I told myself, ‘will ever read this.’ Yet, some people obviously have; even a few who weren’t coerced into doing so by their tyrannical Marxist professors.

      In a meditation on the capriciousness of publishing and reputation, the philosopher Ernst Bloch once asked: ‘Must books have fates?’ The answer, of course, is yes, but not the ones chosen by their authors. The fate of City of Quartz was largely determined by events that followed its publication: the explosive notoriety of L.A.-based gangster rap, the Rodney King atrocity, and, finally, the apocalyptic uprising that followed the acquittal of his assailants.

      But the smell of smoke was already, so to speak, in the air by 1988 when I began writing the essays that constitute City of Quartz and which spilled over into several other, edited volumes. Although the owners of a certain graying newspaper on Spring Street may have missed the obvious omens, every eleven-year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming. In a city tragically full of armed and angry teenagers, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates’s ‘Operation Hammer’ – with its Vietnam-like neighborhood sweeps and indiscriminate nightly harassment – was universally viewed as a deliberate provocation to riot.

      Indeed, this was the interpretation of the two rookie officers who arrested me after the LAPD’s notorious attack on a peaceful Justice for Janitors demonstration in Century City in June 1990. I was in every sense a captive audience, cuffed in the back seat of their patrol car, as they launched into a hallucinatory rant about a coming Armageddon, LAPD versus Uzi-armed Crips and Bloods, on the streets of Southcentral. So, if there were premonitions of 1992 in City of Quartz they simply reflected anxieties visible on every graffiti-covered wall or, for that matter, every lawn sprouting a little ‘Armed Response’ sign.

      City of Quartz, to use one of those Parisian terms that I usually try to run over with my pick-up truck, is the biography of a conjoncture: one of those moments, ripe with paradox and non-linearity, when previously separate currents of history suddenly