One of the mysteries of Los Angeles is how a city that produces so many films and stories about the entire world, indeed the universe, and creates a celluloid reality of such manifold visual imagination and wonder…… is so aesthetically ugly. Citizens here truly put up with an enormous amount of grossness in our midst and seem to accept that we cannot build anything better.
Mike Ramon, a friend of mine from Flickr, recently visited Brazil and captured some remarkable images of a place called Paraty. He wrote, “If you ever get a chance, you should visit. It’s a 3 1/2 hour drive from Rio. It’s an old fishing village in the jungle on the sea.” Mr. Ramon’s photos’ show a dignified place where grace and elegance are in evidence. It is no doubt a poor area, one that hasn’t even a tenth of the wealth of Los Angeles.
Yet who can look at the images of Paraty and not feel joy? What pleasures are there in the hideous monstrosity at the corner of Kester and Victory? Which country is rich and which is poor? What are we Americans working so hard for if the end results are the deformed and degraded mini-malls of Van Nuys and other places?
Here in Van Nuys 
JZY wrote:
“Similar intensity can be brought to examine the activities in academia/research universities, arguably the biggest think tanks of all.”
Definitely. Academia is not exempt from any scrutiny. And universities can appropriately be called “think tanks,” as many courses are designed to get the student to think and receive feedback.
Academia also has several checks in place to address grievances and abuses. At the scholarly level, there is the peer review process. For post-graduate study, there are committee reviews of dissertations. Students also have an appeal process if they feel they were graded wrongly or harassed by their teachers. In community colleges and the Cal State system, there is also a survey given to students that lets them evaluate the professor’s performance. Also, don’t forget that university students are free to select the classes they wish to take and learn from the teachers they like.
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Similar intensity can be brought to examine the activities in academia/research universities, arguably the biggest think tanks of all.
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Wad-
Your comments about think tanks reminds me of something I read in the LA Times a couple of weeks ago by a former Abramoff associate Doug Bandow:
“I came to Washington with Ronald Reagan but left the administration early, frustrated by the domination of Republican apparatchiks. Bent on becoming an opinion journalist, I landed a syndicated column, which was a supportive home. But I could never live on what it paid alone. I affiliated with the Cato Institute, which always encouraged my work. But in the early years my wage there didn’t cover my mortgage, let alone anything else.
So I created a patchwork of jobs. I ghostwrote Op-Ed articles, drafted political speeches, prepared internal corporate briefings and strategized business media campaigns. All the while, I also wrote commentary and opinion pieces.
Clearly, the ethical boundaries in all this aren’t always obvious. Virtually everyone I worked with or wrote for had an ax to grind. Even think tanks and opinion journals have explicit ideological perspectives, which they support through fundraising. Certainly politicians, PR firms, companies and associations have explicit agendas. Although none of the people I worked with or for ever asked me to change a commentary I wrote, when you look back at it, conflicts were possible. “
(http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-bandow4jan04,0,5384749,print.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions)
If your bread and butter depends on lying for a living, you can easily change your ideological winds to blow dollars into the bank.
He also said: “Many supposedly “objective” thinkers and “independent” scholar/experts these days have blogs or consulting gigs, or they are starting nonprofit Centers for the Study of …. Who funds their books, speeches or other endeavors? Often it’s those with an interest in the outcome of a related debate. The number of folks underwriting the pursuit of pure knowledge can be counted on one hand, if not one finger.”
Who would turn down a job, for example, pushing the virtues of the SUV and fossil fuels if GM and Chevron paid me $1,000,000 a year to push their destructive policies? I might call my organization, “The Freedom to Drive Institute”.
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That’s a great synopsis of what a think tank is, Andrew.
Understand what the role of a think tank is. For one thing, the name itself is Orwellian. Think tanks don’t really think in the sense of seeking out truth, justice, etc.
They write the conclusions first and paste together data that fit their preconceived idea. Also, they are pushing either an ideology or a solution that helps their paymasters.
Justification tanks would be a more appropriate term for what they do.
The right wing uses think tanks to greater effect than the left, mainly to advance its prerogatives. They are a form of right-wing bolshevism, where purity of message and devotion to the cause are what the tanks look for in “fellows,” “scholars” or whatever fancy title they affix to the apparatchiks.
An interesting web site to consult is http://www.disinfopedia.org. It’s decidedly anti-right-wing, but it gives you insight to propaganda techniques, PR campaigns and other tools of the idea manipulation industry. (These techniques apply to all ideologies; as the left uses these techniques with the same frequency.) This also shows who funds the tanks (predominantly industry lobbies and the Seven Sinners, the handful of conservative foundations who provide the seed money for these groups).
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Once you’re hired by a think tank….you have to stop thinking. Or else you are fired.
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Oh, I’m well aware of the name in front of his title: Irvine.
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Slightlyslack wrote:
“How Joel Kotkin can say that too much regulation is destroying cities, and then turn around and defend the burdensome land use regulations that have created such eyesores as the Van Nuys strip mall and the cul-de-sac subdivision, beats the hell out of me.”
He’s a think tank product. Find out who butters his bread.
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While landlords undoubtedly deserve some blame for allowing their properties to become ugly, the topology of their designs is almost purely a function of generations of well-intended but disastrous land use regulations.
Let’s start with why the strip mall itself exists: because mixed use is banned. Virtually all neighborhood retail had apartments built over it during the 19th and early 20th centuries (in which the proprietors often lived), but in Los Angeles, virtually no mixed-use buildings were built between 1930 and as late as 1995 or maybe even 2000. Why? Because social theorists and urban planners of the 1910s and 1920s deemed mixed uses to be “disorderly.” Los Angeles is only now waking up from this now that land is so expensive and housing is in such short supply, but virtually every suburb in America, and all but a few central cities, still have such bans in place.
Why does the strip mall have an asphalt moat between it and the street? In order to fulfill minimum parking requirements (which themselves are wholly arbitrary, as the research of UCLA’s Don Shoup has shown), businesses must build parking lots that take up a sizeable chunk of the land available to them. Since it’s expensive to build two entrances (and presents a logistical challenge), it’s easier to put parking lots in the front than in the back.
How Joel Kotkin can say that too much regulation is destroying cities, and then turn around and defend the burdensome land use regulations that have created such eyesores as the Van Nuys strip mall and the cul-de-sac subdivision, beats the hell out of me.
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In many parts of this country communities create building codes that define aesthetic design rules are considered elitest. No. What’s elitest is a community in which people who own these crappy strip malls think they can do whatever the hell they want and no one will stop them. Have some pride in your property!
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Wad-
Well said as usual.
Andrew
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What’s sad: Southern California’s architectural contribution to the world is the strip mall.
Anything else is a tribute to other places or times.
And don’t look to the Industry to help us out of this one. You wonder about the paradox of great cinematics and an otherwise ugly city? It’s simple. Hollywood (or more precisely, Burbank) is sort of like an absentee tenant. It’s an artist that just needs a place to hang. Oh, and don’t worry about the rent. It’s good for it. :>
The fact is, the Industry can choose to be in any place it wants. L.A. is convenient because there are a lot of “sunk” ancillary services that aren’t available anywhere else. L.A. was the choice of the original moguls because Southern California offered a variety of scenescapes (ocean, mountains, desert, etc.) for cinematography, and pleasant weather. Plus, the land was too expensive in New York to build major studios. L.A. has competitive advantages New York didn’t, but New York managed to rebound in the television era.
This didn’t mean that the Industry chose to be a corporate citizen. For one thing, the studio bosses were Jews. L.A.’s old-boy network was Midwestern WASPs. While the latter was busy making money from oil and land deals, the former made movies, with a tacit understanding to stay out of each other’s affairs. That’s pretty much how it has been to this day.
The Industry was able to thrive outside of the network, so it never had to be a good citizen. Also, the Industry realizes it can be located anywhere. For corporate offices, any PO Box would do. As for the aggregate industries, many other cities and countries have been investing in their entertainment infrastructure to get the high-paying work we’ve been taking for granted. India has the second-largest movie-making industry in the world. Hungary has one of the oldest and most efficient moviemaking infrastructure in the world, and has become better after the fall of communism. And don’t forget about all those subsidies from the Great White North.
That’s partly why we can’t look to Hollywood to make our buildings prettier. The other is Angelenos themselves, who think aesthetics rank below making money, eating and maintaining sanity in our inert traffic.
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