I grew up in a town, a mile long and a quarter mile wide, overlooking the Manhattan skyline. Almost any photograph of the Manhattan skyline was taken from somewhere in that town. Those photographs represent the city as an image that could be captured in a single perspective. But that image contained countless stories: "There are nine million stories in the Naked City," went the opening to a television show, "and this is one of them." Within a few blocks, you could hear, in fact you would be told, stories like those that Doug McCulloh has to careen across the basin to hear. Stories mean different things in L.A. and images mean different things, because both are pretty hard to come by. "Here we are in the San Fernando Valley," began Bette Midler in a performance at Universal Amphitheater, "3 million people. 100 stories." That's a joke at the expense of suburban culture, but it also says something about the paucity, or perhaps even the irrelevance, of narratives in Southern California.

It may seem paradoxical to say that images are rare commodities in L.A., which produces them. But it produces them, as an industry and as an art and as an accident, in motion, not from a still center. (I once was driving around L.A. with a professor from the University of Florence, who said that Angelenos, in their cars, with only their head and shoulders visible and looking straight ahead, seemed to him like countless Renaissance and classical busts in motion.) Even the earliest written descriptions we have of L.A. move towards and around the land. Richard Henry Dana's Two Years Before the Mast, for instance, describes the land as his ship sails past (and describes what he finds on land with some disapproval and disappointment). The enormously long trails and roads bordering the ranchos meant that the earliest experience of what would become L.A. predicted the familiar collocation of space and time that freeway driving affords us.

What LA Project teaches us about that perspective is that even the dynamic of linear motion is not enough to comprehend L.A. anymore. Most visitors now approach from the air, coasting down over the grid of the region, so that something like a Thomas Guide map is no longer a representation, but a mimetic image of our first experience of the city. Soon, even that dimension will be quaintly obsolete, and the apparently precise coordinates Doug McCulloh uses in his chance operations will seem gross. It is now possible to rent or buy a car with a global positioning system which tells you where you are going and how to get there. Even your sense of where you are will be, already is, given the ubiquity and essentialness of the radio to driving in L.A., aural as well as visual, conceptual as well as relative.

Doug McCulloh's method in LA Project on the one hand depends on chance, fortuitous encounter, wandering, giving in to the anarchic and chaotic that seems to be so much part of the experience of L.A. at the moment. In that sense, he is the opposite of the flaneur, which is how Walter Benjamin described the characteristic observer of what he called in his famous essay "Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century." Benjamin's flaneur observed the city as it was being transformed by Baron Hausmann's gigantic projects, cutting the great Boulevards through the medieval slums of Paris, but the perspective of the flaneur, suggested Benjamin, resolved the contradiction of order and chaos, rendering acceptable these huge dislocations for the Parisian bourgeoisie. Doug McCulloh, on the other hand, leaves the intimacies and absurdities of Southern California life as he finds them, framing them as little as possible.

But Doug McCulloh's chance operations also depend on something else, something more rigid and imposed, and that is the obsessive grid that attempts to define Los Angeles (and American) geography. From the great surveys of the nineteenth century through the Second World War, the American landscape was imagined through the filter of rectangular and sometimes square grids. You can still see the pattern in the shapes of some midwestern and western states and in the templates of farm holdings on coast to coast flights. It is not uncommon in California cities to suddenly shift from the geometric grids of its pre-WWII plan (and its immediate post-war suburbs) to the organic shapes increasingly common after the 1950s (and predicted in the wealthy garden suburbs of earlier decades). San Francisco, for instance, imposes its grid on the most extraordinarily diverse terrain, resulting in its famously roller-coaster streets and angular retaining walls. South of Market Street, another grid spreads at a different angle, and only at the southwestern quadrant of the city, in the St. Francis Wood area, do the streets begin to follow the curves of the hills. A similar pattern can be found in Riverside. The grid of Los Angeles has always had its own obstacles, from the Los Angeles River to the great boulevards that echo the outlines of the old rancho holdings, to the rail lines that snake in and out of the city. From the 1920s on, the grid has been traversed by freeways that obscure its clarity. The increase in flight traffic means that other patterns of movement and perception occur above the city itself, usually following arcs and angles impossible to correlate with the geometry of the grid. There was a time when the grid meant power, authority, control, centralization. In fact, the grid now represents a pretty old-fashioned and obsolete form of authority, so much so that it breeds its own nostalgia. Doug McCulloh uses the grid as a way of getting at experiences and stories that have themselves been obscured and marginalized by the new vectors of power, but he does so by employing the poetics of arbitrariness that postmodernism (and its ancestors in modernism like surrealism) has taught us. So his stories and images, though they may seem familiar, take on unexpected dimensions. Are they the past? The future? Are they (the stories, the people) lost or found? Are they ordinary or extraordinary?

In so doing, Doug McCulloh's LA Project comments on an ongoing debate about the nature of the urban, about what we used to call "cities." In the early twentieth century, during the Progressive Era, improvements for working-class and immigrant residential areas and grand Parisian neoclassical monuments for official city centers dominated the design of American cities. From the 1920s on, the so-called "Chicago School" of urban sociology studied the demographics, planning and social relations within the classic industrial cities of the east and midwest, replacing the sanitizing metaphors of Progressivism with a gritty understanding of the experience of urbanism. These movements depended on traditional thinking about centers and peripheries, circulation and service zones. In the 1950s and 1960s, Jane Jacobs wrote her eloquent defenses of urban neighborhoods, celebrating the mixture and diversity of street life, in ways that resonate today through debates about the "New Urbanism" and the relationship of density and public safety.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, it has not been Chicago or New York that has provided the model for urban analysis, but Los Angeles, or more particularly, Southern California as a whole, summarized in the title of Edward Soja's Postmodern Geographies. Soja regards urban areas like Los Angeles as no longer centered cities in the classic sense, but virtually as archaeological sites, where multiple urbanisms compete and overlay each other. Even the division between city and suburb, let alone between either and country, was questioned in journalist Joel Garreau's book Edge Cities, the title of which has entered modern usage as an almost self-defining phrase. Scholars of urbanism now talk about an "L.A. School" that has taught us how to think about the potentials and problems of the new urban -- or post-urban -- patterns. The "L.A. School," if it exists, probably began with the almost utopian celebration of the freeway and the proximity to nature celebrated in Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. But Banham wrote his book a quarter century ago (an Englishman, he famously learned to drive to write the book), and Southern California over the past few years has fulfilled only dystopic prophecies, most notably those in Mike Davis' City of Quartz. What LA Project suggests is that we never really do understand change until it is too late, and when we seem to, it really is only by chance.

John M. Ganim

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