A word about Los Angeles: where I have never been, except in LAX and reality: Beaverton is a Glendale of the mind. Many “urban studies” people endlessly trash LA, the city created by grandiose dreams of “making the desert bloom” and a remembrance of an ordo alto and tending towards the end of the world, a Balkanized and congested patch-work of brown fields and green lawns. Yet it is true that there is, can be, no city in the world equal to it: the creation of Los Angeles, a city in the place with the best climate known to man and away from innocence at any age, required fully owning up to the realities of urban living: if one cannot think of an adequate excuse for a city on the rolling plains of the Thames Valley, and it’s not actually that easy, of course there should be no great city on an ocean basin far away from “the cares of the world” (and easy outs for the lazy taskmaster).

The tallest building in LA was the Police Headquarters, where Joe Friday and Bill Gannon (not pictured: ’80s “tools”) did something which was somehow legal? Just so: New York’s “projected” Television City was an “empire of the mind” — revealing the megalomania that causes the “wondrous” sky-scraper to go up, and wages to go down. One must navigate from town to town, or stay in town, or go to UCLA in lieu of the morning glories of Berkeley or the hallowed fields of the Ivy League? Indeed; and if the tallest building in contemporary LA was ripped off from the Monument to the Third International, and the subway “surreptitiously” built to standards that shame Boston, you have no reason to complain. That is what it would be, city living, and if one is unwilling to accept the constraints of “rationality and reasonableness” one might have a worse experience somewhere better or a better experience somewhere worse. Points to everything: but no point to “raging against the dying of the light”, since it will rise again for somebody and that somebody could be you.