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Ballard + Davis = BLDGBLOG
Author: Simon Sellars • May 24th, 2006 •Category: Ballardosphere, architecture, film, urban decay
Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh has posted a terrific interview with Mike Davis, the man JGB dubbed “the prose laureate of America’s decline”.
From BLDGBLOG:
‘I first discovered Mike Davis’s work about a decade ago, through his book City of Quartz, a detailed and poetic look at the social geography of Los Angeles. Perhaps most memorably, City of Quartz describes the militarization of public space in LA, from the impenetrable “panic rooms” of Beverly Hills mansions to the shifting ganglands of South Central. Not only does the Los Angeles Police Department use “a geo-synchronous law enforcement satellite” in their literal oversight of the city, but “thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid.” In Los Angeles today, “carceral structures have become the new frontier of public architecture.”
Many of Davis’s conclusions will annoy you – but that’s half the point of reading his books’.
Read the full interview, which contains a defence of Ridley Scott’s film Black Hawk Down. Although I haven’t seen it, I lost interest in Ridley after Legend and Black Rain, after thinking he was a godhead with the double KO of Alien and Blade Runner…
Gladiator didn’t help matters, either.
By the way, here’s JGB’s review of Davis’s Dead Cities.
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Hi there…I Googled for tim davis, but found your page about …and have to say thanks. nice read.