in the Sixties, with 20 nonfiction titles overall - is a holistic, dialectical study. oeuvre - bookended by 1990’s City of Quartz and last year’s Set the Night on Fire: L.A. His work on Los Angeles is certainly his most popular, but caught in a reductionist binary between optimism and pessimism that tracks with the city’s own cultivated theme of “sunshine and noir” (to use Mike’s own construction from City of Quartz ). ![]() Mike Davis and his wife Alessandra Moctezuma at their San Diego home on July 6, 2022. He said that he will avail himself of California’s End of Life Option Act and is spending his days at home “surrounded by love and incredibly pampered.” The occasion for this appreciation is the recent announcement by his wife, the artist and curator Alessandra Moctezuma and later by Mike himself in interviews, that he has suspended treatment for cancer and is in palliative care. The slides throw light on scenes from across the more than 30 years I’ve known Mike. Mike tells us that the future must be “excavated in the past,” rescued from under the ruins of reaction. There have been large-scale experiments such as the Paris Commune or the Spanish Republic, and countless small-scale ones, like Christian Base Communities in 1980s rural Central America. His faith in revolution is historically situated, pointing toward a string of moments in which “utopian” visions have flourished in the here and now, before crumbling under the weight of counterrevolutionary forces and internal contradictions, only to be taken up again. ![]() He braids them together with an indefatigable faith in a revolutionary project: nothing less than the liberation of humanity from human exploitation, which today also requires the end of humanity’s malevolent exploitation of the natural world. Over the years he’s blurred the lines between these disparate fields. He is also conversant in “hard” sciences like geology, and can read specialized literature in fire science and climatology. But his work roams far beyond Los Angeles, including popular and scholarly work on environmentalism, Marxist theory, urbanism and public health. ![]() I’ll show a few slides that depict moments with author Mike Davis, the most consequential writer and thinker on Los Angeles since… perhaps ever. A transparency is a positive photographic image imprinted on plastic or glass, through which light is projected onto a wall or screen, dramatically enlarging its viewing surface.
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