欧宝娱乐

This book made me realize how difficult reading can be when you don't already have a lot of the concepts in your head / aren't used to thinking about such things. However if I *were* thinking about such things I'd find it really rewarding to see all of them referenced. Really high density of proper nouns. I used wikipedia, or just agreed to have a less rich understanding of what was going on. In fact I think I used just enough google to get by. Anyway now I know that LA was built up on real estate speculation, once around 1880s (I think, not looking it up) with people coming in from the midwest, and again in the 1980s from Japanese investment. I also learned the word antipode, which this book loves, and first used to describe the sunshine/ noir images of LA, with noir being the backlash to the myth/ fantasy sold of LA. I wish the whole book were about the sunshine myth. The chapter about conflict between developers and homeowners was interesting, I previously hadn't thought about that at all. I did have some whiff of it from when my town tried to mandate that everyone's christmas lights be white, no colored or big bulbs or tacky blowup santas and lawn ornaments. And more recently a big to do about a Dunkin Donuts being built on Main Street and what it would look like. It looks very nice. Like a house. What else. A lot of the chapters by the end just seemed like random subjects, all of which I guess were central ideas pertaining to the city-- the Catholic church, a steel town called Fontana, some other stuff. None of which I had any idea about before. So it was fun to find out about it, and at some point I want to read this book's New York corollary.