Question: tell me again, what a city is?
From The Free Dictionary:
cit•y
(ˈsɪt i)
n., pl. cit•ies.
1. a large or important town.2. (in the U.S.) an incorporated municipality, usu. governed by a mayor and council.3. the inhabitants of a city collectively: The entire city is celebrating.
A follow-up question: What is the point of a city? I mean, what is its mission or objective?
From City of Quartz:
“The mission literature [of Los Angeles] depicted the history of race relations as a pastoral ritual of obedience and paternalism: ‘graceful Indians, happy as peasants in an Italian opera, knelt dutifully before the Franciscans to receive the baptism of a superior culture, while in the background the angelus tolled from a swallow-guarded campanile, and a choir of friars intoned the Te Deum.‘ “
In other words, the early players of ‘L.A.’ cast the city as a place where history just failed to take place as it did in the rest of the ‘free world,’ or as a place where fairy tales proved the rule rather than the exception of the land; certainly the image of graceful Indians ready to serve their Franciscan masters invokes the sense of an idyllic place to be. That is, if you’re in the position of the Franciscan master.
Why did the early players in L.A. do this, however? Or, with what objective?
Again, from Professor Davis:
“With sunshine and the open shop as their main assets, and allied with the great transcontinental railroads (the region’s largest landowners), a syndicate of developers, bankers and transport magnates led by Otis [Chandler, of The L.A. Times] and his son-in-law, Harry Chandler, set out to sell Los Angeles – as no city had ever been sold – to the restless but affluent babbitry of the Middle West.”
So what’s Mr. Davis saying about The City, then, that its only purpose was to be sold?!
So many questions, and so little time. But we’ll find a way.
With more soon,
J.T.