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Making Time: Essays on the Nature of Los Angeles
William L. Fox is a longtime explorer of cognition and landscape — the notion of what makes a space into a place. In this book he turns his gaze on Los Angeles, a city dominated by the movie industry, which specializes in bringing places from far away in time into what we experience as here and now — making time, in essence. Time, Fox tells us, is the most invisible nature of all, “its effects are always and everywhere around us.”
The five essays of this collection take us to the Le Brea Tar Pits and local oilfields, the telescopes and telecommunication towers of Mt. Wilson, massive landfills, the Forest Lawn Memorial and Griffith parks, a Hollywood special effects firm, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All of these facilities are devoted to manipulating time on our behalf, be it how we represent prehistory, attempt to maintain an identity after death, or make movies on Mars.
A master of combining science, history, and his own experiences into a riveting read, Fox will make you look at L.A. — and any urban landscape — in an entirely new way.
The five essays of this collection take us to the Le Brea Tar Pits and local oilfields, the telescopes and telecommunication towers of Mt. Wilson, massive landfills, the Forest Lawn Memorial and Griffith parks, a Hollywood special effects firm, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. All of these facilities are devoted to manipulating time on our behalf, be it how we represent prehistory, attempt to maintain an identity after death, or make movies on Mars.
A master of combining science, history, and his own experiences into a riveting read, Fox will make you look at L.A. — and any urban landscape — in an entirely new way.
- GenresHistory
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
71 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 22, 2016
What we know about Los Angeles is probably marred by Hollywood and reality shows, which is a tragic image of a city that has more than what the media portrays it to be. We might think of LA as a narcissistic urban area filled with badly-tanned denizens, celebrity-crazy tourists, and rows and rows of restaurants and bars that cater to the ones who wants to have a good time. To some extent, these are quite true, but the media perpetuates these images so that they could market the city as a sort of commodity.
Situated on the west coast of the United States, California has become one of the most recognizable and most populous states in the country, and Los Angeles is its largest city. You have the mountains to the north, the beach in the south and a bit of the desert to the east. LA has definitely established itself in the media industry -- music, film, and television to be exact. In this book by William Fox, the essays describe the more elusive part of this city -- its nature.
Although it is certain that it is a melting pot of cultures as in most American cities, LA seems to be in a flux, always living in the present. Fox explains the importance of the following aspects about the city: the La Brea Pits, which is a reminder of Los Angeles' Ice Age past, their crude to modern ways of protecting the city from the harsh Sta. Ana Winds, its role in the propagation of telecommunications across America, and the technicalities of its visual engineers, mostly film. As the book is also framed in film history, the city is arguably tied with this industry.
On the other hand, the following quote shows how the image of the city can be corroded, although this pertains to a more personal level of perception. It is found in the chapter "Landfilling," where Fox talks about the transformation of graveyards from a component of a Gothic church to a park area with a less sinister atmosphere.
"It's such a mediated experience that we do not remain involved with it. We don't contemplate it, which is part of a larger issue: that of how our relationship with time has changed along with our perception of the space."
As with the words Making Time, a person's memory of a city, whether he is a transient or an inhabitant, there will always be a specific memory that is triggered by the city. More than the world's distorted view of Los Angeles, its history and nature are much more interesting than what gets presented through the camera.
Situated on the west coast of the United States, California has become one of the most recognizable and most populous states in the country, and Los Angeles is its largest city. You have the mountains to the north, the beach in the south and a bit of the desert to the east. LA has definitely established itself in the media industry -- music, film, and television to be exact. In this book by William Fox, the essays describe the more elusive part of this city -- its nature.
Although it is certain that it is a melting pot of cultures as in most American cities, LA seems to be in a flux, always living in the present. Fox explains the importance of the following aspects about the city: the La Brea Pits, which is a reminder of Los Angeles' Ice Age past, their crude to modern ways of protecting the city from the harsh Sta. Ana Winds, its role in the propagation of telecommunications across America, and the technicalities of its visual engineers, mostly film. As the book is also framed in film history, the city is arguably tied with this industry.
On the other hand, the following quote shows how the image of the city can be corroded, although this pertains to a more personal level of perception. It is found in the chapter "Landfilling," where Fox talks about the transformation of graveyards from a component of a Gothic church to a park area with a less sinister atmosphere.
"It's such a mediated experience that we do not remain involved with it. We don't contemplate it, which is part of a larger issue: that of how our relationship with time has changed along with our perception of the space."
As with the words Making Time, a person's memory of a city, whether he is a transient or an inhabitant, there will always be a specific memory that is triggered by the city. More than the world's distorted view of Los Angeles, its history and nature are much more interesting than what gets presented through the camera.
July 31, 2019
Here are the questions discussed at the Reading the Western Landscape Book Club at the Arboretum Library of the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden on April 24, 2019:
August 3, 2015
I was looking for a few good, edgy, interesting books to together give me a picture of urban life over time in Los Angeles and this was one of them. (I've read several before, many years ago when I was in urban planning school, so this was kind of filling in the blanks since then.) Fox's essays were very quirky and unexpected, both in theme (broadcasting antennas, cemeteries, the history of oil under Wilshire Blvd.) and direction, but surprisingly gave a lot of information about life and history in L.A., kind of at the margins. I really liked that it was one of the few books on Los Angeles I've read that doesn't smirk at you for reading a book about Los Angeles. Fox takes the place seriously, and that made the book even more enjoyable.
July 22, 2009
This series of essays examines the production of time in Los Angeles. The book starts with a meditation on oil in Los Angeles, the La Brea Tar Pits, and the filming of the disaster moving Volcano. The book ends by comparing the production of special effects on a Hollywood movie set to the work on mars done at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories.
I had been to many of the places described. My childhood experiences followed me out of the pages giving me another way into the book. This is a book for a general educated audience interested in thinking through time, memory, the layers of landscape, illusion, perception, and the construction of a "reality" dependent on time.
I had been to many of the places described. My childhood experiences followed me out of the pages giving me another way into the book. This is a book for a general educated audience interested in thinking through time, memory, the layers of landscape, illusion, perception, and the construction of a "reality" dependent on time.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews