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R E C E N T L Y

Getting the boot
By Jon Bowen
Kicked out of college for immoral conduct, the only son of a Baptist preacher takes a vacation from reality
(12/04/98)

In the Bad Line
By Isaac Zava
Purgatory is standing with a hangover in a queue of non-tuition paying students
(12/02/98)

Ask Camille
By Camille Paglia
More darts at Foucault's scrawny haunches
(12/02/98)

Hell no! We won't grade!
By Sean McMeekin
Will the upcoming strike by University of California graduate teaching assistants raise them from their serflike status -- or spell their eventual doom?
(11/30/98)

Debunking the myths of the Puritans
By Maria Russo
A revisionist argues that historians have turned the authoritarian, conformist Puritans into reflections of their own complex, Harvard-educated selves
(11/25/98)

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________all in his head?

 
He's been lionized as a prescient Marxist prophet of end-of-the-continent doom and gloom. But a growing number of critics charge that the author of "City of Quartz" has feet of clay.

BY VERONIQUE DE TURENNE
There's a lovely fountain at the top of the Bunker Hill steps in downtown Los Angeles, and that's where Mike Davis and I are spending Sunday afternoon. The broad staircase, a welcoming sine wave that links Hope and Fifth streets, faces the city's rebuilt Central Library. A never-thinning crowd all but obscures the library's heavy doors. Behind us, scores of people wander the patchwork of lawns, plazas and fountains that connect Bunker Hill's skyscrapers. I'm holding "Ecology of Fear," Davis' 484-page haymaker aimed at the soft white underbelly of Los Angeles. It's a chronicle of apocalypse, a study of a racially Balkanized city beset by natural plagues of biblical proportions: world-record rains, devastating fires, consuming floods, whirling tornadoes and disease-crazed squirrels.

"You weren't exactly honest when you described Bunker Hill, were you?" I ask gently, opening the book. Davis portrays Bunker Hill, a formerly rundown area that was redeveloped in the '60s, as an example of the sterile, repressive urban spaces created by the racist Angeleno ruling class. Davis bites his lip. "You wrote about walled, whites-only fortresses, with bulletproof steel doors, no pedestrian access and security cameras on every corner. I don't see that. Do you?"

Davis puts down his carnitas burrito from the Grand Central Market, draws on a smoothie from the juice bar near the Water Garden and starts pacing. A Latino family seated near a Robert Graham sculpture watches, bemused. "I'm not wrong, I just tweaked things for effect," he insists. "You will find metal doors -- OK, they're on the parking garages downstairs. There are lots of -- OK, two -- pedways in Bunker Hill, and one of them does have an electronic door. It's truth the way I see it."

It was an enlightening interview, but it had one problem. I made it up. I was on Bunker Hill that day, but Davis was in New York. The conversation didn't take place. We've never met.

Still, Mike Davis can't complain. He can't fire off an angry letter calling for my head because I've violated the most basic rule of journalism. Because, as poet and environmentalist Lewis MacAdams revealed in last week's L.A. Weekly, Davis has done the same thing himself. It turns out that in a 1989 cover story for the Weekly, Davis invented an entire conversation with MacAdams, complete with vivid outdoor setting.

Faking one interview doesn't put Davis in the league of notorious fiction writers like former New Republic Wunderkind Stephen Glass, but the acclaimed author of "City of Quartz" and "Ecology of Fear" now faces accusations that reach beyond this journalistic lapse. A growing number of critics claim that Davis' scholarship and reporting are so inaccurate and biased as to border on the deceitful, that he sifts and picks his facts to fit his dark Marxist vision. But unlike journalistic outcasts like Glass and Boston Globe columnists Mike Barnicle and Patricia Smith, whose fast and loose dealings with reality led to disgrace and dismissal, Davis has paid no price for his freewheeling ways. In fact, ironically for a Marxist, he has profited. Until now.

In a brilliant and controversial career as Los Angeles' self-appointed scholar of doom, Davis has earned worldwide praise. The son of a meat cutter who helped found his local union, Davis left high school to become a meat cutter himself when his father became ill. He then learned to drive big rigs -- which became a selling point with affluent leftist readers impressed by his blue-collar mystique. His political evolution began with memberships in Students for a Democratic Society, the Teamsters and the Communist Party. At age 28, Davis attended UCLA and studied economics and history. He moved to London in 1981, where he became an editor of New Left Review and completed his political transformation into a Marxist. Now 52, Davis teaches urban theory at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and he's a sought-after speaker on the lecture circuit. This spring, when he received a $315,000 MacArthur Foundation grant for "exceptionally creative individuals," a friend from his trucking days called to see whether Davis would finally be buying the rig of his dreams. Not likely.

Davis first earned notice with "City of Quartz," the opening volume of his Los Angeles trilogy. In that book, Davis parses the city's power structure to unveil a police state rife with class warfare, ruled by corrupt politicians and planners bent on preserving an all-white status quo. His prediction in "Quartz" of widespread violence, two years before the 1992 riots that followed the Rodney King verdicts, earned him prophet status and helped make the book required reading in many college classrooms. It also gave him carte blanche to continue his highly personal scrutiny of Los Angeles.

"Ecology of Fear," his 1998 portrayal of Los Angeles as an "apocalypse theme park," reiterates Davis' social critique of racism, elitism and class struggle, and adds to it a new vision: natural disaster. Just as Los Angeles' white ruling class, sequestered away in gated, guarded communities, ignores the rage and simmering violence of the city's oppressed, zoned-away, largely minority poor, Davis argues, so too it ignores the doom-laden geography of the city itself, replete with flood plains, fire zones and earthquake faults. Davis' Los Angeles is quite literally dancing on a volcano.

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Tormented by a realtor from Malibu