Playing catch with Los Angeles

February 18, 2021

Peter Lunenfeld, UCLA professor and Vice Chair of UCLA's Design/Media Arts department, tells the story of Los Angeles in his new book, "City at the Edge of Forever." The urban biography unearths the complex stories of a vibrant city, chronicling both the legendary and the mundane of a city ever-present in the American psyche.

City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined by Peter Lunenfeld

"READING PETER LUNENFELD’S KINETIC civic biography, City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined, brought me back nearly a half-century. When I was in middle school, my friends and I attended Saturday football games at the Air Force Academy just outside my hometown of Colorado Springs. The stadium was shaped in a way that field goals or extra point attempts would sometimes sail into the stands. We’d catch one every now and then, and then we’d throw the ball back onto the field and trade high fives.

But when that grew dull, one of us devised a plan for mischief. We’d position our catcher in the usual spot. The rest of us would mill around behind the catcher, eight or 10 boys spread out haphazardly as if we weren’t paying attention. But we were. If the catcher was lucky enough to get a ball — there were other squads vying against us — we would immediately fall into a kind of disciplined conga line stretching backward, up to the stadium entrance gate. If everything worked according to plan, the first boy caught the football. He then tossed a lateral to the boy right behind him, who turned and immediately passed to the next one, then the next on down the line. Hurried, underhanded tosses done quickly, almost without thought. The second to last boy — our quarterback — then threw a long pass to the last of us, the boy who had raced out of the gate, legs churning toward the parking lot. If all went perfectly, he would catch that beautiful pass and run into the sea of cars to hide. None of us could yet drive. The rest of us would scram, thrilled by our game and how seamlessly we had moved that ball, so quickly and so far, lateral after lateral, carrying out our play on instinct.

It’s all that lateraling that I remembered when reading City at the Edge of Forever. Our every aim was to get rid of the ball as quickly as possible. Lingering risked apprehension. Just catch it, throw it, throw it, throw it, throw it, throw it, pass it, catch it, run. And so it is with this book: Lunenfeld, a UCLA design media arts professor, is a nimble lateralist as he takes us through this romp of a book on Los Angeles history and culture. The city is the football tossed about — not from boy to boy but from topic to topic. Stingrays to sushi. Sex cults to Case Study houses. Glamour to murder. Jets to the Chicano Moratorium. Sentences start this way and then dart that way; paragraphs end far from where they began. This is a strap-yourself-in kind of book, alternating between a rush and rushed."—William Deverell, Feb. 18 2021

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the L.A. Review of Books website.
Read more about Peter Lunenfeld.

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