Norman M. Klein

Analysis, photography and fiction combine in a bracing portrait of LA.

Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory

The History of Forgetting

A guided tour through the nuanced politics of architectural illusion, The Vatican to Vegas takes the reader from lavish Baroque fantasies of the seventeenth century to the Electronic Baroque of today. The ›scripted spaces‹ described by Norman M. Klein are punctuated with devices widely used in special effects since 1500: shocks, surprise twists, grand fakes and copies. Since its first publication 2004, The Vatican To Vegas has emerged as a classic across many fields, from media and architecture, to the fine arts and urban planning. Its timing was ironic: Klein assumed in 2004 that the future of scripted illusion was about to radically shift. This new edition brings the ironic story up to the present, and into the digitally overwhelmed ›scripted spaces‹ of the future.

A History of Special Effects

The Vatican to Vegas

Norman Klein

The History of Special Effects

In 2003, Norman M. Klein's docufable »Bleeding Through« raised questions of urban aesthetics and memory as part of the multimedia documentary »Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986.« Now, 20 years later, this important text is reissued along with several essays addressing its central themes, such as the aesthetics and politics of urban memory, the development of Los Angeles since the 20th century, the role of urban imaginaries in US politics, or media evolution in the 21st century. The volume also features a long interview with Klein and two docufables from Klein's celebrated study »The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory«, one being the kernel of the novella, the other imagining Walter Benjamin in L.A. Finally, the book contains links to two films featuring much of the multimedia material contained in the first edition.

An Updated Edition 20 Years Later

Norman M. Klein's »Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles«

We rummage through the worlds where culture, entertainment and power share a contested space. This space could be a street that has been staged for effect. It is software where fake money circulates. Or the site of scripted pleasures, in games, casinos; architectural illusion. Inside this space we find the Floating Class, outliers who must survive casino capitalism. This cast of characters include artists, the semi-employed, hipsters; migrants; the racially ignored-- and always the immigrants. The Floating class is often afflicted by gold fevers. For almost forty years, Norman Klein has written about many such locations, and stories often blending the fictive within the factual, since the arrival of globalization and neo-feudalism. He also traces what for him is the most peculiar site of all-- the present itself. For Klein, the present is an archaeological irony overrun by mad policies, dominated by urban erasure and collective forgetting. In Tales of the Floating Class Klein creates tales of a comic picaresque, a comic tragedyin a historical journey that has barely started. Meanwhile, like mutant flora, new floating species grow ever more varied. This is clearly our Iliad and Odyssey combined-- what follows after the end of the Western Hegemony (ending formally in the 1970s). Featured are twenty-two essays that have been re-edited, covering writings from 1982 to 2017. Norman M. Klein is a cultural critic and historian. Much of his work deals with cities, media, collective and political history. Past works are, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86; (media novel) Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales, plus others. He is a professor at the California Institute of the Art

Tales of the Floating Class, Writings 1982-2017; Essays and Fictions on Globalization and Neo-Feudalism

Los Angeles is a city which has long thrived on the continual re-creation of own myth. In this extraordinary and original work, Norman Klein examines the process of memory erasure in LA. Using a provocative mixture of fact and fiction, the book takes us on an 'anti-tour' of downtown LA, examines life for Vietnamese immigrants in the City of Dreams, imagines Walter Benjamin as a Los Angeleno, and finally looks at the way information technology has recreated the city, turning cyberspace into the last suburb. In this new edition, Norman Klein examines new models for erasure in LA. He explores the evolution of the Latino majority, how the Pacific economy is changing the structure of urban life, the impact of collapsing infrastructure in the city, and the restructuring of those very districts that had been 'forgotten'.

Andy Campbell

Jennifer West

Chelsea Weathers

West's material experiments in film and art explore Southern California's changing geography This debut monograph brings together nearly a decade of "analogital" experiments in film, sculpture and installation by Jennifer West (born 1966)--one of the most committed artists working on the West Coast today. Saturated in a history of avant-garde and Third World cinema (not to mention HIV/AIDS activism and the incipient Riot Grrrl movement) since she was an undergraduate at Evergreen State College, West's work today treads similar ground: challenging the utopianism of new media adoptees as well as the nostalgia of analog-only film adherents. The 11 projects reproduced in the book, all produced between 2014 and 2021, fall under the heading of Media Archaeology, and reveal the historical and material promiscuity of West's experiments in film and art, often tied to the changing geography of Los Angeles and its surrounds.

Media Archaeology

Fiction. "The facts are simple enough: In September, 1909, a relatively unknown Freud spent a week in New York City, en route to a lecture series upstate at Clark University. The air ranged from muggy to stifling. The museum exhibition on antiquities, the one he had high hopes for, proved substandard. The crowds on the street smelled of industrial fluids and sweat. Even friendly faces made him squirm. The conductor on a tram tried to be empathetic: he ordered the crowd to make room for 'the old man.' But Freud did not see himself as old, not yet." Thus begins this off-the-wall collection from the author of The History of Forgetting. Pitched somewhere between fiction and essay, between short story and novella, FREUD IN CONEY ISLAND AND OTHER TALES uses what are possibly actual facts from the eminent psychoanalyst's life to produce beautifully meandering engagements with topics ranging from the work of Lissitzky to laserographic confocal search methods to the ideas of Freud himself.

Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales

Paul Schimmel

Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.)

Lane Relyea

L.A. Art in the 1990s

Helter Skelter

He traces the development of the art at Disney, the forces that led to full animation, the whiteness of Snow White and Mickey Mouse becoming a logo.

Norman M. Klein

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