
Walead Beshty
DESPITE THE CITY’S PLACID EXTERIOR, apocalypse is LA’s perennial leitmotif. Gazing down from Mount Shasta toward the distant Los Angeles basin, Clarence King, the first head of the United States Geological Survey, mused that in the California lowlands, “men and women are dull, unrelieved; they are all alike. The eternal flatness of landscape, the monotony of endlessly pleasant weather, the scarcely varying year, the utter want of anything unforeseen and the absence of all surprise in life, are legible upon their quiet uninteresting faces”a quiescent veneer that, for King, concealed the “