A downtown gargoyle, a votive statue, a pigeon – these are the inhabitants of this otherwise de-populated, de-glossed Los Angeles, its famous sprawl, haze, and horizon chopped up into isolated details and dissociated vignettes. The result is a dreamscape of images that capture the muted, dust-gilded beauty of the “very LA” – though not a Warholian LA, perhaps, so much as a Brechtian one. “On thinking about Hell, I gather my brother Shelley found it was a place much like the city of London,” wrote the German dramatist and Hollywood exile. “I, who live in Los Angeles and not in London find, on thinking about Hell, that it must be still more like Los Angeles.”

If Werner, whose past publications have dealt with the disappearance of the “old” Federal Republic of Germany (Stillleben BRD, 2016) and the urban plant world (Die Blüten der Stadt, 2018), brings a continental candor and directness to the storefronts, office interiors, storage units, and in-between spaces of Los Angeles, the conversations that appear in the back of the volume bring us back to the city’s fabric of imitation and unreliable narratives. A limo driver, a police officer, a Korea Town personal trainer, and a life coach to the stars are fictionally condensed characters interviewed by Tom Kummer – a Swiss writer in LA, known for his mix of fact and fabrication.

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