Word: smog
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...backpacks." There is no lack of photographers to approach landscape with intense feeling, but the feelings are not of the same kind. What happened to the old sublimities? Lost with those who believed in them: such, at least, is the message conveyed by Robert Adams' From Lookout Mountain, Smog, No. 7,1970. It has some of the traditional ingredients: the high view, the extending valley. But tourists have changed the landscape forever, imposing on it their own cretinous expressionism: thanks to the aerosol can, their names (JOE, BILL) are writ large on the rocks, reversing the order of priorities...
THEY REALLY DO have smog in Los Angeles. That's the first thing I noticed when I stepped off the plane in Southern California. I always knew they had a little air pollution, but for some reason I thought the smog thing was just an exaggeration, like when your uncle Mort tells you about this great fishing spot where the fish jump into the boat, or when some guy from Bangor tells you that it rained so hard the other day that three farmers drowned in a hay loft. I couldn't believe that they would have smog that...
...somebody from California why they have smog. "Hey, like we can't help it, man, it's because of the mountains." Right, Ronald Reagan--and trees cause pollution, too! Mountains may have something to do with it, but the real reason for the smog is the Southern California Automobile Fetish. L.A. invented the 13-car family...
...drive home. A few cars got out early, but not many. Boom; the streets jammed up. The headlights below us lit up the street brilliantly, and for as far as we could see, there were backed-up cars fading slowly into the distance in a hazy coud of smog. Behind the hotel was a freeway with a tunnel, and the thing to do in L.A. when you're in a tunnel is honk your horn, so an endless echoing Waaaaaaa of automobile horns filled the air. Drivers were angry and aggressive, but none of them seemed surprised by the traffic...
...STORY, like so many American tales, begins with a California eccentric. Nurtured on the mysterious elixir of sunshine and smog, Californians serve as a national test-track, measuring fads, products and ideas by their unique--and often contagious--standards. The sage of the tax revolt, touchstone of the most important social and economic movement of our era, seemed to emerge half from central casting and half from the Bible--the prophet come to save a nation, live and in color. His Jeremiad condemned demon government and its lecherous grope for the tax dollar; the reverberations of Howard Jarvis's leap...