Mike Davis RIP 1946 - 2022

[hitmouse]

Wasn't sure whether this fits better here or in theory/history, but anyway... not time for the Mike Davis RIP thread just yet, but sounds like it's not going to be long:

Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller

Even in his final act, the legendary scholar and theorist does not mince words. He sees an L.A. that is decaying from the bottom up.

www.latimes.com

Mike Davis has terminal cancer. But his big worry is what is happening to our world

SAN DIEGO — You can easily understand why Mike Davis might be glum.The Jeremiah of Southern California — the writer equally hailed and hated for decrying the dark side of the …

www.sandiegouniontribune.com

I don't know how often a book really changes anybody's life, but I always thought the film Bastards of the Party, directed by a former Blood who read City of Quartz while in jail, was a really impressive tribute to the power of Davis' work.

 

[DaveCinzano]

I don't know how often a book really changes anybody's life, but I always thought the film Bastards of the Party, directed by a former Blood who read City of Quartz while in jail, was a really impressive tribute to the power of Davis' work.

Looks interesting

 

[Idris2002]

Wasn't sure whether this fits better here or in theory/history, but anyway... not time for the Mike Davis RIP thread just yet, but sounds like it's not going to be long:

Mike Davis is still a damn good storyteller

Even in his final act, the legendary scholar and theorist does not mince words. He sees an L.A. that is decaying from the bottom up.

www.latimes.com

Mike Davis has terminal cancer. But his big worry is what is happening to our world

SAN DIEGO — You can easily understand why Mike Davis might be glum.The Jeremiah of Southern California — the writer equally hailed and hated for decrying the dark side of the …

www.sandiegouniontribune.com

I don't know how often a book really changes anybody's life, but I always thought the film Bastards of the Party, directed by a former Blood who read City of Quartz while in jail, was a really impressive tribute to the power of Davis' work.

Well, it is now time for the Mike Davis RIP thread.

I'm glad I got to hear him speak once.

Obituary in the Nation:

Mike Davis: 1946–2022

A brilliant radical reporter with a novelist’s eye and a historian’s memory.

www.thenation.com

 

[Idris2002]

hitmouse - I've asked the mods to change the thread title. Also, I think the thread should be moved to world politics, he was that significant a figure.

 

[gawkrodger]

RIP.

A massive influence and impact on me. It was his work (along with David Harvey) which led me to return to university after many years.

Always rushed to read his output whenever some new writings was released by him,

Think I'll go through a re-reading spree (and catch up on the things I haven't read)

 

[redsquirrel]

Ah fuck. A big loss. But someone who should inspire us.

Jacobin orbit

His final sentences of his final New Left Review piece lamented our miserably stuck political present and, in its celebration of leftist assassins, seemed to slyly pine for the emergence of such figures in our own era: “Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands. It should make us pay homage at the hero graves of Aleksandr Ilyich Ulyanov, Alexander Berkman and the incomparable Sholem Schwarzbard.”

Who else but Davis could go out on these words? And really, who can blame him? He’s only as bleak as the times we live in.

Still, he never fully fell into despair — something I wish I could claim myself. In my darker moments, though, I’ve ironically turned to what he told a New Yorker interviewer in 2020:

This seems an age of catastrophe, but it’s also an age equipped, in an abstract sense, with all the tools it needs. Utopia is available to us. If, like me, you lived through the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me — the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle. Eleven years ago, Bill Moyers brought me on his show and presented me as the last socialist in America. Now there are millions of young people who prefer socialism to capitalism.

 

[Pickman's model]

A superlative author, really sorry to hear this. Met him once in bookmarks some years back about a year after buda's wagon came out, very glad I got the opportunity to shake his hand

 

[redsquirrel]

Verso has a free e-book download of City of Quartz - props to belboid for the heads up

 

[Idris2002]

Aye, thank you belboid.

 

[DaveCinzano]

Looks interesting

Addendum:

It was and will remain interesting

 

[Idris2002]

editor - could this one be moved to world politics?

 

[Pickman's model]

editor - could this one be moved to world politics?

as ever tagging mods is not their preferred option, report the op and ask for its transfer

 

[hitmouse]

hitmouse - I've asked the mods to change the thread title. Also, I think the thread should be moved to world politics, he was that significant a figure.

Congratulations on choosing the tasteful option and resisting the temptation to change it to "Mike Davis' time is up".

 

[hitmouse]

There's been plenty of tributes to Mike Davis recently, and rightly so, but the one by TJ Clark in the LRB really offers a genuinely new and unexpected side of him:

Davis turned the car down a narrow arroyo, killed the lights, crawled forwards under a Psycho-Victorian perched on the hill to our right. ‘Drug king’s headquarters. They’ve got four or five guns trained on us.’ We picked up speed, headed south past the pork factories, zigzagged through terrain vague. It was dark by now. The car swerved off a street of gingerbreads into an alley, accelerated with a shudder, and dived into a hole in the ground. We were in some sort of pipe or sewer, our headlights rimming the place with fire, showing nothing ahead. Davis’s foot was firmly on the pedal. Conversation in the car had ceased. Then suddenly the car slammed to a halt. ‘Goddamn it! Those rains last week ...’ Up ahead, blocking the tunnel, inches away from the fender, was a pile of indecipherable trash – torn branches, boxes, mud, tyre treads, yard debris, a tail pipe. We backed up.

This was one of Davis’s set pieces – taking the greenhorns down an overflow pipe for the LA River, and ending, if things went smoothly, with the car flying out of the pipe clean through the air, crashing down on the concrete sides of a vast dry gulch.

Sounds like the experience of being driven around LA by Mike Davis was considerably more GTA: City of Quartz than I would have guessed?

 

[Pickman's model]

There's been plenty of tributes to Mike Davis recently, and rightly so, but the one by TJ Clark in the LRB really offers a genuinely new and unexpected side of him:

Sounds like the experience of being driven around LA by Mike Davis was considerably more GTA: City of Quartz than I would have guessed?

Davis was one of the stunt drivers for terminator 2

 

[hitmouse]

Another Mike Davis memoriam piece that I've only just spotted:

JoAnn Wypijewski, Mike, in Memory — Sidecar

1946-2022.

newleftreview.org