«city of Quartz: Excavating The Future in Los Angeles» by Mike Davis

No metropolis has been more loved or more hated. To its official boosters, "Los Angeles brings it all together". To detractors, LA is a sunlit mortuary where "you can rot without feeling it". To Mike Davis, the author of this fiercely elegant and wide-ranging work of social history, Los Angeles is both utopia and dystopia, a place where the last Joshua trees are being plowed under to make room for model communities in the desert, where the rich have hired their own police to fend off street gangs, as well as armed Beirut militias.

The 12th studio album from Ry Cooder was his first concept album and historical album telling the story of Chavez Ravine. The Mexican-American community was demolished in the '50s in order to make way for public housing. That housing was never built and, instead, the Brooklyn Dodgers stadium was erected on that site when they moved to L.A.