LA FORUM NEWSLETTER ︎ IT’S TIME TO PICK A SIDE
Summer 2014
This edition of the LA Forum Newsletter began with a loose-fitting idea around virtual and simultaneous urbanisms—their otherness, their residual doublings, and their slippages. Black-market networks and Los Angeles’s popular verisimilitude as seen in Grand Theft Auto V underscore a collection of thoughts from the informal and micro (a 2.5-square-mile section of southeast Los Angeles) to the pervasive macro (a zoomscape city for seven-billion people). Steven Chodoriwsky’s purposely redundant Centerfold centerfold investigates contemporary mores by reproducing Richard Culter’s 1914 “Fashion Notes,” another centerfold published 100 years ago in an issue of the popular (and nowdefunct) Puck magazine. Centerfold centerfold’s pun on readers reading readers reading reveals topics of class and background that were meant to be satirically funny a century ago, and now resonate uncomfortably in a present-day context.