"Q. What is the program of the bourgeois parties? A. A bad poem on springtime, filled to bursting with metaphors." This isn't what I really expected to see emblazoned on a billboard, driving back from USC this afternoon. It's Walter Benjamin, from his 1929 essay on "Surrealism: The Last Snapshot of the European Intelligentsia," a difficult essay (to put it mildly) in which he praises the surrealists for breaking down the distinction between body and image; in which he argues against words as consolation and a substitute for real, revolutionary action; in which he warns against an optimistic belief in the inevitability of progress, a teleological version of history - and much more besides. Not, really, what one expects to see at the 7th Street/S. Rampart junction.
And beyond that, a ghost sign: under the thick whitewash is an advertisement for Furnished Apartments - at the edge of a brick terrace of what are still apartments - although almost certainly not furnished - in which lived (as I know from some previous digging around) the photographer Edward Curtis, in the 1920s, when he was struggling to make a living. Somewhere, in this conjunction of decontextualized, unattributed quotation; quasi-obliterated advertising, and Curtis's own life at this point, there's a very different, unclichéd metaphor hovering about: something to do with obscurity.
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