The views from the Westin Bonaventure are magnificent. The elevator lifts you to one of those revolving cocktail lounges, in which, seated, you are passively rotated about and offered a contemplative spectacle of the city itself, now transformed into its own images by the glass windows through which you view it. The observations above are partly mine and partly Frederic Jameson’s. Below is all Jameson:
So I come finally to my principal point here, that this latest mutation in space — postmodern hyperspace — has finally succeeded in transcending the capacities of the individual human body to locate itself, to organize its immediate surroundings perceptually, and cognitively to map its position in a mappable external world. It may now be suggested that this alarming disjunction point between the body and its built environment — which is to the initial bewilderment of the older modernism as the velocities of spacecraft to those of the automobile — can itself stand as the symbol and analogon of that even sharper dilemma which is the incapacity of our minds, at least at present, to map the great global multinational and decentered communicational network in which we find ourselves caught as individual subjects. (from Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism Verso, 1991)
At the BonaVista lounge I ordered a “Bonaventure Boot” cocktail. It was a mix of tropical liquors that included Midori Melon. Without this green elixir, the lounge was pure 80s pastiche (so many sad returns). After the drink, I channeled Jameson’s histrionics. The rotating lounge became a vessel as I transcended my capacity to organize the immediate surroundings The city’s horizontal and vertical grids appeared as a simulacrum mapped onto the screen/windows. The constant rotation decentered my views. The interior space was lit with mobile lamps inspired by the late work of Frank Stella. The pipped music was 80s fare. Was this the cultural logic of late capitalism?
Tags: Architecture, Los Angeles, Postmodernism