Sex, Death and God in L.A.

Often as amorphous and sprawling as Los Angeles itself, these 11 essays, some of which have been previously published, blend reportage, politics, memoir and fantasy to gauge the temperature of the megalopolis, cool incubator of fashions, follies and the future. With the comparative advantages of Southern California fast disappearing, Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn predicts a long twilight for L.A. as a result of job flight and the aerospace industry's decline. New Left Review 's Mike Davis exposes the industrial peonage of Southeast L.A. and ponders the internationalization of downtown as corporate raiders, Japanese megadevelopers and trans-national bankers restructure the economy. On the personal side, novelist Carolyn See scrutinizes the love marketplace in interracial L.A. in the context of her own failed marriages to a part-Chinese man and ``a Slovak.'' Fiction writer Eve Babitz muses on lust, yoga and the scarcity of sex in a city where even asceticism is eroticized. Screenwriter Jeremy Larner lays down the rules of life in movieland: ``To be disturbed by anything is to be a loser.'' Reid is the author of West of the West. (Feb.)