[Image of The Los Angeles River at the Sixth Street Bridge, Los Angeles, 2001 by John Humble]
There are a lot of weird tours available for tourists in LA, not just the ones that ride past Paris' home. Crime tours. Period tours of West Adams. Black Dahlia tours. Even literary tours of Raymond Chandler's and John Fante's Los Angeles. And it seems like every fall there is the Battle of the Architecturetours.
Everyone's got a gimmick. But then we read about this one and LOVE the idea: The Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles Tour. Brilliant. Forget seeing the Getty Center and Disney Hall. This one gets down and dirty, since its based on his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, and promises to introduce tour-goers to "a new way of looking at Los Angeles in all her gritty, lowbrow, industrial, car-centered splendor."
Want to see the splendor? Take a gander again at Banham's 1972 BBC documentary.
· Touring Literary Los Angeles: City of Chandler, Bukowski and Fante [World Hum]