Recording Review

Chávez Ravine: A Record by Ry Cooder. Poor man's Shangri-La. Onda Callejera. Don't Call Me Red. Corrido de Boxeo. Muy Fifí. Los Chucos Suaves. Chinito Chinito. 3 Cool Cats. El U.F.O. Cayó. It's Just Work for Me. In my town. Ejercito Militar. Barrio Viejo. 3rd base, dodger stadium. Soy Luz y Sombra. 2005. Nonesuch R-740654.

The city can be viewed as a dispersion of linked large projects that structure and dominate the fine-grained interstitial matter. The dominant places are sited upon others that have somehow lost their value in the city. And the new inhabitation comes into being convulsively, sometimes violently, leaving little trace of what it evicted.

- Dana Cuff, The Provisional City: Los Angeles Stories of Architecture and Urbanism

Like always, it begins in dreams. A young ry cooder, son of an Italian mother and an Irish German father, growing up across the street from a swing-shift Douglass DC3 air factory where the Santa Monica Airport now stands, just before the Westside becomes as far west as you can go. Alone in his room, he'd play records and listen to the radio, imagining he was someone else. He remembers it this way: "You hear something exotic and you think, man, that sounds like more fun than I am having, so let's go there. I used to see these low rider cars here in town—black primer, lowered way down—and they'd paint the name of their song on the rear fender. I used to think, I would give anything. Can't I be like that? There were all these fantasies. I wanted to be in Ray Price's Honky Tonk Band. I wanted to a be a low rider guy with a car like that and greasy hair" (Josh Kun, "Ry's Eastside Ride," Tu Ciudad Los Angeles, June/July 2005).