Los Angeles is undergoing a makeover. Leaving behind its image as all freeways and suburbs, sunshine and noir, it is reinventing itself for the twenty-first century as a walkable, pedestrian friendly, ecologically healthy and global urban hotspot of fashion and style, while driving initiatives to rejuvenate its downtown core, public spaces and ethnic neighborhoods. By providing a locational history of Los Angeles fashion and style mythologies through the lens of institutions such as manufacturing, museums and designers and readings of contemporary film, literature and new media, L.A. Chic provides an in-depth analysis of the social changes, urban processes, desires and politics that inform how the good life is being re-imagined in Los Angeles. Throughout the book, Susan Ingram and Markus Reisenleitner dig up submerged and marginalized elements of the city's cultural history but also tap into the global circuits of urban affect that are being mobilized for promoting L.A. as an example for the global, multi-ethnic city of the future. Engagingly written, highly visual and featuring numerous photographs throughout, L.A. Chic will appeal to any culturally inclined reader with an interest in Los Angeles, its cultural history and modern urban style.

Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien, 2002. 12 fig., 2 tab. The contributions in this volume address the ways the two imagined (cultural) spaces commonly designed as 'Central Europe' and 'North America' have mutually attributed meanings to each other and set out to trace patterns and structures resulting from this process. Rather than concentrate on what happens when cultural forms and practices travel across the Atlantic the focus lies on the contexts of their insertion into the 'other' culture. The articles draw attention to how those complexities and contradictions are resolved on an ideological basis in order to produce the kind of stability that is the hallmark of geo-cultural place signification, but also, conversely, the revenge of a spatialized history, the reassertion of their temporality that cultural practices produce when they reverberate in displacement. Contents: James Deaville: Cakewalk in Waltz Time? African-American Music in Jahrhundertwende Vienna - Martina Nubaumer: � ...im gesegneten Lande der Erfindungen so wenig musikalische Erfindung...: Perceptions of American Musical Culture in Vienna around 1900 - Michael Saffle: Cultural Transfer, Identity and Otherness, and Depictions of Musical Vienna in the New York Times, 1918-1938 - Peter Stachel: � I even ask the Putzfrau with the Buerschtl: How the Blues Came to Austria - Barbara Boisits: Austria's Neue Volxmusik: The Sound of the Global Village? - Nada Bezic: Around the World With Croatian Tamburitza - Cornelia Szabo-Knotik: Dreams of Exotic Beaches - Paulus Ebner: Go East, Young Man! A Comparison of The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks (1924) andMr. Pim (1929-30) - Alexandra Seibel: A Topography of Excess: Visions of Vienna in Erich von Stroheim's The Wedding March (1928) - Susan Ingram: Modernity, Modernism and Canadian Film: A Rhapsody in Two Languages - Andriy Zayarnyuk: Closing Modernity: Ukrainian Emigration and Images of America - Natalia Shostak: On Local Readings of Overseas Kin: Visions from Ukraine - Johannes Feichtinger: Migration - Cultural Transfer - Scientific Change: Austrian Scholarly Traditions and their Impact on Scholarship and Science in the Americas 1933-1945 - Markus Reisenleitner: Beach-Haus vs. Traum(a) Factory: The L.A. Experience through Central European Eyes - Wladimir Fischer: America as a Circus: Antun Gustav Matos's Multiple Perspectives on Modernity - Helga Mitterbauer: Fear - Despair - Insanity: The City of New York as a Vanishing-Point of Accelerated Modernity.