TRIAL WATCH : Only in L.A.

The late British writer Reyner Banham once called Los Angeles a place “where only the extreme is normal, and the Middle Way is just the unused reservation down the centre of the Freeway.” It has been 25 years since he wrote those words, but Banham might reuse them now if he could witness the O. J. Simpson spectacle:

Hundreds of reporters and photographers jam Downtown’s Criminal Courts Building. Images of a bloody killing, a celebrity defendant and celebrity lawyers fill the court as a worldwide television audience peeps. Dramatic opening statements, and then the hospitalization of a top prosecutor.

The script could only have been written by the Hollywood movie crowd that brought Los Angeles, again in Banham’s words, “genius, neurosis, skill, charlatanry, beauty, vice, talent, and plain old eccentricity.”

As the first week of the trial ends, the skies over Southern California have finally begun to clear after weeks of rains and flooding. The rains, coming after riots, fires, earthquakes and O. J., have served to reinforce the Nathanael West portrait of Los Angeles as the harbinger of urban doom, a paradise spoiled beyond repair, the “belly of the beast,” as a more recent writer, Bill Barich, called it in his profile of modern California.

But soon the winter rains will have turned desert hills into riots of wildflower. From the gritty Los Angeles Basin, Mt. Baldy will dazzle above with its mantle of snow. Mornings will carry the pungent smell of eucalyptus and lavender. Spring will be upon this palmy land that some have called an Eden.