PFA and the Townsend Center for the Humanities host a panel discussion on Mike Davis's campus lecture series, "Last Rites and Secret Histories in the Southland." The panel is followed by a screening of Shotgun Freeway, a droll and eccentric documentary about the history of the L.A. basin. Best known for the brilliant chronicle City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (Verso, 1990), Davis commands a complex vision of the Southland that accounts for its cultural geography, political and racial turmoil, and mythopoeic presence. He will give two lectures as the Townsend Center's Avenali Professor of the Humanities: "The Literary Destruction of L.A." on September 30, and "Maneaters of the Sierra Madre" on October 7, both at 8 p.m. in the Alumni House on the UC Berkeley campus.