Party's Over, L.A.

WATCHING this Los Angeles- centered film has left me with some mixed feelings.


Being from Los Angeles, my mother was six months pregnant with my younger sister when the '92 "riots" occurred. When I've talked to her about it, it's always been her recounting frantically how much she didn't want to bring another child into the world. The subjugation of youth within the film is starling. The victimization of D-Fens's daughter, the boy who oddly knows how to shoot varying weapons (and is also playing by a freeway...), and even the child at the pool that literally had D-Fens's blood in her palm are all chillingly violent. The ending of the film implies that the party, or the expectation thereof, is over for Los Angeles. Suicide-by-cop via a childhood summertime toy and soft pastel balloons that have lost their flight paint a picture that isn't sane. We too sink with the helium, absorbing the weight of man's inhumanity to his fellow man.

And Adele never got her party...



-- Hailey Hannan

(images: the children of "Falling Down" via www.aveleyman.com, site of movie & t.v. captures)

Cityscape: Which One is Real?

FOR many the notion, "streetlife in L.A." is an oxymoron.  Transplants comment often about how the sidewalks roll up so early here, or how we Angelenos will drive around the block to visit a friend, when really we could simply walk, or take six separate cars to one party when we could simply carpool in one.

Last week, we saw "D-Fens" trudging across a strange map of Los Angeles which in many ways  bent both the city's geography and its story. As well, the narrative fed the prevailing lore that "nobody walks in L.A." Indeed, the idea of a lone man walking the corpus of the city was evidence alone that he was mad,  or so thought the scrambled band of police officers tailing him.

Invented street life is another piece of L.A.'s odd story  We have  a lot of destination walks scattered around the Southland -- Third Street Promenade, City Walk, Americana and most recently L.A. Live As one of our guests, David Ulin, pointed out about the Grove, in the Fairfax District: "It's so strange that a place that people go to walk has a wall up against the real street, blocking its view of it."

All of it begging the question: "Why?"

I snapped these photos a few nights back at different ends of the city as I made my way from event to event and ultimately home. One is a "real" street and one is not. But even the "real" street doesn't look real. And I suppose that too is part of L.A.'s story.



photos: L.G.