I don't know. Suck it up, man. It ain't that bad. It could be worst. I love this city. For those who feel they need to run away from themselves, I offer you a myriad of alleys, piss-stank-filled streets, smog induced hallucinations and the vacant hellos from prisoners (or are they angels??)floating in the clouds of Alameda Ave.
There is something quite unique about this city, and I always encourage to pick at the scab, go ahead. This city itches and it needs you to scratch away the crust to reveal it's flesh and fervor. The class war intensifies under veils of organic foods, scooters and American Apparel ads that glare down at you like gargoyles watching the dungeons.
There is something within the filth. It is beyond 'one man's trash is another man's treasure."
And they're (whoever the fuck 'they' are) wrong, TONS of people walk in Los Angeles. Look harder and look below, they're like ants and cockroaches. No one chooses to suffer and struggle, but we're all in this beautiful garden of misery and mystery and magic. Really, don't take it for granted.
xo
Deegers
(I don't think I need to recommend this book, since it's on it's way to yours truly, but if you're interested, keep reading)
Norman Klein: Bleeding Through--Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 (Book & DVD-ROM)
A crime fiction in which the journey through the evidence is more exciting than the crime itself ... A narrative strategy that reflects Los Angeles ... as open-ended, inconclusive — a series of beginnings rather than any definitive end ... — by David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times Book Review 1/18/2004
Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-1986 is an interactive narrative that combines a database detective story with a digital city symphony and a metanarrative reflection on storytelling in this digital medium. Set in a three-mile radius near downtown Los Angeles, this DVD-ROM explores Boyle Heights, Bunker Hill, Chavez Ravine, Chinatown, Echo Park, Little Tokyo and other contested locations that helped shape the city’s cultural history. These ethnically complex neighborhoods are documented through archival photographs and films and through contemporary images that either reproduce or evoke them. This DVD- ROM is accompanied by a book, which contains a novella by cultural historian Norman M. Klein and essays on the production by Jeffrey Shaw, Marsha Kinder, Rosemary Comella and Andreas Kratky.
The interface enables the narrative to be navigated in three ways. Positioned within a small window, author Norman Klein tells the story of Molly, the fictional protagonist of his novella who is based on a real life person and who may have murdered one of her husbands. He invites us to collaborate with him in writing this fictional life. Or we can explore what Molly never noticed—the back-stories of real life people whose mini-memoirs preserve histories that otherwise might have been lost. And finally, the project leads us to reflect on this act of database storytelling and its cultural implications, particularly when set within L.A.’s urban dream factory. The contrast between past and present is most dramatic and uncanny in the back stories, where one can slide fluidly between "bleed-throughs"—old and new photographs of the same cityscape taken from precisely the same angle—which enable us to make buildings instantaneously emerge or vanish.
Drawing on hundreds of photographs, newspaper clippings and films from the archives of USC, the Los Angeles Public Library and the Automobile Club of Southern California with additional material from personal collections, "Bleeding Through" helps us refigure our vision of Los Angeles, particularly if it has been based primarily on representations from Hollywood mainstream movies.
© 2003 Annenberg Center for Communication University of Southern California
About the Author
Norman M. Klein is a professor at the California Institute of the Arts, and the author of The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory and Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. A critic, historian, and novelist, he has written extensively on the culture and politics of Los Angeles, on cinema, and on architecture.
Rosemary Comella has been working since 1999 as a project director, interface designer and programmer at the Labyrinth Project. As part of Labyrinth, she developed the interface for Tracing the Decay of Fiction, collaboration between experimental filmmaker Pat O'Neill and the Labyrinth team, and she helped direct The Danube Exodus: The Rippling Current of the River, an interactive installation with filmmaker Peter Forgács. She also developed Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, an interactive installation and DVD-ROM, in collaboration with cultural historian Norman Klein and the Center for Art and Media (ZKM) in Germany. She directed and served as photographer for Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevelopment, an installation and DVD-ROM, including catalog, exhibited at the Pasadena Museum of California Art in 2005. For the past ten years, Comella has been producing new media works ranging from interactive installations and CD-ROMS with various artists to social research projects, children’s CD-ROMS and cultural projects in France. Some of the published CD-ROM titles she has been instrumental in developing include: An Anecdoted Archive of the Cold War by George Legrady and HyperReal Media Productions, San Francisco; Slippery Traces by George Legrady in collaboration with Rosemary Comella, published by ZKM, Karlsruhe; Clicking In by Lynn Hershman, published by Bay Press, Seattle; MUNTADAS: Media Architecture Installations, published by Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Cosmos, voyage dans l’universe, published by Montparnasse Multimedia, Paris.
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