Dirty Sidewalks

The people here wear tired looking faces and expensive looking shoes. Coffee fuels them as they careen down the interstate and slide into boardrooms and answer phone calls. Their cheeks and breasts and foreheads and asses will remain long after the rest of them has decayed-- plastic bulbs wedged in a deteriorated skeleton as the sun swallows the earth whole. They feed their bodies plastic but never lactose. They warp their bodies into birds of paradise and then warp their cars around a downtown lamp post.

But that is only one layer of this world. On the outer crust cocaine is a luxury and houses are collectable displays of inherited crystal and mahogany chests and a large canvas that may or may not be an authentic Andy Warhol.

Lurking just below this thin, bright layer are the people with tired looking faces and average looking shoes. They have stress rashes and electric cars that putter down the freeway from stuccoed sing-story homes cloaked in bougainvillea to the cluster of concrete buildings downtown cloaked in smog. The highest points of the city disappear into a yellowish haze.

These are the middle-class that every politician wants to "bolster" or "strengthen" or "rebuild." This is the brunette with her flat shoes clacking on rough asphalt, clutching an old bag that she found coated in dust at the back of a closet.

The gridded streets at the center of town unravel into a mess of curved roads and freeways crawling up the hills-- the stock footage of which bookends celebrity documentaries. The Scientologist Celebrity Center leering with medieval-esque turrets from the hilly brush just off the 110. A top layer. Visualized and filmed. Shared with the world. Peeled back layers unearth infinite nuance. There's a difference between the stucco apartments in a good neighborhood and the stucco apartments two blocks south. And a difference between a good neighborhood that earns its adjective from three McDonald's and a bankrupt mall and a good neighborhood locked behind good gates just off the coast with views of Catalina Island on the days that the mist isn't so forceful. There's a difference between the graveyards filled with plastic and the graveyards filled with only bones. 120 cubic feet under irrigated grass and a headstone is 120 cubic feet of L.A. real estate.

There's another layer to this place. It is the "problem" that politicians want to solve. A woman with a shaved head and her nipple falling out of a torn dress walks barefoot down 2nd Street. Another man with rough dark hands holds them outstretched at the intersection of 3rd and Pico. He peels apart his chapped lips into a yellow grin and asks for quarters. No one ever seems to have change. When they talk about these people, if they ever talk above a whisper, they say the very existence of these people and the audacity of them to not afford $2000 a month in rent in a less than good "good neighborhood" is the problem itself. It's about the visual. A woman with her breast out, not for glamour and not for sex, but because she has no fabric to cover it, does not mix with the scene.

But being here, walking along the badly paved roads, the aesthetics of the opulent and the aesthetics of the weary intertwine.

And they all bleed together, united by the smog pumped into their lungs.

And the cancerous fumes floating up from Wilmington off of the coast.

And the charcoal colored gum stuck to to the sidewalks downtown.

And the haunting of the Santa Ana winds that blow palm fronds into the salted pools of celebrities and whip up the canvas homes of the people on the street and stir up funnels of dust on the side of the 405.

And yet they all repel each other, separated into different zip codes under the same turf 6 feet down.