East Los Angeles - Dresden in SoCal

The East of Los Angeles met with the same nemesis of late-capitalism to which so many other metropolitans have befallen. It is the wreckage of a failed social-welfare state collided with the more sinister darkness of mass-drug induction.

With the funding for public hospitals dramatically reduced and the housing for the mentally unstable destabilised, the psychologically and financially deprived roam the streets in droves. Blocks and blocks of unconscious militias collect with uncertain futures, sleeping and wandering between the wind-swept drives and avenues.

If only they could mobilise, they would prove an unsettling force to the thousands-strong Los Angeles Police Department (they did one week in 1992). However madness is kept at sea by the substitute medicine of crack cocaine. This is no perverse antibiotic though, no soma; theirs is a spark plug of anti-social behaviour and random atrocity threatening to under-siege the mainstays of LA that keeps the LAPD non-content.

The cityscape of downtown and the East LA rolls-on like a concrete mountain range – a horrid memory of bombed-out Europe. The architecture here is a marriage between minimalism and a lack of funding. They are monuments leftover from the apathetic anaesthesia that laid over all of America in the early 90s.

Whoever told the Americans they could do minimalism? The buildings look like leftovers of an unfinished terminal of LAX – concrete slabs of grey unearth, reaching out like broken sacrifices to the Hollywood Hills. The angles and corners meet at the street level with makeshift tents and shelters. The over-towering shadows cover up so much and so little of the decay. There is not even the memory of a dream here.

There are no white faces in East L.A, except for those resurrecting the old factory warehouses with art-studios and lower-East urbunes. But even those bodies don’t come out at night. They move gracefully inside with the slick of paint on canvas, transforming a portal from the dead-end avenues and junky terrains.

The one-way streets make for a dizzying maze of an inebriated hell. One has to track back through the layers of downtown’s inferno to find an escape route. As we drive down the broken boulevards, their eyes sink into our skulls as they penetrate into the car window. A “hey man, have you got some change?” and occasionally a “what the fuck are you looking at?” It’s ambiguous as to who are the ghosts – them or us.