Winter Leaves (and February Flowers too…)

They don’t all fall in the autumn here. Some big green and brown palms can still be seen dropping limbs upon the Lincoln Continentals cruising the Hollywood Blvd. stretch west of LaBrea, past the block on which the slightly crispy folk music tutor types sell home-made hollow-body instruments three days a week, and the street-corner with the light box where a stencil of California burns in the endless sunshine. Though nothing’s getting singed at the moment.

Instead, the cold December rains have taken over, as Biblical as the Book of Axl predicted – give or take a slight calendar discrepancy/delay, though it still seemed an old winter’s song – and much more omnivorous than the ones I brought back from the Emerald Isle in October. 4 inches in a day is crazy shit, especially for people used to holding sunburned hands even after the days have start to grow short.

Nat King Cole Station Post Office (90004) is located at Western and 2nd, halfway up the block from a beautiful corner store-front that’s part Art Deco, part pimp Pharaoh. It’s for rent. Not for rent and right down the street are the world’s only consciously abstract KFC (situated in a Cali late modern commercial space), the non-denominational Vietnamese Christian church and hall (long strings of holiday lights descending festively from its bright neon steeple cross), and the Korean Buddhist temple which looks like it could’ve once been a mosque.

Few opportunities are missed on this strip, and most good ‘uns are recycled by the global masses again consuming American scraps, this time from the overfed table of Los Angeles’ bubble-ical real estate market. Driving around in downpours, you notice these people welcome the rain sans the histrionics, having designed their newly acquired backyards to spring back to glorious life in late winter of their discontent, just as the first-run South Calicackians of privilege begin seasonal shopping for summer retreats and new pants-skirt combinations that better fit.

Hype Men...

...fantasy boosters, eternal dream peddlers. They’re loved up in the sunny Southland -- a mighty local breed. Aggrandizement is not just a privilege reserved for well-paid specialists round here, all become adept at hawking desires after living here long enough, constantly pitching, even if just a toss on the side. (Stay tuned for Les La LA's "USC Football is soooo Dope" pre-Bowl blowout.)

But hype professionals consume entire worlds, flattening formerly enjoyable aspects of everyday-people life, deceiving you into wondering if it is actually better than the original?

The most immediately irritating hype-men are the ones getting on-stage with DJs, promoters selling when the sale’s final, whack MC’s dousing parties right and quickly. Ruining J-Roccc or Egon's sets at Stones Throw, pulverizing a hot-shit Firecracker Anniversary tag-team by Arabian Lover and Egyptian Prince(random WC hip-hop nirvana), or whooping Alpha Tae Omega-like through Kenny Larkin’s mixing board masterpiece in a Glendale warehouse (random LA techno Valhalla). Sprays of inside-baseball shout-outs, verbal floods and rave-stick beacons, when all the stoned soul children wanna do is the rock away, in peaceful musicales ecstasis (or some approximation thereof). But tell ‘em to shut the fuck up and you’re the bad guy.

More consistently insidious are critics pushing local lore to the head of the class. Every Southland industry has ‘em, but bonus plagues upon the local pop boosters and their bottomless inferiority complexi, meek scrubs to the media machinations of the Apple, the sub-cultural absolutists of the Bay, the brain twista salt-of-the-Earth-ians from Windy, every college scene with a decent Cultural Studies thrift store, and, most of all, the Holly Biz nobody beats. (Someone should explore EC-WC rivalries as offshoot of 213’s self-consciousness mental subservience.) By their token, each local undie MC is under-rated by the industry, every freeform digital noise-fest is the next Aphex/electric Miles/Slint, and all the 9pm’ers at Spaceland are better than whoever New York critics are currently getting bandwagon-esque about. All possibly true in individual practice, but never as a rule.

The eternal Southland peddlers helped build the City of Quartz" by selling not just celluloid dreams and sun-out-the-backdoor somedays, but whole infrastructures that supposedly manufacture them. Be willing to play with the machine’s controls, and it just might handover your every wish.