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Old Posted Mar 21, 2011, 7:14 PM
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GaylordWilshire GaylordWilshire is offline
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Speaking of Roller Skates...

Paramount Pictures Corporation


Great post, Beaudry. Love that video. I am reminded of what I think is one of the great predictive (sociologically speaking) and perhaps undersung films about youthful rebellion
and alienation amid the urban decay of the '60s: Lady In a Cage, 1964. The scene above is near the beginning...a little girl tries to wake a bum lying on the sidewalk. Or is he dead?
She's not really concerned either way. (I posted shots of the movie a while ago--it's full of a certain rage, perhaps the kind that has more to do with economic deprivation than
suburban angst, but a very interesting view of collapsing residential central L.A. 30 years before the riots. It's shot on location in what appears to have been still fairly nice Pico-Union.)


Quote:
Originally Posted by Beaudry View Post
Though we thread through the City of Angels four, five, six score behind us, there's something about LA in recent memory--unbelievably now largely lost--that's oddly beguiling. (Cf. recent posts about the Olympic, and Wall of Voodoo, and the Starwood.) Those of us whose sun has passed its midpoint think wistfully upon our youth but somehow it's not all wisteria & red tile. Nesmith's Cruisin' remains one of the most accurate depictions of early-80s LA:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRWTz3zY1WY

Ah, SoCal of my childhood. The culture portrayed: avowed reason to become punk rock and destroy stuff. But were we not anarcho-hedonistic brethren, against The Man? Never ceases to amuse when the good folk of to-day wring their hands over modern youth, who are noticeably bereft of Us v. Them v. Them. Whatever: in the greater pantheon of Old LA and its music, this may be its Zeus.

The SoCal culture depicted there kind of portrays everything punks became punks fer. (Apart from the sociological argument, being punk-rock was just about being smart kids with irresponsible parents.)

A passage that really sums up noirish LA as it existed in the early 80s -- there's something ineffable about his inflection on "buses". In this vid http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6u43zoZ2Zs Eugene defines (here's a rough transliteration) the LA experience at 1:26:

PS: What's the pent-up aggression, where's that come from?

Eugene: Well with me it just comes from like, living in the city and just seein' everything, seeing all the ugly old people, 'n just the fuckin', the buses, and just the dirt, that's what I see all the time -- all the time, I'm just fuckin' bummed, from just thinkin' about that. So, when I go there, I just, sometimes I can get out some aggression, maybe, by beatin' up some asshole.
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