LOS ANGELES SKID ROW

December 2013. Any day. 10 pm. Christmas lights, Art Walk, galleries and fun; hipster crowds packing hip restaurants in downtown LA. You ask the forces that (wanna) be in the city: urban developers, politicians, yuppies, up and coming financiers and techies, pretend artists and even some real ones, and you'll hear about how LA's downtown is booming; it's a new era; it's more and more like NY. Los Angeles is rebirthing, finally arriving as a first-rate, modern, urban (not suburbialized and parochially self-centered mid-American city). Cool. Yet, just one block off Main Street, across Los Angeles Street, one runs into a darkness and bleakness that seems to me a mixture of Soviet deprivation, Third World poverty and American social neglect. Tent "neighborhoods" on the sidewalks compete for space with rampant trash, meandering and sleeping men, small circles of either companions in disgrace or looting drunkards, depending on the perspective of the on-looker, rats venture boastfully on the dim streets and retreat back into their holes when cars approach. Never seen such misery in my life. Anywhere. It's something plucked out of a maddening future of inequity and glass walls separating the haves from the have nots. We don't need to travel across continents to offer development aid. Heck, all we gotta do is cross a city block. The contrast is dumbfounding: Main Street, fluid traffic, people dining outside restaurants, shinny lights hanging across the street, groups of young professionals laughing, catching up on the latest app and walking to the next trendy bar... One block over, lights go down, cars disappear-save the occasional vehicle lost in the wrong turn-small tents pop up like mushrooms on the sidewalks, men crawl next to crevices on the wall to spend the night, crap in all textures and volumes floods the pavement, trash containers bursting at the hinges, rats cross the streets like hurried petit-burgeoises on their way to the office, police cars drive by slowly or stand on corners watching that the misery does not become unruly... What's one to do? To think? To feel?