INTRODUCTION TO LOS ANGELES GALLERY

My family moved from Texas to the San Fernando Valley when I was a small boy around the time Bobby Kennedy was killed in downtown LA and Charles Manson’s “family” went on a murderous rampage on Mulholland Drive. My dad made the daily commute in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405 to Wilshire Blvd and back. LA’s a city only navigable by car where frustration’s spill out into its choked streets. When I grew up there, the smog made you cough after physical exertions, but the air is now infinitely cleaner though I’m not sure what else has truly changed for the better. Los Angeles is a city whose largess—which requires cars--defies definition, yet the culture of Hollywood permeates life and culture. Hollywood is what makes LA unique with its emphasis on superficiality, a glitzy patina laid over ordinariness that you can’t find anywhere else. It’s an amorphous beast: place of wondrous diversity and contradictions beauty in small broken up pieces scattered throughout mundane scenes of tract homes and strip malls. Tourists in search of more than just sunshine, Latinxs hustling to make a living selling food and drink on the street corners, and everyone else in between just living. LA is a desert-city sustained only by water from the Colorado River and Northern California, but by far California’s largest city.