Back it up...

Hmmm... Sideways? but you get the idea...

Let's pretend I'm still in L.A. for a second (even though that was so 3 days ago). It's a glorious sunny day after a rainy one, so visibility is fantastic. And I decide to walk down (straight down) Lakeshore Ave, then Baxter where I find a porch full of parrot cages complete with talking parrots (HI YA! HIYAYAYAYAYA! HEY! PRETTY! PRETTYPRETTY! HI YA!), down Echo Park, down Sunset Blvd, then over to Grand and then down to the MOCA to see the Weegee show "Naked in Hollywood." Nearly the whole time this vodka blimp is following me. I first noticed it way back by the Echo Park Time Travel Mart (Wherever you go we're already there!), and it stayed right with me the rest of the way. I thought to myself, "Funny..."

Anyway, Weegee show- Excellent. I especially liked his assertion that if you put "naked" in front of any word people will pay attention. But what was especially exciting to me was the way that Weegee played with images of sexuality and debauchery with satyrical depth. Some of my favorite images were from the Hollywood drunk tanks, where men were just piled up, as if they had opened the door and just dropped them in. "Drunks provide endless material for me," the caption read. Though I thought the modified images of women and movie stars were interesting, the more documentary and casual pictures of crowds and off-duty strippers made me think that these were the anti-heroes to the photographs of Dorthea Lange. And I love anti-heroes. Especially ones with nice legs and feathered headdresses.

Weegee kept a complete darkroom in the trunk of his car. This is a lifelong dream of mine. Even though I now realize you can have all those capabilities with a cell-phone, there's something a lot more romantic about a trunk full of chemicals. I also am very fond of his stamp...

But back to the blimp. Even without trick photography there is a lot of magic in the world. Certainly in L.A., anyway.