LA County

Some photos I took outside LA County, the facade that was on the cover of Mike Davis's "City of Quartz," the great treatise on and history of Los Angeles. I used to go there occasionally to see a couple friends who got locked up for attempted murder or something. They were actually friends of my friend, but I used to hang out with them until they went to jail. I don't know whatever happened to those guys because my friend got out of the gang he was in (I wrote an article on that for this activist magazine Clamor, who used the incorrect title for the piece and I can't use it for clips because it has the word "fuck" in it... I guess it was a learning experience.) Going to LA County for the first time was pretty surreal as I was standing in line with a bunch of families with little kids who would grow up doing this as a regular thing. Growing up going to visit their dad, brother, cousin or uncle in prison was not a weird thing for them. There were some pretty hardcore dudes in there. I remember seeing this huge Latino dude with a full SUR X3 tattoo on his head and face. The culture of prison in LA makes me think my friends probably didn't make it out of there unscathed, considering they were both pretty young and from a small gang they probably had to do shit in there to survive that would pretty much keep them from living any kind of ordinary life outside of prison. It's pretty f'd up.

Anyhow, for a while I used to look for gang graffiti, which wasn't hard to find, but took a certain eye to decipher the important messages in them, the names and territories, the beef etc. It's weird how the style of writing incorporated itself into other aspects of popular culture: tattoos, graffiti, cheap T-shirts you can buy on Canal Street. I think it's beautifully done when it's on the wall, it only looks like a crude scrawl if you don't know what you're looking at. If you look at it enough you can really see the order of the letterforms and the stylistic rules. Kind of like if you've only ever seen West Coast writing and then go to Philly and see tall hands and whatever. Whatever.