(08/10/05) Misc. South Central Vid

Still working on the rest of the S.Central and Crenshaw vids. I'm trying to put more up later tonight.

Click Pic to Watch These Kids in South Central

Here is a miscellaneous minute that Autumn shot of some kids in South Central.

I didn't edit it at all - just swiped it from her tape. I like it though.

In case it's not obvious, the hand signals they're making are gang signs. It brings up an ongoing theme of that day - about how dangerous the place really might be or if people were just enjoying trying to scare me based on the obvious folklore of fear that surrounds those neighborhoods.

Because they were kids, it's easy to think they were just having fun fooling around and showing off. But that guy on the bike with the hat you see me talking to in the video - he was in the middle of telling me that I had to watch out for kids that age because they were most likely to be in gangs and had the least to lose when committing crimes because their young age makes them relatively unpunishable.

That guy also told me I was in a particularly bad neighborhood of South Central. That he's more than once caught paedophiles on that block. That a girl recently got caught in the cross-fire of gang shootings and died just half a block away.

I have a friend who lived in South Central for five years. He told me that this stretch of South Central was a pretty good one to go to and that it is, in his experience, safe.

I'm pretty sure these kids turned a switch on my DV cam that turned the mic off and hence my sound issues. I guess I was an easy target.

I felt stupid sometimes. Naive. Being there, walking around with the stroller-rig. No matter what is truth or fiction about the place, I felt the density of the social politics that surround it. I felt naive because in the innocence of my project I might have been unaware of how strong barriers to connecting and seeing what's real can be - no matter what your intentions. And that it can be simplistic to think they can be transcended so easily.

Comments

[Vachelle]

Having been a resident of South L.A. for several years I can attest to both sides to the coin. It can be dangerous if you are not careful of random experiences. Bad things do happen and it happens there a lot. But that holds forth in any area that is generally poverty-stricken.

I chalk it up to a type of deliberate underdevelopment of this segment of American society. Desperate people do desperate things.

As you know, Skid Row downtown also has a rep for being full of danger and the truth is, it's not, really (remember?). But the popular perception is that poor people turn evil due to their circumstances and that's not wholly true.

When a large group is treated with disdain and forced to fend off societal attacks or mistreatment the natural response is to strike back. Unfortunately, this state of mass depression tends to implode upon itself and cause those unfortunates to become self-hating and self-destructive and self-perpetuating in their pain.

And since gangs are rife with ignorance, hatred, and ammo(!) and are primarily youth it spells trouble with a capital T!

But good people are also there. They tend to be less obvious because they blend into society better.

Just one man's opinion...

[estevan carlos benson]

Cute kids.

[roxy]

hi