About, but not limited to, Van Nuys, CA.
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At the same time that they are ripping out the soul of Studio City with uninspired, grotesque condom-iniums, they have also removed the sign that stood here since 1944.
Kids are cruel. Growing up in Chicagoland we used to tease the one fat kid in our school. The one who couldn’t run as fast, or who was out of breath just running up to the cafeteria line.
I thought about that yesterday when I was at the Getty. There were groups of schools at the museum, and as I stood looking at dozens of boys and girls walking, I realized that perhaps 8 out of 10 of them were overweight. Granted, many of the kids had names like Hector, Arturo and Roberto and the last names were Martinez, Gomez, Elizando. And inevitably I associated higher weights with lower incomes.
But I know 11 and 12 year old kids, in Beverly Hills and on the Upper West Side of New York who are really fat. They are children whose parents have incomes (or so they say) in the six or seven figures. Just what exactly do these children do daily that turns them into fatties?
Could it be:
1. Sitting in front of the Internet for hours?
2. Watching TV for hours?
3. Being chauffered in a car instead of biking or walking?
4. Eating every meal in a restaurant with huge portions and salty food?
When every kid is fat, suddenly it won’t seen abnormal for a 10-year-old to weigh 160 lbs. Just like it isn’t strange anymore to see 250 lb. women with tattoos who wear low cut jeans and flip-flops. The grotesque becomes commonplace and accepted.
But nobody is teased anymore. They just get diabetes.
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The sickening killing of 57-year-old Maria Hicks of Pico Rivera, who had the audacity to tag a tagger after he defaced a wall, and then was shot to death by his accomplices, has brought forth a new round of condemnation against these vandals. Larry Mantle, of KPCC, even had a show yesterday devoted to the topic, which brought in many calls from people angry about property destruction.
There seems to be a lot of amateur analysis (including this piece) about grafitti, replete with the usual lamenting of gangs, bad schools, bad parenting, bad diet, etc. But when people are randomly killed in L.A., almost anything could have provoked it. Just last week, a man crossing White Oak Avenue in Reseda was deliberately run down and murdered after he yelled at a speeding driver. Parking lot arguments, switching lanes on the freeway, flirting with the wrong woman, coming out of the wrong nightclub, attending a party in East L.A., fixing your flat tire in the Sepulveda Pass at 1 am….these are some killings that come to mind.
We have lots more murder in the US because we have lots more guns. It’s as simple as that. We can talk about making kids read the Bible, but the most murderous states and neighborhoods are often the most churchgoing. We have one political party which calls itself “right to life” based on its strict adherence to no gun control whatsoever and its unflagging support for an unjustified war.
Yes, I hate tagging and wish it would stop. I propose that we create a law that fines every convicted tagger $10,000 and suspends their driver’s licenses for life.
After we enact that law do you think we will see any reduction in the violence? Nope.
3 held in graffiti-linked slaying of grandmother
By Andrew Blankstein
Times Staff Writer
11:30 AM PDT, August 15, 2007
Sheriff’s deputies today arrested three people in connection with the death of a 57-year-old grandmother who was shot after confronting a man tagging a wall in Pico Rivera, a case that has sparked widespread anger.
Maria Hicks died Monday from a gunshot wound to the head that she suffered after a confrontation Friday night.
Hicks was driving home near the intersection of San Gabriel River Parkway and Woodford Street when she noticed a young man tagging a wall, sheriff’s officials said. She flashed her lights and honked her horn at the suspected tagger, who began walking away.
Hicks continued to follow him, sheriff’s officials said, and two people in a silver compact car drove up behind her and fired several shots through her back window, gravely wounding her.
She died three days later. The case was sparked outrage in Pico Rivera and beyond.
Sheriff’s homicide detectives arrested Cesar Lopez, 19, of Pico Rivera, who is being held without bail after being charged with murder.
Jennifer Tafoya, 19, of Pico Rivera and a 16-year-old boy whose identity was withheld because he is a juvenile were arrested on probation violations.
Sheriff’s detectives said they also were looking for two men in their late teens, and were trying to find the car used in the shooting, described as a blue Lincoln Continental.
Responding to a surge in graffiti, Los Angeles County prosecutors, Caltrans and the California Highway Patrol are teaming up to target what officials say has become the prime canvas for taggers: freeways. Prosecutors have lowered the amount of monetary damages that must be committed by a tagger to warrant felony charges, saying the change will make it easier to prosecute vandals.
At the same time, the CHP and the Los Angeles Police Department are staking out freeways frequented by taggers, hoping to catch them in the act.
Los Angeles cleanup crews removed 27 million square feet of graffiti last year, up from 21 million square feet in 2005, officials said. In other areas of Los Angeles County, 13 million square feet of walls and other surfaces were cleaned, 4 million more than in the previous year, county public works records show.
Sheriff’s homicide detectives asked that anyone with information about the slaying to call 323-890-5500.
andrew.blankstein@latimes.com
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You can sometimes look at a street the way a biologist might look at a tree and carbon date its birth and decline. It seems that Victory Blvd. was last built up around 1965. There are almost no new structures from Kester to Hazeltine that have been erected since Lyndon Johnson was in office.
Victory Blvd. has enormous cobra style street lights, the kind that were au courant in the late 1950s. There are hardly any trees, and the wide sidewalks and black asphalt bake in the 100 degree heat.
Enterprising small business owners seem to be doing a brisk business despite the homely surroundings. What Victory needs here is the center landscaped median and decorative lampposts. Like they have down in Studio City and Sherman Oaks along Ventura.
You cannot tell me that people in this part of town lack motivation. They work a lot harder than the poseurs who frequent the coffee bars along Ventura Blvd. What they lack is a city without a civic bone in its body.
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Here in Van Nuys 
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