On Monday, October 3, 2016 I went for a midday walk around the Van Nuys Civic Center.
I carried my Fujifilm XE-2 with a wide angle 16mm lens.
I was just documenting the surroundings, a habit of mine.
The photographs are in black and white, the buildings are stark, the plazas empty, the sun and shadows stark, clear and sharp.
That was the autumn when Mr. Trump was running against Mrs. Clinton.
Cue the ominous music.
These are the buildings and the places where the people who hold authority, work overseeing or not overseeing our governance. The police, the council person and her minions, the regulators of health, safety, zoning; the judiciary who rule upon us and judge whether we are lawbreakers or innocents; they are all found in these blank, lifeless blocks of flat roofed offices.
All around there is parking, more than enough parking for people who no longer need to work here. Many of the multi-story concrete structures were empty in 2016, now they are even emptier. The post office is closed. The James C Corman Federal Building is empty. The library is always closed, though I don’t know if it is officially closed, perhaps a judge will issue an order on the legal status of the library.
Nearby, depending on the hour or the day, there will appear tents, shopping carts of trash, improvised portable slums. Now they are up on the Orange Line at Kester. They are taken down, cleared away, and then grow up somewhere else, in the park, on the sidewalk, next door to your home.
The Civic Center seen up close is a place of repressive, mute, inhuman architecture, a conglomeration of concrete, strips of windows, grandly monotonous. It is a bitter irony that hundreds of millions of dollars built these edifices only to have no humanizing or civilizing effect upon the lives of the citizens of Van Nuys.
From these structures, we are sent motorized birds to fly overhead at all hours, patronized by politicians spouting identarian nonsense, paying homage to the oppressed while doing all the oppression by doing nothing. Secret recordings of one of the elected leaders who once reigned over us, Former Councilwoman #6 Nury Martinez, revealed her low-class judgment, predicated on ethnic power trading. No wonder nobody of any ethnicity can build housing, keep the streets safe, clean up the garbage, the illegal dumping or stop the cars that speed six at a time through red lights.
In all these buildings surely there must be an architectural dreamer who can summon the wealthiest Angelenos as Mr. Biden did last week. Invites should go out to those who have access to power and money: Julia Roberts, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Jennifer Anniston, and Rick Caruso. Chauffeur them 20 minutes, from Bel Air to Van Nuys. Here they can announce a grand scheme to reconstruct a civil, humane community of affordable apartments and lively shops, restaurants and parks to replace the gulag of grossness we now have in the heart of this district.
But this is just fantasy. Who ever heard of a celebrity with friends caring about the conditions of her city? It’s almost as unimaginable as UCLA and USC students protesting against homelessness, violence and poverty in the city of Los Angeles.
Here in Van Nuys 
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