Bandagon
Whoa? Why do I feel the need to probe this story like an open sore? Stigmata. The cold weather here in Chicago has brought on that old Los Angelophilia on. The Black Dalhia was boring, revisionist stuff. About what you would expect from another ugly Ellroy mood piece under Brian De Palma's weak direction. The murder itself remains unsolved, the stuff of southlandish wintertime wetdreams, not certianly any hard modern cold case work to speak of. No chance here dispite a young and earnest cast, you can still get lost up in those hills at night.
Bastards of the Party is a far more interesting film, documenting as it does, one of the street oral histories from the Westwood massacre of the LA Black Panther Party stalwarts in 1969 by the FBI and LAPD and through the heyday of black gangbanging in South Central and beyond to the modern GOPrision Utopia they have out there today. I remember that I was going into the tenth grade at San Pedro H.S. that year but the teachers had other ideas and struck a week or so into the new semester, putting hundreds of thousands of kids back out on the streets for nearly a month. That's when things really started to get strange. Public employees going on on strike? The pigs had another of their famous field days. Sleepy lagoon all over again.
I was ordered to report back to class or risk failure but refused to, and remained out until the teachers won a settlement that included amnesty for student strikers like me and my pal Frank Sanders. I went back and finished the school year and was rewarded with a plane ticket to Chicago and radchic immortality. Frank never came back to finish his third year but joined Junior Whaley in the Marines since June last, and they went to Viet Nam. And Steve Pratte married Gerry Rowden, twice. All of us made it through alive, but Dave Hanlon who lost without Frank, drifted into biker craziness and was stabbed to death over a stolen stereo set, the next winter along. Hell's Angels '69 was the last show we all saw together.That kind of stuff, goes on today everywhere, the universe doesn't care about our problems.
 Pigasus the Immortal under CPD arrest
10:15:40 AM 
|
|
