Movies from Los Angeles, 2006-2007

Dec 6, 2007: Välkommen tillbaka, Tuuli, Marko, Rosa och Liina! It's almost Christmas time, in Darlene Love's Old LA, but it's xmas also in Helsinki. Hope you had fun in SoCal! Vi ses i Hfors!

12.11.07 (18MB): This is for Tuuli, Marko, Roosa and Liina: It never rains in Southern California.

This is for myself. Okay, this is not from LA, but from San Francisco. Pictures are from a quicktime movie sent to me by Dr. Lutz Abe. I added music, and took away pictures of his family and friends at the end. But since this town is so morvellous, I wanted to keep this as memory. I fugure few people come to this page anyway.

Four minutes of L.A. with "Perdido" by Ellington. - This is my interpretation of that great town: swing, sunshine, wonderful architecture if you knew what to search for, ethnic neighborhoods, terrible traffic problems, and mind-blowing social differences. And, although it is the capital of bad taste (see the Christmas shots after ca. 3 minutes and the Rose Parade float shots...), then again, L.A. has some of the best experimental design, art and architechure in the world. My Swedish, particularly perceptive friend noted after seeing my L.A. shots in Flickr that L.A. seems to be simultaneously one of the most fascinating and colorful, but also scary and contrasted (sic) places in the world. Coda (Sept 17, 2007): When I watched this video at the end of Summer 2007, with no fresh memories of the town anymore, I started to see just how much LA felt like a different world in which many things we take self-evident are upside down. In particular, when I saw the "carneval" episode -- as I call picture sequence from Halloween, Christmas and Rose Parade -- I just laughed in disbelief. I got a far better insight into my friend's note.

From Hollywood Hills with Bob Seger. The final collage is impressive - not because of the camera movement, but because of L.A.: in how many cities on earth you can see the globe's round shape by watching the sea of lights in the horizon?

Experimenting with Nirvana, LA and rock video style. Works better then the London experiment above.

Experimenting with Bob Seger and L.A. Freeways. Lores. - Actually, I hated the freeways. the story behind this one is simple. The only way to make them decent was to listen to Seger, Randy Newman, Harry Chapin and, oddly enough, rap: rappers are the best storytellers today, in the same order with Chapin and Newman in fact.

California, Beaches: Central Coast (Morro), Pacifica, Big Sur, Malibu, O.C. - Without beaches, L.A. would be intolerable. With them, it is one of the great places on earth. OK, food is far worse, prices are higher, and life style is far less enjoyable, ut still, think about living in a city in which it takes an hour's drive to get to what is the closest analogy to a beach town on the Mediterranean. Keep in mind: these pictures are from SoCal's winter. (And I would have gone into surfing, had I been born in California: it's obviously a great & fascinating sport.

Christmas Card from L.A. with Disney Choir. - A cliché, for sure, but maybe not in L.A.