Friday, May 10, 2013

Police Terror Of The Future

The sky, very similar to the background.
Via L.A. Observed:
KCRW producer Matt Holzman embedded with cops in the LAPD Air Support unit to see what it's like in the helicopters that patrol Los Angeles skies.
If he could drive home, whether to NPR guy hep urban pad or suburbia, it is not "embedding." A day or two hanging at the helipad & a couple of fly-alongs while the ossifers mostly ignore you &/or try to be on their best behavior is not like racing to Baghdad in a truck full of hopped-up jarheadsgyrenes, you hyperbolic drone.

Now then. Are we as blind/stupid as ever, or have the SoundCloud clowns given us a player w/o a volume control? (It's the accumulation of these little things that drives some to anti-social acts, you know.)ADDED AGGRAVATION: If the fucking thing isn't playing here (IT DIDN"T FOR US, & THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT WE MEAN BY "ACCUMULATION OF LITTLE THINGS," BY THE FUCKING WAY.) click through to listen, & leave a nasty note for SoundCloud about cross-platform something usability blah.

And mere secs. later: We must admit they (whoever they may be) are geniuses, because now the damn thing plays, & we, having added a now-useless paragraph (& this one) are about to boil over w/ rage.

2 comments:

Substance McGravitas said...

The point is to frustrate you in EVERY way, and if that requires it to work perfectly sometimes, so be it.

The tension is a killer.

Glennis said...

No kidding, my introduction to LA, when we moved here in 1996, driving down from Seattle, was police helicopters circling over the sleazy motel we had booked into.

We had arranged for a short-term apartment rental, but for some odd reason we couldn't occupy it for maybe two or three days, so we booked a motel in Westwood near UCLA. At the end of a 10 hour drive from Oregon, we checked in and found that the place was filthy, and as we tried to sleep, suddenly there were police helicopters circling loudly overhead. What an intro!

We ended up calling a friend and it turned out he was traveling out of the country and let us housesit his place in Brentwood for a couple of weeks. As much as I love LA now, I'll never forget the association between a moldy motel refrigerator and the thumping of propellors outside the window.