Column: Is that graffiti or art? How LA draws the lines
LOS ANGELES -- Some acquaintances from Ireland were in town, and we were having lunch in their 20th-floor downtown hotel suite. I was being an armchair tour guide — out the windows, there's L.A. Live, and back behind those skyscrapers, City Hall, by fiat once our tallest building.
One of them pointed and said, "What's THAT?"
I didn't even have to look.
"THAT" is Oceanwide Plaza, the Chinese-owned skyscraper project, dead in the water and half-finished for five years, its floors like unfrosted cake layers, inviting trespass and vandalism and all that vivid graffiti frosting. Any nimble-bodied person with sturdy legs and maybe a bail bondsman's phone number could make the climb to join in turning the building into L.A.'s largest, brashest outdoor look-at-me canvas — like that Norman Mailer book title says, "Advertisements for Myself."
Hard to make all of that make sense to the Irish visitors. But it's L.A. in a nutshell.
Yes, we hate it, yes we love it, and yes, as is our habit, we let time mosey on by as we futz around over what to do.
This city, supposedly
