Luigi Ventura

Dito Montiel and Aqeela Sherrills at Occupy L.A.

Woodrow Coleman came all the way from Long Beach to see the Arab Spring bloom in downtown L.A.

The African-American septuagenarian with deep-set brown eyes and a woolly white tangle of beard sports a well-worn baseball cap that suggests he has something money can't buy -- poverty.

"For a change, bring some change," he says, taking a seat on an ice chest. "Make the world a better place for people to live."

A randy redolence of patchouli, B.O., weed and bus exhaust hovers like a storm cloud, feeling more like Manhattan in July than Occupy L.A. in October. The ideological ooze congeals like liquid mercury on the steps of City Hall.

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Sam Slovick in front of his tent at City Hall

Sam Slovick is sleeping down at City Hall to report firsthand on Occupy L.A. For continued coverage, visit SamSlovick.com.

"Mic check, mic check," a voice booms from the PA system in front of City Hall in downtown L.A. I move into a tent on the south lawn outside the Mayor's office as the movement finds legs and the ideological mercury congeals: a clear common voice addressing issues around corporate greed and the banking industry with a plethora of related issues, including the environment, health care and some more localized concerns like police abuse and the Pelican Bay prisoners' strike.

The demonstration has been incredibly peaceful with few exceptions. Beyond the post apocalyptic rave of tribal drums pounding through the night, the predicable chaos is limited on the steps of City Hall. Considerably more focused than widely reported, the embryonic movement is defining itself with specificity.

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Sam Slovick in front of his tent at City Hall

Sam Slovick is sleeping down at City Hall to report firsthand on Occupy L.A. For continued coverage, visit SamSlovick.com.

There are many voices to be heard in the movement. The nightly general assembly meets on the south steps at 7:30pm where wide-ranging ideas and proposals are heard.

The ideas centering around corporate greed, political corruption and the banking industry were probably most succinctly articulated by a 10 year old African-American girl from South L.A. who told me, "The government took our money and we want it back. They took a lot of our rights and we're gonna need those back too."

Poet/actor/activist Michael O'Keefe and wife Emily Donohoe came by my tent. A fixture at Occupy Wall Street, O'Keefe is decidedly articulate on the movement, specifically the cohesion of message, and the potential for the future and the intention behind the mischaracterization of the protesters by the media. O'Keefe was one of the few identifiable faces in the crowd, prompting the question, when will Hollywood Occupy L.A.?

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Luigi Ventura

Abraham Alarcon Jr, Travelle Robertson and Charles Porter

For a podcast of this column, click here.

Travelle Robertson takes no notice of a large black woman in a bright orange T-shirt exhibiting her substantial bare breasts to passing traffic as he walks Gladys Street near Sixth Street downtown. He's numb to the madness -- he'd seen it all by the time he was 9 years old.

Now 19, the smart and charismatic former skid row wild child who raised himself in the nefarious Ford Hotel is revisiting the scene of his boyhood nightmares. He wants to inspect the transformation of the old hotel, now under way by new owners SRO Housing Corp.

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Sam Slovick

Johnny Jackson

Johnny Jackson is an urban Native American. He is clean-cut, well-spoken and looks young for his 21 years. At the moment, he is sitting in a small tent with his mom and sisters, preparing to don his traditional regalia and sing and dance at a powwow in Griffith Park. Cover band Dog Day is blasting "Sweet Home Alabama" on the main stage.

Jackson wears a black Iron Maiden T-shirt and black baseball cap that says "Quechan." He explains: "I'm from the Quechan from Uma Arizona and Laguna Pueblo from Laguna New Mexico tribes." He also is one of hundreds of L.A. urban Native Americans who have shown up for the United American Indian Involvement/Seven Generations' Indian Day community gathering, which includes food, arts and crafts and a health fair.

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Sam Slovick

Erick Moreno, aka Sen, left, with Melinda Isordia, Juan Cenizales, Alex Sanchez, Albert Sanchez and Athena Cuevas

"I could be kicking it in my projects right now," says Albert Sanchez, intermittently making eye contact and shoe-gazing on the patio at La Fonderie, a bronze and steel foundry on Glendale Boulevard in Silver Lake. "I live in Ramona Gardens projects in East L.A."

The 17-year-old with shaved head and mustache wears a giant black T-shirt with an iconic cholo tattoo art-inspired graphic depicting a woman's bifurcated face -- one side alive and seductive, the other an exposed skeletal death mask framed by roses formed from hundred-dollar bills. It is presumably a representation of the extremes of fast and hard street life in feminine form, but he might wear it just because it looks cool.

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Sam Slovick

Mauricio Cruz at California Workers Advocates

Mauricio Cruz doesn't like to talk about himself. He's a gentle person with big, brown eyes, seemingly incapable of malice. "I always tell the truth, so no one can talk behind my back," he offers quietly in a small office on Van Nuys Boulevard.

The 24-year-old documented Nicaraguan immigrant, at 5 feet 8 and 200 pounds, wears Santee Alley designer jeans, a bright blue Southpole T-shirt and white dress shoes. He has deep, unguarded eyes and speaks in a soft, functional English as he talks to his advocate, Mark Volper, a Moscow transplant who runs the California Workers Advocates office in Van Nuys.

"My grandmother taught me that you always need to be good to others, no matter how they're treating you," Cruz says. "If I can help you, I'll be blessed."

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Luigi Ventura

Rome Viharo, founder and CEO of Media Social

Rome Di Giulio arrived at the Ribbit Tree Dojo on Old Topanga Road for the Topanga Film Festival's transmedia workshop in his signature Darth Vader T-shirt and Bermuda shorts. A forward thinker who places no restraints on his creative vision, Di Giulio describes the transmedia genre as "a story ... and a work business."

Known for his boundless energy and limited attention span, Di Giulio is not fixated exclusively on transmedia. He also turns his myopic lens on other interests including Pokémon, as witnessed by his bright yellow Pikachu backpack, and confesses that he is deeply interested in bugs, lizards, flowers and clouds, but is no longer drawn to snakes. Di Giulio, who recently turned 6, is accompanied by his dad, social media guru Rome Viharo, founder and CEO of Media Social. 

Viharo, a self-proclaimed former "hipster douchebag," was on the innovative edge of the music scene in L.A. in the '90s with his band i-SPEAK. The KCRW darlings were a pre-Ozomatli 12-piece who pioneered the infusion of DJ, sequence samples, hip-hop, world music and soul into a live show. After transcending the music biz, Viharo emerged momentarily as an award-winning digital filmmaker before taking another large leap a step ahead of the rest -- making the obvious transition into the social media matrix. 

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Luigi Ventura

Maggie Goodrich

Los Angeles is a capacious megalopolis that begins at Tijuana and ends at San Francisco. A rugged portion of that geography falls under the jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Police Department, serving some 4 million people in the almost 500 square miles of L.A. proper.

From Rodney to Rampart, the world's most highly scrutinized cop shop boasts 13,000 employees, 40 horses, two bloodhounds, 20 German shepherds, two boats and 26 helicopters. The third largest law enforcement entity in the nation is considered by some to be a miracle of modern policing, by others a marauding beast.

Under Police Chief Charlie Beck, who is decidedly more open-minded than his predecessor, William "Cagney" Bratton, LAPD has achieved a 20 percent reduction in total gang crime and a 10 percent reduction in total crime compared with 2010.

Apparently not everyone is celebrating, however. Attacks on cops are up 13 percent, with 273 so far in 2011. Officer-involved shootings have more than doubled to 25, up from 12 during the same period in 2010. One analysis suggests the reduction in crime has come at a bloody cost. The numbers beg the eternal question: Who is policing the police?

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Luigi Ventura

The synchronicity between the opening of MOCA's "Art in the Streets" show and L.A. law enforcement's crackdown on graffiti hasn't gone unnoticed by postmodern cholo and tattooer's apprentice Sal Sanchez.

Recent arrests of street artists Invader, Smear and Revok are on Sanchez's radar. "The city of Los Angeles is cracking down on graffiti artists, sending people to prison and making an example of them for expressing themselves," he says.

Sanchez manages a design/tattoo studio on South Alameda Street, but at the moment he is bumping Scarface in his silver 1979 El Camino all the way to the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. He's going to see "Art in the Streets," billed as the first major U.S. museum survey of graffiti and street art. It traces the trajectory of the genre from the 1970s until today. Part of Sanchez's job involves maintaining two pieces that his mentor, Mr. Cartoon, has in the show.

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Sam Slovick

Precious waits to be adopted.

Precious is such a bitch. The compact young blonde struts the patio inside the iron gates just behind the Modernica furniture factory in downtown's Industrial District.

Precious is subtly clever, looking for vulnerability: She'll push your buttons, then put you in check just to let you know who's in charge. Everybody knows she's the shot caller.

They keep a cautious eye on her, but the only thing in her field of vision is her old man Clancy, a tore-up street fighter with cauliflower ears. He's retired but bears the marks of a violent past. The scars on his head are a lasting remembrance from his days in the blood sport. Just back from a visit to the doctor for a slipped disk, he's a little wobbly, still under the effects of the anesthesia.

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Luigi Ventura

For a podcast of this column, click here.

A man squints in the afternoon sun, taking in a warm breeze on the porch of a meticulously maintained two-story home at the intersection of downtown and South Central. Laughter echoes from the street, an ice cream truck jingles, kids meander home from school. Inside the house, hardwood floors and easy chairs make it the kind of place where an elderly couple could savor the time left in well-planned lives.

"It's a different time," says the man, whom we will call Bill. "Kids are crazier now and radical. They really, really don't care. It's a harder world out here now. I understand it. I see it."

Actually, Bill hasn't seen it with his own eyes for quite a while.

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Luigi Ventura

For a podcast of this column, click here.

Charlie Romero is a small, exotic island just off the east coast of Echo Park, nestled in a sea of tidy bungalows in East L.A.

"I'm a hot mess," Charlie confesses. He's wearing a candy-striped, polyester-blend tank top and capri pants.

The compact three-room home he occupies with his mother is a tightly appointed affair where Charlie has over the last 15 years Houdini'd himself into a Golden Girls-meets-Gary Glitter, glam-rock, gender-bending, multimedia musical performer.

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Sam Slovick

For a podcast of this column, click here.

Carlos is cocooning. The sound resonating inside the pupal casing of his mind is the dull thud of shock. He's been here before, when he was a kid. Now 19, the handsome, young, undocumented Mexican-American is dodging bullets and beat cops again, trying to find a moment's rest while he gets his bearings before taking flight again.

"Last night I had a dream," he says, as he walks the streets of Chinatown at dusk. "I was on a ride going somewhere but not knowing where. I saw my uncle's face, then I was in a place where I seen the earth and a big-ass hole in the earth. In the dream there was a long hallway with a bright light at the end."

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Sam Slovick

Anthony Torres has been collecting memorabilia from Wes Craven's horror series since 1996.

Deep in the far reaches of Montebello, in a secret temple, a young monk arranges sacred objects on the altar with exacting specificity. Each item is invested with hallowed significance and placed in its preordained place.

The sacrosanct enclave, on the second floor of an unassuming apartment building, just around the corner from McDonald's and 7-Eleven, is the manifestation of an evolved devotional practice. Few in the order achieved the level of mastery practiced in Anthony's Temple of Scream.

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Sam Slovick

When Sava D hugs Tim, he feels right at home.

It's another postcard day at Venice Beach, the Washington Square Park of L.A. Aging kooks and crackpots in an eternal time warp freely express themselves like it's 1967. There's a guy in a leopard bikini with the rubber snakes, a dude in a white turban on skates with a guitar and other fixtures, plus a few new twists: medical marijuana dealers, rappers from South L.A. slinging mixtapes to defenseless tourists.

And there are the travelers, a gang of young hippie-chic, urban guerrillas in camo shorts and TJ hoodies with carefully considered, naturally occurring disheveled hairdos that kids in the Palisades drop hot dollars to chemically configure.

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Sam Slovick

Dennis Kimble has been sleeping on the street for eight years.

Molly doesn't seem to mind the torrential downpour across the street from Sun Valley Park on a Sunday morning. The svelte young brunette makes her way down a sidewalk, through a maze of drenched cushions and blankets. She finds some scraps of soggy food and wags her tail. She's part of a small tribe of street sleepers who haunt the blocks around the park.

Huddled under tarps, chilled to the bone in the pounding rain, they are invisible to the steady stream of traffic as local residents run their weekend errands, grocery shopping at the Mercado or buying shoes for the kids at Payless.

Far from the glitz of the Skid Row press darlings in the human zoo of downtown Los Angeles, this lost tribe has no news crews coming to tell the story of hapless people drawn together by a need for survival and community. It's not a place of hope, but there is love.

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Sam Slovick

Linda, Omar, Matt, Tobie, Frank, Richard and Miguel gather to figure out how to subtract government from the equation.

Tobie Castle is one of the last to arrive at Chuco's on Sunday morning. The 17-year-old self-proclaimed socialist/anarchist street punk came from East L.A. to Inglewood with a comrade for the sixth meeting of the Free Association of Anarchists.

He's spring-loaded in a black leather jacket, black boots, jeans and a blue bandanna under a Suicidal Tendencies baseball cap. "If it wasn't for us working-class people, you wouldn't have your schools and prisons and institutions and churches," he says to a comrade. "We are the ones who bleed and sweat to give you a nice building. But do we get a thank you? No! All we get is dirt and pushed."

Chuco's is a temple of revolution, a community center, decorated in graffiti. A small spray-painted poster is almost invisible in the collage of Krylon murals dominating the pale-green cinder-block walls: Justice 4 Oscar G. The fallen comrade's eyes speak out from beyond. The big banner near the ceiling encapsulates the philosophy succinctly: College Prep, Not Prison Prep.

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Guillermo came to L.A. from the village of Soyapango, El Salvador, when he was 4 years old. His belly swollen with parasites, he rode on his uncle's shoulders as they navigated a well-worn trail in the night jungle to avoid the heat. Guided by a rope and a vision, they aimed for El Norte.

Sam Slovick

Guillermo

It hasn't been easy. He spent his adolescence on Skid Row shooting dope and getting arrested 25 times (his estimate) by the time he was 25. But he's married now and lives in a small house with a dirt yard deep in the Valley. He has a steady job at a nonprofit clinic, five kids, five dogs, two parrots, two turtles, some chickens, a rooster and a couple ducks.

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Sam Slovick

Rick Ross at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica

The wad of crumpled $20 bills stashed under Ollie North's pillow had Freeway Rick Ross' fingerprints all over it when the CIA got caught slanging rocks in South Central back in the '80s. Grimy, crumpled and smeared with ghetto tears, the deal bought Freeway Rick a very public trial. His drug-trafficking sentence went from life to 20 years after he took the lead prosecutor over his knee in open court and spanked him with his own law book. Although the CIA connection has never been proved, the story surfaces in a biopic about Ross that Nick Cassavetes wrote and will direct. Ross has the new draft of the script in his pocket on this day, which might be why he's laughing.

Ross is on the freeway heading north toward Santa Monica from LAX. He is just back from Philly with the sniffles, and the sparkle in his eye is the maniacal megalomania that drives kings of industry and heads of state. The former undisputed Donald Trump of crack is deceptively understated in a black hoodie, cap and jeans, with the meticulously maintained beard of a Fortune 500 CEO. Back in the day he was annually banking a sum that would equal $3 billion in today's money.

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