@boikoda said: Quite a few Turks, too.

Yeah the music publishing guy who ran the webcast where I saw Lisa Loeb promo her summer camp album (when in reaction to online eating revenues labels introduced 360 deals and publishers were focusing on placement in commercials and vidya as their angle) was Turkish, and you’d see a few occasional flags but not much of a collective community presence.

I do wonder how much of that was the Armenians already loudly owning the local public expression re: Turks with “fuck them”. On Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day you’d see young Armenian men dragging leased BMW 3-Series up and down between Hollywood and Hillhurst blasting System of a Down and glaring out the window about the Turks with Armenian flags at the corner of their bumpers.

God help me but the whole Armenian thing I saw in LA (at one point Little Armenia, but these days it’s like Little Armenia:Little Italy::Glendale:New Jersey), down to how in the 21st century it leans hard into wounded victimhood, really came off as a Borat-level satire of nationalism, especially when the rest of their public-facing culture is the same pastries and tiny coffee and hookah and spiced chicken and mint leaves as everyone else

Oh , crystal chandeliers, they were known for that too, as a lace-curtain thing ranked between a display case of Hummel figurines and those huge columns out front, full mirrored wall, gilt everything “Persian Palaces”

Man, kinda nice to recall and unlimber all my LA stuff, I was still me back then so I picked up all sorts of senses of things.

At one point I figured out what all the bodies in Greater LA that had police powers were and how many men under arms they had and that included like, the Federal Protective Service in charge of a few downtown buildings and these colleges with their own forces, and the SPCA apparently? And then there was like this locals only-type environmental preservation nonprofit with rich donors in the mountains west by the ocean that absolutely did not have police power but used it anyway, like some sort of Catholic schism over the monopoly on force.