return to skid row: james ferraro's wild ride a decade on

“skid row started as a collection of poems, it came first as words, then grew into becoming the lyrics of skid row… i was writing about the state of the world around me, living on what feels like the brink of societal collapse while also seeing high excess everywhere. all the sounds of the streets crept in, the blood and tears on the street, the echoing sirens in the early morning fog, soaked into the poetry and it became evident that la is a hyper america.”

- james ferraro 

“although city leaders periodically essay schemes for removing indigents en masse… such ‘final solutions’ have been blocked by council members fearful of the displacement of the homeless into their districts. instead the city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of urban cold war, promotes the ‘containment’ (official term) of the homeless in skid row along fifth street east of the broadway, systematically transforming the neighbourhood into an outdoor poorhouse.” 

– mike davis

“you live in a dumpster?”

 – bart simpson

los angeles, 500 square miles in the golden state of california condensed into a triptych of plastic palm tree orchards and syringe-bathed sidewalks, crowned with a bullet-riddled HOLLYWOOD sign, which when folded in reveals a poster of william friedkin’s 1995 thriller to live and die in LA. a zone that balances between the fault lines of its own mythology and fate. a dizzying mural where stars are born through self-mutilation, and snuffed out by an overdose. 

yet there’s something so familiar and even human in this rather extreme over-saturation of tragedy, success, and the faustian spirit. ferraro has always had this incredible ability to weave conceptual opposites into a singular confrontation that sinks us into the present state of affairs, and on “skid row” he dresses up this marriage of two conflicts in the context of the history and hype of LA. 

read the full article at listencorp