222

Since January 2008 there have been 222 homicides in LA county.



I’m not sure what to do about it, but I can’t stop thinking about it. It started when I came across the LA times Homicide Report (blog). For over a year reporter Jill Leovy and Rueben Vives had a simple and horrendous task, to document every homicide in LA county online. Its seems crazy that newspapers didn’t have do this before, but Leovy points out in a Zocolo podcast that the implied conventional wisdom is that as long as the majority of homicides occur in “high-homicide enclaves”, minimal effort and resources will be allocated by the state to solve this horrendous problem. You begin to realize that this has been going on for years, reading the blog and comments from friends, family and yes... rival gangs and enemies begins to give you an idea of how sheltered we have become.

I’m not sure how to fix it, but reading about it everyday has brings up more questions than it answers. My only response is to attempt to write a piece about it. Which for me brings up the immediate question, how can you do that without people running out the door. All I know is that probably no matter how hard I try its going to be seen as polemic.

The music is done, music and text based on a harmonic deconstruction of Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary. What better than “borrowing” music from one of the most famous funerals of a British Monarch (1694), to honor those whose brutal deaths who continue to go unnoticed.