[4 our younger audience http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam-12 ]
Ian
You lost me. Wojtek
I think that was the point - be cryptic, impress yourself. Doug
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I think I can flesh this out. Jack Webb was a fascist, but he had a great fascist flaw. He loved the documentary so much he gave it public police dramas that actually performed almost nearly opposite of what he intended, a critique of the LAPD.
Dragnet and 1 Adam 12 were some of my favorite TV because they came close to the actual LAPD, my enemy number one as a kid and student.
It is very hard to explain the horrific LAPD and its role in urban war against the poor, the young, the discontent. Jack Webb did his best to justify their true assholia. Dumb ass white kids just as from the white poor and down and out world turned against the vast urban landscape of LA where the blacks, chicanos, chinese and koreans work and live and struggle with and against the city establishment. A world of contest and death and destruction every bit as dark and ugly as The Wire did Baltimore.
This is the urban novel.
The novel that Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Zola might write but never knew. This is the stuff of Crane, Sinclair, Steinbeck, Hemingway, of Stallone, Orwell, of the Italian realists, the world I truly wish I could formulate out of the blood and guts of my life.
I watched Cairo as if it was LA, because it resembles LA in its vast spawl and incommensurate worlds...what if it had happened here? Sure I was dreaming. But I knew a vast city once upon a time as a boy... there is no describing what this is like... Guadalajara and Los Angles wondering around in a universal city, completely vulnerable to its forces and miracle, surviving them---by statistical probability. It leaves a stunning impression on the mind for a lifetime of speculation. We have the ridiculous Profiles in Courage. Where was the boy or girl who did the household errands for mother in the vast urban landscapes of the earth?
CG