pawn store

It's becoming increasingly the case that I drive through Los Angeles with a camera riding shotgun beside me, ready to be picked up at traffic lights or when just generally stuck in a line of cars.   This is what I saw coming back down Santa Monica from a Saturday morning trip to Whole Foods (nb: if one goes to a WF in a predominantly Jewish area on a Saturday morning in the middle of the Jewish holidays, it's a delightfully tranquil shopping experience).   It doesn't quite fulfill our strange hobby of cruising the streets looking for signs of the recession - I haven't fully looked back from the RU class two years ago when "how does one photograph the economic downturn?" became something of a running theme - but note not just the people waiting for the Pawn Shop to open (well, maybe that's what the girls are doing, anyway), but the bricked in windows, as if imitating the effects of the late C18th window tax in Britain.   What I like best is the yellow building: there's a wholesale import, in very many areas, of the central and south American habit of painting houses very bright colors, which enormously cheers up even a very tatty section of the street, like this one.