Hayley Fox

From Jesse Villanueva's new front door, he can see the mountain of dirt where his family home of almost 25 years once stood. Construction workers in bright orange reflective vests and yellow hard hats move beneath him, combing the land that 49 Echo Park families used to call home.

Villanueva's house is gone and in its spot will be the main structure to a new elementary school, known temporarily as Central Region #14.

Liz Garo carefully arranges flowers on a table, gazing peacefully into space and reveling in a moment of peace. Behind her, bottles clank together and chairs scrape against the floor, a faint smell of leather and stale beer hangs in the air. In front of Garo, the electrical crew hangs lights, arranges yards of cable, and performs repeated sound checks, blasting music through the club's speakers. She is at home.

Part Time Punks is a group of record buffs and prominent DJ's that host a resident music night every Sunday at The Echo in Echo Park. On October 11, Part Time Punks' hosts a 12 hour music festival that gathers all walks of artists, musicians, actors, writers,and those struggling to be them. These are the new, the gentrifying, faces of Echo Park:

These are the people who never get a vacation. There are no paid sick days and no law mandated breaks. Their offices have no air conditioning and no cushioned chairs. In Echo Park, the street vendors and the friends and family who keep them company, preserve the tradition and soul of this rapidly changing neighborhood. 

In Los Angeles, it is rare to even find a place fit to call a "neighborhood". This maze of people and cultures is thinly connected by freeways and disconnected by an often isolating city landscape and isolationist society. In Echo Park, even as the demographic changes with the influx of young, hip artists, the history of this rich area downtown adjacent, is maintained by its community that has been here the longest.          
                                                                                  
Making huaraches, blue corn masa creations resembling quesadillas, this food is delicious and good for the soul. Squash blossoms, huitlacoche (corn mold), and fiery homemade salsas fill these gooey creations. As your paper plate sags under the weight of the hefty huarache, there is nothing left to do but stand on the curb and start eating.                       
                                                                                

Reluctantly smiling for the camera, he sits next to his shopping cart of flower arrangements. This man has prime seating beneath the shade of an expansive tree growing out of the sidewalk. To his right, a woman making fresh squeezed orange juice.To her right, a cart of  fruit that's perpetually in season. Cantalopue, watermelon, coconut and oranges, doused in lime juice and chili powder. Served up in a sturdy plastic bag with a complimentary fork. (pictured below)

 From afar, this man's face and entire body is completely shrouded in balloons and inflatable toys. All that can be seen is a mass of floating colors and shapes. Making laps around Echo Park lake and up Echo Park Ave., he is an overwhelming favorite with local children on Saturday mornings. (pictured above)

Peeking out the back room of the local dry cleaners, this boy watched intently as cars and foot traffic passed by. The steamy, humid air of the cleaners and the whirring of industrial machines seemed to do nothing to distract him. Later in the afternoon, a truck selling churros and champurrado (hot chocolate made from masa), would be parked right outside his window.

The Echo Park lake is home to the area's other longest-abiding residents.Turtles, geese, and birds of all kind, have made their home lakeside. The Echo Park lake is planned to be drained completely in the upcoming year to help cleanse the water of a growing number of pollutants. This flock of birds would make choreographed flying circles around the north side of the lake. A woman was throwing bread crumbs, causing the pigeons to gather and graze, and then take off with a group flutter.

Carefully arranging the cushion on his make-shift shoe shine booth, this man sets up shop by these telephone booths every day. Parked on the side of the street, a mere few feet away, is a mobile shoe repair service. Fixing footwear out of the back of a mini-van, complete with portable machines and hand-drawn side, it is unclear if this is competition or a growing business.

Nathan Rabin's relationship with pop culture is no flashy summer-fling; it's soulful, heartfelt, and indestructible. Best known for his current position as head writer on The Onion's A.V. Club, Rabin is one film critic who can take a joke. His writing is witty and insightful, treading the line of moxie and insensitivity by relying on his inherent undying love for film.

His "Year of Flops" series on A.V. club is the epitome of forgiveness, as Rabin revisits the dregs of film history; those films disparaged and shunned by the masses, and gives them a second chance. 

Born on April 24, 1976, Nathan Rabin grew up bouncing between group homes for the emotionally disturbed and foster care. With an absent mother and an ailing, often unemployed father, Rabin often writes of the solace he found in pop culture. He graduated in 1999 from University of Wisconsin at Madison with a degree in Communication studies.    

This white, Jewish boy was enraptured by hip-hop and in an article with Time magazine even quotes rap superstar Busta Rhymes as saying, "Rap is funny. If you don't get the humor, it's terrifying." Speaking a great deal to Rabin's own sense of humor and brutal self- reflection, he becomes a film critic who deserves respect as a writer and a person.

Rabin auditioned to guest host on Ebert and Roeper and was denied, but still harbors a deep soft spot for Roger Ebert that Rabin references on multiple accounts. Ebert even wrote a praising blurb for Rabin's recently released memoir: "The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You By Pop Culture." After an unfoundedly scathing and derogatory book review from the Washington Post surfaced a week ago, Rabin responded not in self- defense, but in defense of his fellow AV-ers.

"The review read like a dispatch from an alternate universe in which the sincere, compassionate pop-culture lovers that I work with every day had morphed into goateed, dead-eyed, alien-controlled doppelgangers who exist only to ridicule and mock", Rabin writes on Poynter.

Nathan Rabin's public record of reviews and commentaries have become so inextricably intertwined with his personal life, it becomes an anagram extracting information from his published works. In many recent interviews, Rabin's decision to write a memoir at the age of 33 is often questioned, and for him he can only explain it as therapeutic; "There's no support group for people who've had their shows canceled before their time",he explains about his failed ventures. While bloggers like Emily Gould suffer through overexposure through public diaries, Rabin uses the filter of media criticism to live out personal turmoil.

It's hard enough to go through puberty amidst the quiet isolation of a normal teenager. It becomes infinitely harder when you are 18 years old, in the public eye, and that puberty is actually an expose on your competing gender traits. Caster Semenya, a South African World Champion runner, caught the world's eye a few weeks ago with her landslide victory in the 800-meter race. As rumors swirled around her impressive win and her decidedly masculine attributes, Semenya's post race testosterone levels and the media's attention lead to gender tests with startling discoveries.

Semenya's test results proved she had both male and female parts, disclosed to her and the entire world nearly simultaneously. The incredible trauma of this discovery has spurred an outpouring of international emotion, and the corresponding politically correct buzzword for hermaphrodites; intersex.

While many media outlets compete to chart the newest findings in her case and gravitate towards the public sensationalism of Semenya's personal "trauma", individuals across the world have begun to reach out in compassion; mostly. Announcements that Semenya is under suicide watch and a quote which compares her to "a raped person"  dominate twitter conversation, as well as providing links to a "Support Semenya" website where the public can voice sympathies.

On the antagonistic front, an anagram for Caster Semenya has been identified as "Yes, a Secret Man". This highly publicized, fairly non-sensical discovery is treated as a ground-breaking explanation for Semenya's physical characteristics. Twitterers have been working overtime, posting and reposting links to newspapers, blogs, and chatrooms that have spread this finding like wildfire. 

Some twitterers find posts like this humorous, and "twits" like  Hampstertoast caught my attention, with his childish, racist, and frankly un-witty tweet that refers to Semenya as a "he-she" that is "the one from Milli-Vanilli that hasn't killed himself yet." He's accompanied by S2phoebeS2, who references Shania Twain's song "Man, I feel like a Woman", and laughs at her own comical invention.

While the twitterverse has become a forum for open discussion, it is also where private or irresponsible jokes made in haste become history forever online. When someone mis-speaks or makes a joke in poor taste, there is often room for forgiveness and forgetting. Shared between two friends or a small group, those words can dissipate and jaded memories fade. By voicing such opinions on twitter, they exist to be read over and over again, pouring salt in a wound that rarely has time to heal. For some twitterers, it appears the wall between interior monologue and published thoughts has become so thin, potency of words is often overlooked.