Khaled
2025
I first knew Khaled Abdel Aziz as a landlord, then as a client and finally, after accompanying him through shadows, deceptions and blood, as a friend, the most unlikely of friends.
In 1974, wedged between late winter’s rain and late spring’s marine layer, Los Angeles seemed to blossom in ways it never had before. It seemed to throw off what felt like the final cloaks of formulas and finances that allowed for a short but fertile creative season widely looked back on as the city at its best.
For the first time since leaving the police department, I had time to explore my city’s exports, to listen to albums and go to the movies. Most seemed to soar past their predecessors and draw us toward some vague new understanding of ourselves. But I couldn’t shake off my frame, I still saw things as a detective, and while many of the ingrained suspicions and outlooks of cop stuck with me, ground had shifted.
That spring the feel of the city, the rush, the throb, the breeze, each had taken on a pleasant new texture, as if all of Southern California was draped in jacaranda that would never stop blooming. However a city catches lightning in a bottle we had caught it and packaged it up for distribution, vinyl and celluloid sailing off across the mountains and out to sea for the world to enjoy.
