Shot of the Day #255: Wall of Stalker Shame?

Shot with iphone, click to enlarge.

Writing Day in the Valley w/ Green after helping Miller move to his new hole in Burbank (a pretty effortless affair, unlike OUR moving days, yeesh), and we took a walk to clear our heads a bit, get some fresh air. Walking around his 'hood, which used to be ours a few years back, one can notice that not one house looks the same; each one a different (and many times, ugly) exercise in style and excess...which is a stark contrast to the complexes I grew up in. All the houses in the area of Port Jefferson Station were either "Style #1" or "Style #2", and while there'd be variations and alterations made over the years (our house got a few makeovers itself), but for the most part, they all had the same basic style and structure.

Around here, it seems every house has it's own unique look and style, a "slash o' personality" added to every address, man times with a foreign taste to its look. I'm guessing it's because if you think of all the entertainment money that's gone through these properties, so many people who have taken Hollywood's money and made their "mark", that everyone with that kind of money would have an excuse to make their houses their own. So as we walk down the streets, brainstorming and bouncing ideas back and forth, we notice one of the houses has a fence completely covered with hand-made signs that have been stapled to the property. At first we thought it was a memorial of sorts, the kind you see at car crash sites or houses that just lost a child (or like in Union Square in NYC post-9/11, still fresh in my mind), but when we got closer to the signs, it was a much darker message.

Seems that whoever lives in the house with this fence has been employing the use of a 24 hour a day camera system, which was perched above the signs at the front of the alley, looming down at us as we silently gawked at the abrasive signage covering the fence. Words like "Peeper" and "Stalker" were motifs on many of the signs, accusing the person with the camera of supposedly being quite the lookie-loo. Why are the neighbors doing this? Is this person some form of reclusive child molester? I mean, is having the camera alone enough for such a public outcry? We didn't know all the facts, but damn if it wasn't an eye-opener. Funny too, as we walked past the house, an androgynous-looking figure (with hair and face that smacked Phil Spector, adding to the creep value) suddenly comes out of the house in question and FOLLOWS us for a few houses before turning around again...so he/she MUST have seen that we were loitering outside thanks to their infamous cameras. Shiver.

So strange. Ah, Saturday.

Joe