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Filmed December 14, 2007
The Smell
Los Angeles, Calif.

Jasmine Watson is a Whole Foods employee and a showgoer/promoter at the Smell, an all-ages venue in downtown Los Angeles. Though she recently left her hometown of San Pedro for the much colder city of San Francisco, she found time to attend four concerts I played this month in California, and, pre-performance, shared entertaining Whole Foods insider gossip. I filmed her under acceptable lighting conditions against a brick wall.

During Jasmine’s portrait, I was distracted by the Smell’s proximity to the Greyhound Bus Station in downtown Los Angeles. As readers of Philip Carlo’s The Night Stalker will remember, serial killer Richard Ramirez used motels around the Los Angeles Greyhound Station as a base of operations for speed-fueled murder sprees from 1984-1985. Ramirez, now incarcerated on California’s Death Row, once shared a cellblock with celebrity paparazzi-puncher Sean Penn.