Belly of the Beast

The "LA's dark underbelly" cliche makes an appearance in this LA Times article from a few weeks back. It's about noir-surf-detective novelist Don Winslow, a former private investigator, grad student, tour guide in Kenya, punk-rock novelist, and otherwise interesting-sounding guy, who should be therefore worldly enough to avoid this:

"One reason I find SoCal so interesting is that there's so much beauty -- and that's real," Winslow said. "But there's another layer underneath it that's not so pretty. One thing I wanted to do was run those two tracks simultaneously -- without backing off of either."

And, LA Times, as much as we love you: You're on the hook too, for choosing that as the pullquote.