Hooping.org

[Hooping.org's Editor Philo Hagen takes a spin at community.]

by Philo Hagen

When I relocated from San Francisco to Los Angeles two years ago, one of the first things on my list was to find the hoop community. After seven years of making Bay Area Hoopers happen every single Sunday, I was really looking forward to being a participant, a hooper among hoopers. I wasn’t quite sure what was in store for me though. A few years earlier as a visitor I’d attended a balmy Sunday afternoon hoopjam near the boardwalk that was run by a congenial blonde who ruled her boombox with an iron fist. Her lack of musical democracy (and taste according to some) was apparently responsible for that other Sunday afternoon hoopjam, the one that took place just a few hundred yards down the beach. While one group spun it up in the grass to the Top 40 favorites of yesteryear, the other devoured a steady diet of sand and hard driving techno. Which group would I align myself with? Neither actually. Both had ceased to exist. Local hoopers told me of other hoop groups with once exciting periods on the L.A. scene that had come and gone. In a city that undoubtedly has more hoopers per square mile than anywhere else in the world, I was really beginning to wonder what was up with Los Angeles.

It is interesting to note here, as well, that experts routinely use whatever societal ills are on the rise in L.A. as the American social barometer of what’s to come for the rest of the nation. Maybe it’s that the staggering size of the city and its 10 million inhabitants are such an easily viewable petri dish for the entertainment industry, who immediately translate whatever is going down into music, movies and television. I’m no sociologist, but when people pointed at L.A.’s rise in gang violence years ago, most everyone believed it was something that could only happen in L.A., until it happened where they lived too. Things just seem to happen here first and hooping is no exception.

When you follow nearly all of the roads of the modern hooping revolution as we know it, you ultimately land here in Tinseltown. Even if you want to go all 1950′s hula hoop fad about it, you’ll still wind up here in the Knerr family garage in South Pasadena. If Los Angeles really does have this ahead-of-the-pack foreshadowing nature though, could it be that what we are having for dinner is going to wind up on your menu soon? Perhaps our challenges have already arrived. When the largest hooping community in the world comes to a halt, what exactly happened and just what did we decide to do about it? Read the rest of this entry →