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Los Angeles Times
2 days ago
- Los Angeles Times
A man blaring a train alarm torments L.A. neighborhood. Then he was arrested
A quiet Van Nuys neighborhood of manicured lawns, palm trees and single-family homes has been embroiled in a noisy squabble over a train horn that one homeowner has affixed to a tree and used to set off drawn-out blares at irregular intervals. While the window-rattling blasts over the last two months have drawn complaints and calls to police, they have also garnered concern from Peach Avenue neighbors over the well-being of the homeowner. The latest chapter in the train horn saga took place Wednesday when Los Angeles police arrested Gary Boyadzhyan, 50, an unemployed car technician, who set off the horn after previously promising to keep it silent. In an interview with The Times, he described the drama as a 'cry for help' and alluded to being 'wronged' by someone, without elaborating. 'He's a nice guy who is just going through something,' a neighbor said about Boyadzhyan, echoing the sentiment of most neighbors. Boyadzhyan attached his setup, similar to a big-rig or train horn, to a palm tree in his backyard. The horn hangs over his one-story home. Since June, Boyadzhyan has set off the horn in long belches in the late afternoon or at night, according to neighbors on Peach Avenue, an otherwise quiet residential area. On Wednesday morning, Los Angeles Police Department officers visited him. 'I didn't know where it was coming from all this time,' neighbor Clara Espinoza said about the horn as she walked by Boyadzhyan's home. She watched as three officers marched up to his door. 'Oh, it's Gary's house,' Espinoza said with a note of surprise. She's lived in the neighborhood for 24 years and couldn't pinpoint the source the horn blasts. She had planned to call police and noted that the frequency of the horn had increased in the last few weeks. 'He's a nice enough man and I say hello to him whenever I walk by,' she said. 'You know this is in the Book of Revelations. The horns. Well, trumpets. But it's like the same thing. It's alarming.' The officers knocked on his door for several minutes. 'We just want to talk,' one of the officers said as a Times reporter watched from the sidewalk. Boyadzhyan appeared at his door in shorts and a T-shirt. He spoke to the officers for several minutes. After the conversation, Officer Chase Lambert said the call to the residence was over a neighborly dispute. He and other officers declined to elaborate on the dispute. 'We are aware,' Lambert said motioning to the property and the horn. 'There are things that are being worked on to alleviate the horn issue.' Boyadzhyan answered his door and spoke to a Times reporter about his visit with the LAPD. 'I have an issue with LAPD Van Nuys,' he said, referring to the Police Department's local bureau. 'I also have a legal case that's ... it's over a person who wronged me and it cost me everything. It cost me my job. Everything.' He did not elaborate about the situation and why he is setting off his horn and other alarms from his property. He added that he's an out-of-work car technician and that the whole situation with the horn is a 'cry for help.' 'If they were concerned, they could have come over to talk with me,' he said about his neighbors. 'Instead, I have strangers knocking here, police, reporters.' When asked whether he planned to keep the horn off, he said, 'I didn't have any plans to turn it on right now.' A few hours later, the horn sounded again, according to his neighbors. LAPD officers arrived at the home, handcuffed Boyadzhyan while he was standing on his front lawn and led him to a police vehicle. The LAPD said he was arrested on suspicion of interfering with a peace officer and disturbing the peace, which are both misdemeanors. Boyadzhyan was booked into a county jail shortly after 9 p.m. and released on his own recognizance about 5:30 a.m. Thursday, according to jail records. He did not respond to requests for comment. News station ABC7 first reported about the train horn on Peach Avenue. Espinoza, who lives around the corner from Boyadzhyan, said the horn was loud enough to rattle her windows. Another neighbor, who declined to give their name out of privacy concerns, said Boyadzhyan would set off the horn for 20 to 40 intervals at a time. While they acknowledged that the horn was annoying, they're more worried about Boyadzhyan's well-being. Boyadzhyan is often seen walking around his property late at night, sometimes using power tools to garden or working on vehicles in his driveway, according to neighbors. Before his arrest, a spokesperson for City Councilmember Imelda Padilla's office said it had not received any complaints about the horn. 'Our office will be coordinating with appropriate authorities to address these concerns and bring order back to the neighbors on Peach [Avenue] and ensure the individual is offered help,' Padilla said in a statement. 'This neighborhood deserves peace and quiet in its homes, and the current situation is unacceptable.'
BBC News
24-04-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
The overlooked masterpiece full of coded messages about World War One
Esoteric and pioneering, the paintings of a lesser-known Pre-Raphaelite, Evelyn De Morgan, explored the trauma and meaning of war – and prefigured current fantasy art. On a rocky beach that glows red with lava, smoke-breathing dragons surround wretched-looking prisoners beseeching an angel to deliver them from suffering. The oil painting Death of the Dragon by Evelyn De Morgan looks at first like a scene from the New Testament's apocalyptic Book of Revelations. But, painted between 1914 and 1918, it's also something more personal and critical: an allegory for the misery and bondage of World War One, and the confrontation between good and evil. The spectacular painting, measuring more than a metre high, is one of the highlights of a new exhibition, Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London, at London's Guildhall Art Gallery, home to the City of London Corporation's art collection. On display are rarely seen works from the De Morgan Foundation, as well as two newly-restored paintings and two recreations, completed just last year, of works lost in an art warehouse fire in 1991. The show coincides with the reopening of the De Morgan Museum in Barnsley, Yorkshire, following an extensive roof renovation, and responds to a rising interest in this lesser-known artist. She has tended to be eclipsed by her husband William – a ceramicist and writer, who had worked early in his career with the textile designer William Morris – and the famous men in their circle: her uncle and art teacher, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, for example, and the painters William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Much of what we know about De Morgan today comes from her sister Wilhelmina, who set up the De Morgan Foundation, but even she saw fit to publish the couple's posthumous biography under the title William De Morgan and his Wife. Yet, Evelyn De Morgan more than deserves the art world's belated acclaim. A Slade graduate, who was working at the tail end of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, she took the arguably twee or overly sentimental genre into new territory, creating tableaux that were unusually visionary and energetic. The women she portrayed were less passive than those depicted by her contemporaries, and featured as symbols of agency rather than objects of the male gaze. Instead of a drowned body floating down the river, as in Sir John Everett Millais' Ophelia, or figures whose main currency was their looks, we meet a skilled sorceress creating magical potions and flying superheroines who can cast rain, thunder and lightning from their fingers. These goddess-like figures show the influence of the classical art that De Morgan had studied. Immaculately executed works such as Boreas and Oreithyia (1896) reveal her interest in mythology and her mastery of the human form, reminiscent of Michelangelo. In Death of the Dragon, in terms of composition, it's easy to see the influence of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (1483–1485), which De Morgan had visited in Florence. If De Morgan's haloed angel echoes this idea of rebirth − reflecting the artist's belief in a spiritual afterlife − then the winged beasts are its counterpart, Death, always biting at the heels of the people and threatening to overcome them. Elsewhere in her work, Death takes alternative forms: a dark angel bearing a scythe, sea monsters or – more obliquely – a sand timer. It's a symbolism that speaks to life's transience, and acquires additional poignancy in her later work, conveying the collective trauma of living through a World War that claimed close to a million British lives. "During the First World War they [the De Morgans] were in London, so they would have been directly affected," Jean McMeakin, Chair of the Board of Trustees of the De Morgan Foundation, tells the BBC. "Death was real for them in a way that perhaps we've largely forgotten these days," she points out. "Members of William's family died from tuberculosis, and his own health was often quite poor. Death was, in a way, always present in the background." More like this:• Why this iconic 1839 painting is not what it seems• The surprising story of Van Gogh's guardian angel• Nine striking, rare photos of 19th-Century America De Morgan was a pacifist and her art became a form of activism. In Our Lady of Peace (1907), a response to the Boer Wars, a knight pleads for protection and peace, while in The Poor Man who Saved the City (1901), wisdom and diplomacy are advocated as alternatives to military intervention. Later, in The Red Cross (1914-16), angels carry the crucified Christ over a withered landscape pierced by Belgian war graves – a suggestion, perhaps, that the Christian faith is at odds with the brutality of war, but offers us hope of redemption. "You must never praise war," De Morgan declared in The Result of an Experiment (1909), a book of "automatic writing" co-authored with her husband. "The Devil invented it, and you can have no conception of its horrors." Good and evil The idea of the forces of good and evil acting upon ordinary people was pervasive at this time. "Spiritualism was quite popular," asserts McMeakin, citing the author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – the creator of Sherlock Holmes – as one of its most famous adherents. Other-worldly beliefs, she says, were "probably the result of the turmoil, the massive changes happening in society leading up to the turn of the century, plus a period of many wars, which would have had an impact on their view of the world". Doubtless, De Morgan was also influenced by her mother-in-law, Sophia, a well-known spiritualist and medium. With so many lives lost, it was no doubt tempting to believe that you could reconnect with the departed. For De Morgan, materialism was in opposition to spirituality, and many of her works conflate the pursuit of wealth with death. Crowns, as worn by the winged serpents in Death of the Dragon, are a repeated motif denoting greed and misery. In Earthbound (1897), an avaricious king in a gold cloak patterned with coins is about to be overwhelmed by the angel of death, while in The Barred Gate (c.1910-1914), a similar figure is denied entry to Heaven. With the future so uncertain, De Morgan places the importance of spiritual fulfilment and happiness at the centre of much of her work. In Blindness and Cupidity Chasing Joy from the City (1897), for example, "Cupidity" is personified as a crowned figure clutching treasures who is driving away "Joy" in the form of an angel. Here, as in Death of the Dragon, the central characters are chained, suggesting trapped souls. In The Prisoner (1907-1908), the barred window and a woman's chained wrists make captivity a metaphor for gender inequality, hinting at the De Morgans' support for universal suffrage (Evelyn was a signatory of at least two important petitions, while her husband was vice-president of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage). The theme recurs in Luna (1885), where the rope-bound body of a moon goddess, a mythological figure of feminine power, functions as a metaphor for a woman's struggle to influence her own destiny. Christened "Mary", Evelyn later adopted her then-gender-neutral middle name, as women's art was not taken seriously. "She wanted to be considered on the same level as her male peers," says McMeakin. "We can assume a huge degree of self-possession and determination in her desire to become a professional artist," she adds, making the point that even De Morgan's mother opposed her career choice. Technically, De Morgan was also a pioneer. She experimented with burnishing and rubbing gold pigment into her works to add depth and interest, and explored new painting techniques invented by her husband, made by grinding colours with glycerine and spirit. Stylistically, she was also ahead of her time. The unconventional use of pinks and purples, and the bold rings of rainbow-coloured light, prefigure the psychedelic painting styles of the 1970s, while her terrifying monsters would not look out of place in contemporary fantasy art. While art history has tended to paint women as virgin mothers, objects of beauty or temptresses, De Morgan's specifically female perspective recasts them as figures of hope that augur an alternative, brighter future. In Lux in Tenebris (light in darkness) (1895), for example, the female figure holds an olive branch in her right hand, offering a pathway to peace. In Death of the Dragon, the angel is surrounded by a magnificent rainbow: a symbol (along with the sky) of joy that denotes spiritual fulfilment and freedom, as well as the promise of an afterlife. It's a mistake to think of works such as Death of the Dragon as "completely bleak", argues McMeakin, noting that "often with [her] apocalyptic scenes, there is a glimmer of hope, or a part of the painting that is calm". In many ways, Death of the Dragon is optimistic, expressing a sense that the war – the metaphorical dragon – is nearing its end, and that good can overcome evil. In this existential battle, De Morgan saw a place for her work. When she was aged just 17, she chastised herself for not painting enough. "Art is eternal, but life is short," she wrote in her diary. "I will make up for it now, I have not a moment to lose." Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London is at the Guildhall Art Gallery, London until 4 January 2026. -- If you liked this story sign up for The Essential List newsletter, a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news, delivered to your inbox twice a week. For more Culture stories from the BBC, follow us on Facebook, X, and Instagram
