Freeway Flyer buses stop at the Exposition Boulevard station, adjacent to

Mannequins are everywhere in metropolitan Los Angeles.  In virtually every department store and clothing shop, mannequins submissively serve their owners, who use them to tell us what we should be wearing and how we should be projecting our hipped-up selves.

During the 1930s, surrealist artists were preoccupied with mannequins, which (as historian Margaret Plant observed) they viewed as symbols  of America's decaying consumerist culture.  In the Exhibition Internationale du Surrealism, mannequins were treated as "phantom object-beings," to be entrapped in department store windows and cages.

Nothing much has changed since then.  Mannequins continue to make people feel uneasy. For some, they seem spooky, even scary.  Maybe that is because "phantom object beings" are inherently scary. Or maybe we just don't like the fact that mannequins remind us of our way-out-of-control consumerism. They cartoon our desire to fulfill breezy L.A. lifestyle dreams.w people ever get on.  At most hours of the