DEMOCRATS AREN'T ONLY CONVENTION IN TOWN

LOS ANGELES -- This city is too big and too busy -- not to mention too
weird -- for a single convention.

So it's probably a good thing it's having more than one.

In case you missed it -- which is highly likely given the scant national
coverage -- Los Angeles this week is home to several ancillary events. We
have the Homeless Convention, located, oddly, at a housing development for
the homeless called Dome City. And the Shadow Convention, a gathering of
unaligned malcontents led by Republican defector and celebrity pundit
Arianna Huffington. And hordes of mostly young people participating in
D2KLA, a sort of anti-convention near the Staples Center.

On Monday evening, the street outside a civic building called Patriotic
Hall, about five blocks south of the Staples Center, was blocked off to
traffic. But a growing cluster of shadowy conventioneers spilled over into
the street.

A few, carrying clipboards and walkie-talkies, scurried in and out. What's
going on?

Bomb scare was the report from a well-mannered young man named Donald, who
was passing out literature for Los Angeles mayoral candidate Francis
DellaVechhia ("No political parties. No lobbyists. No polling").

Panic and precaution were not the watchwords for this bomb scare, however.
It was phoned in two hours earlier; the police were inside rooting around.
But it was only now that the building was being cleared.

On a screeching makeshift sound system mounted aboard their media truck,
the Shadow conventioneers attempted to carry on outside. "They're not going
to shut us down!" the audience was told, It was not clear who the "they" were.

Huffington took the microphone to announce that the program will continue
"as if nothing has happened," a perhaps unintentionally precise description
of how the Shadow Convention is faring.

Paradoxically, this might have been the one moment so far in which
something actually was happening. As novelist Gore Vidal is introduced, and
conventioneers press further into the street, about 100 police officers in
riot gear materialized 50 feet away. They wanted the street cleared.

Vidal glanced over his shoulder and proclaimed: "It reminds me of Chicago
in 1968. That was a merry time."

His audience, however, became less merry as the police deployed into riot
stick-ready formation. Heated negotiations ensued. A stream of officers, in
similar gear, spilled out of Patriotic Hall.

Later, the Shadow Convention was once again inside addressing its signature
issues of campaign finance and corporate greed. Sadly, from the point of
view of its publicist, the briefly tense standoff was overshadowed, so to
speak, by something approximating real civil disobedience at the Staples
Center.

Police and local news organizations report that force was required to break
up a demonstration outside the Democratic National Convention. An element
of the D2KLA crowd loosely described as the anarchists had been flinging
bottles and concrete over the barrier around the center. A few tried to
climb the fence.

The spirit of the crowd is fueled by an influx of attendees from a nearby
outdoor concert given by Rage Against the Machine.

Using pepper spray, rubber bullets and horses, police cleared the area.

An hour later, departing rioters mingled with conventioneers. About one in
three from both sides was talking on a cell phone. One young caller in
dreadlocks described the action: "You oughta smell that gas. It's just like
Raid," the bug spray.

The Democrats seem secure, as they should be. The departing president who
addressed them promised early in his first term to put 100,000 new cops on
the street; about half of them appear to be providing security.

Both groups are triumphal, and entirely disconnected.

Later, local news reports on the convention featured 30-second clips of the
Clinton speech, 3 minutes on the riot and breathless updates at every break
on the progress of the night's main event party at Paramount Studios, at
which Clinton was expected.

Not a word on the Shadow Convention.