Every Sunday Morning, a place where various things get thrown out, shot at, cut open, and dissected. Topics of interest: psychological, and medical anthropology, privatization, globalization, excess, language, humor, hip-hop culture, jazz, brain and mind, memory, urban space development, Los Angeles, the Chicago Bulls, UCLA Bruins, FC Barcelona, and mankind.
Thank god that the former 2 things haven't been developed in her consciousness yet. I couldn't be happier.
At this point in her life, before she hits the 2nd decade of life in the Gregorian calendar, my sister decided that this would be the summer that she'd finish something she had always meant to finish.
Instead of a summer sitting down doing bitchwork or working at Jamba Juice, she'd steal what she needed to steal, she'd shoot at who she needed to shoot at, she'd take what she needed to take.
All so that Carl Johnson could reclaim the city of Los Santos.
Ironically, my kidly sister is playing a very adult-themed game. When I was about 11, I had written in some Playstation game fair my idea of the best video game ever. My idea didn't necessarily mean violence, but I wanted a game that integrated elements of someone's life together. I wanted the person to be able to do a variety things rather than just fight, or just shoot or just play basketball, or just drive. I wanted to fight, shoot, play basketball, AND Drive within some kind of progressie storyline.
Enter the Grand Theft Auto series.
Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is the latest rendition and centers around a fictional character named Carl Johnson who's mission is to re-gain prominence on his city block. Its a game I bought because I kinda liked GTA 3. As this fictional character/protagonist, Carl Johnson or "CJ", your "job" is to work for a variety of bosses to progress through the game. Your means of accomplishing missions requires a deal of technical precision fighting, shooting, and driving. You can also simply choose NOT to progress through the game, but you won't be able to access the storyline.
The storyline is loosely based on the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, which was quite scary as an 8-year old. Should you choose to progress in the storyline, you will encounter a city-wide re-enactment of the Riots where everything is on fire, and no one is standing around.
I know that there's a new Grand Theft Auto for the Playstation 3, but I don't really care because I don't have one, and therefore that iteration doesn't exist.
There's a sense of Bladerunner-ish dystopia. It's a land where only the objectified, personality-less Other exists in abundance. It's a world of mysterious, fallen, and disparate adults.
Along with these themes of adulthood, personality-less, disparate Others, I noticed a few other things:
1) No one comes in pairs or groups. It is a world of wandering individuals. There are no families and no kids here unless they are on the satiric talk radio station. Only old men, prostitutes, ambiguous men, tough guys, big shots, prostitutes --- a world built by adults for adults.
People bunched together usually have guns and exist for the dual purposes of aiming poorly and shooting you.
2) Along that line of thinking there are no schools, social services with foundations and muckety muck dinners to infiltrate, playgrounds, no libraries, museums or places of cultural interaction.
3) With no groups of people together, there are no festivals or fairs happening as events in the game. Closest thing you get are street races.
4) It's very quiet in the game, unless you're attacking someone and they're screaming, you're in a fist/gunfight, and/or the police are chasing you.
5) Open and green spaces are places of no space or social interaction. There are no Madame Matisse Hipster joints or beer gardens or dog parks.
6) There are no other animals in the game, other than the humanoid ones. It would be cool if they added roaming cheetahs, monkeys, elephants, camels, deer, tigers, hawks, hippopatami in their next renditions of the game. However, if they added Ecco the dolphin, or Free Willy I'd return the game as soon as the discovery was made.
I wonder....what would PETA do (WWPD)?
7) There are no seasonal or long-term cyclical demarcations. Every day can differ from sunshine and rain, but it's generally all the same. There's no KOST Christmas songs despite the progression of days in the game. There ain't no Easter Bunny, unless in reference to some kind of joke.
8) Without any of these spontaneous things, there is no room for passive consumership. Everything has a purpose within the game whether its the video game arcade or your fashion sense adding to your sex appeal. My sister got really rich in the game, grabbing over 11 million dollars, but
9) There's the economic development maxim that cheap transportation equals economic activity.
Cheap, dispensible, transportation is the key to you making money. The jetpacks, the planes, the motorcycles, firetrucks, garbage trucks, taxis, ambulances, go-carts, the cars are the vehicles needed to help you complete most of your missions from which you earn your money.
This is all transportation that the protagonist takes all by himself. There are no passengers, except when he's stealing taxis or ambulances He's not waiting at a certain time for any subway or bus or train. He moves whenever he needs to move.
The highways, the lakes, the airport runways, the basic two-way streets, are the infrastructure you take. Oddly enough, construction is seen in the game, particularly when you are prevented from going to another city early in the game, but we don't really to get interact with infrastructural maintenance.
10) There are no banks to rob, surprisingly, but you can rob casinos!
11) There are no landfills, or prisons. There is no sense of waste as things simply disappear or are blown up. You don't destroy the green spaces by speeding on it at 90 mph.
12) It's a world of unlimited infinite supplies. You can always get guns. You don't have to gas up or maintain your car, unless you want to take it to the paint shop. There is room for water treatments plant, power plants, or gas stations. You can waste cars as needed, and people will keep buying them and putting them on the road no matter what! The sense of ecology is one where things don't really ever get destroyed, but they simply disappear, and re-appear as part of the mass produced generic products.
What prevents us from seeing all this stark human reality is the obvious cartoon-like feel to the game. The producers try to give an inverted or warped sense of reality from the different puns, metaphors, and commentaries. There are the obvious rip-offs of name brand clothing like Zip posing as an imitator brand for Gap or Caligula's Place as the mock hotel for the world famous Las Vegas hotel Caesar's Palace. There's the satiric societal commentaries on politics and mass media, progressive happenings in the game about drug use, capitalism, etc. You'd have to be a cynic or at least have some cynical sense to really relish and enjoy this game.
These add up to an overall sense of fragmentation in the city-state of San Andreas or the Grand Theft Auto series in general. It is this fragmentation and disconnection which the game exploits to provide a space for the gamer to do what they wouldn't do normally. Other than the people he meets in the mission storyline, CJ's sense of disconnection from people and place is what makes it acceptable to be killing random people, running over the different types of infrastructure. We don't know any of them, we don't know their stories, we aren't sensitized to them, so it's all OK. (However, you might be a little sensitized to that prostitute that you decide to take in your car for a few minutes and choose not to kill her.)
The lesson I take from the fragmented and disconnected virtual Grand Theft Auto city is that in our real cities, perhaps we'd do best to encourage ecological and personal connection. By connect, I usually imply a sense of "play."
One way to encourage a sense of play is in the physical public space along the lines of the Jane Jacobs school of thought. It's hook, line, and sinker within the ideas of walkable cities and taking back the streets. It's about making the streets places to be. It's about building a place where seemingly random connections are likely to be made, where people are not on guard.
One intriguing topic within this stream of thought is the playground within the public space.
It strikes me that effective community-building things usually have an element of play within them. I touched on the Water Pump merry-go-round. Play has a certain randomosity to it, which enables you to make connections in concept and potentially to other people. How many times by instinct could you just kick that soccer ball that comes sailing towards you? Maybe you could've made a new friend?
The play-oriented city is the type that connects people more. The type where people simply seem to do things for no purpose other than fun and enjoyment. What was interesting in the video is that one group of people thought they would take a picture of the fun they were having. It's the kind of stuff that makes the space a place.
Yesterday, at about 7:30 PM Pacific Time, I get a call from one, Daniel Larson, Oakland native with the sailor's discourse, Leon Powe's classmate, future mother-fuckin' Golden Gate University Law school graduate.
He says he's in LA! Back from another year at Beijing. Just like he said on the facebook, but I rarely take anyone's promises seriously on facebook.
During his time there, he carved up a niche as an English language teacher. He went from university students to rich kids. He had enough money to rent an apartment and pile it on when he got here. He even got some of that live orange-tang. This motherfucker was living the life.
Then they tell him that they won't be able to renew his visa.
So he was here. First thing he did was go to the 99 cents store to buy a pair of socks and toothpaste. 99 Cents store is unabomber crazy ridic. Went to eat expensive-ass hipster Mexican food, with 'Yell putting his Negro O Modelo in a fuckin' wine glass. Then simmered down with a string of NBA Street 2 games.
Turns out the 'Yell is just one small part of a mass eviction. So I was basically chilling with a live-walking news story yesterday.
If he renewed his visa, it would've cost him $1100 US dollars as opposed to the $20 he usually paid. Somewhat out of range for a guy who got his money under the table and in cash.
Apparently, during the olympics people will now have to walk around at all times with their papers. Now that's immigration enforcement to the max. Kinda ironic that the borders are getting tighter at a time when they want to show their connection to the international community.
The rich international community.
This was supposed to be a big coming out party in terms of certifying itself as a cosmopolitan globalized middle-class burgeoisie-lifestyle and experience. Stadiums were to be built, new infrastructure and transportation was developed, slums were to be cleared.
But everything seems to have been sour so far: from the international torch relays being crashed by protestors to the fact that tourism is down.
Maybe it's my reactionary response to American media discourse, but I feel bad for Beijing in relation to the rest of the world cities who've hosted Olympics. Didn't seem like those other cities had to go through half the crap that they have.
Think about that for a second: No images of the "model, ideal" body. No implicated racism, sexism, prejudices. No mindfucking, mindnumbing subliminals. All in the name of getting a few people rich.
“The Clean City Law came from a necessity to combat pollution … pollution of water, sound, air, and the visual. We decided that we should start combating pollution with the most conspicuous sector – visual pollution.”
"You couldn’t even realize the architecture of the old buildings, because all the buildings, all the houses were just covered with billboards and logos and propaganda. And there was no criteria.
I wonder how a town with no advertisements functions.
Apparently, it’s amazing...so far. They uncovered a lot of problems the city had that were never realized.
For example, from the article.
"there are some favelas, which are the shantytowns. I wrote a big story in my newspaper today that in a lot of parts of the city we never realized there was a big shantytown."
As per relevance to where I live, Los Angeles, I wonder what the effect of this outdoor ban has been on Sao Paulo's graffiti scene. Has graffiti activity slowed down or picked up?
Sao Paolo was apparently a graffiti center before this ban and still remains one. Check this set!
When you break it down, all graffiti is, is mostly advertising too, except much less controlled and funded. It's guerrilla message sending, which is all advertising is.
So the question would be: are people on an individual level less prone to make and send these guerrilla messages with an outdoor ban enacted?
Short answer looks like a maybe not. On internet inspection, perhaps not...but again, I'm writing about an interesting idea from a city I've never visited.
I ran across the video below on reverse graffiti in Sao Paolo.
This 2/14 Boston Globe spread on Sao Paolo Graffiti acts as if graffiti is still alive and well, least the good ones.
"Pixadores, as graffiti artists are called in São Paulo, find room for their art alongside city freeways, on the walls of abandoned warehouses, and even atop high-rise apartment buildings. While it's still common for police to prosecute pixadores for illegal graffiti writing, many artists now receive government commissions to display their work in public spaces."
Now the caption above is interesting for a few reasons relevant to LA.
First, they've found room for art along city freeways.
LA did too, but look at what happened to this mural over the course of 23 years.
Read about its fate here and here. The comments are very interesting.
What's interesting here is that apparently the Los Angeles kids mural could have been saved.
"The story that was not told, and the real travesty here, however, was that just a few years ago, the City of L.A. raised a huge amount of money to restore these murals, and paid the artists to do just that, and to APPLY AN ANTI GRAFFITI WAX COATING! As I understand it, all Caltrans had to do was melt off that wax to remove the graffiti, then recoat it for future protection! Not much more time, money or effort would have been required." - Brother of LA Kids Mural Artist, Glenna Boltuch
The quote above brings me to my second point. Sao Paolo seems to embrace its graffiti and murals. LA doesn't do that unless its that one Venice graffiti place or the Arts District.
I wonder...if we didn't look at graffiti as a problem, and perhaps actually weaved the graffiti into the fabric of the city ala Jane Jacobs' school of urbanism, perhaps there wouldn't be a graffiti problem. Perhaps if people other than the motherfucking LAPD, rich corporate and individual developers were heard, there wouldn't be so many unwieldy and random tags.
I guess the movie Crash is sort of useful in this sense...if people weren't so disconnected and impersonal, maybe there wouldn't be as much a need in the first place for a space to graffiti, a space to be seen and heard, a space where you can just 'crash' into so many people at once without actually doing it. Just maybe we'd have the makings of a community.
...same bizarre feeling of seeing dead people ...same disbelief of whether some things were real or not ...same blank staring at some exhibits and pretending to have a level of sophistication ...same wannabe physiologists talking aloud trying to explain why a body part looks the way it does
This time however, I was particularly struck by the blood flow and its relation to city planning. I think transportation planning can be like blood flowing through the body.
In transportation planning you just hope things can keep running smoothly, just as in your body, you just hope that things can keep running smoothly. However, inevitably there will be traffic, bumps in the road, potholes to hold up traffic, just as there will be little things in your body that will hold up optimal blood flow and probably make you sick.
I'm not sure exactly how that makes sense to anyone in the transportation planning discipline nor the neuroscience discipline, but I see the connection and I wonder what other insights I can glean from such a connection.
Whom should you thank for this insight?
1) a talk in January by a bunch of USC professors about the "expiration date" of cities, who spent the talk making a metaphor between the city and a living organism. 2) my desire to connect my two biggest interests of late: neuroanthropology and city planning.
10. My landlord's dog. I hate dogs. They're all over Silver Lake. Fuck em. I especially don't like the K9 pee reservoir called the Dog Park over at Silver Lake Park.
9. I am not sure, but how sustainable our all these novelty shops like the gelatto, shoe, and furniture shops especially given that a few of them have multiple locations? I don't think the adverb "very" would precede "sustainable" but I guess we'll see.
What we need is sweet bread shops, book places, Dippin Dots stands, Mobile vendor co-ops, and progressive cause organizations.
8. Sunset Junction and parking. Parking in general is bad (see #5), but this event takes the cake in terms of annoyingness that it deserves its own special mention.
Being a special event, I don't even know who to get mad at with that, anymore cause it's such a big event. But I do know that I'm basically chained at the hip to the 'partamento the weekend this happens.
For those of us who park on the street, our mobility is pretty limited. For one, mass transit only goes one way and doesn't even really lead to Central downtown.
What's more is that we don't even get any free pass to the event.
7. The 30 degree incline. I will never understand why people feel the need to rev up their engines even harder when they reach it.
Especially a certain stupidass motorocyclist who would rev up his engine just to get over it in 6.3 seconds instead of 6.8. I hope someone will have the sense to drop a flying kick on him while he's at full speed on his motorcycle. Or to be safer, when he's just walking to his house and walking his dog. Either way, it's the end results that count.
Anyway, I also hate parking up the steepest grade of this incline (see annoyances 5 and 6), especially when my home is at the very bottom.
6. Parking on Saturday, Sunday mornings.
I hate Madame Matisse and Millies Coffee. I almost shat myself with excitement when it got tagged up (see positives to Silver Lake #2).
What makes this problem worse is that the 99 Cents store is pretty anal about its parking. They post up tons of We-will-Tow-Away-your-car-at-all-costs-signs-even-if-there-is-usually-a-70% vacancy rate in our parking lot.
Those signs are right up there next to the just-as-ubiquitous we-don't-give-a-flying, contorting,-or-spinning-fuck-about-the-neighborhood signs.
5. Parking on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, especially next to Madame Matisse and Tantra and all those other hipster hangouts.
God do I hate trash day the most. A lot of perfectly good space being eaten up by random utility trucks and rolling trash bins.
4. Bellevue Rec Center posting no soccer signs basically everywhere without really having explained why. They strategically planted boulders around grassy areas to ensure that kids who break the rules face stiff penalties.
Use the open space however you want. It will just go against the 10 commandments of Park management to kick a ball around the area even though the picnic tables are hardly ever in use.
Another beef with the Rec Center is that out of sheer laziness, they cut their lights out at about 6:30.
3. People who use the place as its "playground" on Friday-Saturday nights, making me park uphill. God, I hate these people. I'm just a crosshair...here...waiting to smash your goddamn Beamer like I was Jack from Hook in that room full of clock.
2. Silver Lake Neighborhood Council representation...last time I went I just saw a lot of residents who probably weren't there when we first moved in from Chicago in 1989. I don't think I've seen a lot of Central American and non-gringo resident representation. We might live together, but I don't imagine us being chums or anything.
1. Gentrifiers beg at about the lower leg?
Well, rent is always getting higher. My parents are always complaining that the landlords are jacking up the price.
I wish I'd a known what the hell was up with those Live/Work condos down the street. Selling only for $700,000 a piece!
I don't know the business aspects and internal politico-economy of Silver Lake, but I have to wonder when I see stuff like the 98 cent store (not the corporate 99 cents stores) MC Computers, and a Cleaners shop go out in favor of some vegan eateries, comic book shops, the 34734279438 cafe within the area, and a gelatto shop.
I think it was the LA Weekly that noted how the emergence of gelatto shops in a neighborhod near you was a signal that your neighborhood would be gentrifying too.
I like talking lots of smacks, but I'm an optimist, and I always like to finish on the good.
10. Even though I do get mad at the trendies, the young whatevers (I can't call them young professionals 'cause I hardly ever see anyone walk out with a briefcase or anything) gentrifying, it's nice that they bring an element of multiculturalism and integratedness. But it's only a start because there's still a degree of separation.
9. 99 Cents store. The headquarters of Halloween, Christmas, Easter, we are told.
8. Open space to be opened at the Reservoir. Hopefully with enough leverage from the Committee to Save Silver Lake's Reservoirs.
7. Sunset Junction...bringing the music across the street from me. It's not quite that bad.
6. The 30 degree incline. Has a way of telling you who can park and who can't. Has a way of telling you who can run and who can't.
Of course I've only seen one other person run up it, and it seemed like he was inhaling asbestos after it.
5. The long-haired toothless, crutch-carrying white Bum in front of the 99 cents store who comes every morning from 7-10 and waves at me while I go running. That guy is hip-hop. You will probably never read this and I've never said more than one line to you but, this blog is for you.
4. Bellevue Rec Center track and basketball court. Just being there and actually being maintained is actually good enough.
3. Ground zero for some political rallies. I've witnessed a Kerry rally, a student immigrants march, and some antiwar rallies. This may be on the way out though...we shall see.
2. Graffing and tagging baby. Bombing a super lame ass Gentrifiers mural painted with a brush of dumbass next to you!
Blaow, I weigh one hundred and four-ty pounds...
Actually, on the other hand the one that feels, I do feel bad for the artists who spend time working on something, only to have it hacked up as quickly as it is.
I also feel kinda bad for the Elliot Smith memorial.
But understand that the claiming of open space in this form is really a battle from and for the young folks who in all likelihood probably don't have the privileges the artists have. It helps to keep the place grounded and hopefully opens the door for dialogue.
1. Location. It's next to the history of Echo Park and Historic Filipinotown.
Spanish Colonial America vs. British Colonial America
by B.J. on 6/14/2005 06:46:00 AM
0 commentsPrint this post
It's interesting to see how we in the West US come from a Spanish Colonial America whereas the East from a British Colonial America and how those colonial influences are still embodied in our society today. Just think.
LA vs. NY
Tupac vs. Biggie
laid-back and classic vs. quick and fresh
scattered vs. contained
play vs. work
Why am I thinking about this ?
So, my instructor said something interesting in class when she talked about growing up in El Segundo in the tradition dominated by "Spanish Colonial America" rather than a tradition dominated by "British Colonial America" as is all over the East Coast.
We were talking about this in the context of plazas and how it was Spanish (or Native American) tradition after Sunday Mass to go to the plaza with the guys on one side and the girls on another staring at each other while in some kind of line, engaging in flirtatious activity, and how this activity managed to manifest itself onto the time when she was growing up in the 1960s, cruising Sunset Blvd in her car with her chicas staring at males. According to her, we still do it today when we drive and always look at people's faces and body language as to what our next move should be at an intersection.
Apparently this stuff does not happen in NY. Or maybe it does, I don't know.
But regardless (a shout-out to George Lopez), Spanish Colonial America still permeating West Coast culture. Columbus Day --- WTF is that ? We out west don't know. Eventually, I'd like to go deeper into this, especially in regards to the physical planning of the city. (Wow I sound like I'm proposing my dissertation topic)
At the top of my head, the most prominent example of Spanish colonial America being present is that you can still see all the Spanish rooftops on top of the older houses, especially in the California Missions. Some of the architecture is probably out of the Spanish-Native American tradition.
I'm not sure how city planning went in Spain, but I do know it did take a while for LA to industrialize as quickly as NY did. But we did have missions which people would have to walk to --- so immediately we are a walking wandering culture.
NY followed a loosely British model of commerce that you could see by the 1750s. It was a trading port right away. They want to get things done.
Least for me, the sewer covers seem to be pushed in are there are more random road cracks that I didn't notice before, even in the well-paved roads in Westwood.
They're just fucking my car up like it was an ex-Jehovah Witness college freshman girl on 1-dollar beer night. It'll be their (meaning state of California's) fucking fault if my car suddenly has some leak and I probably will sit back and do nothing like the Asian that I am.
What the hell did all that rain do to the goddamn roads of LA ?
More armchair anthropology, meaning I make sense of stereotypes.
LA is often called a representation of the world with all these different cultures in different parts of the city. There's a lot of stuff that I notice when I'm driving, particularly about race and class.
Every day to school, I go west from the hacked up lower-middle class neighborhood in Silver Lake through big ballin', shot callin' (though these stiffies might put it another way) 90210. The further west I drive, the more white and slanted-eye folks get, the shinier the cars get, the more traffic it gets, and the more hasty the drivers get.
Speeding up traditionally has been associated with young drivers, but you know what, it's not just them, it's these clean-cut corporate white people who like to run too.
All over Beverly Hills they are just ready to cut you off if you "slow down" to 40 mph. The type of people who do this run the gamut: Let's see there's the Bend it Like Beckham Mom with veins in her eyes after 15 face lifts when it's her pussy that needs to be patched back up blasting past you in her Beamer, there's the all-familiar corporate shark in either his BMW, his Porsche, one of those European cars. The Asian people in the rice rockets (thanks to UCLA) are actually pretty moderate.
However, not actively engaging in this speedfest are vehicles such as pick-up trucks or vans strictly for lugging lots of tools or supplies around. You will also notice how brown the drivers and scrubbily dressed they are.
This got me thinking: why aren't they speeding up ? Don't they have to get somewhere too ? Is there a fear that they're going to get pulled over ?
Racing is something that has always been done for power, but driving in the real world is a lot more varied.
Those who speed up want to establish they indeed are here and/or need to get somewhere. And Those who drive slow and casually are either ignored, busy, and/or very assured of themselves.
I don't think these things are permanently inherent in any culture as much as it has been conditioned on them by the way America has treated them in their jobs and whatnot.
So these older brown guys are acting as they have been conditioned here in America; there is a long history of them getting crapped on and getting menial jobs, so they've become indifferent to the world. So as a result, a lot of these older lower-class guys just slow down because they're indifferent.
There's also another group that generally likes to slow down, the assured and matured group, regardless of any age, race, or class. Not indifferent, just no need to speed up, turn up the radio. They tend to be well-acknowledged people who don't need anymore acknowledgment.
Too bad we don't have a lot of them in LA (or I don't even notice).
A lot of the younger generation, brown, black, white, yellow coming through in a wide variety of cars with mix of road slugs and speeders. I think what produces the young speeders in general and not just in the brown folk is this need for power and control. It's like this maybe because they like to show off whatever they have and to establish that they are here.
The other half that speeds is generally oldest and dominates the Beverly Hills that I talk about probably speeds up because they need to get somewhere and feel this need. It's pretty much exclusively white with a sprinkle of Asian folks. If they are speeding up to get to places at any class, it shows how much they are slaves to a system that calls for them to get here and there and here and there. Richer white guys. Slaves to a system. Ironic, eh.
Not to sound like one of those romanticized or metaphysical writers, but there was two shades of grey in the sky. One was good, the other was, eh, mum. I think in both, I saw such mundane things turn into such elaborate things.
Driving down the last strip of West Hollywood Sunset with the tall buildings, I was awed at how the sky was a perinklish grey. It was like a smoke of hope cause it reminded me of good times when I was 3 or 4 and someone took me to see Bozo the clown back when we were still living in Chicago (which reminds me of the Richard Marx song "Keep Coming Back." I don't remember going, but I did get McDonalds afterward.
However further down the road in Beverly Hills territory the sky morphed into a gray grey. Now that reminded me of driving in the back of a funeral car in the rain in Los Feliz.
by B.J. on 8/28/2004 07:02:00 AM
0 commentsPrint this post
Yesterday, I took a trip to East Los Angeles and Downtown LA cause I wanted to see the art there --- murals and taggings as opposed to the West LA plethora of bourgeois steel sculptures, paintings, and digitzed nonsense. Maybe I'm romanticizing a bit, but I find the East LA/Downtown LA art much more interesting because it is more interesting to concoct your own theories as to why and how it is constructed. Anything becomes more interesting in that regard - if you're trying to see how things are constructed, but the art in East LA seems much more raw in that it's not polished off and retouched and put somewhere for display. It's just there.
All the preceding pictures were on Olympic Boulevard. I thought it was a park, but it turned out to be a bunch of residences, so I didn't exactly stroll in to see other art that was on the side of other buildings.
The Staple of East LA Mural Art
This is Belmont Art Park that I was talking about in this post. It wasn't the cleanest of places as there was mud and dust everywhere and it smelled like shit at ground level. But hey it's a place much like the Venice Beach wall or what a skate park is to a skateboarder it is to a tagger. There were paint cans everywhere and about 20-30 males there playing this game from Mexico of which I forgot the name.
You know the line, please say it to yourself accordingly cause it's way beyond annoying.
I don't think I came on a great day when people were out creating new shit.
"Belmont Art Park United is a group of Los Angeles residents who request that the land located at 1304 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90026 Assessor's ID Number 5152-007-013, know as the Belmont Tunnel or Toluca Yard be turned into an art park and general recreation facility open to the public. This piece of land is of great historic value to the community of Los Angeles for two main reasons. The area should be preserved as a historic place due to its past use as a subway tunnel portal and train yard for Los Angeles’ first light rail subway system, the Pacific Electric Railway’s Red Line. Secondly the yard has been used as an art park by local artists and muralists who have painted the walls of this site for over 30 years. This is a valuable resource for young artists and muralists to express them artistically as they develop their artform into a constructive, and useful trade such as mural painting, fine art on canvas, graphic design, scenic design and commercial illustration."
Basically, some corporation wants to build a bunch of low-income housing condominiums in what is considered a place of great artistic achievement (though the culturally retarded will call it rubbish graffiti with no artistic merit).
I may be an idealist, but I side with those who want to keep the park because parks like that are not only great places of art, but also a way of empowering people in those tough neighborhoods and keeping these alienated minority elements happy. Ironically, most of the time, it would be low-income housing on the verge of being eliminated on which I'd side with in favor of something for some white dude's recreation like say. . .a park.
However, in this particular situation, the art in this park operates as a great way for people in these communities to express themselves in an extremely harmless way. This is one way of fun. This is what they can thrive on.
And it's not just a few elite artists. New art is constantly put up there and art that someone may have done just a few months ago may have been painted over 3 or 4 times. There's that whole website above dedicated to fighting for this one grain of sand in the sandbox that is Los Angeles.
Even if you really don't really care for the welfare of these people, this kind of place is the type that actually serves the society at large. Notice in my second paragraph that I said "expressing themselves in an extremely harmless way." With these parks, kids are able to stay away from gangs and drugs - one way to stop violence. Look at it this way if you're a Republican who thinks that anything like being a minority can be overcome with a strong mindset: They gain their own power by expressing themselves and their opinions (albeit like most minority art usually resisting white American culture by asserting its own). And when they gain some of this power, there's more chance for integration and another mini-step for your so-called color-blind societies. More importantly, they also still pump money into the economy by buying your expensive spray paint cans.
The part that no one ever acknowledges because its about as sanitary as a Dmanisian fossil. Geez, there's no respect for the dirty places, even though they've got more wisdom.
Hollywoodland was all farmland, first of all. Now the only thing green is the toxic shit on those bumpy ass roads.
It's interesting to see how my city evolved so quickly, wondering about who roamed where and how things got started. Fun shit all the time.
But here are the interesting tidbits about the history of the landmarks we see today bulletpointed and packaged for you:
-Children's Hospital was built in 1913
-The Vons (Safeway for Nor Cal fools) located on Virgil and Sunset was the movie set for an old movie called Intolerance. The William Fox Studio (predecessor to 20th century Fox) was located on Western and Sunset.
-That old Cahuenga library was built in 1916 and named after the Cahug-Na Indians who lived in a stretch of Atwater Village to Hollywood.
-That broken down piece of shit that is called LACC used to be University of California, Southern Branch in 1919. But that university relocated 12 miles to a ranch called Westwood and now calls itself UCLA.
-The church of Scientology buildings oun Fountain used to be the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. It was built in 1930. Cedars of Lebanon eloped with Cedars-Sinai in Beverly Hills in 1976.
by B.J. on 10/30/2003 09:11:00 AM
0 commentsPrint this post
Do you ever remember ever thinking that you would kill the guy who invented some annoyance like school, lawyers, or parking meters ?
Well, I got the name of one of those punks who created these annoyances: Carl C. Magee, the parking meter.
Feel free to dig him up and successively pelt him with pennies till you feel like he or someone else gets the message.
"The world's first installed parking meter was in Oklahoma City, on July 16, 1935. Mr. Magee had been appointed to the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce traffic committee, and was assigned the task of solving the parking problems in downtown Oklahoma City. Apparently, folks who worked in the area were parking on downtown streets, staying all day, and leaving few spaces for shoppers and others who visited the central business district."
"Magee's solution was to install parking meters, charge for the use of the parking spaces, and turn over those spaces that would otherwise have been filled by all day parkers. In addition, the parking meters would generate revenue for a growing city. It must have worked, as the idea of metered parking eventually caught on worldwide. From that early beginning, the use of parking meters by municipalities, colleges and universities, and private parking facilities has increased to the point that today, in the United States alone, there are an estimated five million parking meters in use."
The story of highways in general is interesting because it brings to consciousness standardization within cultures and other crap like that.
It can take you from LA to Frisco (101), from Cal Poly Pomona to San Luis Obispo (OK, I'm not really sure how to do that). There's a sort of mystery to every little town like Soledad or Gonzalez I pass every time I make the trip up the 101, the El Camino Real, which used to link the 21 California missions to get to school. I've been intrigued by those mysteries and the histories of every town's inhabitants.
But Los Angeles is interesting in its own way. It brought the first freeway in the 6, the Arroyo Seco Freeway, which has since become the 110 according to this timeline. It also established its own standards in the way highway signs were made as dotted out in this picture, from the fonts to the system used to tell the distance from an exit.
Notice that the signs are in white and black, rather than the standard green and white starting in 1964 today. This photo was taken in 1966 at Sunset Boulevard on the 405.
Kriske.com provides more thorough explanation:
"Early guide signs were crude and usually specific to the particular location. However, in 1956, state highway engineers developed a number of specific guidelines for creating signs to be standardized across the state.
The overhead sign that is now typical of all interstates was first used in California along heavily travelled urban freeway segments, and as of 1956 the Golden State was using overhead signing more extensively than any other state. Another California innovation was the use of white lettering on a black background, which enhanced visibility and legibility. Vestiges of these antique signs can still be found, most notably the black sign along Northbound Interstate 5 at the I-210/CA 14 truck route separation. Due to its success in California, this light-on-dark scheme was later incorporated for use in Interstate guide signs (using Green instead of Black) into the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), which specifies signage requirements for the Interstate (and Federal ?) System."
This photo was taken in 1974. Two things are radically different from those days as the Pasadena 11 has become the Pasadena 110, and the "Bakersfield" destination has been replaced with Sacramento.
The 7 freeway since 1985 has become the 710.
The 99, 6, and 134 freeways in 1959.
Now it's just the 5 and the 134.
Now the 10, 110 South to San Pedro, and 110 North to Pasadena. Notice how the US Routes were not the solid white that it is today, as seen on freeways like the 101.
Bitching About Parking Thanks to that Damn Gay Festival
Holla if you've seen Venice Beach ! The real Heart of LA ! Crowded and hard to park, eh ?
Same label of "heart of LA" applies to that damn Sunset Junction mess also known as "Gay Festival" in front of my street yestrday.
They really should have strict parking standards like permits only for fucking residents only here because it's a bitch trying to find any especially yestrday and any weekend afternoon. The kicker is that in white "residential" areas, there are ridiculous parking restrictions like no parking at all after 6 PM, 2-hour-limit, etc. when the street is as empty as a Clippers game, which is how those retard overweight, donut-eating, with black glasses thicker than J-Lo's ass, rent-a-cops named Warren have earned their nuts and beans by placing tickets on unfortunate motherfucks like myself who didn't take the time to read their 20 signs regarding the parking there. Punk mothafuckaz (American History X Black guy voice --- like the Respected One, Mary, Partner, and the Weasel would know). Dude, those white "residential" areas, have 2-story houses with real backyards and garages neatly and carefully organized, complete with a set of 4 white people packaged neatly in each house, while my hood consists of like 15 straight apartments jumbled up a fucking hill and gays, Mexicans, and Flips stuffed in bunches like Elton John's night before. The only perk is that I get to stay out late. But then they can get me on curfew.
Add me to your reading list.
|
Sports Two |
Big Soccer |
Basketball Forum |
|
Michael Moore |
Onion |
Entertaining News |
Questions for God |
E-Baums World |
Stupid Videos 
|
So You Wanna... |
Medical Anthropology |
|
Websites' Archives |
