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.
Author's Rendition of statement: "Bill Wennington got wurped"
Actual statement: "Bill Wennington got worked."
The etymology of the word stems from a shellacking the 1996-1997 Chicago Bulls took from the hometown Los Angeles Lakers team in the game of Professional Basketball. "Wurped" is merely a mispronunciation of the word "worked", however by mere fact of the aforementioned shellacking, combined with the author's inability to say anything in defense of the Chicago Bulls, "wurped" functions to intensify the sense of defeat, or loss (i.e. salt on the wound).
Four years ago there was a graffiti park called Belmont Art Park near downtown Los Angeles on 2nd Street and Glendale.
I first came across it during a Huell Howser special. The context was right in front of the downtown vista of buildings. It used to be the site of the transit station. I can't believe I'd never seen this place. Huell spent the program interviewing some Latinos in the park playing some kind of ball game from Mexico or whatever, overviewing the art, speaking to some kind of tour group, and interviewing the artists.
I checked it out one day, then another day, and then another day (which is not documented). First day was when there were people playing that ball game I saw in Huell Howzer. Second day there were gates, but we pushed through anyway. Third day, there was no way of getting past the gates and we could only see the park from behind the gates. A few conferences, article readings later, I came to learn gradually that there was some deep history and precedence to it if Huell didn't already impart that into mind.
Many of the lot’s constantly replenished murals have been featured in magazines, photography books, art history textbooks and documentaries. Taggers come from all over – San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London – to paint there and document the murals. Art students from Japan make the pilgrimage to the lot where 2nd Street and Glendale Boulevard meet in the shadow of downtown to soak up the atmosphere.
From the 1980s, up until last November, the site was a popular neighborhood gathering place, outdoor art gallery, ancient Mexican Indian ballgame court, and a profitable film shoot location. In early 2003, planning began for building a 276 unit apartment complex on this site, but the community was not alerted of these plans until August of 2004.
Part of the site used to be a Shell gas station in the 1940s. Underground Storage Tanks have been buried for all these years, but only recently leaked gasoline into the soil and groundwater, when they were removed, illegally, by the developers.
Interestingly enough, Belmont Art Park is the site where Edward Doheny discovered oil. The Doheny of the Doheny Foundation and Doheny St. in West Hollywood. I guess it's only a fitting history to a fitting end...
The historic and cultural importance of the graffiti was not recognized by the city. Only the tunnel, the yard, and substation were declared historic and cultural, not the layers upon layers upon layers of sweat and paint. They decided to monumentalize a substation, a place which handles the utilities of the transit system. Utilities which have long ceased to be functional. It's like worshipping your nearest non-working fire hydrant. They will celebrate the yard's cultural history and heritage by making it a new pee reservoir/dog park.
Belmont Art Park was closing down was to develop 276 housing units, 20% of which would be allocated for affordable housing. Initially, before the LA Times was writing about this, somehow I was led to believe that the condos would be developed for low-income housing. Young, dumb, beating the drum. I knew at the time that we needed affordable housing, but I'm not sure why affordable housing advocates were fighting for this as if it was some kind of solution to homelessness.
The lot has been used for tarasca, an ancient Mexican ballgame, and as a canvas for elaborate graffiti murals that have gained international notoriety and been the backdrop to films and commercials.
But other community activists argued the development would help solve a long-standing need for affordable housing in the dense neighborhoods that surround downtown.”I am tired of seeing people on the street,” said Alvivon Hurd, a downtown resident and member of ACORN, a housing advocacy group.
“As much as I like the park, I can’t take that position.”
The planned complex calls for 55 affordable housing units, an after-school tutorial program and surplus parking.
Alas, the Los Angeles Downtown News now reporting on the new development called Belmont Station at Glendale and 2nd St.:
Almost one-third of the residents who pre-leased market-rate units at Belmont Station are USC students, but Essex expects the property to be popular among young professionals and families who work Downtown, Prayonsirisak said.
"I thought an obstacle was, we were out of Downtown, but a lot of people were okay with that because Downtown, it's busy, it's crazy, there's so much stuff going on," she said. "Whereas here, when you leave from work even though we're just blocks away, it's kind of like the suburbs of Downtown."
Somehow, I don't think those affordable housing advocates from 2004 envisioned USC students, who usually can afford a $30,000 education and live kinda far from their campus, young professionals to be the big beneficiaries of the "suburban" developments.
In fact, there's class snobbery inherent in the discourse of the blogger trying to sell us on the new development.
Aside from its historic connections to the old Belmont Tunnel, the development is notable for its generous allotment of affordable housing - 55 of the 275 new residences have been set aside for low-income families.
I'm not quite seeing how "generous" things are when a family needs to make almost $60,000 a year just to live in the "affordable" studio with the lowest rents at $1600+. And only 20% of the units are priced at that "affordable" rate. Not quite seeing how the $4000 a month condos will do anything either to mitigate the nation's largest homeless population.
Equally intriguing is the way various people seem to perceive of the history that was there before them:
However, the structure may be sandblasted to remove decades of graffiti or painted to match its original color. Crews testing exterior paint chips found some with 150 to 200 layers of spray paint, a telling sign that the derelict station (and the site in general) was once a playground for graffiti artists and the homeless.
"We welcomed that with open arms, the history," Kinney said. "Obviously, it was a challenge because when we first saw it, it was all graffitied. But watching it progress, we decided we were going to take this theme and run with it."
The way they handled the issue of graffiti is as wasted fragments of past years, home to vandals and transients. It's treated as an obstruction. It's a history that doesn't need to be known or need to exist, essentially, cause were creating a new whitewashed one covered in green.
In the eyes of some potential buyers and people who follow real estate development, it is a place that "didn't exist" for 45 years.
I’m glad that this once forsaken neighborhood is coming back to life at such a rapid pace after more than a 45-year hiatus! The apartments look great!
Apparently, the neighborhood's been "dead", and is only "re-birthed" when his white flight-ass comes back to town.
In the end it's not about the muralists, the taggers, the spray cans, the tarrasca. It's not about Meta-Housing, the commentors, the new buyers. It's about the memory of a space of nowhere that was co-opted into a place of somewhere, which got exposure everywhere --- the essence of the roots of hip-hop. It's a place you won't find on a tourist map, but has just as much resonance. It's about the meanings created, manipulated, the interconnectedness of the pieces and the people, the folk who breathed into life from an ambiguous dirt pond in the teeth of downtown Los Angeles.
by B.J. on 7/16/2008 11:46:00 PM
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I have no idea why I saved this blog here a month ago. For some reason, my memory recall of ideas has been hazy. I feel like I've been "tip of tongue" most of the time in which I know I had an idea, but it feels like I can't quite capture exactly what it is. I'm hitting everything, except the exact strand of thought that clarifies everything.
The Depression of 2009 and the Economic Geographies of 1929.
At the time I del.icio.us'ed it to my "blog" tag, I was thinking of a possible master's thesis, the geography of opportunity, for my Master's application, I made a trip to the Center for Land Use Interpretation bought a book and set of maps called Radical Cartography and another book called Slow Space.
Quotes of interest:
-"In discussions of the current financial crisis, the importance of housing and mortgages, and of foreign account imbalances, notably with East Asian manufacturing economies, suggests a failure in spatial fixes on which capitalism has been said to depend."
Spatial fixes I've learned from this blog, and this paper are simply "geographic expressions of an economic system."
-"It is a matter of material sites of social reproduction, such as the home."
So what was of interest to me? What was the question or questions I was interested in?
Some possibilities...
1) What were the economic cycles were people enmeshed in at the time? What was the physical infrastructure, layout that made this possible in the first place? Upon what did people depend on to obtain commodities to sustain their lifestyles? What was the geography that enabled them to depend on such things in the economy? I think this is likely what I was most wondering about.
2) What did the maps of 1929 look like? Was there spontaneous consumership and what did that look like?
3) Could it have to do with immigrants and following the flow of goods and commodities?
4) What were the social networks available? Upon what networks of relatives, co-workers, friends did people rely on during the depression?
5) What were the opportunities they saw and what did they seize upon?
I can't quite figure out what was interesting, so it's just here and maybe something else will remind me.
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.
Los Angeles' Skid Row from Pras Perspective and the Society that Buries Useful Information
by B.J. on 1/25/2008 05:19:00 AM
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Pras from the Fugees finished a documentary last summer that highlights a very important issue. The documentary featured him living first-hand as an actual, walking, breathing homeless person in some of the roughest streets of LA (some say its as bad as Calcutta, whatever that looks like). He filmed with hidden cameras and crew for 9 days, sleeping on the sidewalk, panhandling, and assorted other homeless people stuff.
This is the sort of thing that piques my interest.
When I went to go watch it within 6 days of its stated limited release, it was fucking gone, probably due to lack of interest and uh...lack of marketing.
It really irks me that for issues like this aren't being heard at all. Instead, it's pretty sick that we pay lots of attention to utter bullshit. I don't give a shit if American Idol were canceled tomorrow. I wouldn't die crying knowing that I haven't seen anyone Dancing with the Stars. I shouldn't give a shit about NBA basketball, but I guess that's my form of alcohol.
Part of its on us, but then part of it is that marketers do quite the job...
The know how to saturate and engage, which is why most of them would probably be effective teachers. Teachers are basically just entertainment (least that's what my co-worker told me, and I think that's true too). Wish that talent would devote its time towards more worthy causes than choices of cereals, choices of cars, iPhones, credit cards.
Its sad that the information that would probably be more useful to know is buried underneath the tons of crap thrown at us. I'm glad that we have the internet (unless some corporation goes out and buy this too) to try and change that.
In this age of hyper-globalism and consumerism, with super-marketing (that is the taking over of television, radio, billboards, buildings, the built environment) with all our basic needs (relatively) fulfilled from water, food, shelter, heat, clean air, clean environment, electricity, its as if our only ultimate objective is...to find entertainment for ourselves. Can't we do something more? If we can learn to saturate ourselves with "useless" stuff, can't we learn to saturate ourselves with better, more useful information?
Can't we find a way to market information such as the number of people who die from water-related illnesses or information about the number of people living with electricity or the number of things we consume?
Can't we find a way to market this type of humanistic media, these movies about the human condition so it becomes THE thing to see?
"I experienced everything - panhandling, sleeping on the sidewalk, the rats trying to get into my tent, defecating, urinating on the sidewalk. Because you know when you're homeless, you can't go into restaurants and use the facilities.
So it was just actually seeing the reality. We have this misconception that oh yeah, people who are homeless are usually lazy or they're on drugs, and that's not actually the case at all. People who are chronically homeless - that means where they need assistance to get out of their situation - only make up about 20 percent of the homeless people (unintelligible). The rest are just regular people (unintelligible) just misfortunes."
Commenting on a scary experience he had during his "stay" at Skid Row
"One was when I think I was sleeping in the tent, it was raining real hard and the rats was coming in. I was, like, man, I need to get out of here. But see, what happened is - see, it's like we as human beings, we adapt, and I started to adapt to my environment. So then, like, on the fourth or fifth day I got comfortable and now I'm trying to figure out exactly how I'm going to maneuver.
So I forgot about going back to my other world. Because see, when you get trapped in that world, you've got to find the best way to make it fit for you, you know what I mean?"
by B.J. on 11/10/2007 03:58:00 PM
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It's been quite a while since I last ran more than 10 miles.Today I wasn't going to be content just running the typical Sunset to West Hollywood usually through Beverly Hills and to UCLA, or Griffith Park Boulevard to Los Feliz through Glendale, or SilverLake to Fletcher through Eagle Rock route.
Those routes...too routine, and I have a sneaking suspicion that I won't ever be able to run a marathon in 2 hours and 9 minutes.
Instead, today I decided on going to downtown LA, and wherever else the road took me.
Started out gloomy and chilly enough by this Angeleno's Standards, which is why I handily wore my winter headband, which suckered me into believing that I was Rafa Marquez, the Barca defender and Mexican hero.
It was a day, a run where I saw how beautiful everything is...and how ugly things can get.
Ran across buildings that have been here since the emergence of LA as a big city 130 years ago.
Shook my head, mentally, with each and every luxury loft occupying tons of space, with the knowledge that Skid Row is literally a block away.
Ran across the Eastern entrance of FIDM. Wondered if the rich white females there would look at me, catch on to my Rafa Marquez headband. and call it the next big thing.
Visited a cool nonprofit that will and has served as my parking lot when I have to go to the Convention Center and/or Staples Center.
Had to see the old Alvarado terrace. There's a little strip of land, as part of Arnold's Parks act, that serves as a "park" with some authentic cobblestone roads. It's always interesting to see something that old.
Saw the old "S.Hoover Apartments" sign on this one building, that I always see when I drive down to this part of town. I can't make up my mind if the structure was built and the lettering was written around the 1890s or 1920s or somewhere in between or heck maybe even later.
Went through to Westmoreland, thinking how it was an enclave for LA's earliest elite, what they and their ancestors would think of it now.
Parused through the old high school. Or should I say "brand-spanking new" old high school. Seems like all anyone has to do to ruin things is burn down one general section of the school. No more street crossing to get to that building across the street, no more on-ground student center, no more sophomore lockers near Pinney.
One of the women I talked to said that it looks like a college campus. Yes, if you're a fan of the "institutional" look that Porter College at UC Santa Cruz sports, then you too might enjoy the new construction.
After that, I ran across some egregious examples of city planning on what was a route for the high school cross country team. The route stretches from Venice westward bound to La Brea. I never noticed how unwalkable it is. Jesus christ, or Councilperson build a fucking side walk!
In other news, "egregious" is rapidly emerging as one of my favorite vocabulary words to casually inject into normal conversation.I didn't realize how far La Brea actually was and could feel the urge to quit bearing down on me.
But I was so far from home that it would've probably taken a 4 hour walk to just to get back. So once I was up La Brea and crossing 1st street, I eventually gave in...5-6 miles to walk...and at a pace you can only expect after running more than 10 miles for the first time in months...without drinking any water, eating anything beforehand.
I'd have to walk up La Brea and wait for Santa Monica Boule to show up.
This is when the sun started to show up a bit more.
I wondered how and why the hell the surveyors measured La Brea heading West.
I saw orthodox Jewish people attending Saturday morning services. Kept wondering if they spoke English. Perhaps that's how some folks in Montana or South Dakota view Mexicans, Arabs, etc. Wondered if they had a myspace and if they would put a grainy self-taken picture of themselves in those suits. Wow, I am showing tons of ignorance, and I guess I know a bit of what it feels like to be one of those people mocking people of color.
Saw some nice graff work across La Brea.
Women with nice fat ischial collosities wearing pants to a point of tightness and you could see the outline of their little cloth (or possibly silk) coverings.
A frail-looking white homeless man offered to suck my dick.
Noticed a water shop on Santa Monica, and that they had dropped their prices for a gallon from 25 cents to 20 cents. Also noticed that Little Ceasar's was selling crazy bread for 2 bucks. Don't even know if the price has gone up or down, but pizza's only 5 bucks!
Saw a bunch of people in the Medical building where I used to go to the Dentist having some kind of conference breakfast or brunch. Still smelled pretty medical --- a strange enticing mixture of basementy and gassy.
Noticed that they've sandblasted a lot of graffiti in the spot leaning up against an Elementary school.
Along the way, I noticed a bunch of other things:
Lot of people working on a Saturday. Mostly the ice cream pushcart vendors, the fruit pushcart vendors, the day laborers at industrial buildings, the people making the comida at las restaurantes centroamericana, the ditch diggers, mass poster plastering. It's interesting how specialized a people we have become. We all do one thing at a time, hope to get paid well, and buy stuff. Yet, this might be changing given the way information is now sent.
I noticed that the areas had more space, the more West I went. Developers from the 1920s and 1930s at work?
I wondered if there were any straight houses in and around the Pico-Union, Alvarado terrace area. Pretty damn big for just families. This is probably something I could just find out by looking at a zoning map, but that can be a daunting task.
Saw private security guards telling homeless people to vacate the premises on several structures with lots of crap in it, usually with people who use paper to acquire the crap. Very popular around 99 cents stores and convenient stores in and around Hollywood, and soon, coming to a city near you!
Tagging is just through the roof nowadays. The Los Angeles mural painted by cache has a bunch of people trying to scratch on it already, and I think that was a pretty dope mural with some credibility, but some people obviously don't think so. Or perhaps Cache shouldn't dominate every damn wall I see in Echo Park and should integrate more folks in his work. I noticed on an affordable housing project, kids had already began tag-scratching it's doors. And that's been up for maybe only 2-3 years. A mural that is currently in work with a bunch of white people on it on is sure to suffer the same fate.
I built up a craving for sweet bread. Saw it first in Echo Park, saw it on Santa Monica, but nothing reasonably walkable, which sent me to thinking about the economic and demographic development of Silver Lake. Only the ever popular Pupusas, and Tacos...in restaurants allowed. No bakeries? One I see is a restaurant and some Filipino bakery.
I continue to be stunned at how people come here to be rebels or "different" and...shop, shop, shop...for furniture, vintage furniture, vintage clothing, shoes, gelatto, vegan crap, coffee. Shopping...the most undifferent thing you can do. The people in Silver Lake make me mad sometimes.
But all in all the day was pretty damn fun, more food for thought or perhaps a waste of time for some.
The road I took took me down Sunset to the borderline between Chinatown and downtown. From downtown to the Staples Center From the Staples Center to Loyola High school. From the high school to La Brea. And from La Brea to back home. It started out gloomy and chill and ended sunny and chilly. Ran through a mix of enclaves, with the businesses offered in English, Spanish, Korean, Armenian, Jewish, Tagalog. I thought about George Carlin's meme of how we've turned America into a mall. Thought about architecture, urban planning, race relations, personal relations, language, and the physiology of the brain.
In the words of Forrest Gump, I just felt like running.
But not without my Livestrong, Enriching Lives, Justice for Immigrants, and Serve the People wristbands.
by B.J. on 8/28/2004 07:02:00 AM
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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.
Add me to your reading list.
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