Spotted on Spring St across from the Los Angeles State Park. The McKenna logo has been declared vulgar by some (sorry no photo).
Blossoming and fruiting
calendula
pink jasmine
loquat
++++++
Pictorial Webster’s: Inspiration to Completion from John Carrera on Vimeo.
The amount of work it takes to make a handmade book is astounding. Even more astounding is the price, $3000! Whoa, a mass-produced version is available for much cheaper. It’s cool and all, but I bet Dover has cheaper clip art.
++++++
A food activist becomes a mistaken messiah!
“I don’t think a messiah figure is going to be a terribly good
launching point for the kinds of politics I’m talking about – for
someone who has very strong anarchist sympathies, this has some fairly
deep contradictions in it.”
+++++
Oil spills are aggravating
Oil spill feared on Great Barrier Reef
“The state government has been acting like snake oil salesmen spruiking
the riches to be made from exporting LNG (liquid natural gas) and more
coal, however they fail to acknowledge the environmental harm that will
be caused both on land and sea by these industries,” Capricorn
Conservation Council spokesman Ian Herbert said.
+++++
“OC life is not the life for me”
In theory this seems good, bring back all the old punk and hardcore bands for an autism awareness. I mean, how many of the old punks were suffering from autism and didn’t know it, right? But honestly, I want to preserve my memories of the band members youthful bodies,their frenzied on-stage energy and the loud, fast music. These reunion shows are stuffed with old dudes laboring through sets while trying to relive their glory days, the songs are slower and some even try to shove long metal guitar riffs into hardcore songs. Isn’t that what we were against? I don’t want sad new memories.
Orange County Punk Rock Picnic
++++++
Turkish Ice Cream Man
When I was 17, I was an ice-cream scooper at Thrifty’s, now Rite-Aid. I quit after a month because the weird guys from the nearby Hollywood halfway houses gave me the creeps, I kept breaking the sleeves of ice-cream cones making them unusable and I also didn’t realize part of my duties was to lug heavy cases of ice-cream out of the huge storage freezer down a flight of stairs. So much for my first job.
+++++
Trails Cafe in Griffith Park has some tasty eats for an after hike respite, vegetarian stuff too. It’s a bit on the pricey side so hike with money. I had a delicious peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a very nice lavender and vanilla cookie which I have not stopped thinking about, yum!
+++++
Learn Vegetable Gardening by the Foot
For many years I gardened using the square foot method. Initially (and subsequently, come to think of it) it’s pretty labor intensive but the rewards are high yields and less time spent thinning and wasting seeds. The soil must be double-dug due to the close spacing of plants but most gardening folks would recommend raised beds so as not to damage soil structure. I used a kitchen colander for soil sifting and two school rulers to measure my little plots.
I didn’t have a job at the time and would sometimes spend ten hours a day in the garden. Yeah, I was a little OCD. Now I’m the laziest gardener ever and my vegetable yields are representative of my work.
++++++
I saw The Runaways movie and was kinda disappointed. First off, I was a Runaways fan although I was the generation ten years later. I thought Cherry Bomb was the bomb, har har. I always wondered why none of my peers seemed interested in them. Perhaps it was because Joan Jett was already a pop sell-out by then and Weird Al Yankovic had already improved her music. I have always liked this song by Joan Jett though, maybe because it reminds me of a football chant.
Back to the movie…The production quality was cheap and not in a good, edgy way, just cheap. Like they’re supposed to be in Japan but the actors don’t look Japanese and “Tokyo” is a recognizable street in Downtown LA.
The actress Dakota Fanning who played Cherie Currie was just wide-eyed and goofy. If you see videos of Cherie Currie, she was hard, like chola hard. I mean she looked like she was 30 years old and tough. That did not come through in the movie at all. And Kirsten Stewart as Joan Jett, pfft, she’d try to do this rough thing with her voice and I wanted to laugh. It was like an after-school movie for rebellious girls but not too rebellious, you know. Ah, maybe I just compare these things to my own teenage years too much. Overall, the movie did not capture the spirit of the era nor was it evocative of something monumental as I imagined it set out to be.
+++++
Among the many t-shirt ideas I’ve had in mind to make “Los Angeles: Number One in Riots” is one of my favorites. According to this list, we’re number five and six which I think makes us number one as we are the only city listed twice. Oh yeah!
Ten of the Wildest Riots of All-Time
+++++
Celebration – New Skin
Crazy about the vocals and the organ on this song. You can hear more of them and get downloads too and this amazing music site: The Sound of Indie
+++++
one more song before the end of this long post…
I can’t believe this is Paul McCartney! Why? Because I actually like it and I dislike most anything having to do with The Beatles.
+++++
From the Daily Bleed:
April 6th is the birthday of ERICH MÜHSAM
German anarchist poet, murdered by the Nazis
Joan Brossa
I usually post these to Facebook and quite honestly, it’s FB that has pulled some of my attention away from this blog but I think this blog deserves better, don’t you?
:::
The Entryway
(h/t LA Observed)
This is really bizarre…or is it? I don’t know anymore. Two reporters go to live with a Mexican family in MacArthur Park so they can learn Spanish and make this fancy website to document it. I haven’t read it all but they seem to mention cockroaches and cholos quite a bit.
:::
It has a toilet, cutting board, bed/sofa and captures rain water!
:::
Joan Brossa
I first became enamored with Joan Brossa when I saw a posthumous exhibition of his work at the Miro Museum in Barcelona. Iwas enamored and delighted by his visual poems or ‘poetic revolt’. An example are these two leaves paper-clipped together and called ‘Bureaucracy’
:::
Speaking of bureaucracy, I have a special fondness for graphics from the Paris 68 uprisings. I was thinking of making a t-shirt from this graphic, would you wear one?
:::
The XX – Islands (Delorean Remix)
I’ve really been enjoying this song. Oh, and this one too!
:::
Today is Wilheim Reich‘s birthday (1897), the inventor of the orgone accumulator and author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism. I used to think if only more people read him, we’d all have less hang-ups and be a lot happier. I’m not as naive anymore but I’m still just as earnest.
:::
“This unassuming little girl is one of the Egyptian Dancers who caused a furor at the 1893 World’s Fair.” from the book Striptease: From Gaslight To Spotlight by Jessica Glasscock.
Bisquit-Roller Boogie
I tried my best to resist the lure of this video which I was first introduced to through artist Porous Walker‘s Facebook page.
What is it exactly that I find so lovable about this song? Is it the synthy Hi-NRG beats, the hypnotic vocoder robot vocals, the infectious chord changes, the catchy chorus backed by samba shakers, the requisite hand claps, the unrelenting bass line, the melodic alarm clock beeps taken from a children’s cartoon all topped by a perfectly timed cowbell pop? Or is it the video itself with the Chrissy Snow dancers, so vapid and rhythmless (you can see them counting beats in their head) following a choreography that means absolutely nothing to them cause all they are smiling about is the cocaine they were promised after the video shoot? Did Cicciolina find her inspiration here? Xuxa?
What could top the blondies’ choreography of Roller Boogie? How about a bunch of Mexicans*? I don’t have too much info about this clip but I am fairly certain it comes from el otro lado. Funny, but the stiff lackluster boogieing this song seems to inspire fits it perfectly. Do androids dream of roller boogie?
*My apologies to all my Pinoy readers, this clip is actually from the Philippines!
Ornette Coleman-Times Square
In the early 90s, mainly due to the influence of my cooler hipper friends and because of the bands we were listening to at the time, I became a semi-follower of the free jazz genre. I can’t say I really enjoyed listening to most of the records I collected but there was something about the music that kept me interested. I think it was the moment when the dissonant chaos turned into discordant melody – it was those little hooks that always pulled me in.
Ornette Coleman was one of my favorite free jazz artists, I tried my best to get into the stylings of musicians like the Brötzmanns but I admit, it’s the fellas from this side of the world I found more palatable. Eric Dolphy and improv master Pharoah Sanders are also favorites.
I love this clip and how the song starts off funky and we’re all thinking it’s time to shake your booty but then quickly turns into Coleman’s notorious all over the place crazy sax. If Los Angeles is to be represented by a type of jazz, I say Ornette Coleman would be the sound of the city with a little Poncho Sanchez thrown in for good measure.
By the way, as I was writing this post and listening to Ornette Coleman, a friend walked by and asked “What happened? Did your computer freeze?” referring to the song. Har har.
Dog Faced Hermans-Timebomb
Bonus! A song by Dog Faced Hermans who were one of the bands I mentioned earlier that were very influenced by Ornette Coleman and who through their music, led me to the world of free jazz. Seeing Dog Faced Hermans play live was an unforgettable experience.
Photo taken in the Lincoln Heights Industrial District
For a brief moment the warehouse doors opened… and behold, an unexpected sight!
Love and Rockets, #13 by Jaime and Beto Hernandez
By coincidence, the creator of the above publication came up to me when I was 14 years old and told me I reminded him of a character named Maggie from a comic book called Love and Rockets. Interestingly, the story of said character eerily mirrored my life for the next six years, love life and all. I related very closely to this fictional world of SoCal Chican@ punks, cholos and weird, spooky unexplained happenings – it brought me a bit of solace during the dark days of my teen years.
Mr. Freeze-Dr. Know
Not knowing there were any connections between the above story and incident, I saw this band one and half years later after reading my first Love and Rockets comic book (which was bought at a store called Y-Que.)
Poster spotted in Hancock Park
I’ve always been a fan of public art especially stencils and wheat pasted posters. There’s been a long tradition of using these methods of public propaganda to promote subversive political ideas and critiques of culture. Often the graphics and posters are clever and thoughtful and the critiques they make witty and sharp. (See this video for how it’s done.) How could one not want to squat, take to the streets or run to the barricades after being inspired by such expressions of creativity?
It is within this context that I view the current crop of stencil/graff/flyposting artists here in Los Angeles and sad to say, these attempts at public art are hardly worth the mention. (Shepard Fairey? Pffft.) Most of the wheat pasted pieces I’ve seen, especially on the west side of the Los Angeles River are all about self-promotion and lack original and creative qualities.
Take this poster for instance. Einstein holding a sign that says “Love is the answer?” In this day and age of La Crisis and the numerous dire situations this city finds itself in, and the only thing this artist can come up with is this pseudo-hippie slogan? Oh how edgy! And Einstein…really? And when has ‘Love’ solely been the answer to anything? Some people’s ideas of love can be pretty screwed up, so no thank you. Social change comes not from wishful thinking and sappy slogans but from real engagement with the world we live in. Perhaps it’s this engagement that’s lacking from the current crop of west of the River public art.
“ People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth. “– Raoul Vaneigem, 1967
See LA Taco for an amazing gallery of public art from Argentina.
