An Old (2005) Graffiti Film

Watch it while you can!  The film is called Infamy and it features artists from NYC, Philadelphia, San Fransisco, and LA.  Thanks Steve G. from NYC who turned me on to this.

 

iWatched, I’mCreeped

First peeped on The Live Feed.

Later seen on Huffington.

From Znet here are three articles on terrorism: Terrorism’s Future (2004), Terrorism Before and After 9-11 (2002), War on Terrorism (2006).

What do you think?

Learning Music Monthly is Sick

From about Learning Music Monthly:

Learning Music Monthly is a collaborative, subscription-based album-a-month series. As a subscriber, you receive a brand new full-length album of original music every month. You can choose to receive your monthly issues on CD (delivered to your mailbox in beautiful handmade packaging, with cover art by a different artist each issue), or in downloadable high-quality mp3 format. Subscribers also receive unlimited access to our online archive of music, including a newly re-mastered album from the original twelve Learning Music albums released each month. Additionally, you are invited to collaborate in the creation of Learning Music Monthly, with remixes, covers, and sound donations, regardless of whether you are a subscriber or not.

Also see CASH Music: Learning Music This May Also Be It

Midnight Ridazz Photo Montage

Found on Ridazz:

mandingo | armadillos MySpace | armadillos YouTube

An Interesting Read

Check out this article by Geoff Manaugh on BLDGBLOG from October 2007 about Los Angeles:

I got back from Los Angeles last night and my head is still spinning. I’d move there again in a heartbeat.
There are three great cities in the United States: there’s Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York – in that order.
I love Boston; I even love Denver; I like Miami; I think Washington DC is habitable; but Los Angeles is Los Angeles. You can’t compare it to Paris, or to London, or to Rome, or to Shanghai. You can interestingly contrast it to those cities, sure, and Los Angeles even comes out lacking; but Los Angeles is still Los Angeles.

[Image: L.A., as photographed by Marshall Astor].

No matter what you do in L.A., your behavior is appropriate for the city. Los Angeles has no assumed correct mode of use. You can have fake breasts and drive a Ford Mustang – or you can grow a beard, weigh 300 pounds, and read Christian science fiction novels. Either way, you’re fine: that’s just how it works. You can watch Cops all day or you can be a porn star or you can be a Caltech physicist. You can listen to Carcass – or you can listen to Pat Robertson. Or both.
That’s how we dooz it.
L.A. is the apocalypse: it’s you and a bunch of parking lots. No one’s going to save you; no one’s looking out for you. It’s the only city I know where that’s the explicit premise of living there – that’s the deal you make when you move to L.A.
The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.
It says: no one loves you; you’re the least important person in the room; get over it.
What matters is what you do there.

[Image: An extraordinary photograph, called 4.366 Braille, by jenlund70].

And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a means of protesting something; or maybe that means buying everything Fredric Jameson has ever written and even underlining significant passages as you visit the Westin Bonaventura. Maybe that just means getting into skateboarding, or into E!, or into Zen, Kabbalah, and Christian mysticism; or maybe you’ll plunge yourself into gin-fueled all night Frank Sinatra marathons – or you’ll lift weights and check email every two minutes on your Blackberry and watch old Bruce Willis films.
Who cares?
Literally no one cares, is the answer. No one cares. You’re alone in the world.
L.A. is explicit about that.
If you can’t handle a huge landscape made entirely from concrete, interspersed with 24-hour drugstores stocked with medications you don’t need, then don’t move there.
It’s you and a bunch of parking lots.
You’ll see Al Pacino in a traffic jam, wearing a stocking cap; you’ll see Cameron Diaz in the check-out line at Whole Foods, giggling through a mask of reptilian skin; you’ll see Harry Shearer buying bulk shrimp.
The whole thing is ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous city in the world – but everyone who lives there knows that. No one thinks that L.A. “works,” or that it’s well-designed, or that it’s perfectly functional, or even that it makes sense to have put it there in the first place; they just think it’s interesting. And they have fun there.
And the huge irony is that Southern California is where you can actually do what you want to do; you can just relax and be ridiculous. In L.A. you don’t have to be embarrassed by yourself. You’re not driven into a state of endless, vaguely militarized self-justification by your xenophobic neighbors.
You’ve got a surgically pinched, thin Michael Jackson nose? You’ve got a goatee and a trucker hat? You’ve got a million-dollar job and a Bentley? You’ve got to be at work at the local doughnut shop before 6am? Or maybe you’ve got 16 kids and an addiction to Yoo-Hoo – who cares?
It doesn’t matter.
Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it’s bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don’t matter. You’re free.

[Image: Two beautiful photos by Andrew Johnson; here's the left, here's the right].

In Los Angeles you can be standing next to another human being but you may as well be standing next to a geological formation. Whatever that thing is, it doesn’t care about you. And you don’t care about it. Get over it. You’re alone in the world. Do something interesting.
Do what you actually want to do – even if that means reading P.D. James or getting your nails done or re-oiling car parts in your backyard.
Because no one cares.
In L.A. you can grow Fabio hair and go to the Arclight and not be embarrassed by yourself. Every mode of living is appropriate for L.A. You can do what you want.
And I don’t just mean that Los Angeles is some friendly bastion of cultural diversity and so we should celebrate it on that level and be done with it; I mean that Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void. It is the void. It’s the confrontation with astronomy through near-constant sunlight and the inhuman radiative cancers that result. It’s the confrontation with geology through plate tectonics and buried oil, methane, gravel, tar, and whatever other weird deposits of unknown ancient remains are sitting around down there in the dry and fractured subsurface. It’s a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots.
And it doesn’t need humanizing. Who cares if you can’t identify with Los Angeles? It doesn’t need to be made human. It’s better than that.

Thanks sarahmascara and jen in l.a.

vosotros Drops Patriotic Public Domain Album

¡ YES WE PUEDE !

L.A. Bike Scene on Vimeo

L.A. Bike Scene by Studiodrome

SoapBoxLA Critisizes The LADOT Bikeways “Most Significant Successes”

I couldn’t get off work to attend this.

Here is what SoapBoxLA had to say about it:

The LADOT Bikeways staff reported to the City’s Transpo Committee that their three most significant bikeways “successes” are:

1) The LA River Bike Path. Apparently by success, the LADOT was referring to:

a) Successful litigation! The City of Los Angeles is flush with victory after fighting all the way to the State Supreme Court to avoid taking responsibility for the design and maintenance of the LA River Bike Path. The City of LA rejected the claims of an injured cyclist who was injured on the gate/chain link fence at the Victory end of the bike path. The City of LA fought the claim arguing that the City of LA is immune from any liability for the bike paths, that anyone who rides on a bike path does so at their own risk and that they are recreational facilities and not transportation facilities.

(No attempt was made to reconcile the fact that the LADOT apparently calls the LA Bike Path a transportation facility when seeking funding and then a recreational facility when looking for immunity.)

The bottom line is this; cyclists riding the LA River Bike Path do so at their own risk, (there’s a sign just N of the Los Feliz bridge informing cyclists of this limitation) and the LADOT has argued successfully that riding a bike is a recreational endeavor inherent with the risks that come with such dangerous pursuits. Hunting bear? Jumping out of a plane? Swimming with sharks? Wrestling Gators? Riding a bike on the LA Bike Path? You are a daredevil and you are on your own!

b) Successful communication! Cyclists on the LA River Bike Path often find themselves at odds with other user groups and mistakenly take the term “Bike Lane” to mean “Bike Lane.” That’s not the case. The LA River Bike Path is actually the LA River “Mixed Use” Path and is fair game for dog-walkers, roller-bladers, joggers, pogo-stickers, ballroom dancers, hop-scotching, jump-roping, shopping cart pushing, picnic basket carrying, non-motorized vehicular travelers of all flavors and speeds! Of course, that’s a mouthful to put on a sign so the LADOT continues to post “Bike Path” signs because it’s simpler that way.

c) Successful eradication of light pollution! Apparently the wildlife in the LA River were kept awake at night by the pesky Bike Path illumination. No Worries. Freelance wildlife fans liberated all of the copper from the bike path electical system (twice!) leaving the Bike Path in the dark and the wildlife free to do whatever they do when it’s dark.

2) The Orange Line Bike Path. Apparently by success, the LADOT is referring to:

a) The Metro’s successful Orange Line Bike Path. In a classic demonstration of “Success has many parents, failure is an orphan.” the LADOT is more than willing to glom onto the success of the Metro’s OL Bike Path when discussing success but when it comes to taking responsibility for the maintenance of the Bike Path, the LADOT fought for two years to avoid signing the paperwork, insisting that the Metro hasn’t completed the project.

b) The Chandler extension which consists of bike lanes (yea for magic paint and the BSS who actually did the work!) and the Chandler Bike Path which was in the news recently as the location of the collision between a roller blader and two League of American Bicyclist licensed instructors, resulting in broken bones for both cyclists and yet another confusing debate over the use of the term “Bike Path” vs. the use of the more appropriate term “Anybody-but-that-motorist-Path.” The LA section of the Chandler Bike Path is distinguishable from the Burbank City section in that the LA side features drought resistant (dirt) landscaping while the Burbank section uses reclaimed water and is actually landscaped and green and feels like a parkway.

3) The Expo Line Bike Lanes/Path. Apparently by success, the LADOT is referring to:

a) The future? Is the list of accomplishments so short that by #3 the LADOT has to start pulling out the list of hopes, dreams and good intentions? The report started off with “We’ve been doing a number of things…” and then shifted into the future of the Expo line, a facility that is a Metro project. Telling other agencies how to do their business seems to be the major “success” of the LADOT Bikeways Department.

b) The opportunity? Perhaps this time around, the cycling community will have the opportunity to forge a relationship with the Metro, developing and refining on the bikeways design standards and establishing safe and effective accessibility to the Expo line for cyclists. As for the role of the LADOT in the development of the Expo Line, one need only look to the streets surrounding the Orange Line and Van Nuys Blvd. for a demonstration on the LADOT’s commitment (or lack of commitment) to connectivity for cyclists and pedestrians. (Busted curb lanes, missing crosswalk, parking for 18 wheelers? Is this an industrial zone and traffic sewer or a transit hub?)

At the end of the day, it is excruciatingly apparent that the LADOT operates with little if any accountability or obligation to lay down real goals, actual accomplishments and any sense of accountability. This meeting, just like all the others, included an LADOT call for more staffing in order to continue with the Transportation malpractice that is inflicted on the people of Los Angeles.

All totaled, there are 11 people currently working on the secret projects that purportedly are the future of LA’s Network of Bikeways. As our City leadership is scrambling to find opportunities to cut the City budget, the Bikeways department brazenly steps up to the mic and acknowledges that they can’t think of three things they have done that would justify their existence. Bold, cavalier and utterly contemptible!

This would be a great time for the LADOT Bikeways Department to start preparing the “stuff-we-did-this-year” report for the upcoming Bicycle Advisory Committee meeting on Tuesday, December 2, 2008. As usual, we’ll be “Storming the Bastille” and asking for accountability in measurable terms.

“See you on the Streets!”

Damn, son! When will the LADOT be held accountable? Storm the Bastille Tuesday, December 2. After Party at Ridge Way?

IlluminateLA has a recording of the meeting here!

The Greatest Hits So Far from Learning Music

From learningmusicmusic.com:

about

Learning Music began as a collaborative album-a-month project, commencing in November 2006 and concluding in November of 2007.
The series included an album recorded entirely on handheld cassette recorder, a collection of music videos filmed before the music was made,
songs for an autobiographical musical written by a robot, and dozens of homemade electro-acoustic folk-pop anthems.

Twelve months and twelve albums later, it was time to get out of the house. Inspired by the early works of Terry Riley, the Talking Heads,
and Storm & Stress, Learning Music became a live band, which has included as little as four to as many as twenty musicians at one time.

Visit the original Learning Music site, where you can listen to the first twelve albums in their entirety.

related activities

ing || Willoughby || Mad Gregs || Readers || Jazz Farm || Community Pool Tapes || Vosotros || Learning Music myspace

From vosotros:

• RCRDLBL.com is featuring Learning Music on their site today! They’re offering 4 exclusive downloads from the band’s recent “Greatest Hits So Far” compilation, so grab em all … ps they are FREE…

“these experimental sound scientists don’t just make a pot-and-pan racket … the output is energetic but soothing … and it’s cheaper than Tylenol, folks”

Thanks John(s)!

The Metroplois Exhibition

UnHip LA on Free Museum Admission

Don’t let predatory capitalism fool you, the only good museums are free.  Don’t want to pay for parking either?  Ride your bicycle!  From UnHip LA:

More recession fun -

On October 4 and 5th, many museums in Los Angeles County will be open for freesies. Typically a museum free day means way more crowds, but still it’s a fun way to hit a bunch of museums at once. Here’s the list from www.MuseumsLA.org:

MUSEUMS FREE-FOR-ALL
Free Admission Days October 4 and/or 5, 2008

In a joint effort to welcome diverse communities across Southern California, the Museum Marketing Roundtable announces the fourth annual “Museums Free-For-All” during the weekend of Saturday, October 4, and Sunday, October 5, 2008. The following 24 institutions—exploring art, cultural heritage, natural history and science—will offer free admission to all visitors on one or both dates

Participating Museums:

• Armory Center for the Arts – Both Dates
• Autry National Center – Sunday, October 5th Only
• Bowers Museum – Sunday, Octoher 5th Only
  
• California African American Museum – Both Dates
• California Heritage Museum – Saturday, October 4th Only
• California Science Center – Both Dates
• Craft and Folk Art Museum – Both Dates
• Fowler Museum at UCLA – Both Dates
• The Getty Center – Both Dates
• The Getty Villa (advance tickets required) – Both Dates
• Hammer Museum at UCLA – Both Dates
• Japanese American National Museum – Sunday, October 5th Only
• Los Angeles Fire Harbor Museum – Saturday, October 4th Only
• Los Angeles Fire Museum & Memorial – Both Dates
  
• The Museum of Contemporary Art,
  Los Angeles (MOCA) – Both Dates
• Museum of Latin American Art (MoLAA) – Both Dates
• Museum of Tolerance – Sunday, October 5th Only
• Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County – Both Dates
• Norton Simon Museum – Sunday, October 5th Only
• The Paley Center for Media – Both Dates
• Petersen Automotive Museum – Both Dates
• Santa Monica Museum of Art
• Skirball Cultural Center
• Southwest Museum of the American Indian.

C.R.A.N.K. MOB Soowhooop! on Vimeo

Video Market is a new Los Angeles based film collective. This is their first collaboration.  SooWhooop!

Post Wolfpack Hustle Thoughts, All City 2 Rumors, and found PIST Bike Trailer on YouTube

I just got back from another epic Wolfpack Hustle. We went from Tang’s down Hollywood, south on La Brea down the hill quick right on Sunset to Doheny on the top of the hill. Doheny something something to Venice Pier. Took Santa Monica Blvd. back to Tang’s. Felt fast.

Lots of talk about the upcoming Wolfpack Hustle: All City Team Race 2. Here’s what All City 1 looked like:

Whose on what team, what route, etc. Sounds like there will be at least two teams from Wolfpack (Team A: Wise, Super Cole, Tony Z, Beatriz, and Tang’s Chris *subject to change), and teams from Block, the OC *cough*, Thirsty Thursdays, CubCamp, 818 Polo, an all girls team, and more!

I’m thinking Vermont, Western, and La Brea are going to be a big deal. Venice and Washington too. Somebody on Wolfpack A told me to, “think major streets.”

Well then, who is taking the Freeway?!

Anyway, I found this video on YouTube post shower:

Posted by soundboarding.

Memorable lost in translation quote, “for example, eating octopus balls without holding on . . . That’s so bad. Sorry, it’s a bull shit idea.”

New Fixed Crew out of the OC

From the Jayde Grenade Blog:

We are a group of friends who love riding bikes and love riding fixed. We love taking photos and love having fun. We are a family of friends looking for more friends. Welcome to Jayde Grenade.