Please pass the saccharine

For the third installment of this occasional series, I again fail to stay within the actual borders of Los Angeles proper, straying again into one of those Island municipalities that dot our landscape within LA county.  Tonight found a strange lesson in the kitsch back rooms of the ever hip city of Santa Monica.

My journey for the evening took me first to Santa Monica’s Laemmle theater to see the documentary Enlighten Up!, which carries the tagline “A skeptics journey into the world of yoga.” I will return to this after the fold, but let me foreshadow the after-movie dinner at Gates of India, around the corner from the theater.  Such is the source of this installment’s artistic sampler.  In defense of the restaurant, it has a distinct disconnect between its serving area and its restroom, a pattern I somehow expect to find throughout this series.  The front room is quite replete with fairly interesting Indian artifacts, with nary a whiff of Hallmark Americana schlock.

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Nature Of A Fragile Mind by David Gough

I ran into David Gough years ago on Live Journal.  That’s right – Live Journal.  It used to be a great place for creatives to network and glimpse into one another’s lives.  I was addicted.  At the time, LJ was burgeoning with artists like David Gough from all over the world.  It kept me coming back every day to read and write.  It was inspirational and fed into my own endeavors.  

In the case of David, I was taken right away with his dark imagination elegantly rendered.  To me, his work was pretty death on the prowl or life’s inevitable darkness romanticized.  It was also sexy and sometimes whimsical in a way that spoke to my inner child.  I connected with it. But, eventually, he was among the many casualties of Live Journal and moved on.  

David is originally from Liverpool in the UK.  In a modern day echo of a fairy tale, he fell in love with a California native and moved to San Diego.  Though he’s been just a few hours away from Los Angeles since 2005, I never had occasion to run into him or his ever evolving art. So, it was with great pleasure that I discovered David’s work will be part of a group show at The Hive this month.  It’s the third time, in fact.  It’s very much deserved.  He’ll be one of many talented artists on display from May 2nd through May 29th.  

The Hive May 2009 Group Show artist reception will take place next Saturday evening from 8 pm to Midnight at 729 S. Spring St. in Downtown Los Angeles.  Those entering The Hive show will be given $5 entry to Infusion Gallery’s “Peep Show” for the night as well. ($10 for both gallery shows and performances!)

Congratulations to “Keekle” for offending our authors by not just adapting post titles into porn films, but also adapting our names into those of porn stars. You can see his contribution in the original post here.

Keekle and a guest will be having dinner with Ron Jeremy on Monday before sharing a limo ride with the international superstar to the premiere of his new film, “One Eyed Monster” at the Fine Arts Theatre in Beverly Hills. (Is there a better named venue for a film of this caliber?) For those of you who didn’t win, but would like the play the home game, the DVD of the film will be released Tuesday, April 28th.

Alex Thompson has done the legwork pulling all the details together on this and has a post up on Westside Bikeside that he’ll be updating as more news comes forth. At this point it seems that a black Hummer with no license plates ran into a group of cyclists in downtown LA on Friday morning around 2am. At least one cyclist was sent to the ER and several others bikes were totaled. The Hummer initially tried to flee the scene only to be stopped near by by LAPD (apparently there was still a bike stuck under the vehicle at this point). According to Alex’s report:

The occupants of the car fled on foot, and though LAPD caught the driver, several of the passengers escaped. Those passengers returned later to threaten the group of cyclists, saying that if they spoke with police, they would return “60 crips deep.”

After a large group of police officers interviewed the witnesses and the suspects they released the driver, who drove off without a ticket. Officer Cho, the officer in charge at the scene then approached the cyclists. He first told the group:

Get everyone together because I don’t want to say this twice. If anyone says anything I’m gonna walk away and I’m not going to talk to you guys. Based on the evidence right now it looks like the cyclist hit the car, not that the car hit the cyclist.

Cyclist then argued with him, pointing out that the driver of the Hummer was dislodging a bicycle from underneath his vehicle when the police pulled him over. Officer Cho then responded, saying “if it had been me with my family in that car, I’d have done the same thing, and I carry a gun in my car.”

The psychedelic “summer of love” poster in the window Family Affair Music in Old Town Monrovia is your first clue this isn’t your average record store.  In business for 50 years in the same location is something you don’t see much every day.  The current owner has had the shop since 1972 and says “I’m still here as people know if I don’t have it in stock, I will know where to order it for you.”

Today’s venture in was my first.  I was pretty amazed at the collection of used albums he had in stock.  More than I could even attempt to dig in depth with the time I had available today.   Read the rest of this entry →

Not much else to say… Photo by Mr. Rollers.

There are scores of talented artists in LA doing all kinds of rad stuff, but who has time to figure out which ones are worth checking out? For those who can’t spare 120 minutes, I give you 120 Seconds.

This week I took my (borrowed) handycam down to one of those warehouses full of rented practice spaces in the epicenter of what appears to be post-apocalyptic LA (just on the outskirts of Skid Row) to interview emerging LA-based atomic prog pop trio, MA46.

120 Seconds with MA46:

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Regarding the Contortions of the Face that Occasionally Happen Whilst Dancing

In booths and against the walls, chic-looking fashionistas and Hollywood types leaned and looked around the Bar Marmont. Like a lion/ess gazing across the Serengeti, each leaner surveyed the room, searching for any sign of stylistic weakness in other Gucci-shoed peeps in the pack. After all, this was, allegedly, a “cool event:” the private listening party for Diplo (aka MIA’s ex-boyfriend) and Switch’s (an English DJ) project Major Lazer (an aural ode to Jamaica). But when the music started and the leaning stopped, the dance floor filled with (sorta) writhing bodies each afflicted with the same syndrome: Dance Face… Read the rest of this entry →

By now, you’ve probably heard about Metro’s board giving the new Eastside Gold Line extension two different names. One in English: Edward R. Roybal Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension. The other in Spanish: La Linea de Oro, Edward R. Roybal. Both of which will prove to be a useless political move, as normal human beings will revert to the shorter, easier “Gold Line.”

The fact that Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina has forced this down our throats without any public input from the actual citizens who will have to pay for all of that new signage – twice – has already been hotly debated on sites like Curbed. And while the stupidity of some out-of-touch policitian making such a move will cost us millions in wasteful spending, there is a bigger issue here.

Instead of unifying the unique ethnic enclaves that make up this great city, Los Angeles is segregating them. Isolating them further into their own little pockets by the ever-growing language barrier. And for what purpose?

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Angelenos were always proper, in the city or in the sand. But gentlemen and ladies still enjoyed their leisure activities. Swimming. Bowling. Strolling the boardwalk under the freedom of the Stars & Stripes.

It was the North Beach Bath House in Santa Monica. The year was 1905.

Photo from the USC Digital Archive

Longtime Metblogs readers will recognize the name Chad Robertson, and with good cause. He’s super talented and paints mind blowing “mashups” that are so layered with imagery that you see new things every time you look at them, almost as if the paintings themselves are telling you one long continuing story that evolves the more time you spend with them. I also used to work with him at sixspace so may have mentioned him here a time or two. Anyway, he has a new exhibition entitled Come Together opening this weekend at Western Project in Culver City. The reception is Saturday from 5-8 and I know personally I can’t wait to go stand in front of these new works and get lost in them.

Well, if you thought my previous contribution to this series was obscure, check what I’ve got for you today. Hey hey it’s the Monkee otherwise known as Michael Nesmith, who it turns out in 1979 wrote not only a most excellently whacky song about Los Angeles, but also as a pioneer of the music video medium* produced a pre-MTV clip for “Cruisin’ (Lucy and Ramona and Sunset Sam)” filmed at locations around Hollywood that like a time capsule in the shape of a mirrored roller-disco ball captures our town in all its glitzy late-’70s glory as a melting pot filled to the brim with silly sunglasses, strange fashions, weird characters, funkadelic sleazery, and cheese. Lots and lots of cheese:

Lucy and Ramona cruisin’ thru the jungles of L.A.
Hopin’ to promote a dream somewhere along the way.
Rollin’ thru the streets looking for a disco,
Passin’ up the treats from a kid named Cisco
Trying to make connections
With their blemish free complexions
And just as fate would have it
They ended up with Sunset Sam.

After the Monkees broke up 1969, Nesmith did some stuff for RCA Records, scoring a Top-40 hit with “Joanne” in 1970. He followed that with less successful endeavors and eventually left the label to form Pacific Arts, a multimedia company specializing in commercials, film, music and videos.

In 1979 he released the album “Infinite Rider On The Big Dogma,” a departure from the country-rock flavor for which he’d become known.  “Infinite Rider” had rock, a bit of soul, and even some near-rap infused funk, as evidenced on “Cruisin’,” better known as the “Lucy And Ramona” song.  While “Cruisin’” didn’t crack the charts, it didn’t hurt that the video Nesmith created for the single got plenty of exposure on cable movie channels back in those heady days when those burgeoning networks filled the blanks between feature films with videos.

The rest is history (and one of my favoritist videos EVAR!). Funk it up Nez:

A bit more info and complete lyrics after the jump.

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A few years ago, every week I’d make my way down Alameda to the warehouse district, park my car in a highly dubious location, and walk alone through the darkness of downtown to a single illuminated doorway, where burnished light and raucous conversation spilled out into the blue-black of the deserted street.

The New York promo art Kid Koala created: click for HUGE

They stopped happening.

Kid Koala’s “Music To Draw To…“, on April 26, reminds me of those rosy nights. Check it: A fiver gets you admission, a cuppa hot cioccolata, and a pencil. “Quiet people are invited. bring your own sketchbook, notepad or yarn. no dancing,” says the website. I can live with that.

Hell, I might even get some work done.

Click thru for info on the next day’s “Loud Party,” as contrasted with the “Quiet Work” of Music To Draw To.

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If you missed the Long Beach Grand Prix our colleague Dave Share has a nice post recapping everything over at OC Metblogs. I only wish I had weekends free enough for that kind of fun!

When legendary folk musician Woody Guthrie got around to adding a song about Los Angeles to his musical legacy, it wouldn’t be any sort of rousing celebratory anthem along the lines of “This Land Is Your Land.” Instead he gave us “The New Year’s Flood,” a solemn ballad fittingly about a disaster that on January 1, 1934, devastated communities along the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains and perhaps took the lives of untold “Dust Bowl refugees” like himself.

Well, not quite like him. While California proved a veritable cornucopia to Guthrie, whose popularity soared with a show he broadcast from the old KVFD-AM radio station in the mid-Wilshire area after moving to Glendale in 1937, the Golden State of the mid-1930s was much stingier to the hundreds of thousands of Guthrie’s beloved “okies” who fled drought-devastated areas of the south and southwest, drawn west to a mythical place shamelessly promoted as a land of boundless wealth and opportunity. While farms were certainly in need of laborers, the sheer deluge of workers drove wages steadily downward, forcing people to scratch out desperate existences living in cars, tents, or in shacks they built out of whatever materials they could find, wherever they could find: such as the foothills along the base of the San Gabriels that towered over agriculturally rich valleys.

Kind friend do you remember,
On that fatal New Year’s night?
The lights of old Los Angeles,
Was a-flickering oh so bright.
A cloudburst hit the mountains,
It swept away our homes.
And a hundred souls was taken
In that fatal New Year’s flood.

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