Sea Monster Slides!

There are few things that I love more than a giant cement sea monster (those few things include giant cement dinosaurs, giant plaster donuts, and that’s about it).  And that is why I made the pilgrimage to San Gabriel this weekend, to Vincent Lugo Park, home of La Laguna de San Gabriel, better known as the Monster Park.  Metblogs covered the Monster Park a few years ago, when it was at risk of demolition, but it’s still standing, in no small part due to the fantastic work of the Friends of La Laguna, who were recently recognized by the LA Conservancy for their preservation efforts.  And god bless the Friends of La Laguna, because this place is basically amazing, and every child deserves the chance to play on a giant cement octopus.  The Monster Park is such a wonderful place – it’s such a departure from the sterile, unimaginative playground designs that you see everywhere.  I think that everyone should do themselves a favor and find a small child to take to La Laguna (please ask the small child’s parents for permission first).

Opening Day in 1965 - Courtesy of Friends of La Laguna

I also love this park because of its wacky, mid-century aesthetic.  The colors, the curving lines of the statues, and the unselfconscious whimiscalness remind me of the kind of mid-to-late-sixties animation you’d see in psychedelic movies like Yellow Submarine.  The park is the work of Mexican-American artist Benjamin Dominguez, who built several parks in and around California in the 1950s and 1960s.  The Monster Park is his last work, completed as he was turning 70, and I think that it stands as a testament that public art can be beautiful, and fun, and interactive.  And really, really awesome.

My first ride on the shortest railway in the world, also known as Angel’s Flight, was certainly memorable for that reason alone, but made even moreso because of who I happened to share the tiny trip with. Back then, long before the city got the level of bike culture it has today, I was prone to getting on my bike and going places just for the hell of it. And in this case on the morning of Saturday, March 24, 1996, I set out from where I was living in Encino and pedaled across the valley to the L.A. River downstream first for a double-dipped helping of lamb sammich goodnesh at Philippe’s, followed by a casual cruise to explore other places such as Union Station, Olvera Street, Pershing Square, Central Library, as well as the famed funicular that had only been rededicated about a month earlier that year.

Eventually I found myself atop Bunker Hill, doing my best to avoid and placate the bike-bothered security guards first at the Music Center and then at California Plaza where I locked up and paid the 25-cent fair for the downhill trip on the funicular that would connect me to a meander through Grand Central Market.

Upon boarding I found myself standing behind a gentleman in a blindingly white leather blazer, and it didn’t take long to recognize him to be actor Nicolas Cage. Having been in the same high school drama class until he dropped out to go make “Valley Girl” and get his career launched, I toyed with the idea of asking if he remembered me and what brought him downtown, but instead I kept my yap snapped because I already knew the answer to the first question, and the the answer to the second dawned on me. He was probably on lunch between rehearsals for a little show called the 68th Academy Awards airing the next day from the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, during which he would end up being presented with the best actor Oscar for “Leaving Las Vegas.”

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OMG I have to run into Rite Aid real quick for my ointment

We like to post pictures here on Metblogs of the automotively challenged. Drivers who cannot park between the lines. We refer to them, affectionately, as Parking Tards.

But, friends, today we have something very special. A tard that overshoots the space completely, landing on the sidewalk.

Sherman Oaks. Riverside & Fulton.

Bravo.

Another angle of awesomeness after the jump.

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This past Saturday the annual Fargo Street Hill Climb took place, organized by the Los Angeles Wheelmen. On a personal note, I’ve tried multiple years to make it up the 33% grade of what’s one of the steepest streets in the city/state/country/hemisphere/world/galaxy/universe, only to get psyched out staring up from the bottom of the massive frozen concrete-coated tsunami and miserably failing mid-way every time (here’s handlebar cam video of my 2006 attempt). On another personal note, my eyes went wide when I cracked open today’s paper. I’ve never seen the unique event get such mega-play in the LA Times, not only with a front page photo, but a story on its inside LATeXTRA section as well.

It’s enough to make me vow to try again next year.

Venice has always had a history of being the shady part of the west side. This isn’t news to anyone who lives there and honestly it’s that grit that attracted many of them there in the first place. But there’s a difference between a neighborhood that is a little rougher around the edges and one where you don’t feel safe in your own home. Due to an extremely cut back police force covering the area and a growing homeless population, increasingly, the latter is exactly how Venice residents are describing the situation.

You may think I’m over hyping things but if anything I’m playing them down. For four weeks now residents have been organizing a letter writing campaign where they are literally begging the Mayor, Councilman Rosendhal and many at the LAPD to please protect them. On Friday local site Yo Venice posted an open letter from a resident named Steve who was threatened by a homeless man at his own house:

…This man was trying to sleep behind our gate at our front door. I heard him trying to no open our front door to get inside our home. I was holding my baby. I confronted him to get off my properly and he then threatened to kill me… looked at my baby and told me he would kill her too. He claimed that the house was his. He took a swing at me as I stepped back away from my properly. He kicked our gate over and over as hard as he could…

Steve called 911 and after 45 minutes the police eventually showed up – which is actually an improvement. You might recall Tara posted on Metblogs in December about coming home and finding a homeless person blocking her entrance to her house. Her call to the police for help resulted in no officers ever coming by – even though this was only a few weeks after a Venice resident, pregnant with twins, was raped and murdered in her own home by a transient who just happened to pick her out.

With no one to protect them and a situation that is seemingly getting worse, if the LAPD and local politicians don’t do something to help soon they shouldn’t act surprised when residents are forced to take protecting their own and their family’s safety into their own hands. This situation can only get worse or better, which is it going to be?

Los Angeles is only the 27th Craziest City in America.

L.A. – Where people plaster the sides of historic buildings with pictures of the Mad Hatter, and chase Twittering food through city streets.

The Daily Beast ranked the nation’s 57 largest metropolitan areas based on “psychiatrists per capita, stress, eccentricity and drinking levels.”

#27, Los Angeles

Psychiatrists per capita: 28
Stress: 22
Eccentricity: 5
Drinking: 53

Colorful Character: Candace Frazee and Steve Lubanski have transformed their home into a Bunny Museum, a shrine to over 23,000 bunny collectibles that include bunny-themed furniture, light fixtures, kitchenware, toiletries, books, and games.

Apparently, Cincinnati is #1 when it comes to crazy.

This proves my theory that all of those people that I see mumbling and stumbling on the streets of L.A. are actors from Ohio.

Photo from jek in the box’s photostream

Just what we need in the land of uber water using St Augustine lawns, a homeowner that rips it out and puts in native and Mediterranean type plants that thrive in our wet winter dry summer climate.  Good thing they don’t live in Orange or Glendale where those sorts of actions are frowned upon and a homeowner could be sued by the city.  (In fairness the dude in Glendale put in fake astroturf but the intent was the same…no lawn watering in a drought).

I like this yard, socially responsible yet has the look and feel of a cottage garden.

Long live individuality and the space free of an HOA!

Pic by me and get’s bigger with a click.

A subway station? Here? Such a debate would have been absurd at a sleepy little corner like Wilshire & Crenshaw.

The year was 1934.

Photo from the USC Digital Library

When I was a Pop Warner-sized punk back in the early-mid ’70s my mom was dating a guy named Jim who was with ABC Wide World of Sports in some capacity and thus he knew a guy named Carroll Rosenbloom who happened to be the owner of a professional football team you may have read about in the history books that used to live and play here (what a concept) called the Los Angeles Rams, which was my fave team, of course, and pretty much as beloved as the Dodgers, up until Rosenbloom drowned in 1979 and his wife Georgia wasted little time and tears moving them to Anaheim the next year after the team triumphed through  a strange season to come pretty damn close to winning the 1980 Super Bowl. But that’s another story.

Anyway. One day my mom comes home from work and hands me a pamphlet promoting something called the “Olsen Brothers All-Sports Camp” taking place for a couple weeks that summer in a faraway place called Logan, Utah. On the front is a picture of Merlin Olsen and his brother Phil in their Rams uniforms, the two having played side by side in 1971 and ’72.

“Jim says if you’d like to go, he’ll pay for it,” she said.

I indicating my willingness by jumping up and down screaming joyfully, so too young to have any clue that Jim’s generosity was not only providing a vacation for me from them, but also a vacation for them from me.

And so it was that I flew first class to Utah with Rosenbloom’s son Chip and Rams General Manager Don Klosterman’s son (whose first name I can’t remember) Kurt (thanks for the reminder DK!), and I came to stand eyeballs-to-kneecaps with some of the sports gods of my youth: Jack Youngblood, Harold Jackson, Jack Snow, Jack Reynolds (lotta Jacks going on, eh?). But I worshiped none more than Merlin lordhavemercy Olsen, who was my biggest hero, literally and figuratively.

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No, this little lady I came across this morning isn’t tagging the traffic light pole at the corner of Jefferson and Mesmer in the Del Rey/Playa Vista cusp of the city. Rather she’s de-tagging. I watched for the time it took my red light to turn green as she meticulously scraped off with her keys the mostly illegible bright orange script hastily scrawled there by some blighter who probably had no idea that sometimes what’s thrown up must come down. Bravo.

This is the scene in front of my apartment building on Woodman Avenue in Sherman Oaks last night around 11:00 pm (with apologies for the grainy cell phone picture). Apparently the woman driving the flipped over SUV was making a left turn into her driveway and someone came around the corner from Moorpark and crashed into her.

Amazingly, everyone was okay and when we arrived on the scene the woman and her son were standing on the curb, chilly but seemingly unharmed. I’m not sure what happened to the driver of the vehicle that crashed into them, but the police said  everyone walked away unharmed. The silver (rental) SUV on the right belongs to my bff, Andrea, who was totally psyched to have found a parking place right across the street from my building. “Guess I should have purchased collision insurance huh?” she said.

Have you wished you knew how safe each street is for cycling? Thanks to Deputy Chief David Doan, Mihai Peteu, Sergeant David Krumer, Paul Bringetto, Tait McCarthy, and Lyke Thompson … we have displayed all the collision data from 2008 recorded by LAPD (involving cyclists.) A single red dot represents a collision, and a larger red dot with a 2 or a 3 or a 4 in it represents 2 or 3 or 4 collisions. As you can see, East Hollywood, the defacto center of bike culture in LA, has plenty of accidents.

Thanks to Bikeside for this super helpful bit of data porn!

Today’s LA Times story about Councilman Tom LaBonge’s recent motion to clarify the rules regarding parking at failed meters (i.e., you should not get a ticket for doing exactly that), reminds me of the time I parked outside Amandine at a failed meter.   Luckily, or unluckily, enough, a cranky parking enforcement officer was giving a ticket to the car behind me.  When he was done, I asked him to look at the meter and to note it for the city and, oh, yes, to have it on the record as broken in case I received a ticket from another officer.  Or, as it turned out, from him.  He told me that he could (“barely”) see the “FAIL” flashing, but “if it’s working when I come back, I’m going to have to ticket you.”  When I pointed out the stupidity of such a policy – since he obviously saw that it was not functioning – he shrugged and told me that my tickets would include instructions on how to file an appeal.  Yeah, put the “enforcement” in “enforcement,” that officer did.

The city is supposed to tell you that parking at a failed meter is perfectly legal, and that, in such instances, that little cement spot along the curb is yours gratis.  However, the city seems to keep this meter policy hidden away like a dirty secret – I couldn’t find any municipal code or other authority that states as much.  Perhaps the city’s Parking Violations Bureau should respond to this very Frequently Asked Question out on their website?

Even if you do know the rules, though, there are a number of parking enforcement officers like my Lovely Rita who either don’t know or don’t care, and will ticket you anyway.  Perhaps more commonly, many (excluding my parking enforcement officer) are understandably unaware of the fact that though your meter was defunct when you parked, it somehow found a second life somewhere deep inside its cavernous metal just as they were driving by in their street edition Zambonis.  Theoretically, the best way to beat this type of ticket is to first, park your car at the non-working meter, and then, second, to report the malfunctioning meter (call (877) 215-3958) and/or submit the meter information online via their circa-1998 web form.  For me, that’s not quite enough.  Since my awkward interaction with my Rita, I have tried to remember to take cell phone photographic evidence of the dead meter in case I do get ticketed, on the theory that I’m guilty until proven innocent.  Oh, that is a FAIL on many, many levels.

Photo of a lonely meter courtesy xxjetlab via the Metblogs Flickr pool.

On occasion I’ve been known to vigorously rip down unauthorized signage because I’m one of those assholes who takes issue with those assholes who don’t give a shit about illegally blighting our fair city for their own selfish gain.

The law that such basterds fail to observe is Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 28.04, which states as follows: “You cannot be a dick and put a sign up on anything that’s public or utility property, not simply because it’s lame but also because you’re then going to irresponsibly leave that stupid sign there to decay until it becomes someone else’s problem; and seriously no one went to your garage sale anyway much less one that happened two months ago.”

Well aware of that legality, the discovery this morning of the sign, pictured above, found at the median between Highland Avenue and 4th Street was at first modestly disappointing and then semi-rich in irony in that whoever installed this “Need Repairs?” placard did so by damaging its victim tree with a series of screws sunk into its trunk — and all done purposefully high enough to prevent anyone less than 7-feet tall and/or without a ladder handy from removing it. To add their ignorance to the tree’s insult and injury, these aren’t just any arbors. This and every one of the 82-year-old palms that line the center of Highland between Wilshire and Melrose are collectively known as something that goes a little like this: Los Angeles Historic-Cultural Landmark No. 94.

So I called the number on the sign to ask the 818-based handyperson what was up with the double fail, but all I got was an outgoing message that told me I’d reached a guy named Jake and to leave a message. And since he couldn’t tell me to fuck off directly, I assumed him to be an otherwise fine and decent fellow just trying to make a buck in these hard times. With that in mind, after the beep I politely encouraged him to take that trip back over Cahuenga Pass at his earliest convenience to make repairs, so to speak, and take down that sign and any others he may have hung in the vicinity lest some far less tolerant and more angry Hancock Parkians start calling him and/or the office of our sign-hating city attorney.

Just in case he chooses to ignore my suggestion, I’ve put in a request to the Bureau of Street Services, too. Wonder who’ll get there first?

"TK-421, Why aren't you at your post?" "I needed a Latte."

So, this caught my eye, but it caught it on Facebook. My friend Melinda snapped this from her cell and posted it there with the title, “Storm Troopers need coffee breaks too.”  She was kind enough to let me share it with you. (I have agents in the field!)

Where else but Los Angeles can you happen across a Stormtrooper making a call on his cell from a coffee shop? Well, where else on Earth. I imagine it’s fairly common on the Death Star.

This does, in fact, appear to be a Coffee Bean and not the Death Star Canteen, as described by Eddie Izzard. (Be Advised, that link leads to hilarity, but there is also liberal use of the “F-Bomb.” So, its NSFW rating depends largely on your work place’s attitude toward the word, “Fuck.”

So, I’m wondering if this is who he’s calling.

Pictured is Courtney Cruz, taken by Shannon Cottrell for the LA Weekly’s coverage of Star Wars Burlesque. Click the lovely photo to go to the article. That photo, incidentally, has been immortalized in Tattoo Ink. Click here to see the Ink, and LA Weekly’s article about that. (I don’t blame ‘em, I’d be proud, too.)

<Darth Vader Voice>Impressive.</Vader>