I can’t think of a better day to talk about this next blog than a rainy day in Los Angeles. I just drove back from the gym which is less than a mile from my house, and in that single span I saw more 4 wheeled dumb-assery than a Target parking lot in the Valley on a Saturday. Which, by the way, I personally believe is the single most dangerous place to walk in all of Los Angeles. Compton ain’t shit when you have a horde of trophy wives in Escalades on Blackberry’s meandering blindly in search of two parking spots they can sprawl their Bimbo Boxes in showing the world just how much they don’t give a fuck about their fellow human beings. Now that I have that off my chest…

I was doing research a few months back while I considered starting my own ‘Bad LA Driver’s Blog’. “The Devil’s Taint”, which is what I affectionately call the 405, was going to be a masterpiece of snark, wit and plain old trash talking. Then I found L.A. Can’t Drive… My hopes were dashed! The site was everything I wanted. Replete with photos, hilarious stories and not just an Idiocy Meter™ but an Asshole Meter™ as well. So I gave up my dreams and added L.A. Can’t Drive to my newsreader and haven’t looked back.

The founder of the site, a bloke naked Mike was kind enough to do a quick interview with me about the site, driving and other fun stuff. Enjoy and check out the site. He does take submissions from the public so if you’ve got any doozey’s send them his way. Just check L.A. Can’t Drive for details.

J: First off I love your site. As a 10yr+ LA driver I see this stuff every day and I’m glad you’re there to chronicle the gems. How did you get started with the site? Was there one particular incident in particular that spurred you into action?

M: The website has always been and always will be a medium for me to vent freely about my frustrations with asinine, assholish, and quite frankly retarded–yeah, I said it, you overly PC fake-as-hell bitches–L.A. driving. All kidding aside, when I moved to L.A. in 2006, I found myself succumbing to road rage, which when coupled with my sciatic issues from sitting in traffic all day, made me a pretty irate commuter. As a born and bred New Yorker, adjusting to the culture and lifestyle of Southern California is hard enough without having to deal with sucky drivers. And believe me, the irony has not been lost on me that a Chinese (albeit Asian American) male from New York City is writing about bad driving. Contrary to what some detractors may say, I have never claimed to be a perfect driver, nor do I drive like I’m chauffeuring Miss Daisy. And I certainly don’t drive around like a citizen cop trying to find bad driving for my blog. I needed a cathartic release from my daily frustrations, and being a creative person at heart, I thought that writing about my anger and letting it go in the webosphere was healthier than acting it out behind the wheel and screaming epithets at other drivers. There wasn’t one particular incident that made me decide to finally start making a running commentary on L.A. driving, though I must say that the plethora of drivers cruising around at night without their headlights on blew my mind from day one. And I’m not talking about dusk either…owls are hunting and roaches are having bonfires, and yet a disturbing percentage of L.A. drivers still have no idea that their headlights are off. To this day, I still don’t understand it, and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen in any other city I’ve lived in or visited.

Read the full interview after the jump

That is great advice if you a) believe in alien vistation and b) have fear of alien abduction. With option “b” I thought most came during the night while you were sleeping. A little rarer is driving on some lonely country road, which thankfully we have none in metro LA.   None the less one more reason to buckle up.  Pic by me with the cell phone and it does get bigger with a click.

Street Art is a pretty big topic in Los Angeles, and it’s been a hot topic right here on Blogging.la in the not too distant past. There’s no question that the epicenter of Los Angeles street art sites is 50mm Los Angeles. For the last 15 years some of the most talented folks in the LA scene have wasted countless hours on the message boards there. But sometimes you just want to see the art. And that is where Melrose & Fairfax has been killing it. Since the arrival of Known Gallery in the actual Melrose & Fairfax district, that area has become quite the hot spot in itself so a site named after that really need to deliver, and the dude(s?) behind M+F certainly deliver.

The site is like a firehose of pics, documenting every angle os street are in the city. Spray paint to wheat paste, posters to stickers, stencils to every damn thing else you can think of. If it’s happening on the streets in LA there’s likely a post about it there. While there is certainly news and discussion there, the site really excels at providing a constant visual stream – new pics all day every day. You can pop over there any time and see new stuff – sometimes new stuff by people you know, sometimes new stuff by new people making their first attempts on the streets. In a few minutes you can get a great idea of what’s new around town visually right this minute. Anytime I see new work that catches my eye that’s the first place I look for more info. Not to mention with so many other sites being text heavy, the commitment to photos here is a welcome distraction. And of course, you can find them on twitter as well (though sadly that’s just a feed of posts from the site).

[This post is part of our Blogging (in) LA series]

Omar Bárcena's Los Angeles photo used through Creative Commons license

Hello there b.la readers,

Those of you who stop by regularly know what Blogging.la is about. We blog here because we love LA and we want to share what we love about it with you all. We don’t pretend to be comprehensive or “objective” and we aren’t paid. We’re just Angelinos with various passions and proclivities (even obsessions). We like to write about our favorite LA moments or upcoming events that we think sound interesting or news about vegan restaurants or bicycling or film noir or street art or elections or or or … fill in the blank.

But we know we’re not the only game in town. We were the first group blog about LA–we’ve been blogging in LA since 2003–and we’ve seen a lot of other sites and bloggers come and go.  Most of us who write for b.la read a lot of other sites devoted to Los Angeles. At one of our last meet-ups we decided it would be a good idea to share some of our favorite LA-based sites with you. So for the next two weeks, we’ll be posting every day about our LA compadres–from the ridiculous to the sublime. As with so much of what we cover here, we are simply writing about what we think is noteworthy (both for its virtues and faults); we aren’t attempting to be encyclopedic about our approach. That said, after the first couple of weeks of daily posts, we plan to continue the series indefinitely with weekly posts about other LA sites. We aren’t promising anything, but If you have a favorite you’d like us to cover, of course, you should write us and let us know.

Enjoy!

Click here for posts in this series.

That crazy 99 Cent Chef is at it again.  With some Jacaranda blooming  just a tad earlier than usual he celebrates their arrival with a quick video tour and ends it all with a recipe for eggplant hummus.  If you dig purple food this will be for  you.  You can follow more of his adventures in and around LA in the 99 cent stores creating more fun food on his Blog.

Courtesy of SamCarterArt.com and available at the show.

What happens when movie nerds and the ability to paint form into some super movie artist nerd? Excellent things. Like the 3B Art Show at Gallery 1988 in Venice. 3B showcases pop art based on the movies Back To The Future, Beetlejuice and Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure/Bogus Journey. A similar show was held last year titled 3G (Goonies, Gremlins and Ghostbusters) in which Ernie Hudson showed up opening night in Ecto 1. While there were no stars at the show, there were 2 Delorian time machines, pre and post Mr. Fusion (In the same space-time continuum?? This is heavy). It was awesome.

As far as the art in concerned, it was really amazing to see what some of these artists came up with. (My friend Sam Carter created the pinup of Jennifer from Back To The Future you see to the right) A lot of the art wasn’t what you would expect. I really enjoyed that the artists pulled a lot of scenes and characters that don’t initially come to mind, then when you see it……”Great Scott! I forgot that was in the movie!” I’ve included a few pictures that I took opening night and you can see all the art on the 3B site, but you should really go check it out in person. The site just doesn’t do some of them justice.

Alrighty then this semi-funny PSA would have been a lot funnier if these guys camped it up a bit more in the vein of the Village People.  Maybe even break into song to make it a bit funnier.  This video won’t embed so watch it HERE.

The message is a good one, Crimestoppers allow you to report information on crimes anywhere in metro LA anonymously if you so desire.   Maybe this might be a way for those thugs that hammered so badly on Brian Stow, the Giants Fan who is still in a coma weeks after the fact to be caught.

Hat tip to my friends on the Arcadia PD who twatted this out a bit ago.

Having participated  in Bike Week going back to its beginnings in the mid-1990s, it’s good to see how far the events have come from such humble origins. But one thing that’s always perplexed me through those years is how big the collective emphasis is on biking “to” work, with pretty much a total divorce from that whole “from” part.

Though the Law of Commuting states, “What goes out, must come back,” year in and year out Bike Week organizers ignore that all-important second part. On the designated “Bike To Work Day” that “To” part is taken literally. Mornings are chock full of strategic events and pitstops and various freebies, sprinkled with the occasional councilpersons who’ll don helmets and grins and pedal under an MTA sign and past a camera pool. And if you’re in the right place as you pedal, you might find a few scattered Starbucks that’d give up a free drip coffee if you rolled there before 9 a.m.

But pretty much after that hour things are broken down and packed up and put away — which is literally half-assed; a willingly missed opportunity to keep the good vibrations and awareness going on for that integral return trip. Well, with this coming edition of Bike Week (May 16-20; with Bike To Work Day on May 19) I’m pleased to report some progress has been made. Not by the city or the county or Metro, but rather by the LA County Bicycle Coalition who for better or worse is gonna help returning cyclists get their drink on.

Read the rest of this entry →

This weekend: art walks, graveyard film screenings, and outdoor food fests.  In other words, it’s almost summer.

Read the rest of this entry →

See? No lines.

Lest I get myself pigeon-holed as “that guy who won’t stop talking about food trucks,” I’ll try to make this my last food truck-related post for a while. But it does seem like a worthwhile cause to call attention to the weekly food truck extravaganza that takes place on Wednesday nights at Taft High School in Woodland Hills. Read the rest of this entry →

Last night was the kick off to the 125th Anniversary celebrations in Monrovia and it was a parade.  The Art Bears, 7 in total stole the show.  Each of them here get bigger with a click, sorry but a couple of them aren’t that sharp…low light and moving caused a lot of problems.  The whole parade on my flickr set.

I know it’s a print-is-dead digital world in which what’s new is old already, but if there’s something that still demonstrates the power and worth of newspapers, it’s the jaw-drop that happens when you unexpectedly find yourself holding almost half-century-old history in your hands, which in this case came when I moved some boxes out of my mom’s place and into our basement today. One such box in particular was my stepdad’s — something of a collector — and right on top of an amazing stack of Life and Look and Saturday Evening Post magazines from the 1920s through the ’70s were these two local publications, the first editions to hit the street after the assassination (click them for the bigger pictures):

Los Angeles Herald Examiner / Nov. 22, 1963

Los Angeles Times / Nov. 23, 1963

You can bet I’ll be going carefully through these pages gape-mouthed on a slow analog ride in the wayback machine.

What are you doing this Saturday? What if I told you you could hear some great music, go to an art auction and a rummage sale, eat good food, meet interesting people, and possibly save a life while you were at it? Some friends of mine have put together a fundraiser to help pay for Dave Melrose’s cancer treatments (more information on the treatments here). It’s an all-day event in Altadena (noon until midnight) and the entertainment includes, among many others–Jack Black doing, according to the Facebook page for the event, a Black Sabbath tribute(!); and Dos, a band consisting solely of two of the best bassists ever–Kira Roessler (of Blag Flag fame) and Mike Watt (Minutemen, fIREHOSE, etc.). For the complete schedule look here. What I know is this, the people putting on this thing are dedicated and creative. There will be some great art for auction and the “rummage” at their sale will be far superior to most rummage. Yes, it’s in Altadena, but it’s $20 for the whole day and how often do you get to say you spent your Saturday saving a life?

REDRUM

Cinespia. Classic films, under the stars, on the hallowed grounds of Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It is an experience that is unrivaled in a city that is chock-full of things to do.

So why the reruns?

for our tenth season, cinespia will be bringing back some of our favorite movies from past seasons

Checking the schedule so far, I’ve already seen two of the films at cinespia in the past 5 years, and a third has been shown by the LA Conservancy at a recent Last Remaining Seats. So what gives?

I know that many of cinespia’s patrons are returning customers. And some of those patrons probably go to LRS as well. (Can we cross-check our screening calendars, please?) With such a short season and so many films from which to choose, I find this baffling. Especially in Hollywood. And especially when cinespia asks fans to make screening suggestions on their own Facebook page.

I’m still going to go. It’s still my favorite thing on Earth. But, I am very, very disappointed.

Vertigo? Again?

I hear this model's very roomy inside.

Who?

Exactly.

I wonder if he’ll let me borrow his Sonic Screwdriver.

Spotted on Virgil just North of 6th Street.