March 23, 2012, 10AM, LA City Hall Steps, 200 N Spring Street, Los Angeles

China Town dying courtesy Llane.org

Congresswoman Judy Chu and API will be speaking on the steps of City Hall before they meet to discuss the “Formula Retail” motion in front of City Council for a vote tomorrow.  Show up and show your support for Congresswoman Chu who is working to support the preservation of China Town.

“Formula Retail” is a motion to prevent Walmart and other big boxes from coming in and changing the character of Chinatown.  Its about preserving the character of the community and its businesses.  Its about preventing the big boxes from coming in and running the existing shops out of business.

After the jump is a copy of the motion for “Formula Retail”, if after you have read it and believe in its purpose please contact your City Council Person and ask them to vote for it. Read the rest of this entry →

Proof that I can be two places at once, I bring you two perspectives of yesterday’s Los Angeles Marathon. This first is my obligatory timelapse of the thundering herd at the race’s seventh mile on Sunset Boulevard in Silver Lake, as seen weirdly from a low-res cam literally duct-taped to the eyepiece of a 20X spotting scope:

Next I captured the street-level perspective of the event having gone down  to cheer my neighbor Dean on who was running the race in support of and to raise awareness for the Wounded Warrior Project. When I got down there with my wife Susan I found another neighbor Ralph had brought his drum (and a killer St. Patty’s Day-green dye job to his goatee), so Susan went back and got my drum and together we banged on them as the parade of participants pranced past:

Not happy with the LA Times decision to set up a paywall limiting you to content on the LA Times Web?  Blogger and ever diligent lover of all things LA has a way for you to overcome the paywall limits and is explained entirely in his post HERE.  Happy reading.

If you’re not going to see Vox Femina, you still have a chance for some good literary-themed fun on Saturday evening. The Rattling Wall is hosting a reading at Skylight Books beginning at 7pm. Check it out!

LA may not be the first city you think of when it comes to Irish-Catholic heritage, but that doesn’t mean there are no Angelenos interested in celebrating the man who single-handedly drove snakes from the Emerald Isle. Vox Femina LA, a women’s choral ensemble “dedicated to the performance of quality choral literature from a world perspective with an emphasis on music by women composers,” is celebrating St Pat’s day in style with music inspired by some old playwright from England. Here’s some info from the press release:

Vox Femina Los Angeles, the almost 40-member women’s choral ensemble, continues its 15th anniversary season with From Shakespeare to Shamrocks, a spring concert celebration that brings the English and Irish together in song on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2012 at the Zipper Concert Hall in the Colburn School of Music in Downtown LA.

In this bi-cultural evening, Vox Femina will unite classic Shakespeare sonnets with authentic Irish music sung in Gaelic. From classical works to folk songs, traditions new and old from England, Scotland and Ireland will be celebrated at the event.

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On the final day of its journey from Riverside County to its new home at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, I opted to bike down to South Los Angeles with my friend Joni because we’re a couple of those kook types who thought it would be da schist to pull a literal all-night “boulder dash” and follow the 340-ton rock along the entire length of the last 10.5 miles to the museum. Call it Levitated Mass Transit.

Your enthusiasm may vary, but the trek was a total once-in-a-dozen-lifetimes blast. And while its moment of arrival in front of LACMA at 4:30 a.m. was cause for celebration among the hundreds gathered in attendance, for me the most dramatic moment happened above in Exposition Park at the bend in Figueroa Street just south of Exposition Boulevard when the 200-foot long, three-lane-wide transport vehicle had to negotiate its first turn of the night, and its right front corner came within what looked to be less than an inch of making contact with a speed limit sign. As the spotter says to me at the end, “If you’ve got a half-inch, you’ve got a mile.”

Gneissly and successfully avoided.

If I’m getting redundant in my topics — maps, cycling, birds, maps — file your complaint with the other contributors here who have far better things to do than post. In the meantime, I just keep plugging away in this lonely place — this time with another historic map from Big Map Blog — and  just in time for that local trade association’s annual function known as the Academy Awards this Sunday. If I were giving out the Oscars, Big Map Blog would get one for bringing all us little people out there in the dark this awesome and timely 1937 addition to its collection of cartrography: Hollywood Starland, at right (moderately embiggenable if clicked).

Sure the artist misspells Katharine Hepburn’s name, and strangely enough the then 14-year-old Hollywoodland sign isn’t anywhere to be found. But don’t let those oversights keep you from clicking on over and marveling at the full-size version of this otherwise meticulously glorious representation of a bygone era in celebrity worship so bitingly chronicled just a couple years later in Nathanael West’s “Day of the Locust.”

The 2012 edition of my Watts Happening Ride took place this past picture-perfect Saturday, and it was my complete pleasure to share the following landmark people, places and events I’ve discovered there with the 28 cyclists who joined me:

1. The last residence of jazz great Jelly Roll Morton
2. The childhood home of Nobel Prize Winner Ralph Bunche
3. The location of the 1969 Black Panthers shootout
4. The Hotel Dunbar, centerpiece of the Historic Central Avenue Jazz Corridor
5. The location of the 1974 SLA shootout
6. The actual fictional location of the Sanford and Son Salvage Yard
7. The Watts Towers of Simon Rodia
8. The location of the incident setting off the 1965 Watts Riots
9. The home of Eula Love, killed by police in 1979 as a result of a past-due gas bill dispute
10. The motel where legendary singer Sam Cooke was killed
11. The flashpoint of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots
12. The location of Wrigley Field, demolished in 1966.

Unfortunately, the above annotated timelapse video abruptly ends at the third-to-last location we visited, leaving me to discover that I need to get a bigger memory card if I want to capture the entire 33-mile, six-hour tour on camera the next time — and there will be a next time. I hope you’ll join me.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt sentenced some 120,000 Japanese-Americans to prison for the duration of World War II. Today, on the 70th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 9066, Los Angeles County is marking the occasion with its first Day of Remembrance, which in turn made me remember my visit to Manazanar 4.5 years ago that I wrote about on November 13, 2007, here at Blogging.la:

Coincidental to Jason Burns’ November 9 post in which he referenced Manzanar in response to the disconcerting news of LAPD plans to target map Muslim enclaves in the city, two days later (returning from Death Valley’s Eureka Dunes) my wife Susan and I paid a somber and sobering first visit to the infamous place (on Highway 395 a few miles south of the ironically named town of Independence), referred to all politely as an “internment camp” or a “war relocation center,” or “reception center,” but with eight guard towers erected around the barbed-wired perimeter staffed with military police manning machine guns trained on the 11,000 men, women and children kept here against their will (more than 90% of whom were from the Los Angeles area), I’m in the mood to call it what it was: a prison. One that should forever be remembered as a testament to the freedom-destroying power of fear and an abominable insult to the United States Constitution and the civil liberties it guarantees us as citizens of this country. Pardon my righteous indignation.

The rest of my recollection is after the jump.

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I have sung the praises of the Big Map Blog in the past, most recently in December when a 1932 map of Los Angeles was added to its extensive cartographical collection. And here I go again, because they just posted another jaw-dropper in the form of H.B. Elliott’s birds-eye viewpoint of our town when the population was only 65,000 back in 1891 — one that looks like the artist drew inspiration for it from an imagined vantage point aloft above what is now Elysian Park.

What makes this document so exquisite is not just the map itself, but the detailed representations of both exteriors and interiors of some of the commercial and civic landmarks of that time, most of which are long gone. Click the above image to biggify it. But better yet, got here on Big Map Blog and click the full size download link and get yourself the 157″ x 111″ version to marvel at available there for free.

Some of the everyday "uniqueness" we find in the L.A. area

After my recent Hollyhock House tour, I met a friend from out of town at the Figueroa Hotel for a drink. At the bar by the pool, we met a woman named Rachel who said she was holding a meetup for the local Atlas Obscura chapter. My friend got all excited at the mention. I thought, what the hell is Atlas Obscura? Turns out, it’s a bit like blogging.la.

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Per this article the Los Angeles Times, the city of San Francisco may or may not attempt to simultaneously belt out a rendition of Tony Bennett’s “San Francisco” – the city’s official song – at noon today, a sort of citywide flash mob to honor the 50th anniversary of Bennet singing the song for the first time at the Fairmont Hotel.  Maybe more interestingly, the article notes in a parenthetical that our fair City of Angels doesn’t have an official song (though oddly enough, LAX has one).  Which of course prompts at least one Angeleno to wonder: what would be our official song?

Way back when, we did a nifty series called “Songs About Los Angeles,” any of which would be worthy contenders.  Randy Newman’s “I Love LA” seems to be the obvious choice, though there are others: “Los Angeles” by X was the most popular song in our series, according to Franklin Avenue’s post-series poll.  Or, how about “Pico And Sepulveda” by Felix Figueroa And His Orchestra?  “Straight Outta Compton” by NWA?  Others?  Votes?

The first Watts Happening Ride I organized five years ago was a simple there-and-back to Watts Towers from the Cornfield downtown, spurred on by the lamentable fact that as a native angeleno I had spent my whole life to-date never having been to the true treasure that is the amazing, inspiring and enduring work of Simon Rodia.

In its various editions since (the last one taking place in 2010), the Watts Happening Ride’s destinations have grown well beyond the iconic towers to include a variety of landmarks involving people, places and events in and around South Los Angeles.

The 2012 incarnation of the Watts Happening Ride will be departing from Silver Lake on Saturday, February 18 at 9 a.m., and will include the addition of a couple locations I’ve recently found. So if you’re not heading out of town for the long weekend and have a hankering to get your bike-riding discovery on, I hope you’ll join me.

For the latest info and any updates, the ride’s Facebook page is here.

When: February 18, gathering at 8:30 for a 9 a.m. departure
Start/Finish: Silver Lake’s Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign (northwest corner of Sunset Boulevard & Benton Way)
Distance: 32.95 miles (route map)
Pace: Casual
Terrain: Flat
Weather: In the event of rain that morning, the ride will be canceled and rescheduled to a later date.
Approximate Time: 5-6 hours
Optional Partial Ride: If doing the full route isn’t feasible, consider joining the ride at approximately 9:30 a.m. downtown on Spring Street (anywhere between 2nd & 9th streets) for the roughly 9-mile portion to the Watts Towers. The 103rd Street Blue Line station is near to the towers and can be an alternative to get you back into downtown.
Things You’ll Need (in no particular order): A functioning bicycle; $7 for the half-hour optional tour of Watts Towers; snacks and water for along the way; money for a late lunch at King Taco.

Smack dab in East Hollywood sits one of Frank Lloyd Wright‘s gems, the Hollyhock House. I was part of a private tour of the house recently, and was truly, er, floored.

Hollyhock House was built for oil heiress and single mom Aline Barnsdall just after World War I. The setting was a stunning hilltop olive grove surrounded by 36 acres, with 360-degree views of a then very picturesque, perhaps even quaint, Los Angeles. Barnsdall designed her homestead as a multi-structure arts complex, complete with theaters for both live performances and films. Today, that spirit remains, as the property is now the Barnsdall Art Park, housing the Los Angeles Municipal Art gallery, theater, and art center where numerous art and music classes are held.

More photos after the jump

You’re probably not like me and are able to cope with the scope of the massively collaborative and on-going Pacific Standard Time exhibitions that fall under the ambitious region-wide initiative’s banner. Me, not so much. With so many institutions involved, I suffer from something of a paralysis when trying to decide whether I should go to the Getty or the Hammer  or LACMA or wherever. Case in point: I literally became immobile when I just now went to the Pacific Standard Time website and a banner popped up that told me there are 42 events taking place right this moment of 10:28AM — and that may even include a Big Gulp Cup retrospective at my local 7-11.

A few weeks ago I did manage to brush my intimidation aside and pay a first-time visit to MOCA to see the cool exhibition of Weegee’s Hollywood period photographs, but — pardon the digression — then I wandered around the museum’s permanent exhibit and found this piece of crap stuck to the wall, which reinforced both my abject disdain for “contemporary art” and my urge to punish whoever curated it with an extended indian-burn session to the forearm of his or her choosing.

Detail from the 1938 Kirkman-Harriman map depicting Los Angeles County in 1860.

So instead of getting all wound up trying to eenie-meanie-miney-mo to which big box the next I’d go, instead I brought along my inner map geek and together we ventured yesterday to the first floor galleries of the Central Library downtown where I spent an extended segment of the afternoon marveling at the selection of kick-ass cartography displayed as part of  its “As The City Grew: Historical Maps of Los Angeles” exhibit.

The 34 maps arrayed go back to the mid-1800s and offer an awesome and up-close glimpse back into our city as it was and as it became. Unlike the aforementioned contemporary bullshit I encountered, some of the maps are true and intricate works of art, and I would highly recommend paying them a visit whether you just find yourself in the library’s vicinity or are in between far better-decided visits than mine to the myriad Pacific Standard Time venues.

WHERE: Los Angeles Public Library, Central Branch, 630 W. 5th St, 90071
WHEN: Through November 4, 2012
COST: Free