Over the weekend, a few dozen old- and new-skool food stands, trucks, restaurants, and even some eateries from Baja trekked to the Rose Bowl to participate in the second annual Street Food Fest. There were three entry times, two during the day and one in the evening. I got there at 6 and, whether it was because of Carmageddon or because everyone decided to do the day trips, the crowd was comfortably crowded – very few long waits and ample time to sample everything you wanted to sample, and then some.  At the end of the day, a few awards were handed out: Javier Plascencia’s smoked oyster with chicarron and sea pickle was the Best in Show amongst the official judges and the crowd, and one of my favorites, Antojitos Carmen, won “Best Old School Street Food” for its huitlacoche huaraches. A few photos from the event below:

Above is a new YouTube clip out of Villaraigosa’s office titled “Building A 21st-Century Transportation System For Los Angeles,” which primarily features the mayor talking to various cameras and groups. He’s seen in front of  the Congress of Mayors in DC. He’s talking to another group about how important the 405 diamond lane is. And apparently in his City Hall office he’s talking to a camera and outlining what he hopes will be his legacy in getting Los Angeles moving mass transportationally in the coming years. To emphasize his dedication to that goal he valiantly proclaims that he’s ever-ready to fly to Washington at even the slightest whiff of federal funding… since there’s just so little here in town for which he’s needed.

Snark (mostly) aside, it’s a decent presentation with good ideas and information, but unfortunately the clip’s bookended by a couple head-shakingingly poor choices.

As shown above, the first thing viewers are greeted with before they press the play button is a YouTube 101 fail; a screen-still* of Villaraigosa taking a nap closed-eyed during an interview — an image that’s safe to project only if you’re a hypnotist or a sleep disorder specialist.

At the other end of the video is this closing image is shown at right, subtitled to indicate the mayor is inside that LAFD helicopter taking off on a purported survey of the work being done on the 405 (click it for slight embiggenation).

*In case Villaraigosa and/or his YouTube team has wised-up and gone back and selected a less-somnolent alternative — which is always an editing option — I’ve posted a screengrab of His Drowsiness after the jump.

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You Should Like This

Before The Event That Never Was, I wrote about the need for a rail line along the 405 corridor. I exchanged a few emails with Bart Reed of the Transit Coalition, who shared some insight as to how to get such an important piece of the transit puzzle off the ground (or rather, under.) He said they have been in talks with Los Angeles Council Districts 6 and 11, and that they would begin promoting through social media sites.

The Valley-Westside Rail project is now up on Facebook. You should like it.

I asked Bart how people could get more involved. He said that we need to start by garnering support from neighborhood councils. So, that’s where I began, with a few emails of my own:

This past weekend, the closure of the 405 and the media attention it received resulted in a ripple effect on the entire freeway system. Drivers got lucky. Businesses did not. This further illustrates the need for viable transportation alternatives. Specifically, a more comprehensive regional rail network.

As a contributing author for Blogging.LA, I wanted to get your input on a newly envisioned Metro rail line from the Valley to the Westside, by way of the 405 corridor.

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Malingering's photo used through Creative Commons license

LA was edged out of the number one seat for GQ‘s coveted “worst-dressed city” title by Boston of all places! I find it hard to believe–nearly impossible, in fact–that preppy old Boston can beat LA’s hootchie skirts, hipster glasses, bad knuckle tattoos, and omnipresent flip-flops [Oxford comma represent!]. GQ says:

Angelenos wage a fierce, daily battle against time and taste so effective it would be admirable if the results weren’t so obnoxious. Ground zero of this war against time is strongest in the thrumming hub of mind-blowing sartorial choices of the few neighborhoods nestled on the axis of Sunset Blvd. You know you’re getting close when you start seeing a profusion of regrettable headwear. . .

Note that Washington, D.C., most sartorially boring place on earth, did not even make the list of 40 cities, throwingthe accuracy of GQ’s snark and the list as a whole into question, in my opinion. Truly, I don’t know how a person could spend a couple hours at HiHo on any given weekend and not automatically grant us the gold. Silver–bah!

Would you like to see a man and his flip chart?

If so, you’re in luck: Demetri Martin is on tour, and we have a few tickets to see his one-man-plus-props show this Sunday, July 24th, at the Fox Theater in Pomona.  To win, just leave a comment below with your favorite Martin prop: that flip chart? His guitar? Ukelele?  Have at it, folks, and I’ll pick a winner on Wednesday.

On that first day of the anticipated/feared “Carmegeddon,” in Los Angeles , while other far fleeter pedalers were kicking ass over a jet plane in a race from Burbank to Long Beach, I was joined by four awesomely like-minded cyclists — Ann, Harold, Robert and Thaddeus — for a more casual 47-mile bike tour that began and ended in Silver Lake and included a climb up from the valley to the top of the Sepulveda Pass for a look at the ongoing demolition of the Mulholland Bridge over an entirely emptied 405 Freeway.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately depending on your tolerance for stopmotion videography) I can’t show you the entire ride as my camera’s memory card filled up at Mile No. 37, just as we were entering Beverly Hills on the way back to our start point.

But it was an awesome day and an awesome group with which to ride.

Route: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/?r=4642041

We are very excited to have assembled a crack team of Donut Experts who will be serving as celebrity judges at the Donut Summit!  The judges will vote in all of our voting categories (more on those soon!) and will also select a donut to win the Judges’ Choice award.

Our expert donut judges are:

Billy Vasquez, The 99 Cent Chef

The 99 Cent Chef’s blog is one you should be following, if you don’t already – it’s a tasty ode to cheap, creative cooking, largely using stuff you can find on the shelves of your local 99 Cent Store.  Our own Frazgo interviewed the Chef a few years back, and you can read his interview here.  Billy has been blogging and posting how-to recipe videos since 2006, when the writer’s strike inspired him to help people eat on the cheap.

And when it comes to donuts, the 99 Cent Chef doesn’t mess around.  He took on the heavy hitters and made his own Krispy Kremes in the video below, which, at current count, has over 160,000 youtube hits:

Jenn of Just Jenn Designs and Just Jenn Recipes

Jenn is a designer (if you don’t love her big bundts greeting card, you probably don’t have a soul) and a food blogger, and certainly knows her way around a donut or two.  From tasty plain baked donuts,  to chocolate sour cream donuts; from mochi donuts, to strawberry milk donuts, Jenn has written some of the most creative donut recipes I’ve seen.  And I am completely in love with her totally cute coffee and donut cupcakes!!

Shelley, the Fry Girl

We loved Fry Girl donuts at last year’s Donut Summit!  Shelley has a portable mini-donut maker, and you can hire her to do donut catering for events and parties.  Her donuts are tiny, homemade, melt-in-your mouth taste explosions (and I do not use the phrase “taste explosion” lightly), and they took home awards last year for Best Yeast-raised donut, Most Visually Appealing, and Most Unconventional donut.   Since Shelley’s donuts were such a big hit, it seemed only natural to have her back this year as an expert donut judge, and we are really glad to have her.

And, of course, we want to thank Intelligentsia for providing us with coffee to help the judges cleanse their palates between bites of donut.

From the Skirball Bridge (click for embiggification), taken at the midway point of today’s 47-mile Autocalypse Now Ride.

Trees are a big deal in Santa Monica. Sometimes they get manicured. Sometimes they get cut down and cause a controversy. In this case, on 11th Street near Santa Monica Blvd., a lone protester has made a stand on a tree stump. The handwritten note taped to the traffic cone on top of the stump reads:

R.I.P. *Here remains what was once a beautiful TREE cut down under our very noses. When will [our] city cease this action?

Hopefully, the city had a good reason to cut down the tree, i.e., that it was dead or dying, rather than just some form of aesthetic tree gentrification. I did see some newly planted trees nearby on the same block, so perhaps that is what will happen here too.

Hmmm.  Earlier this week I posted a ‘rumor’ that the 405 wasn’t closing.  Well, it IS closed, but the traffic all around it is moving just fine!

I just drove to Ojai for the day and I zipped up the 101 right past the 405.  Not even a slowdown!

And last night and this morning, the city of LA is quiet, quiet, quiet.  Seems everyone really IS out of town or hibernating.  It’s kind of nice.  Seems like a normal city.

Perhaps we are the most normal city in the world! Everyone emulates us.  And personally, I think we have the best life-style on the planet! Viva Los Angeles!
And hell, Viva Carmegeddon! It’s tamed this puppy!

Carmageddon?  Karmageddon?  Is everything on your GTD list this weekend within a 2 mile radius?  Or are you really jonesing to drive that automobile around to hit up a food festival or two?  Decisions, decisions.

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You would not believe your eyes, if ten million fireflies, lit up the world as I fell asleep…

Addictingly catchy, Owl City is a great band to see in concert & they’re on tour with their new CD “All Things Bright and Beautiful.” Adam Young tells us that…

The music and lyrics conspire to make listeners feel as if they were stepping into another world — a verdant musical dreamland where “reality is a lovely place, but I wouldn’t want to live there,” as [he] sings on the opening track “The Real World.” Images of abundance, like a backyard of butterflies (“Honey and the Bee”), blossoms filling a room (“Hospital Flowers”), and “sunsets that dazzle in the dusk” (“Dreams Don’t Turn To Dust”) unfold alongside starry-eyed imaginings of cherry bombs staining blackbirds red (“Kamikaze”) and dipping one’s toes in the galaxy (“Alligator Sky”).

They’re playing two shows!!
7/21 || Owl City with Mat Kearney, Breanne Duren @ Club Nokia
7/23 || Owl City with Unwed Sailor @ Fox Theater Pomona

Thanks to our friends at Goldenvoice, I have a bunch of tickets to give away to lucky Blogging.LA Readers! Please leave your comments below (and specify which concert you’d like to attend) and I will pick some lucky winners Tuesday July 19th @ 12PM PST. **Update** Winners picked.  Still have a pair for FOX Pomona, if anyone still wants!

You can also buy tickets here: http://www.goldenvoice.com/shows/details/?id=31090

Unlike most of the general city citizenry who’ll be doing its collective best to get away from the autocalypse this weekend, I’m just too curious not to get on my bike and go for a looksee by riding up into the eye of that storm that is the Sepulveda Pass tomorrow morning (July 16).

The Autocalpyse Now Ride

If you’re partial to longer rides and interested in coming along, I’ve charted out what’s roughly a 47-mile route that will begin and end at the Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign at Sunset Boulevard and Benton Way in Silver Lake (here). In a nutshell it will involve heading upstream along the Los Angeles River Bikeway in to Burbank where we’ll then access the Chandler Bikeway to North Hollywood and then the Orange Line Bikeway to the Sepulveda Basin. After a sidetrip to marvel at the monochromatical Kafka-esque vastness of the Sepulveda Dam spillway, we’ll make the climb up to the top of the pass where we’ll pause to fathom the rareness of the entirely dried up Interstate and perhaps imagine in the marked silence that there might be a valley-bound zombie horde made up of UCLA students and reanimated corpses from the Los Angeles National Cemetery trudging toward us from Westwood.

Presuming I’m not the only one on the ride, If I’m feeling particularly talkative I might regale you with the tragic/triumphant connection I have to the Mullholland Bridge that makes me kinda sad to see it demolished.

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anarchosyn's photo used through Creative Commons license

LA Observed pointed out yesterday the sad contrast between two recent reports, one which identifies a substantial increase in the number of “high net worth individuals” in LA–people so important they have their own acronym (HNWI)–and the other that gives an overview of the growing demand on LA county food pantries. A number of reports about the economic recovery have claimed that job regrowth has mostly been in low paid and unskilled jobs, and perhaps LA is seeing the effects of that trend.

The number of people accessing food pantries has increased 73% since 2008 while the amount of funds and food supplies are not keeping pace, and in some cases are decreasing (take the LA food bank, which is receiving 800,000 pounds less a month from the USDA than it was at the start of 2011.

At the same time, the number of people whose “investable assets” exceeded one million dollars increased 8.8% over last year. Only Houston saw a higher increase. So if you’re one of the many who feel like the middle is getting squeezed right now and there are more and more people living in one extreme or the other, you may well be right. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…. And people wonder why I persist in calling myself a leftist.

The other day the entire world collectively pointed and laughed at the obvious publicity stunt unleashed by JetBlue, where they announced plans to offer $4 fares from Burbank to Long Beach to avoid carmageddon. But flying seems pretty fast right? I mean, you are in a plane and all. But how fast is it really? Fast enough to beat Wolfpack A? Seriously, easily the most elite street cyclists in LA, possibly in the country started doing the math and think they can make that trip faster on bike than JetBlue can in a plane. You know what? I think they are right. I’ve seen the hustle in action. I’ve seen Wolfpack A win race after race. I think this is totally legit. Several folks are already trying to get JetBlue to accept the challenge. Let’s see what happens!

UPDATE: IT’S ON! Details being finalized right this very second, but this is happening. Point to point. It’s a battle of commuters. A house in Burbank to the Long Beach Aquarium. More details soon!!!