Intersections

Kid tags bus carrying mayor, earns major street cred *

I don't think I've ever seen a photograph like this: Anne Cusack at the L.A. Times catches a kid tagging a bus that was stopped at an intersection near the Santee Education Complex. The bus was carrying Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and LAUSD Supt. David Brewer on a media event highlighting a new bus stop meant to improve safety in the area. The photo turned into the story and wound up on the front page of the paper, giving this brazen travieso more free exposure than a tagger could ever dream for:

As word of the incident rippled through the crowd, Villaraigosa asked that the bus be stopped to catch the tagger. Officials soon thought better of the idea, and rather than create a traffic hazard at a busy intersection, pledged to identify and deal with the student today.

Still, the mayor was heard to say that the boy should do "a lot of community service" after being caught. Officials didn't seem to see any irony or humor in the timing of the brazen vandalism. "It's a cry out for help," said Vince Carbino, Santee's principal.

Whoever that kid is, and no matter how much community service they give him, I bet he's real, real proud of himself.

** WEDNESDAY UPDATE: L.A. Times follow-up says the tagger is 15 and writes ZONER. It quotes another student at the end who mentions that other kids where "glorifying" ZONER: "They were saying, 'that's my homie, that's my homie.' "

Cory Kennedy: Young, fashionable, famous, eating

Cory Kennedy, the former intern for Mark "The Cobrasnake" Hunter turned full-scale Internet phenomenon, got her big L.A. Times magazine profile in Sunday's West:

From the moment Hunter posted his first pictures of her, with her doe eyes and her brown hair asunder, it was clear that her childlike face, surrounded by all that L.A.-noir, had its own gravitational pull.

[...]

But mostly the reaction was simply to 15-year-old Cory as seen through the love-struck eyes of a 20-year-old who couldn't stop looking at her. "She was totally real," Hunter says, "and totally innocent."

I first met Cory while I was reporting my A-1 profile of Mark for the L.A. Times, linked here and here. Then I ran into Cory and Mark walking together happily on Hollywood and Highland last Christmas. It's easy to hate on L.A.'s "cool kids," but even easier, and better, to love them. Clearly, they're having the greatest time of their lives; the rest doesn't really matter:

That was Cory and Mark at a Paper magazine party last year. I also wrote about New York-based Paper's first big stand in L.A. in 2005 for the L.A. Times. "L.A. is the old new New York!" Loren Granic, part of Goddollars, said in my story. In 2006, the magazine did a series of parties in different L.A. hipster neighborhoods and reportedly plan on doing so annually. Paper, always on the cusp of cool...

* Filmmakers Nate Van Dusen and Jessica Sanders are working on a documentary that features Cory. Here's Cory's blog, her MySpace, and a weirdly mesmerizing video of her eating while listening to Good Charlotte.

This week in gangs: Does the Mexican Mafia run Cudahy?

Welcome to Cudahy, about one square mile of town in Southeast L.A. County where 18th Street toughs rule the block, the police force is from a city nearby but not next-door, and City Hall holds official functions at a nightclub adorned with photos of famous drug traffickers. LA Weekly investigative reporter Jeffrey Anderson combed through police records, internal emails, law enforcement memos, and the gangsta streets of Cudahy to make a strong but necessarily inexplicit connection between the Mexican Mafia and George Perez, the political boss in Cudahy, pictured above. Anderson's bomb on Cudahy, "The Town That Law Forgot," is packed with chilling stuff:

Perez is hardly shy about his relationship with this alleged mafia associate whose street nickname is “Weasel.” Marroquin owns a bar called Marroking’s Deuces on Atlantic Avenue in Cudahy. This month, campaign signs for the longtime Cudahy City Council incumbents adorn the property, the scene of an alleged assault in 2005 during which Marroquin, according to an arrest report, warned a patron who owed him money: “You’re messing with the Mexican mafia. I run all of Cudahy.”

The piece also shows how structural barriers between local law enforcement, the DEA, and the FBI are hindering progress on lifting the fear and terror that reigns in Cudahy. In yesterday's recently media newsy Hoy, the Black P-Stones are profiled in the paper's ninth installment of a series of gangs in Los Angeles. On Thursday, Hoy profiled the Grape Street Crips in Watts, beginning the story like this:

Some fell silent, some evaded questions, and others quickly walked away from a reporter. All were united by a fear: "I don't know anything," most residents replied when asked about the gang problem in Watts.

Updating the Harbor Gateway story, I guess the 204th Street gang is serious about enhancing its bloody street cred. The district attorney's office accused members of 204th Street with killing a potential witness to the racially motivated murder of 14-year-old Cheryl Green:

Five members of the 204th Street gang allegedly stabbed 21-year-old Christopher Ash 80 times and cut his throat before dumping his body in the middle of a Carson street Dec. 28, according to the L.A. County district attorney's office.

The L.A. Times also reports that anti-gang program Bridges is facing more scrutiny over the question of whether it actually works. In "Broken Bridges," LA Weekly's Anderson and Christine Pelisek revealed in December how this guy, Hector Marroquin, ran a Bridges anti-gang program while serving as a tax collector for the Mexican Mafia. (The nice thing about the new L.A. Times story online is that it revives an excellent interactive feature on the Mara Salvatrucha by reporters Rich Connell, Robert J. Lopez, and Chris Kraul. Had been looking for it.) Finally, Alex Alonso at Street Gangs magazine dissects the threat level of each of the gangs currently being targetted by the LAPD.

Previously, "This week in gangs: The camera is mightier than the sword." * LA Weekly photo on top by Ted Soqui.

Listening: Freak-folk us to dreamland, Grizzly Bear

Saw Grizzly Bear at the Troubadour the other night and, yes, their music is a weirdo kind of dreamy thing: atmospheric, doo-wop-ey, long and short, folksy, raining down gently from lots of different times and places. You sort of want them to sing you to sleep every night, by a fireplace. Alec Hanley Bemis in this LA Weekly interview calls their latest album "Yellow House" a "grower." Here are pictures from the Troubadour show by David Greenwald. (He also has shots of Foreign Born, who opened. Seen them before. They're brilliant; like their spacey raw rock sounds make your chest open up a little.) Check out this really amazing clip of Grizzly Bear doing their song "Knife" on the soggy streets of Paris. Without instruments:

Red convertible, oversized sunglasses, war-torn street *

The World Press Photograph of the Year is linked here. (I've grabbed and reposted it from the Guardian newsblog.) The winner is Spencer Platt of Getty Images for his photograph, taken during last summer's Lebanese-Israeli war, of stylish young Lebanese driving down a devastated street in south Beirut, in a red convertible. There's a guy behind the wheel and four attractive and busty young ladies wearing oversized sunglasses. One of them is snapping pictures on her cellphone cam. Behind them, what must have been a high-rise is a pile of rubble. The image is stunning in its contrasts and banality. Without the background, it could have been taken on Rodeo or La Cienega. (* Or even, a friend notes, Mexico City or Tijuana.) If I remember right, it ran A1 in the L.A. Times.

According to their website, TimeOut Beirut is still rebuilding after shutting down during the conflict. Here is Mehammed Mack's ode to that city at the LA Weekly. The current ArtKrush has an interview with the founding editor of Bidoun magazine, Lisa Farjam:

Any form of expression is a political act, but you could make the case that the link between art and politics is exceptionally intimate in the Middle East, whether it's a question of representation, expression, funding, or exhibition space. In the Middle East, art-making occurs in relation to ideas about nationhood, "good art," censorship, etc., which all intersect with political discourse. One can't really talk about the arts in this part of the world without raising the question of politics.

Did Obama miss his California moment?

Yeah, he brought in $1.3 million last night at the Beverly Hilton. And the crowds at his Baldwin Hills rally seemed excited to hear him speak. But in my "A Considerable Town" piece this week, published long online only, I wonder if presidential hopeful Barack Obama failed to seize a golden opportunity:

Here was his big media moment in a state that stands to become ever more important in primary season, in a city seen worldwide as a testing ground for cross-ethnic harmony and an incubator for progressive causes and cultural movements, and in a section of that city where African-Americans enjoy the fruits of the audacity of their hope daily, in their stately homes and sparkling cars. Where was the juice? The L.A. love? He tossed us a nod to the nice weather, but not much else particularly thought-provoking or specific to the legion of voters in Southern California who are engaged, angry, hopeful and thirsty for change.

Plus, Nikki Finke on the Geffen-Dowd-Clinton-Clinton-Obama media/money cluster&%$@. And below, "Tell your momma about Obama!"

Tell your momma about Obama! *

Presidential candidate Barack Obama is lucky his name is so rhyme-able. "Tell Your Momma About Obama!" was one of the hand-made signs held up in the crowd, in a couple variations, during Obama's rally Tuesday at Rancho Cienega park in the Baldwin Hills area. I also saw "No More Drama, We Want Obama," and a couple Spanish-language signs, curiously held up by people who didn't immediately appear to speak the language. From the press risers, the crowd looked mixed, excited, and a little sunburnt; some people had been waiting a couple hours before Obama took the stage. When he finally did, there was a stump speech with no added local context or flavor. No "I was down on Crenshaw earlier..." or maybe "Your city is what the 'audacity of hope' is all about..."

And yet, Obama's speech was sprinkled with a couple satisfying whoppers, such as, "We fund both sides of the war on terrorism." The audience loved it. After he spoke, people clamored to get their hands on the man as he worked his way toward the parking lot. LAPD was heavily present. Across the abandoned tracks of Exposition Boulevard, a couple people manning a folding table selling bootleg Barack T-shirts said they almost cleaned out. Here's somewhat fawning coverage of the event from the San Francisco Chronicle, which apparently didn't notice that all kinds of people, not just African Americans, showed up to hear the freshman senator's all-inclusive message of hope and equality. But then, American papers love an overwrought identity politics narrative.

* BEVERLY HILLS REPORT: I'm told that at the exclusive Beverly Hilton reception Tuesday night, Obama was introduced by his wife Michelle, who "went on too long" and was "clearly very bright, and seemingly competitive with him in a weird way." The deep-pocketed attendees looked with googly eyes upon the charming candidate once known as Barry around Eagle Rock, I'm told. Michelle said Barack was bad at making the bed and opening things in the fridge. Here's the latest AP summary on Obama's big day in L.A.

* Photo by Orly Olivier.

The glory days of Mexican 80's candy pop

We all knew the words to Menudo's "Subete a mi moto" (not to mention the popular parody version with the foul-language lyrics), but besides boy bands and their famous graduates, Latin American pop music in the 80's was heaven for girls with big hair and thick ankle socks. These groups flourished in Mexico, and found their shimmering trailblazer in Yuri, seen here taking Spain by storm with an army of slinky menbots:

Groups like Flans made Mexican bubble-gum pop the soundtrack of our lives -- as long as they didn't actually have to sing live. With pants and moves like this, though, who cares if you're even holding a mic?

But the undisputed sparklers of this sound were the girls of Timbiriche, who -- long before the Spice Girls came around -- turned loud clothes, simple choreography, and mid-range-heavy back-up music into pop gold. This is the group in which future superstar Paulina Rubio came close to permanently frizzing out her hair. Really, blue Amish skirt girl, how awesome are you guys?!

Any groups I'm missing? And a more pressing question arises: did this sort of Latin-galactic pop machine ever ... really ... leave? Didn't think so, L.A.

Writing in Boyle Heights, via Nigeria and London

Author Chris Abani grew up around Lagos, "a Third World city in the best possible sense," reading Yeats and Baldwin and watching American TV. His first novel, written as a teenager, got him sent to prison. It would be the first of three times. This L.A. Times piece chronicles Abani's journey from Africa to immigrant London to East Los Angeles, where he still lives and writes:

At first he found L.A.'s centerless quality frustrating and isolating after London. But he has fond memories of "chickens crowing in the morning, mariachi bands playing … people pulling beautiful wooden donkeys down the street." And as he settled in, he realized that American culture, with its mix of ethnicities and classes, has always been impure, mongrel.

"And L.A.," he said, "is the perfect metaphor for all of this."

Abani, who is also a saxaphonist, told Scott Timberg he considers himself "an Igbo writer, a British writer, a black writer and a Los Angeles writer." His most recent novel is ""The Virgin of Flames," about an East L.A. muralist named Black. Ruben Martinez wrote the L.A. Times book review.

From a lost New York to a cha cha L.A., freestyle romance

On the train, on the pier, at Coney Island, Stevie B is in a shiny black patent leather jacket and dead serious about cha cha love:

With people like Lisa Lisa and the Cult Jam, freestyle migrated to West Covina, La Puente, Whittier, and so on:

By then, "Latin hip hop" had gone Hollywood:

Let's take a mix and go cruising on the boulevards, old skool-style...

Gorgeous Japanese gang tattoos

The Guardian reports a "spectacular" underworld turf war is brewing among the criminal syndicate street gangs in the biggest metropolis in the world, Tokyo. This story comes with a photo of yakuza members displaying their gang tattoos: intricate, large, and filled with imagery from Japanese mythology, they're somehow familiar. The story says:

Japan's top yakuza don, who spent 13 years in prison in the 1970s for stabbing to death a rival with a sword, immediately joined hands with the Kokusui-kai, a much smaller gang based in Tokyo that had leased territory to the Yamaguchi-gumi's fiercest enemies, including the Sumiyoshi-kai.

There are fears that this week's shootings could be the result of the Yamaguchi-gumi's attempts to seize back the leases in an underworld version of a hostile corporate buyout.

Sounds like a movie, kinda. Or a video game. At National Geographic, Chris Rainier has an image from the yakuza tattoo culture.

Take a train from Echo Park to Venice

Took the bus from the office to Echo Park last night and back this morning, and, geez, if even a simple ride down Sunset doesn't make a guy yearn for a fast, modern metro system in L.A. like this imaginary one. In the proposed future L.A. metro system by Damien Goodmon, which was all the rage on local blogs for a bit last year, rail and subway lines would have Sylmar interconnected to San Pedro, Baldwin Park to Santa Monica, and LAX to the Burbank and Long Beach airports. Imagine three transfers one continuous ride on the "Silver Line" from Sunset and Echo Park Ave to reach Venice Beach on a leisurely Saturday. (Link at Metroblogging LA. Some of the comments are good and noble: "I'm crying.")

But, if L.A. ever joins the ranks of modern megacities with real mass transit, we should keep in mind that living with a subway means being in very close proximity to lots and lots of strangers. Check out this hat-tipping transit cop on a platform at Higashi-Kawaguchi station in the Tokyo subway and the throngs of people he's directing:

But the platform traffic in the Tokyo subway appears cozy compared to the jam in this claustrophobic tunnel in the metro in Moscow:

Finally, here's a short video piece by L.A. artist and writer Harry Gamboa Jr., depicting an apocalyptic daydream on the Red Line:

The sounds of the barrio, from L.A. to India

Ozomatli, the multiethnic fusion jam band born in the barrios of Los Angeles, have landed in India. As cultural ambassadors invited by the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, they're doing large shows in both India and Nepal, with performances scheduled in Kathmandu and Bangalore. I can only imagine what a glorious sight it will be when Ozo takes their customary percussion conga among the youth of South Asia. Something tells me they'll be treated better there than they were in Texas.

Reading: The nutritious value of sadness

The current issue of Bomb magazine features a fascinating conversation between Max Benavidez and Salvador Plascencia, author of "The People of Paper." The novel is a delicious read: a magical saga where "cowardly saints avoid their duties by moonlighting as masked Mexican wrestlers" and "a decaying Rita Hayworth is harrassed constantly by agitated lettuce pickers," as I noted in my L.A. Times review. One thing I didn't note then, though, was the nature of the book itself, which Plascencia discusses in this interview:

As far as the physical appearance of the book goes: "design" is often taken to mean something that happens after the writing. And, without a doubt, the people at McSweeney's are great designers in that sense, but the graphic and layout elements within the narrative are not just decorative. The columns, the blackouts, serve an integral narrative function. [...] What I find extremely interesting is the apprehension toward typography and design by many critics. You hear people say, sarcastically, Call me old-fashioned but I like my novels with words. The irony is, if you're familiar with print culture and history, a book consisting of pure prose on a single column is a fairly recent development that has more to do with the standardization of printing presses and lazy publishers than literary tradition. There are limits to what prose can do, and sometimes it's not a metaphor and lyricism that you need. Sometimes what the page needs is a darkened square.

And on sadness, which in Plascencia's novel is represented as the base of a food pyramid, below breads:

No one really wants to live in Eden; we would die from the absurdity and boredom of a life suspended in exposition where there is no potential for injury.

At Tingle Alley, there are intriguing posts quoting Plascencia and his editor on the process on publishing "The People of Paper." Also in the current Bomb, Marisela Norte in conversation with Gronk, Josh Kun on Los Tigres del Norte, and Adelina Anthony on Cherrie Moraga.

Colored lights are our friends

I want to go to the new Santa Monica Civic Center just so I could park there. (From LAFrog via CurbedLA.)

Smile! Your car is getting repossessed!

"Operacion Repo" is one of the best new "reality TV" shows in a long time. It follows a band of vehicular bounty hunters who repossess cars after their owners default on payments. When the car owner comes storming out trying to figure out what the hell is going, they're hit with cameras and lights and microphones. What happens next is usually not pretty, but always highly entertaining. The show is officially in Spanish but much of the dialogue happens in raw, indigenous L.A. Spanglish. Losanjelous has an interesting interview up with the show's creator and producer Lou Pizarro:

Q: People, it seems, will do whatever it takes to be televised these days. And I believe “Operacion Repo” succeeds partly due to this phenomenon. Do people ever refuse to sign waivers allowing you to air their episode?

A: Sometimes, but for the most part they do not mind at all.

"Operacion Repo" airs weekday afternoons on Canal 22 Telemundo. Watch out with them angry cholos!

Markets adjust, nativists retreat to the letters page

Strong editorial in the L.A. Times today:

It's really no wonder that Bank of America has been quiet about its new initiative in the Los Angeles area to offer credit cards to customers without Social Security numbers or credit histories — including illegal immigrants. After all, just hours after the Wall Street Journal reported on the program, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs chastised the $74-billion banking giant for its "outrageous policy," called its spokeswoman an idiot and hinted ominously that the new credit cards would stoke terrorism, money laundering and forgery.

In fact, BofA's program, which issues small amounts of credit at relatively high interest rates to checking customers in good standing, shows how markets adjust to deal with reality, even when politicians and nativist TV commentators want to remain in denial. BofA recognizes that the 28 million Latinos in its market are here to stay, and it is targeting financial products to suit their needs and help them continue to boost local economies.

[...]

According to a recent study by the Center for an Urban Future, a New York-based think tank, L.A. County leads the nation in the number of Latino-owned (as well as Asian-owned) firms. More to the point, the study also reported that about 80% of L.A.'s new entrepreneurs were immigrants.

But at the same time, the paper still feels the need to run letters like this. Irrelevent xenophobic nativists still need to vent somewhere -- might as well be the LAT, I suppose. Here's the Gannett news story on the study cited in the editorial: Immigrant workers drive urban economies. Now I wonder, what market is CNN adjusting to?

Listening: Let's make love, Sao Paolo-style *

Have a nice Valentine's Day, courtesy of Lovefoxxx and the hottest, weirdest girls (and one guy) from sexy megacity Sao Paolo. It's CSS. Sometimes people blurt out at random, "The world is amazing!" and I think this is what they mean by that:

* Wait. Have to throw this in. Lovefoxx tells The Guardian about how CSS is treated in Brazil:

Sometimes her annoyance turned to violence, such as during a ruckus with a nightclub host who initially refused her entry without ID and then said she could come in because she was famous, which annoyed her even more. "I had just seen Fight Club and so I said, 'This conversation is over,' just like in the film. Then he said that I was just a dirty little bitch from CSS, so I said, 'you know what you are? You're a fat guy with titties that wears a tiara'." The rest of the band had to dive in to save her when he lunged for her.

Serenading bus driver

Curbed LA has a great video of a cheerful MTA bus driver by zeldaxfitzgerald. I love the variety of faces of commuters as they board:

ImpreMedia 1, Tribune 0

Crazy start of the week in the national Spanish-language newspaper war. Tribune is selling its Hoy property in New York City to ImpreMedia, the same company it's been doing battle with over Spanish-language newspaper readers in the major Latino markets: New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago. ImpreMedia is the alliance built in 2004 to counter Tribune's Spanish-language ambitions: its biggest papers are L.A.'s La Opinion and New York's El Diario-La Prensa. Sounds like ImpreMedia has ambitions of its own: the company told Editor & Publisher it will not fold Hoy in New York and continue to publish it. They've also been acquiring Spanish papers in other parts of the country recently. ImpreMedia CEO John Paton told his own papers in this story from El Diario-La Prensa: "I'd love to buy Hoy in Los Angeles and Chicago. But they're not for sale. We'll just have to wait." The story also quotes USC professor Felix Gutierrez and makes special note of Hoy's previous circulation inflation scandal.

At the same time, Tribune's L.A. Times CEO David Hiller announced Monday that they are finally going to give some attention to its long-neglected Hoy paper in Los Angeles. Hiller is bringing Javier Aldape into the big tent to be "Vice President of the Los Angeles Times Media Group for Audience Development." This can only be an improvement over how the Hoy enterprise has been run so far, with non-local editorial content largely produced centrally in Chicago for all the papers. That has resulted, at least in L.A.'s case, in an Hoy paper that's failed to connect with readers. Even though it's free. We'll see how Aldape manages to "develop" this audience. If the L.A. Times' and Tribune's record on reaching the various Latino communities in LA. is any indication, he has a steep hill to climb. Maybe basic quality control is a good place to start. LAObserved reports today that the local Hoy completely missed the big U.S.-Mexico futbol match last week. Que vergüenza... * Art by Lalo Alcaraz from LAWeekly.com.

Listening: Life in cartoon motion, and return of the Monch

Until now, I've never been to Coachella, and this has almost become a badge of honor for me: can't deal with big crowds, overpriced water, or sloppy people on ecstacy. Having said that, this year's line-up is dangerously enticing. There are so many good acts making their big desert debuts. Among these, popalicious Mika stands out. His single "Grace Kelly" is No. 1 in the UK right now. A Lebanese British songster and pianoman born in 1983, he sorta makes you blush a little -- even when he isn't wearing ambulance-red hotpants. It's that star-bright Bee Gee falsetto, I think:

Others on my Coachella wish-list: LCD Soundsystem, !!!, Rodrigo y Gabriela, The Roots, Grizzly Bear, Lupe Fiasco, CSS, El-P, Busdriver, Hot Chip, Erol Alkon, The Rapture, Jose Gonzalez, Manu Chao, Bjork, DJ Shadow, and ... Pharoahe Monch? He's back?! So I'm online looking for an old video, and, how about that?, I find one where the featured "video girl" is actually Maritza Murray, a classmate since the sixth grade and one of my tightest homegirls. The only suitable conclusion from all this is ... I love everything:

RIP Bill Wingard

There's been considerable interest in my post on the fatal accident last month at the crosswalk in front of the Silver Lake Trader Joe's. Bill Wingard, the man who died there on Jan. 20 at the age of 43, led a rich life. A native of South Carolina, he was a model, actor, playwright, and producer active in the local theater scene. This is his biography at Company of Angels, which he joined in 2005. Here is the link to the online petition for a safer crosswalk at 2730 Hyperion. Thank you neighbors and readers for the comments. Here is a recent one from Algernon with an important update:

Bill Wingard was a friend of mine, and I regularly cross at that very crosswalk. In response to a fury of activity, we learned from the city that an order for a full traffic signal was actually scheduled some time ago, with construction slated for April and completion by July. Too late for Bill's sake, but it will slow traffic down and give pedestrians to cross the street without losing their life.

My respects and condolences go out to Bill's family and friends.

Defying gravity ... and taste?

Far above the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River, the Hualapai Indians are building a spectacularly enormous glass-bottom walkway in the shape of a horseshoe that will allow visitors walk out over the canyon at 4,000 feet, or four times the height of downtown's Library Tower. For a $25 fee, you'll be able to feel like Wile E. Coyote when he runs out over a canyon and doesn't realize he's groundless. Predictably, there are people who are displeased with the project, calling it a tacky eyesore, as the L.A. Times reports. The Hualapai, like a lot North American Indians, want to be self-sustaining. Understandably so, but fears of overdevelopment are prevalent, even among the tribe:

Joe Powskey, a Hualapai guide who takes tourists through a newly built Indian village adjacent to the Skywalk construction site, said that although growth was necessary to give the tribe an economic base, tribal leaders needed to be careful not to overdo it.

[...]

Powskey said he was aggrieved to see visitors step down from buses and toss cigarette butts around the rim. "We ask people not to smoke. They do. We tell them not to throw cigarettes around; the bones of our ancestors are buried here."

The quote refers to the general abuse tourists inflict upon the canyon, sign of a wider problem than a single project meant to give a struggling native nation an economic boost. * Graphic from LATimes.com

RIP Julio Ochoa Ruelas, O.G. of the lowrider

The lowrider is one of the few truly home-grown cultural exports of Los Angeles that has become an international phenomenon. One of the godfathers of this American tradition, Julio Ochoa Ruelas, died last month at the age of 62. Ruelas co-founded with his brother Fernando the oldest continual lowrider car club in the world, the Dukes So. Cal. The L.A. Times' Jocelyn Y. Stewart gives us an obituary:

The story of the brothers is intertwined with that of the lowrider, which begins with World War II, when factories that normally produced cars instead made tanks and other vehicles for the war effort, Messer said. During those years and shortly after the war, it was impossible to buy a new car. Many of the veterans who settled in Southern California after the war brought with them new skills, money and a desire for something uniquely theirs.

[...]

Lowriders are "artistic creations that are also mechanical marvels." They ride low. They ride high. They "hop." They are canvases on which art is painted. The Ruelas brothers learned to love lowriders in a multiethnic neighborhood of South Los Angeles, where they were raised and worked.

Last year, the San Diego Automotive Museum presented an exhibit called "Bajito y Suavecito: Lowriders of Southern California," which featured cars, models and memorabilia from lowrider car clubs in San Diego, Los Angeles, the Inland Empire, and Tijuana. Women lowrider car clubs were featured as well. The Save Our Centro Coalition has some great photos from the opening reception last February. Union-Tribune publisher David Copley was there. One Saturday me and my brother took my dad to the exhibit, as he owns a '40 Buick and a '37 Chevy, and while we were in there our dad ran into a couple San Diego O.G.'s he hadn't seen in years. They stood among those beautiful shiny machines and reminisced. Stuff like that always happens to him.

* Still going strong, Lowrider magazine. Photo from here.

This week in gangs: The camera is mightier than the sword *

Ernest Hardy interviews Cle “Bone” Sloan, the filmmaker behind the HBO documentary "Bastards of the Party." Hardy's introduction offers a concise and valuable run-down of the history that led to the current "culture of death" among black gangs in South L.A. Here, Sloan describes how his personal connections to the war between the Bloods and the Crips shaped his filmmaking process:

In 1996, my young homie Mouse was killed. He was the son of my O.G. homie, Big Mouse, who’s now serving 40 years in a Nevada state penitentiary. Before Big Mouse went to jail, he asked me to look out for his twin sons, Tyrell and Cyrell. Cyrell was killed three days after I interviewed him for the film. A week after that, the question was posed to me on film: What would I do if I ran into Li’l Mouse’s killer? Back then, I said I wouldn’t hesitate to kill him. In 2003, I was asked if I felt the same way. I said no. Because I know the killing won’t stop unless I stop.

This film drops just as Los Angeles is "getting serious," again, about its vast gang problem. On Friday, the LAPD announced a 200-officer assault plan on the city's 11 most violent gangs (That L.A. Times page is missing a number). The announcement bucked tradition by naming the gangs and their territories outright: Canoga Park Alabama, the Avenues, Mara Salvatrucha, La Mirada Locos, 18th Street Westside, Black P-Stones, Rollin' 30s, Rollin' 40s, Rollin' 60s, Grape Street Crips, and (the recently overhyped?) 204th Street. Here's the LAPD's official page on the new campaign. Will it work?, the LAT asks.

On top of this, there's a whole separate international effort with the feds that's attempting to tackle the scarier problem of the transnational gangs MS and 18th Street. Seeing as these were essentially created by previous federal policies -- U.S.-backed civil war in El Salvador results in exodus of refugees to Los Angeles and the Washington area, gangs emerge, undocumented criminals are deported back, where the gangs get stronger and globalize -- good luck with that:

* Photo above by NPR reporter Mandalit del Barco, who shot it while reporting from a Mara-packed prison El Salvador in March 2005. * Photo on top by HBO via LA Weekly.

Reading: I Pass Like Night

Just finished Jonathan Ames' 1989 debut, "I Pass Like Night." Phew. It's a downer, for sure, charting the misadventures of one Alexander Vine, a hopelessly hopeless 20-something Jewish doorman at the Manhattan Four Seasons who spends his nights picking up hookers in the Bowery, talking to bums, and rationalizing his experiments with mansexuality at the height of the New York AIDS epidemic. For a while I couldn't get enough of this genre: episodic, jarring, these books follow disaffected young people doing drugs and having sex and just spiraling and spiraling. With no point, really, no moral, just the trauma of youth in an increasingly brutal and vulgar world. They flourished in the 80s. I read "Bright Lights, Big City" by Jay McInerney, the best example of this genre from the East Coast, and "Less Than Zero" by Brett Easton Ellis, the really horrifying L.A. version of the same story. But after so much of this, "I Pass Like Night" was starting to give me motion sickness. And anyway, didn't F. Scott Fitzgerald write the bankrupt-youth book to rule them all way back in the Jazz Age? But I am indebted in a way to these courageous authors and their beautiful and damned protagonists. The Mexico City book of this style, Jorge Dorantes' "Nada Que Ver," which I devoured twice over during my last semester in college, opened my eyes to a Mexico not imagined in Hollywood films, tourist guides, or bedtime stories. It's still my favorite: a tribe of pill-popping, bed-hopping chilango hipsters careen out of control to a "Thelma & Louise" finish. The author, according to his book jacket bio, once wrote subtitles for porn films. ... Please, someone translate it.

Listening: The motion and the melancholy

When it comes to somber, hypnotic music that gets you feeling a little sorry for everything but also hopeful about the triumph of electro in the mid-late 2000s, nothing tops "Boy from School" by Londoners Hot Chip. Pitchfork named it the No. 7 best track of 2006, beat in its genre only by those icy cool Swedes, The Knife. Since being introduced to "Boy From School" last summer, I've found myself unable to grow tired of its disco wails. For driving, it seems to suit the shifty L.A. streetscape on Friday afternoons around dusk. Here is Hot Chip doing it live and extended in New York last August, playing up the track's surprising danceability. The visuals are bad but the audio is so crisp and stirring:

And here is the video by Garth Jennings.

Weekends are for movement.

The genius in the front row *

Watch this perfectly hilarious clip from NBC4 of an, ah, incident during a City Council meeting in Carson, another vaguely corrupt little city in south/southeast L.A. county (surprise!). The lady that gets gently smacked upside the head with some papers clearly has her priorities straight. You can almost see the thought bubble on top of her head in that second when she decides to let out a dramatic gasp and "collapse" to the floor as if it were choreography for some kind of safety demonstration... "Law. Suit."

Aaliyah 4-Ever

To celebrate Valentine's Day in today's LA Weekly's music section, some staffers and writers contributed short pieces on our favorite love songs. Gendy Alimurung wrote about K-Ci & Jo-Jo's "All My Life," Judith Lewis wrote about Shakira & Alejandro Sanz's "La Tortura," Ernest Hardy wrote about Aretha Franklin's "Prove It." I dropped some words on Aaliyah's "I Care 4 U":

Aaliyah’s voice in the track is a melancholic, angelic echo. Every time I hear it now, the song fills me with an unbearably heavy sense of loss and longing. We all loved Aaliyah immensely. She was so classy, so sultry, so glamorous, so sweet. And just as with the horrible death of Tex-Mex goddess Selena in 1995, Aaliyah’s passing permanently affected us.

That first day my siblings and I heard “I Care 4 U,” it must have had a particular effect on one of my brothers. He and his wife named their first child, a daughter, Analiyah, honoring both the singer and a beloved aunt of ours who died in 2000. Analiyah and I, to my great honor, share the same birthday. Life is death is love is life, I guess.

Check out all the Aaliyah MySpace tribute pages. In this brief and spine-tingling clip, Aaliyah sings from "I Refuse," a cappella. Still so pissed she's dead:

Airbrush portrait on top by "Sue J."

On hip-hop handwringing: International spotrockers unite! *

For a while now, everyone's been worrying about the death of hip-hop. (I mean, gays are invading it!) There are certainly plenty of worthy adherents offering healthy critiques, most recently suggested by the ITVS documentary "Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes." But while hip-hop is presently weighed down by the politics and discourse of race, economics, vice, sex, and coming on "hard," we sometimes forget this was a socially subversive, party-based subculture since the beginning. Something tells me hip-hop will find a way back to the playful beats of its roots. There are underground scenes across the U.S. and around the globe that most of us can only speculate about. And there are groups like Spank Rock, hip-popping "international spotrockers" who are clearly influenced by the vintage greats like Grandmaster Flash:

Yeah, this hoppy digit-tech style is definitely one of hip-hop's many new/nostalgic subgenres, but considering some of the other options (and their preoccupations), I'll take it. Check out this piece on the group on Flavorpill Video. Spank Rock, led by the poetic prankster MC Naaem Juwan, had a secret show about a month ago at The Echo. * I'm told I should also consider in this sphere acts like ghetto-tech MC Bus Driver, who plays at "Low End Theory" at the Airliner tonight in Lincoln Heights.