M.I.A. plays her second show tonight at the Echoplex, and Losanjelous, bless their hearts, has pictures from last night. The image above is from their nice assortment of close-ups. There's so much hype around these scarce shows: Apparently 1,000 people showed up Monday to get precious few tickets released at the last minute due to demand. If you're going tonight, blessings. Baile-funk the sh*t out of her new stuff. I'll be home a few blocks away in my sparkle-motion tights and floppy neon green painter cap (kidding), YouTubing her:
That's "Boyz," one of the new tracks. M.I.A., a Londoner-by-way-of-Sri Lanka, has a compelling personal saga, but as you can see, part of the phenomenon is how visually striking she is, and how much she's influenced street fashion by excessively piling on mismatched, painfully bright colors and shimmery prints until she and her fans start looking like some kind of deranged tribe of sugar-high post-ethnic Smurfs.
** Add: The LA Weekly Play post on last week's Rapture show that I found a way into. Caught funky-fun Chromeo later that same night. Chromeo played new stuff too, but seeing them again just made me real nostalgic for 2005. * Thanks, Lxs.
First they allowed same-sex unions, legalized abortion, and started talking about banning indoor smoking. Now, Mexico City has allowed conjugal visits in prisons for gay couples, at the urging of the city's human rights commission, BBC reports. The AP says:
The decision was prompted by a complaint filed by a man identified only
as "Agustin N.," who said he wanted to visit his companion, "Ricardo
N.," at the Santa Martha Acatitla prison on the city's east side.
Agustin filed a complaint with the rights commission — which has the
power to make recommendations but not to enforce them — saying prison
authorities had denied his request because the two are gay.
** In Mexico City last year, I got to catch a show of contemporary art from Cuba at the Museo de la Caricutura, with excellent paintings and multimedia works. There was a video piece -- I wrote the info down somewhere -- about a woman getting her house re-done, "Extreme Home Makeover," Cuba style. The show was a part of the city's book fair. The invited guest cities from the Spanish-speaking world were Havana and Los Angeles.
Hate 'em all you want -- and as the misogynists, frequently bigoted pompous punks that they can be, it's pretty easy -- but the kids at Vice consistently put out a fascinating magazine, and now blog and online video channel. Here's a piece on Little England in Sri Lanka, orphans in Afghanistan, and L.A.'s own MS-13. All the information you need on a subculture you'll likely never see for yourself, and none of the thousands upon thousands of arty writing in a publication you'll never get because it's not free like Vice is. Brilliant!
Since we've been on an Africa kick lately, I'd like to emphasize this link to a Vice photo essay on wrestling in the Congo, mimed with a magic twist. The image above is from the story, by Benedicte Curzen. Hail synchronicity: Earlier today my friend Rebecca pointed me to this satirical and quite damning piece in Granta, on "how to write" about Africa:
Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their
souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef
and wheat; monkey-brain is an African's cuisine of choice, along with
goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you
show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe
how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.
If you're like me and sort of suspect Africa has interesting urbanisms, any and all scraps of visual learning on life there are
very welcome. For example, a few years ago the Craft and Folk Art Museum in L.A. had a great exhibit on sign-painting in Ghana, showing how a craftsman tradition has been built around the practice of painting signs for home businesses of all kinds: from barbers to movie theaters.
* Interesting: This blogger notes how the Kinshasa power company always shines brightly, even when the rest of the city lies in darkness. Reminds me of the DWP building downtown.
We return early this week with more coherent posting once we manage to piece together finite and feasible summer goals under this mind-numbing heat -- and turn away from "Cosby Show" reruns and "Little Britain." Meanwhile, let India Maria show you how it's done:
"The Warriors," the cult film about seriously theme-dependent street gangs in crumbling 1970s New York, had to be based on something. Witness "80 Blocks from Tiffany's," an engrossing 1979 documentary on the gangs of the South Bronx, now available to the YouTube generation. It's a fascinating window into a culture we're privileged to recall with romance and nostalgia because we didn't actually live it. Here's the first chapter:
The best approach to Fox News is to completely ignore its existence, but every now and then (like the LESBIAN GANGS SPREADING FEAR WITH PINK GUNS! story) the Republican propaganda network does an "outrage" piece that is so ridiculous it sounds like satire. Consider the decision by Macy's to pull a NaCo tee from its racks after mysteriously unsourced complaints on Fox that the shirts were "offensive." Why? Because they made the pugnacious and sorta precise statement that 'Brown Is The New White.' (Here, here.)
Guanabee posted on the "controversy" then tracked down Edoardo Chavarin, the NaCo co-founder who created the design, for an interview. An excerpt:
Guanabee: What exactly did you mean by “Brown Is The New White,” anyway? Are you implying some kind of Latino New World Order?
Edoardo: Exactly. We are taking over the world so everybody better watch out!!!!!!! (Ha ha ha! just kidding!) NO! It’s hard to ignore the fact that
Latinos are everywhere now… its hard to pick up the newspaper and not
read about Latinos in politics, music, art, design, etc. It’s just
shining a little light on that in a funny way. That’s it.
I could have spent all day circling Jason Rhoades' installation in "Eden's Edge" at the Hammer Museum at UCLA. The late artist's 2004 work, titled Twelve-Wheel Waggon Wheel Chandelier, is dominated by neon-light representations of crude terms for female genitalia. There's so much going on, and you know how I feel about fluorescent tubes. The words' orange industrial wiring is anchored against a wall at, if I recall correctly, a pile of pillows and an upright, formidable cucumber drenched in what could be semen. Far out! I mean, L.A. oozes sex, excess, decadence, sinister brightness -- the coarse flat plains where desire intersects with destruction. (Emphasizing the point, Rhoades died of a likely overdose, a year ago on August 1.) It makes sense for this garish display to be the last on view in what I think is the richest, smartest show on Los Angeles art in a long time.
In the interview, Garrels, a Gotham transplant, articulates the now commonly held belief that the L.A. art scene is more exciting and innovative than the scene in New York:
There’s an openness. I don’t think the art making has been completely
overshadowed by the commercial world here. Artists are more willing to
talk about art here. The gallerists are more open to talking, they’re
not just selling. There’s just a very lively, spirited community here.
This assertion was touched upon in Christopher Knight's review of the show in the L.A. Times, and more or less in the New York Times, in this Sunday piece in March. KCRW, in turn, recently discussed the growing East Coast media fascination with L.A. in this segment.
"Eden's Edge" shows why none of this buzz is empty hype, and part of the fun of it is figuring out how much you agree with this specific take on the L.A. glow, and what you do and do not personally like. My personal choices are the dark paintings by Matt Greene, which are covered with mushrooms and naked women; the vast abstract collages by South L.A.'s Mark Bradford, made from discarded street signs; the psychedelic swap-meet-looking paintings by Sharon Ellis; Elliott Hundley's intensely layered push-pin collages; the really unbelievable pieces on translucent calfskin by Rebecca Morales; and the weird films by Stanya Kahn & Harry Dodge.
Witness LA has more, including Councilman Dennis Zine's angry letter to the federal drug agency. It's only pot, right? One Witness LA commentator sums up the stakes: "Those Federal officers are violating the sovereignty of California and the will of its voters." Link. Story at L.A. Times.
Sometimes it's a color, sometimes it's a pattern or a shoe, and sometimes, like this week, it's headgear. Whatever the focus, Bill Cunningham's regular "On the Street" photo essay in The New York Times Style section is always a crowd-pleaser. Above, a celebration of the fedora. He writes, deliciously, "The straw fedora, with its rakish snap brim, is the summer status symbol."
Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, the man behind surreal masterpieces "Holy Mountain" and "El Topo," gave the following interview to a Spanish television program last year. I originally saw the clip on one of Harry Gamboa Jr.'s rich email newsletters months ago. The moment Jodorowsky reaches out to make physical contact with his interviewer is thrilling. It merits another viewing, but it is not subtitled:
Some highlights of Jodoroswky's words, in my translation:
"Think of the work and not of the fruit of the work, every action you make, make it like a sacrifice to the divine, and always work knowing that you have an interior God." ...
"Life has no meaning, but we must live it." ...
"Everything that is, is here, in this instant. If there is heaven, it is here. If there is Paradise, it is here. If I am here, where else can I be but here? ...
"We are not destroying ourselves, we are writhing like a worm that will give birth to a butterfly, we are in a full human mutation, we can no longer live like this." ...
"We're mutants, we're mutating. We are the fathers and mothers of a new human race." ...
"We're passing through this final anguish, in which everything falls. Religion falls, politics falls, the economy falls, industry falls. And so, there will be no revolution, there will be re-evolution, there will be mutation."
Don't you miss truly engaging television like that? I do. * See more on Alejandro Jodorowsky here and here. More clips.
Weather knows no borders, so a storm brewing in Mexico often impacts the skies in U.S. border states and beyond. (Can't they build a wall for that?) Recently, however, systematic budget cuts at Servicio Meteorologico Nacional, Mexico's national weather service, have led to less frequent launching of weather-measuring balloons south of the border, resulting in less accurate weather projections on the U.S. side, reports the San Diego Union-Tribune:
The lack of data could make it harder for forecasters to predict the
timing and intensity of thunderstorms, and that could cause
complications in potential flash-flood situations.
"It could be that we'll get surprised one way or another," said
Ed Clark, warning coordination meteorologist at the Weather Service's
Rancho Bernardo office. "The models could show a storm being a little
wetter or drier than it really is."
Mexican weather service official Olivia Parada Hernandez said cuts began during Vicente Fox's presidency. Felipe to the rescue? I've always found it strange how U.S. weather maps sometimes show Mexico and Canada as blank blotches, as if people in Seattle don't care what Vancouver feels like, or El Paso has no interest in temps in Cd. Juarez. On the other hand, I've seen Spanish-language weather broadcasts show state boundaries and weather patterns in detail on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico line, in accordance with reality.
Matthew Fleischer of the LA Weekly sat down with Femi Kuti, son of "Black President" and Afrobeat icon Fela Kuti, before his concert at the House of Blues last week. This exchange stood out for me:
What’s your take on Bono and concerts like Live 8 that campaign on behalf of Africa?
Bono
doesn’t need to tell us that we are poor. We know we are poor. All
these concerts come and go and nothing changes in Africa.
So then what’s the best way for concerned Americans to get involved with helping Africa?
Not
to feel sorry for us but to be positive toward us. Do more business
with us. Come and visit us. We, in turn, have to get stronger and not
rely on leaders to do everything for us. We must take action ourselves.
But Western democracies must also stop turning a blind eye to African
corruption and start taking action — then we can start moving forward
as a nation.
I'm going with it, especially after noticing on clips of their current tour the inspired use of the pyramid as icon, symbol, and base. (We are in the future, after all.) There's a new Daft Punk interview in the current Fader, with photographs by Todd Cole of Thomas and Guy-Manuel in their signature helmets taken in and around Echo Park. Personally, I'm eager to see how The Rapture attempts to top this energy at the Mayan this week. Bet it's going to be good:
That's the European video for "Sister Saviour," spotted last week on LAist. It's a song that in the proper mind-frame gives you all the elements of rock-n-roll gold: foreboding, destruction, guts, valor, and the promise of rebirth. In other words, the moment. Here's the Rapture's pleasing new single.
On the drive up from a getaway weekend in San Diego Sunday, my friend Nina took me for a quick tour of her native Redondo Beach, which included a walk around the Redondo Beach Pier. After five years of living in L.A., I am embarrassed I'd never been. It's an untouched modern California miracle: crowded, diverse, full of locals (as in, kinda "gansta"), unpretentious, not chaotic, and not a tourist in sight. Venice and Santa Monica never had it so good.
The boardwalk has a Fun Factory packed with the kind of classic arcade games you only see in movies now, a "pirate" shop, and boardwalk food of major nostalgic nutritional value. We took in the view at the roundabout "crow's nest" bar at Tony's, with a martini and margarita, contemplating the scene of a long-ago melancholy vision from Patti Smith:
Everyone was singing, girl is washed up
On Redondo Beach and everyone is so sad.
I was looking for you, are you gone gone ?
Pretty little girl, everyone cried.
She was the victim of sweet suicide.
I went looking for you, are you gone gone ?
There's a book available about the history of Mexican Americans in the area. Other links are here, here, and here. Intersections will definitely be doing more exploring in the South Bay in the future.
Something about the vibe at "Brasilintime Live" at the Mayan Thursday night reminded me of the feeling you get at a close cousin's long-awaited welcome-home party, or a spontaneous gathering of true friends. It feels like a concentration of undiluated freshness and good energy -- above and beyond the ubiquitious forces of cynicism and irony. This is what happens when you bring together new-school hip-hop DJs and old-school Brasilian precussionists and let them make music together. It felt like everyone was there to participate, from the crowds in the line snaking almost to the corner of 11th Street to the artists on the Mayan stage, to the security guys even.
Sao Paolo's DJ Nuts opened the night with some very fresh tropicalia-meets-hip-hop grooves while interesting covers of vintage Carnaval records flashed on the screens in the Mayan, which if you've seen on the inside is really one of the most ornate, dazzling venues in Southern California, covered with exocitized "Mayan frescoes." Brian "B+" Cross and Eric Coleman (who DJs regularly at Firecracker in Chinatown) put together the night to cap a special week in Los Angeles for the premiere of the film "Brasilintime," which is more or less the film story of how they combine the forces necessary to create the magic of a live show such as Thursday night's.
Magic is the correct word in this context. By the time me and a friend climbed to the very top of the theater's balcony, somehow finding our way into the VIP area, the four DJs stood behind the four forefathers of beats, creating a wall of sound that was constantly moving, snapping, surprising, and invigorating to experience. Once we were caught and politely asked to leave the fancy zone, we found the floor to be that much more satisfying. All the people were swaying and jamming, making a hip-hop tropical wonderland completely within their heads and bodies.
That's the blunt, dispassionate assessment of one woman quoted in La Opinion's front-page article today on the changing face of MacArthur Park-Westlake, by reporter Roger Lido. Here's the link. The piece points out that the crime has been greatly reduced after the installation of hidden LAPD videocameras around the park, and more new businesses are moving in, to everyone's satisfaction. But it also notes that rents are rising dramatically, forcing long-time residents to move out-of-state, and student population figures at local schools are dropping, byproducts of what City Councilman Ed Reyes calls the "double-edged sword" of the dense district's inevitable gentrification. My translation:
"There are people who say that it's good that there are changes; the other side of the coin is that they're displacing low-income people and minorities who have lived there for years," [said housing advocate Evelin Montes].
In a short period, she said, the cost of renting a studio went from $450 to almost $900, and it's no longer possible to rent a one-bedroom apartment for less than $1,200. Although a municipal order prohibits raising rents on older residents (who are 80% of the residents in ZIP Code 90057) more than 6% a year, rents rise slowly and inexorably.
MacArthur Park-Westlake, of course, already has a Home Depot and a Starbucks, but it remains the social and cultural center for the wave of Central American migration that swept into Los Angeles during the civil wars of the 1980s: a dense, teeming, thoroughly Third World-feeling neighborhood where illegal street vendors operate openly, and where you can still get a fake ID while simply driving through. * Photo from Wikipedia. See previous related posts in Hoods.
In an interview with LAist last year, Duncan was asked, "If you could make a perfume that embodied the essence of Los Angeles, what would it smell like?" She responded:
My cologne is called Santa Ana after the powerful winds that bring desert heat and faraway smell into the city. It smells like: Celluloid and sand, coyote fur and car exhaust, contrail cloud and chlorine, bitter orange and stage blood and one bushel of ghostly, shivery night-blooming jasmine flowers like blown kisses from the phantoms of the ten thousand screen beauties who still haunt our hills every full moon because they think it's a stage light.
After his ground-breaking first film, "Keep in Time," Los Angeles-based photographer and filmmaker B+ is back with "Brasilintime," premiering this week at three separate events in Los Angeles. The party is capped Thursday night with what looks like a truly unique show at the Mayan, featuring the Cut Chemist and Madlib, and from Brasil, João "Comanche" Parahyba, Ivan "Mamão" Conti, and DJ Nuts. "Brasilintime" appears to be built on the same premise as "Keep in Time": bring together contemporary hip-hop artists and put them in a room with the musical forefathers who laid the beats and rhythms upon which hip-hop was built, let them jam, and see what happens. In this case, it's the old-schoolers who created Brasil's hybrid samba-jazz-tropicalia sound who meet the new-school, from two continents:
Trivia: "Keep in Time" screened outdoors at the Zocalo in October during the D.F. book fair, a true and faithful representation of urban musical culture from Los Angeles. It was well received. Check out the "Brasilintime" link for more.
We're on a bit of a global kick at Intersections lately, so bear with this excursion to the shadowy corners of one of our newly minted "global cities," Istanbul. NPR's Ivan Watson takes us to Tarlabasi, a teeming district of Istanbul that is basically one of humanity's many urban badlands, a place that attracts the Turkish capital's outsiders and miscreants, its dope dealers and transsexual hookers, its gypsies and illegal immigrants from Africa. Not surprisingly, the area is not mentioned in The New York Times' recent "36 Hours in Istanbul" feature.
The NPR piece is worth a listen, and the audio slideshow is excellent. Link. And also, this attachment feature on Tarlabasi at De-Regulation. Read more on the cultural scene of the greater region, always at Bidoun.
Zhenli Ye Gon (now christened with a Wikipedia page) is a Mexican businessman of Chinese descent who entered the news in March after massive blocks of cash in various currencies were found in his mansion in D.F.'s fancy Lomas de Chapultepec. Authorities said the money was tied to a methamphetamine ring. Ye Gon, also known as "Charlie," was considered a fugitive, believed to be in the U.S.
Then earlier this month he reappeared and dropped a bomb of catastrophic proportions for the cloak-and-dagger world of Mexican politics: He accused the ruling conservative National Action Party (or PAN) of forcing him to hide the cash, alleging it was tied directly to President (sort of) Felipe Calderon. The L.A. Times summarizes:
In an interview with the Associated Press this month, Ye Gon said
Calderon's Labor secretary, Javier Lozano, had given him the cash. The
money, Ye Gon said, had been destined to fund Calderon's presidential
campaign and "terrorist" activities in the event of the victory of
Calderon's opponent, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Ye Gon
repeated those assertions in his 17-page letter published Monday,
saying, "I am an innocent victim and I was blackmailed to participate
in these activities of the corrupt politics of Mexico."
The
letter spun a fantastic story that involved suitcases filled with money
delivered by cars with diplomatic license plates. Officials from the
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, made him an "honorary
senator," Ye Gon wrote.
Here's the link to the letter, published by El Universal. It's certainly juicy, and would, if believed, only confirm what many people in Mexico already widely assume, that corruption is so firmly entrenched in Mexico's political culture that even a president who puffs himself up as tough on the cartels is not immune to the lure of millions upon millions of U.S. dollars, pesos, Hong Kong dollars, and gold coin centenarios. Calderon, understandly defensive and a bit un-P.C., called Ye Gon's accusations a "cuento chino." Guess he's nervous: Vicente Fox, Calderon's predecessor, himself presented Ye Gon with his Mexican citizenship papers in 2003, Milenio reports, in a piece headlined "The Day of the Chinaman," a headline that demonstrates the enduring, blissfully inappropriate nature of Mexican notions on ethnic difference.
Mexico is now trying to extradite Ye Gon, but his lawyer said today in Washington that if he is returned to Mexico, he faces certain death. And while diplomats and drug agents try to figure out who really owns the $207 million, the cash is in New York, where it is being counted and authenticated -- and accruing interest.
L.A. is swamped year-round in festivals and fairs (here's just a sample), but underneath the big headliners and big county affairs are the small-town ferias that happen in largely working-class districts such as Pico-Union and MacArthur Park on a pretty regular basis, drawing mostly neighborhood people. These generally consist of a few roving, rickety amusement rides and some concession stands, on a blocked-off street, park, or public school campus. Here's a video I spotted on The Jimson Weed Gazette from a feria in MacArthur Park, on blocked-off Wilshire Boulevard, I believe. It's not much, but you get the idea:
The site has nice photos of L.A. Know of any other good L.A. photoblogs that we should watch? * Via this post Chicken Corner.
Like many others, when I first heard about the case of Pedro Guzman, an American wrongfully deported to Tijuana, I chuckled. Then I sought out his mother Maria Carbajal and began spending time with her in TJ as she searched the streets for signs of Pedro. Previous news updates on the story are here and here. From my piece this week, already online:
As she searches for her son, questions swirl around her: Why was Pedro
singled out to be screened by immigration? Why would he lie about his
status? Why hasn’t he called us back? Did he find work? Did he go
farther south?
"Only he knows how to answer that, when he is
present," Carbajal says. Lawyers fighting for the government and for
the ACLU have a lot of questions too: Is Guzman mentally disabled? Was
he coerced or convinced at some point during his time in county jail to
sign a voluntary deportation order? Could it be possible that he wanted to be deported?
It
is late June, six weeks since Pedro entered Mexico at San Ysidro, the
southernmost district of San Diego. He hasn’t been heard from since his
initial phone call home. Carbajal left her job on the night shift of a
Jack in the Box to stay behind and keep up the search. It took some
time, she says, to get used to daylight again.
"I don’t have a
schedule. I find someone who says they saw him, or saw someone who
looks like him. I’ll go meet them, it doesn’t matter what time it is,"
Carbajal says. "But nothing, no one has given me anything."
* SHOUT-OUT: I want to thank the students in Mr. Ben Gertner's journalism class at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights. Mr. Gertner asked me to visit last week and the group had some very good questions and thoughts about a lot of subjects, like transportation in L.A., gentrification, and media. Thank you again.
** ON PEDRO GUZMAN: If you have any questions or comments, I invite readers to post them below. This is a free space for discussion.
The Seventh Letter Crew, pretty much the biggest, baddest graffiti crew on the West Coast, home of international graf kings Saber, Revok, Push, Retna, and many others, finally gets its big LA Weekly cover story. Graffiti has evolved into a major high-end market, as the tale of the Seventh Letter shows:
Having done paying jobs for Adidas, Boost Mobile, Nike and Scion,
Seventh Letter members may get heat from other artists for selling out,
but they refer to their opportunities as "buying in." Why let a junior
designer in an ad agency attempt the crew’s style when the real guy can
do it better and faster and offer the product a little credibility? "When a company hires or sponsors a Seventh Letter writer, they know
they are going to get a professional, someone who can conduct
themselves in an appropriate way," says Eklips.
European art
schools hold classes in technique, and companies there manufacture
premium paint stock. Salzburg, Austria, boasts a graffiti museum.
Taipei and Tokyo hire the Seventh Letter crew to paint in their cities. "In Taiwan, especially, we’re treated like royalty. Here, we have to be
underground — because of laws and envy."
The piece by LA Weekly deputy creative director Shelley Leopold comes with a slideshow and video. It lays out how this group of guerilla artists are permanently altering our relationship to the visual landscape of the city. Also comes with an online special: the re-publishing of Ruben Martinez' 1989 cover story on the flourishing of graffiti culture in L.A. Low-brow pacesetter mag Juxtapoz recently devoted an entire issue to the crew.
* Photo below is of the most audacious Saber-Revok piece in recent memory, atop an abandoned office building at Sixth and Vermont. It stayed up for weeks because it looked like a large piece of advertising. Which, of course, it was:
* Taken by gaus_one. Also, check out Lurker, a new LA Weekly art blog.
That's Glass Candy. Discussed at Status Ain't Hood, and also at Pitchfork, and in interview at We Shot JR. Glass Candy played at the Echo in May. They're calling it "nu Italo disco," noise-rock, or some other such cannibalized craziness. All I'm getting is flashbacks to dark roads not yet travelled.
Taco trucks have been changing the landscape of famously foody New Orleans ever since new
Latin immigrants began arriving to participate in the rebuilding effort. Then late last month Jefferson Parish, saying "they're on wheels for a purpose," passed a ban on the trucks. On Saturday the L.A. Times went in on the story and found lots of reasons to suspect the ban is rooted in old-fashioned racial discrimination:
To advocates of reclaiming the old ways, new establishments that do not
build upon the city's reputation, and may not even be permanent,
represent a barrier to progress. As New Orleans City Council President
Oliver Thomas recently put it in an interview with the Times-Picayune,
"How do the tacos help gumbo?"
Yet many New Orleanians welcome
anyone willing to repopulate the city — and surprising numbers are
eagerly munching tongue and cow's head tacos, broadening their palates
in a city where the civic pastime is eating and talking about where to
eat next.
A professor in the piece notes that "white Southerners" are now as likely as daylaborers to eat lunch at a taco truck. Makes sense: New Orleans has always been open to absorbing new foods and new cultures, so fittingly, local blogs are mostly critical of the ban, even this business blog.
The Fourth of July is a big holiday in Echo Park. Most years, we’re
served with weeks of “premature” fireworks, then have residual
explosions for several weeks afterward, to the immeasurable distress of
pets and wild animals everywhere. On the big day, however, the park
becomes ground zero for a direct-contact fireworks show that is a
running local miracle for the simple fact that no one has been killed
in the process. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people ring the lake and
launch big, scary fireworks from their bare hands, into the sky, over
the water, into the trees, even at each other: firecrackers, flares,
Roman candles, sparklers, helicopters.
Read on. So, to update the Echo Park gentrification drama: Last week the L.A. Times ran a story about the fate of the pedal boats at Echo Park, and in MacArthur. Eric Garcetti maneuvered to save them, but only for now. Already you feel that boogeyman -- the shift of gentry -- pressing upon a park that is mostly the domain of immigrant street vendors, families, joggers, and people resting or napping. But there are more and more intrusive, cocky film crews domineering whole areas of the park and planting their hulking trailers directly in front of people's homes for weeks at a time. For the Lotus Festival this weekend, obnoxious temporary fences went up around the park's exterior, two weeks ahead of time, with no warning. Questions keep circulating as to what might happen to the lake in the future. Here's one at Curbed LA:
"I've been hearing rumors that Echo Park Lake is going to be closed for a year, drained and refilled, and perhaps the area around it re-landscaped. [...]
there were big new "No Vending in Public Areas" signs up... perhaps
directed at people selling helotes and snow cones and hot dogs? I sure
hope things aren't headed that way... I love walking around the lake
and getting snacks from the vendors, and the whole community vibe that
goes on there. Are they going to shut it down for a while and gentrify it, and kill all the local character?"
And here's how a certified shithead of a commenter named Whatever responded:
Let me rephrase that ridiculous question: "Are they going to clean the lake up, make it all nice and pretty,
and change the character of the status quo that is all nasty and dirty
because the people who use it now are probably immigrants from agraian
[sic] backgrounds?"
Reminds me of this shithead of a post at Metroblogging. Keep in mind this is just chatter over the lake. And people wonder why many see the phenomenon of gentrification as a form of malignant racism and lopsided class warfare. Anyway, in defense of the thriving, organic community that is Echo Park at its soul, lets now turn to the wisdom of ace young filmmaker Stephanie Cisneros, whom I wrote about while at the L.A. Times, and her film on the home that is her neighborhood:
In an interview Tuesday with the Televisa's main national morning
news program, Hank Rhon estimated his wealth at about US$1 billion
(euro734 million) and he endorsed a strange brew of tequila steeped for
a year with bear bile, scorpions and tiger, lion and dog penises. "It gives you an impressive amount of energy," he said. "It tastes like tequila, but smoother."
Sounds hearty! The real news is this: Baja's top Televisa anchor stepped down to jump in as PRI's candidate for Tijuana mayor, with the elections less than a month away, after their first candidate was disqualified.
Dancehall is about to get a major dose of the Elvis Presley/Eminen phenomenon in the form of guerilla marketed Collie Buddz.
Born in 1981 in New Orleans and raised in Bermuda and Toronto, Buddz is hard to miss: dashing good looks, a distinct and sharp voice, and well-crafted beats that are pretty hard not to make figure-8s with your ass to. In other words, pop gold. Buddz plays a "secret" show in L.A. on Thursday night. Here is his MySpace page, where you can hear a sample of "Blind to You," directed at his "haters," and the Latin-laced "Mamacita," in which he gives praise to Selena. Dope. Buddz has an interview in the current Fader. Here's the video for his single, "Come Around." Seems legit:
Now a natural question is, who might he be biting? * Here's an interview Buddz gave to Str8OuttaNYC.
As they say, se esta poniendo buena la cosa in Tijuana, with the summer municipal and state elections taking ever-more dramatic turns. First, Jorge Hank Rhon, the multi-millionaire former mayor of Tijuana with the private zoo of exotic animals, was disqualified of his candidacy for governor of Baja California by the state electoral tribunal, a move some saw as politically motivated. The state government is run by the PAN; Hank, the populist son of a famous mayor of Mexico City, belongs to PRI, which currently rules in Tijuana. The tensions have been leading to unfortunate results in the law enforcement sector.
Hank took his case to the federal electoral tribunal in the capital, where rulings are final. The state decision was reversed, paving the way for a sweeping win for the come-from-behind Hank. The people at the weekly paper Zeta (R.I.P. Blancornelas) must be a tad displeased. All throughout the legal drama, Hank filled the Tijuana airwaves with pleasant gracias for the people's patience and support, while giving the impression a distant "they" were trying to rob the people of "their" assumed victory.
Hank's slate did not emerge unscathed from the "persecution" of the PAN state government; the PRI's candidate for mayor, Jorge Astiazarán, was disqualified because he was born in the U.S., a customary birth practice for those Tijuana families who can afford it, and did not fix his Mexican papers until 2003. I'm sure Hank is in mourning. The election is Aug. 5.
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