Intersections

Traffic, soda pop, house parties: How life goes on in Tehran

A colleague pointed out this cool photoblog from Tehran by a "former Los Angeles resident" that offers further glimpses into everyday life in one of the largest and certainly very oldest cities in the world. I like the tone and manner of the images and captions. For the above photo, the blogger says:

Two friends being silly and covering their faces inside Asr Jadid movie theater where we watched a horrible Iranian film named "Mask." I would say out of the 100 films produced every year only 5 are worth watching.

Under a photo from a darkened birthday party, the blogger says he's "a 79," meaning he's around 28 right now. Here, the blogger shows us "a jazz concert in someone's living room." The metro, he writes, is more modern than in New York or London.

* Link: Life Goes on in Tehran. Related, on modern and contemporary art in Iran, and Issue 9 of Bidoun: Rumor.

O wind, o air-conditioning, rend open the heat!

Here and there on the horizon late last night quick bursts of lightning flashed across the sky like the flickering of gargantuan cosmic headlights. Then came a distant roll of thunder before the still air returned to its state of eerie normal for the past few days: Quiet, warm, and sort of creepy, the way the hot air walks over the skin. And that's only at night. The daytime is a whole 'nother story. To put it bluntly, it's f*cking hot outside right now. And it's going to get hotter.

Cruel, mean hot. Hell on concrete hot. Smoggy, icky, lean on the horn for no reason hot. The breezes come to "rend open the heat," but, if it's hot wind, is it really respite? No, not with endless flat miles of baking concrete and angry idling engines.

The mayor's office and the L.A. Department of Water & Power are calling an emergency press conference at this hour to urge people to reduce their energy consumption. Good luck with that. Remember, Children + Hot Weather & Cars = Danger! For now, anyway.

* Photo by 4x4jeepchick via Flickr.

In memory of journalist Ruben Salazar

Today is August 29, just another day in late lazy summer for most. But for faithful students of history, Aug. 29 is the anniversary of the historic Chicano Moratorium march against the Vietnam War in 1970 in East L.A. Sheriff's authorities brutally repressed the demonstration, resulting in the death of trailblazing journalist Ruben Salazar. He was fatally struck in the head by a tear gas projectile while inside the Silver Dollar Bar on Whittier Boulevard. Salazar's death marked a dark turning point in the movement and in our city's long, unfortunate history of repression on the part of law enforcement, which haunts us to this day.

Killed while practicing his craft, Salazar's name is engraved on a placard in the grand main lobby of the L.A. Times building on First and Spring streets downtown, along with those of other Times journalists who have died on the job. I remember passing the names often on my way between the streets and the Times newsroom while I worked there. (This brings to mind the journalists currently dying on the job in Iraq.) Salazar is also memorialized at the former site of the Silver Dollar, as seen at ELAGuide.org, an engaging web project of guided virtual tours of East L.A. Here is the About page.

You can read directly from "Border Correspondent," Salazar's collected writings, at the California Digital Library. The California Chicano News Media Association now gives out Ruben Salazar journalism awards. His legacy continues to guide many journalists and writers working today. And will, I believe, for generations to come.

* Links: Moratorium wiki, Sonoma State University, Salazar wiki, "Border Correspondent." Read more on the Chicano Movement and its actors in Carlos Muñoz, Jr.'s essential history, "Youth, Identity, Power," recently revised.

* Photo above from the UCLA Digital Library. 

A spooky eclipse, from the edge of California

* Image above by mariannes_stuff via Flickr.

Just before 2 a.m. a faint shadow began overtaking the top edge of the full moon in the southeast sky. We watched it from the concrete on my stoop on my hill here on the edge of California. The night was cool.

By 3 a.m. the shadow had completely darkened the whiteness of the dangling globe and gave it a spooky red sheen, as if the moon were opaque and we were watching light filter through from the other side of the galaxy.

Go Metro: The never-ending Shanghai subway

"In 1990, four years after Los Angeles broke ground on its Red Line subway, Shanghai began to build a subway system too," begins a recent L.A. Times article. "Los Angeles was one of the richest cities in the world, with an extensive freeway network, top-notch engineers and serious congestion problems. Shanghai was poor, a decaying post-colonial metropolis shaking off decades of economic stagnation. Its streets were congested too -- with bicycles."

So what happened? In less than 20 years, Shanghai has built one of the largest metro systems in the world. And it's still growing, rapidly. Los Angeles, already suffering the embarrassment of having dismantled its extensive early rail systems, still can't build a subway to the sea. Nevermind one that connects Long Beach to Pacoima or Venice to El Monte. In Shanghai, the goverment draws up a future subway line, the people in its way are moved and compensated, and that's that. By 2020, it will have some 22 lines, hundreds of stations, and serve millions of people every day. In comparison, Shanghai completely squashes L.A.'s measly metro and it's slow-moving expansion plans into East L.A. and Culver City. (Check out this other imaginary L.A. metro map, and whimper.)

The LAT story gets dissected at LAist with the help of a contributor at Shanhaiist, who wonders why the paper didn't quote anyone unhappy with being displaced by the Communist government. You can learn more about the Shanghai metro at the Shanghai Public Transportation blog by Micah Sittig, and Wikipedia.

* Links: L.A. Times, LAist, Electric Railway Historical Association of Southern California, Intersections, Transit Coalition, Shanghaiist, SPT blog, UrbanRail.

* Flickr image on top by kafka4prez via LAist. Map image from Wangjiangshuo's blog, who also blogs about an accident in a Shanghai metro car in which a man was crushed to death by a closing door.

The magic of airport people-movers

Previously on Intersections, Canadian singer Feist helped us vindicate American Apparel. Now, she guides us on a magical journey on one very long airport terminal people-mover:

The video, for "My Magic My Man," is directed by Patrick Daughters. Here is Feist's MySpace.

Castro deathwatch goes into high gear: Fidel is dead?

Perez Hilton has already called it and is sticking to the line: Fidel Castro is dead. The Miami Herald is in a holding pattern, doing a story about the rumors but leaving it at that. The most comprehensive updates are at Babalu Blog, an intensely fervent and pretty brutish anti-Castro site that I would otherwise not recommend if you're devoted to nuance, but that's the kind of ire Castro generates, so, so be it. Link.

* Updates as needed. Image above from PerezHilton.com.

Murals behind bars: The California of Alfredo Santos

Some weeks ago a homegirl of mine from school named Susie Ra told me that during a law school field trip she toured San Quentin, California's oldest and most notorious prison, and was struck by the murals in the prison's cafeteria. They depicted the history of California in lush landscapes and scenes. She was amazed and said I should look them up. Well on Sunday The New York Times published a piece about those very murals and their maker, a former inmate named Alfredo Santos, now retired at age 80 in San Diego:

In 1953, two years after he was locked up, Mr. Santos submitted the winning sketch in a competition among the inmates to paint a mural on one side of a dining hall partition. After inexplicably being denied the use of other colors, he began to apply thinned, raw sienna oil paint directly to plaster. Before long the warden ordered Mr. Santos to paint all three double-sided walls in the dining area.

[skip]

The murals chronicle not only California’s history, but also the evolution of Mr. Santos’s style. The first scenes, including an Indian village and the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra, are rendered in the listless fashion of a 1950s textbook illustration, with isolated vignettes surrounded by areas of blank wall. "At the beginning I wanted to be conservative, to please the prison officials," he said.

But soon vignettes crowd the walls, playing like a crazy newsreel of random images; at one point a covered wagon rumbles westward not far from where an owlish Groucho Marx  peeps over a movie screen. Unifying compositional elements — the World War II bomber that dominates the fourth mural, for example — lend a W.P.A.-era monumentality.

Santos later worked at Disneyland and then painted and operated galleries in Mexico, building a fine career as an artist. Here is the link, which goes to the International Herald Tribune in Paris because NYT links go behind their firewall after a week. (Unfortunately the IHT does not have the complete story.) The NYT piece has a cool multimedia feature that allows you to scan the murals up-close. They're really brilliant, like Riveras almost. The fourth one is kinda trippy and futuristic.

* Hold up: The SF Weekly did a piece on Santos and his murals with rich background detail back in 2003. Link.

Does it come wrapped in bacon?

(Chortle, chortle.) Yes it was a week ago and yes everyone seems agreed that each year it sucks a little more than before, but Sunset Junction is still ultimately about -- how should I put this? -- people meeting people? Here's an image from the festival by Sonny I. LaVista that captures ... that happy side of L.A., that bliss, that fun. No other way to put it. * From LAist. Browse Flickr for more.

Watching: Havana in black-and-white, after the fall

LACMA ain't all that bad (kidding). Tonight they're screening -- for bloody free -- "Memorias del Subdesarrollo," the landmark film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea based on the novel by Edmundo Desnoes. I've had the pleasure of seeing this film twice, first on VHS and then on screen at a museum in Mexico, D.F. last October during the book fair. I've not read the book but the film is an elegiac, almost impressionistic look at Havana in the period right after the fall of Batista, seen through the eyes of a privileged aspiring writer who stays behind instead of escaping to Miami. Here, of all things, is the film's Japanese trailer:

The screening is part of LACMA's Latin American cinema series. The Getty Foundation gave them a grant to do it. Read more on "Memorias del Subdesarrollo" at this nice movie blog from Chile, Vida en 35 mm, which says the film achieves in giving the viewer a vivid portrait of Revolutionary Cuba without the fanaticism of the pro- and anti-Castro camps. Previously, "Life, beautiful, under Cuba's kingfish."

* Later at Intersections: A note to commentators, who have been vigorously debating the case of Elvira Arellano in previous posts.

Elvira Arellano travels to the Mexican capital

La Opinion reports that Elvira Arellano is in Mexico City to speak before members of Congress at the invitation of a legislator from the center-left Democratic Revolution Party. The head of Mexico's national commission on human rights stated that President Felipe Calderon should actively protest Arellano's deportation to the United States government, reports La Jornada. His government declined. The Chicago Tribune has another round-up saying Arellano is being treated like a celebrity in Mexico:

Richard Marosi of the L.A. Times also says Arellano is "the toast of Tijuana." Speaking to an immigrant rights advocate earlier tonight, the topic came up of how happy Elvira looked in footage from TJ, where she was deported to on Sunday night. Of course she's sad she's separated from her son, but it makes sense, I was told, for Arellano to exhibit happiness. The woman had lived inside a church non-stop for a year, and had lived and worked in fear of being deported for many years before that. Imagine the relief lifted off her shoulders.

On Francisco Goldman and Aura Estrada, gone too soon

Late to this news. Aura Estrada, a 30-year-old Mexican writer and wife of author Francisco Goldman, died in a swimming accident in Mazunte, Oaxaca, in late July. Here is a memorial page at Hunger College, where Estrada was working on an MFA, with links to samples of her writing, photos, and an essay that memorializes Estrada and mourns her loss, by her husband, called "Mi Aura," opening with their first meeting at a bar in Brooklyn:

As if finding a young mexicana reciting George Herbert in a New York bar was not unusual enough, I was struck by her unique, yet oddly familiar, pronunciation: most of the women from Mexico City I know speak English with a soft, almost British-sounding lilt, but Aura’s voice was exuberant, robust, with a slight thrumming raspiness –- the voice of a spirited and wise old Mexican woman, or even of your smartest, most irreverent old Jewish aunt. I even asked her, "How come you speak English like a New York Jew?"

Goldman, who is Jewish-Guatemalan-American, lives in Mexico City and New York. I first met him and Aura the same night, at the party in Polanco that opens my D.F. cover story from last summer, "Down and Delirious in Mexico City." Aura and I shared a short but spirited conversation that night; she told me about a writer's collective she worked with.

Goldman is the author of three novels and the new non-fiction book, "The Art of Political Murder." According to press materials from his publisher, the author is moving along with a planned tour of eight U.S. cities in October. The book is a study of the murder of Bishop Juan Gerardi in Guatemala City in April 1998, shortly after the publication of a massive government report on human atrocities during the 36-year Guatemalan civil war titled Guatemala: Never Again. Bishop Gerardi had written the introduction. The first chapter of "The Art of Political Murder" is strong and enticing.

I am currently reading, or, I should say savoring every page of "The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll," by Alvaro Mutis, in the beautiful translation by Edith Grossman. Francisco Goldman writes the introduction, a rich prelude. Here is Goldman interviewed in Bomb magazine, from which I've borrowed the above image, by Marion Ettlinger, and his recent piece in The New York Review of Books, on "The Great Bolaño," which Intersections blogged here.

As Aura Estrada's memorial page notes, Goldman and she actively translated her writing into English, and he plans on continuing the work.

* More links at About Last Night, Words Without Borders, Maud Newton, and Paper Cuts.

Did Elvira Arellano martyr herself in vain?

The question has been coming up since Arellano was deported on Sunday night. Was risking her deportation by leaving her sanctuary church really worth it? From my current LA Weekly piece:

If you're going to get deported, guess there’s no better place for it to happen than in Los Angeles. The city is just so used to deportations — from the mass ejections of Mexicans in the 1930s to the terrorizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids of today — that your removal from the country is sure to be conducted with extra efficiency. And if your deportation happens to be seen as unjust or symbolic of broader ills, you’ll generate welcome media buzz in the most buzz-friendly city in America.

Read more here. * Photo from Monday's rally by Ted Soqui.

The 'little things' that gentrification brings

EL CHAVO! notices the "little things" in changes to the flatlands of Lincoln Heights, heralded by -- what else? -- a new "loft" development. In the latest bloggy installment of this classic L.A. story, EL CHAVO! notes that the vendors of precious junk that gravitated around the beloved St. Vincent de Paul thrift store have disappeared due to "harassment and ticketing." The comments both at Chanfles! and Curbed LA on this topic are very instructive in their own ways.

And in the same vein, the familiar call of the Death of Sunset Junction pretty much manifested true this weekend, as I saw firsthand how the outrageous entrance fee and the outsider-in feel to the festival (this year on a curiously more compressed strip of Sunset Boulevard) meant the event finally became essentially soulless, as Blogito argues. The always artful Notes from Mictlan has a gentrification 'bluez' yarn to spin as well.

What to say now? The only constant is change?

* Photo above from Chanfles!

** A BLOG NOTE: Regular readers will notice the gradual inclusion on here of a search engine and some links. I remain functionally inept on altering code that isn't a copy-and-paste sort of action so I'm relying on a friend to help me out. More blog links are on the way. Also, I noticed that a couple words I used a few weeks ago have generated some static electricity in L.A. blog-land. Let me make a clarification. Calling EL CHAVO! L.A.'s "premier Chicano blogger" was in no way a diss on the many Latino or Latino-oriented blogs in Los Angeles run by dedicated and terrific bloggers -- who will be linked up with Intersections soon. But anyway, in the future I'll be more thoughtful with instantaneous or informal pronouncements of tastes or preferences.

Now, back to the work ...

L.A. mayor to ICE re Elvira: Brief me next time *

* This post is being updated below.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa released a statement this afternoon on the arrest and deportation of Elvira Arellano near La Placita in L.A., seemingly saying to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, 'Alert me next time you do this.' Here's the full text, with strategic bolding:

"As this case demonstrates, Washington's failure to enact comprehensive immigration reform has direct and profound consequences for real families.

"Until we resolve the status of the estimated 12 million undocumented people living and working in the United States by giving them some meaningful pathway to citizenship, families will continue to be torn apart. As Mayor of a city that is over 40 percent foreign-born, I can tell you: when families are torn apart, our communities are torn apart.

"As a result, there is understandable frustration in our large cities, which depend on immigrant contributions, with the federal government's inability to enact just and necessary reform of national immigration policy.

"The manner of the arrest and deportation in this case raises concerns in our community.  To begin to address those concerns, I am asking Assistant Secretary Julie Myers to brief me and local law enforcement leaders regarding her agency's enforcement priorities and future practices in this region."

Difficult to say how a semi-challenging statement like this would be taken at icy ICE. See post below for more. * More updates coming up here or there.

** ADD: Stopped at the rally in support of Elvira Arellano in front of the Federal Building downtown tonight. It was a small gathering but still spirited. Chicano nationalists waving Mexican flags drowned out the speakers from churches and immigrant advocacy groups -- you know, the people actually doing work to promote just immigration practices.

** ADD: Update from post below worth re-emphasizing: Elvira Arellano says she's staying in Mexico.

On Elvira Arelleno's deportation: Cosmic justice awaits ICE? *

* This post is being updated below.

Elvira Arellano, an undocumented immigrant who spent an entire year in sanctuary in a Chicago church to avoid deportation, was arrested outside La Placita church at Olvera Street on Sunday and deported. Immigration agents in unmarked cars waited till she left the church, the spiritual birthplace of Los Angeles, surrounded her car, and nabbed her from her 8-year-old U.S.-born son Saul. She told Saul in the few moments she was allowed to console him, "Calm down. Don't have any fear. They can't hurt me."

Arellano was taken to an ICE facility in Santa Ana and then booted into Mexico at San Ysidro. Arellano has been widely photographed with a T-shirt that reads, "Who Would Jesus Deport?" and in that spirit I'm drawn back to a comment I left on my previous post on Arellano in response to a tired and fundamentally bigoted argument against "lawbreakers":

And I think that comparing Elvira Arellano to Rosa Parks is actually a sign of honor and respect, and an homage to her name and what Ms. Parks stood for: justice, compassion, and equal protection under the law. Ms. Parks was also denounced in her time -- by people like you.

So you keep wasting your time and energy in LaValle, WI against a human wave that is more or less unofficially welcomed by our government, while the rest of us in more progressive and pragmatic American cities get on with our lives and embrace the cultures and the dynamism that immigrants bring to our societies, as they have since the birth of this nation.

I imagine ICE agents feel pretty damn good about themselves today, arresting a young woman who posed no kind of threat to nobody, in front of her son outside a small church in the middle of L.A., but many of us believe in more cosmic forms of justice, justice that some believe will eventually catch up with the architects and agents of these destroyers of families and the sacred bonds that unite people.

Since 2004, at least 62 immigrants have died in ICE custody. Three have died since July. One of them, Victoria Arellano, a transgender woman and AIDS patient, died at a hospital in San Pedro after not receiving her medication. The Washington Post reported: "As she vomited blood, fellow inmates cared for her in vain."

* Links: L.A. Times, AP, Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune's Antonio Olivo, who has been covering this story since the beginning. It rained in Chicago last night:

Amid heavy rainfall Sunday night, about three dozen people sang, and read passages from the Bible during a vigil Sunday night outside the Chicago headquarters of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement downtown to show their disapproval of her arrest. They sang, prayed, read from the Bible.

* More updates later.

** ADD: CBS2 reports protests are growing in Chicago over Elvira's deportation. Vigils are planned for tonight in downtown L.A. for Elvira, and a separate vigil was announced by Bienestar last week for Victoria Arellano (no relation to Elvira) at 6 p.m. at 300 N. Los Angeles Street.

** ADD: Watch the ICE press conference video feed from KTLA at the LAT current story link. The pale bald-headed thug you see here with the robo-cop voice and the sinister eyebrows is apparently Jim Hayes, director of the ICE office in L.A. He's there to keep pushing the characterization of Arellano as a "criminal fugitive alien," and to deflect the inconsistencies presented when you deport a non-threat of a young mother while letting all those "criminal fugitive aliens" keep picking Hayes' fruits and vegetables in the Central Valley. I wonder what God he prays to.

** ADD: It's hot and I can admit that I'm letting my visceral reactions to this story bubble up on Intersections, conjuring up magical karma and all, but there are many practical matters to address. What now? Less than a day after being deported, Elvira Arellano seems resigned to the fact that she'll have to stay put in Mexico indefinitely, leaving the rearing of her 8-year-old son to her friends in the immigrant rights' movement in Chicago.  Antonio Olivo reached Elvira today in Tijuana. From the Chicago Tribune story: "The only thing I can do is stay in Mexico." She also told Olivo that ICE officials "were angry with me for everything I have done."

** ADD: See post above, "L.A. mayor to ICE re Elvira: Brief me next time."

More on Dynes: Forced to resign as UC president?

Seen at the Daily Clog: UC president Robert Dynes' quick fall from power at the top of one of the world's most prestigious public university systems was likely not his decision, the SF Chronicle's Matier and Ross write, citing unnamed sources:

Board Chairman Richard Blum met with the 64-year-old Dynes over dinner at Trader Vic's in Emeryville three weeks ago to tell him the regents had grown impatient with his lack of progress in reforming a dysfunctional university hierarchy, the sources said.

Dynes, who has been criticized by state lawmakers for UC's practice of handing out hidden perks and bonuses to top executives, offered to step down next year. Blum, however, told him it would be better if he did it sooner rather than later.

No surprise here. Just about every major "resignation" in the U.S. in recent years has been presented as a voluntary move but in many cases it's safe to say it was not. Blogger Cindy Mosqueda, a UCLA graduate student, has more on what the Dynes' "resignation" means for the UC-CSU Compact with the governor, at Loteria Chicana. * Previously, "Corporate scientist Dynes resigns at UC Inc."

* Image above from a demonstration at Sproul Plaza courtesy of Loteria Chicana.

Shizu Saldamando: Drawing up the playful heart of hybrid L.A.

Shizu Saldamando, still 29, is a California artist who I believe embodies the leading edge of the state's long and energetic traditions of cultural and creative hybridity. A Japanese-Mexican American woman raised in the Mission District in San Francisco, Shizu's drawings and paintings combine, as the L.A. Times says in this recent article, "elements of traditional Chicano portraiture, lowrider art and pinta (jailhouse) art." Her media is just as mixed-up. She uses "glitter, origami paper, ballpoint pen, bed sheets, handkerchiefs, ruled notebook paper and plywood" to depict friends and people she knows living life in L.A.'s Eastside and Southeast. She works mainly off her own photography.

Saldamando's style is really unmistakable. You know a Shizu piece -- like a Diane Gamboa work -- from across the room. And you get a sense after just looking at a few of her pieces that her work is a real window into the lives of the familiar young rockabillies, rockeros and post-cholos/as of authentic Los Angeles. She renders their sense of romance, fashion, playfulness, and genuinely affected melancholy in a way that makes you feel close to the subjects, as if you've met them before. (Sometimes, you realize you have.)

* A show of new work by Saldamando is up this month at Tropico de Nopal gallery in that old Belmont-Westlake-Temple/Beaudry region of central L.A. Here is the press release. See L.A. Times article for more. (Love the image above but I'm having trouble correctly naming and dating it.)

** ADD: Adrian Arancibia posts a lyrical reaction to the show at LatinoLA.com.

Ingenious marijuana farm found in Glendale mountains

I was in Glendale on Thursday, way up in Glendale, up up up the 2, behind the Verdugo Mountains. I was alarmed at how tall and green that range is, how far and hazy the downtown L.A. skyline appears from way up there. And then I saw the news said this, "$10 million in pot found in Verdugo Mountains," and this, "Glendale police seize $10-million marijuana crop":

A helicopter scouring the area for signs of fires on Tuesday spotted an "unusual patch of greenery," said Glendale Police Officer John Balian. Narcotics detectives hiked up the mountain and discovered a sophisticated marijuana farm throughout the area. The operators had designed a watering system using the water from a tower that was designed to be used in case of brush fires, Balian said. Police also seized a sleeping bag, rifle scopes, and rifle bullets from nearby, but no suspects were in custody.

You can't fault the pot farmers for not possessing ingenuity; they were tapping into Glendale water to irrigate their crop. Now, what will happen to all those godly plants? I mean, after being "taken to an undisclosed location"?

* LAT photo by Brian VanderBrug.

Major quake in Peru, hundreds confirmed dead **

* Above: Peruvians camp out in the streets to keep safe from aftershocks.

A massive earthquake struck Wednesday night 25 miles under the ocean floor off the coast of Peru. The mayor of Pisco said 200 people were buried under rubble in a church that collapsed during Mass. The quake reportedly lasted two minutes. Check continuing updates at the major news outlets linked to the right. For news from Peru, see Radio Programas del Peru and Adonde. * Intersections will be updating this post throughout the day.

** UPDATE: There's a blog called Peruanos Unidos that begins its top post on the quake with a sense of steely devastation:

Where a house once stood, that house no longer exists. The families divide the work. Those who search for somewhere to live, and those who, among tears, search the rubble for their loved ones.

Link. Updates with video and images at NYT, NPR, Washington Post, and the blog ALT1040.

** ADD: The Pacific plates have been active this week. Today there was a small quake felt (again) in Los Angeles, near Chatsworth, again. More from Peru:

** ADD: LAT follows up with a story that says powerful aftershocks are rolling through Peru now, as survivors camp out, waiting for aid, and making attempts to communicate with relatives. Death toll has risen to more than 500.

** ADD: Check back "Peru earthquake" results at Google News for more. The Peruvian Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles is sure to have relief plans soon. My thoughts tonight are with our brothers and sisters in the great land of Peru and our Peruvian American friends here in California.

Elvira Arellano leaving church sanctuary after one year

Elvira Arellano, a latter-day Rosa Parks, is leaving the Adalberto United Methodist Church in the Humboldt Park district of Chicago after one full year of living there, invoking sanctuary, to prevent her deportation. She's taking her case directly to Washington, D.C., where she will urge Congress to finally pass some immigration reform so that she won't be separated from her U.S.-born son Saul. There's good footage from her farewell press conference at Chicago's NBC5. Read more at Chicago Tribune and from the AP.

Keep mind this brave woman was born in 1975, making her just 31 or 32. Of all the media coverage I've seen, ColorLines above all gives Arellano the respect she deserves, with a multimedia feature and a link to Saul's letter to President Bush, which begins:

I Saul Arellano age 7 an American citizen, do now formally request a mettin with President George W. Bush. I request that he grant safe passage for my mother, Elvira Arellano, so that she can be with me at this meeting and can return safely to our Church. I request also that our United Methodist Pastor, Rev. Walterd L. Coldman and his wife, Emma Lozano and my Congresmen Luis V. Gutierrez, Boby Rush, and Rafael Pulido and Abel Uribe and my friend Daysha Delvalle also be present at this meeting.

You can see it written by his hand. See also "Remember the Immigrant Rights Movement?"

Hottest new celebrity career-booster: Dying!!

This is the cover of the current supermarket tab Globe, which takes the Hollywood death trend to a whole new level. No, to a whole new galaxy:

Could dying be any better for a stagnant celebrity career right now? Globe's "leading age expert" "Dr. Lillian Glass" says Britney, Lindsay, and MJ could be goners in 5 years or less. But Liz Taylor, George W. Bush, and, incredibly, Nicole Richie, will be with us for decades more. Makes me wonder what the natural next step would be. Maybe a cover that screams: BRITNEY -- DIE! DIE! DIE!?

* My designer stylist homegirl Nina spotted this cover first at the Malibu Vons -- fittingly -- and Rena K. helped me with the image.

In downtown L.A., up, up, and away? *

There's no better place to experience the intrinsically L.A. characteristic of prosperous destruction than downtown Los Angeles. There is so much building going on, so much new retail and restaurant life, and so many new yuppies sharing sidewalks with the familiar residents of the vast homeless encampment that is L.A.'s skid row, it's really overwhelming. Everytime I am there something is different. Just the other day I drove up First Street and gasped to see the ghostly old State Building reduced to rubble. When? Why? Who knows.

More is on the way. The City Council's unanimous approval of a new building ordinance for downtown basically frees up developors to build as many -- and as tiny -- housing units, as tightly together, as they can. "Incentives" are attached to the ordinance to push them to build "affordable housing," of course, but the real aim seems to be the Manhattanization of downtown L.A., only without all the subway stations every few blocks. Reaction to the changes is mixed. Gridlock, anyone?

On Monday I checked out the press conference held by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Councilwoman Jan Perry (who recently chimed in on the debate in an op-ed), and Carol Schatz, president of the Central City Association, for the signing of the ordinance. They held it at a gaping construction site on Figueroa for a planned 32-story tower by Astani Enterprises. Out of nowhere, Villaraigosa said the changes in downtown would happen, miraculously, "without gentrification," and Mr. Sonny Astani, an immigrant from Iran, admitted at one point that the particular development where we stood would not have affordable units.

* Link to map at You-Are-Here.com, and to the L.A. Times' comprehensive coverage here, here, here, here, here, and here. See this View from Loft post on the State Building demolition. Alternatives available at Livable Places.

** Photo from You-Are-Here.com.

** ADD: And just over the bridge, if you haven't studied the New York Times' article about KCET's cybermurals on Boyle Heights, check out this resourceful post also at View from a Loft.

Corporate scientist Dynes resigns at UC, Inc. *

Robert Dynes is resigning as president of the University of California, and we can thank him, previous leaders, and much of the UC's bureaucracy for making it OK to embrace the practice of freely pimping our state's research to corporate interests. Dynes, a former researcher at AT&T Bell Laboratories with a $405,000 salary, will be remembered for lavishing top-paid UC officials with outrageous, back-door perks and fattened paychecks -- in a system that keeps raising student fees. Dynes also had many unnervingly close relationships with crooked politicians and private sector power-players, as detailed in this exhaustive San Diego Reader cover from last year. Pulling a cliche a Rove would love, the physicist said he needed to spend more time with his family.

Here is the coverage in the L.A. Times, the Mercury News, the Daily Cal and its Daily Clog, and the Daily Bruin (both papers updating over the summer break). The San Francisco Chronicle had a main bar, a timeline, and an analysis by Charles Burress on Dynes' tenure. The story re-focuses attention on California's most precious brain trust, the 10-campus, 200,000-student university, an invaluable engine of economic, intellectual, scientific and social progress. Reminds me that I once profiled John Douglass of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at UC Berkeley, on his book "The California Idea and American Higher Education," about how once upon a time the university nobly guarded its mission, and how the California model came to influence the rest of the country. The university press at Stanford published it.

* SFChron photo by Lacy Atkins.

** DATA UPDATE: UCOP tells me the UC system budget is $16 billion, $3 billion of which comes from the state. This means that more than 3/4 of California's premier public university's budget is private. Which begs the question, why even call it a state institution anymore?

Excavations: Pola Weiss, and 'evidence' of moments

There's a landmark show currently at the museum at Mexico's gargantuan national university UNAM called "La era de la discrepancia/The Age of Discrepancies: Art and Visual Culture in Mexico, 1968-1997." This period is generally known as the era of modern darkness in Mexico, the turning point being the government's massacre of untold hundreds of students and demonstrators at Tlatelolco on a day of infamy for all of us, 2 October 1968.

After a little browsing of the catalog for the show I came upon a biographical sketch of Pola Weiss:

Pola Weiss (Mexico City, 1947-1990) is often called the first pioneer of video art in Mexico. Starting the mid-1970s, she produced various works for the public and commercial television, and she created "arTV," a term that expressed her belief that television was a possible medium for art. Her first work, Flor cósmica (Cosmic Flower), presented at IX Encuentro Internacional de Videoarte, held in 1977 at Mexico City's Museo Carrillo Gil, featured a sort of changing kaleidoscope along with a score by Tomita.

[skip]

One of her major contributions was the concept of "video dance," dancing actions performed for the camera. The dominant note in her work, nonetheless, was a search for identity, whether in terms of her origins, her body, or her feelings (Autovideato, 1979; Mi corazón, 1986). It is said, though it has never been proved, that she committed suicide in front of her video camera in 1990.

I wonder why this hasn't been confirmed, and how it can be. There's otherwise very little written or visual information about Weiss online. Here's the link to the catalog. Link to Freize review. Link to Arteven.com post. Link to La Jornada article and here. The show is up till the end of September.

* Sorta in the same vein, check the opening anecdote in Doug Harvey's recent piece in the LA Weekly on the Getty Research Institute's current show "Evidence of Moment." He describes an early encounter with an art action by "one John Duncan, who had bribed a Tijuana mortician to let him have sex with a female corpse, recording the act on audiotape. Afterward, he had gotten a vasectomy 'so that the last potent seed I had,' he recounted, 'was spent in a cadaver.'"

* Also check out this nominally related link at The Mex Files on one man's excavation of his Anglo-Italo-Mexican heritage.

Ultimate darkness: The cooling beauty of sandstorms

In the States through media we're all familiar with the terrible wonder of earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes. We rarely get access to recorded examples of the power of sandstorms. Caught these clips of sandstorms currently floating across the Web. The first is from Al Asad airbase in Iraq, from April 2005. As the storm envelopes the viewer the environment turns to absolute darkness. And it sounds so intense:

The second is from Khartoum, Sudan, in April this year. Watch as the sand cloud crawls over the cityspace and simply swallows it. Exciting:

See this blog from the Fletcher School at Tufts University for a report on how a haboub is experienced: "But to tell you the truth, I love the haboub. So you might feel even dustier than usual. You might wake up in a bed full of sand. But the haboub also cools down the city to an extent yet unexperienced during my short stay." Link.

Other thoughts on Inglewood's 'The History of Transportation'

Stopped by at the tail-end of "The History of Transportation" mural unveiling in Inglewood today. A local charro dance troupe was performing, but it appeared most people had already left. Not much media; the glare on the Southside this weekend is centered on the bad news out of King medical center.

Anyway, interesting things happen when you bring a pair of fresh eyes to a piece of art. A friend today commented, after taking in Lundeberg's 240-foot long petrachrome work depicting the transportation history of the Centinela Valley: "Where are all the Africans?" Most of the people who inhabit the mural's scenes after the panels that represent the pre-Colonial era and the Mission period seem to be even-toned Anglos. No black people, and no Chinese or Japanese. Then we read the draft information panels written by art historian Michael Several, whom I interviewed while researching my piece this week. No. 5 says:

Reflective of the period, many ethnic populations are under-represented in their contributions made to the area and to the transportation growth within the state of California.

Nonetheless, the people who were there today seemed pleased with the mural's prominent new home near City Hall and Inglewood High School. As we took off, a local publicist nodded approvingly and said: "Our mural."

* The L.A. Times did its mural preview in Saturday's paper.

Father of dead soldier faces deportation, and other notes

From the fertile annals of the human disaster that is our country's current immigration policies vs. the world's worker migration realities, there are several immigration-related news items this week that require some attention.

First, in The Houston Chronicle, soldier Armando Soriano dies in Iraq at age 20, after dedicating much of his short life to helping his undocumented parents rise from their poor South Houston life. His mother gets a green card; his father, because of a prior deportation, now faces deportation again. A Texas Congressman is trying to figure something out.

In Rhode Island, The Boston Globe reports that an undocumented Brazilian suffering from epilepsy died in federal custody after being arrested on a deportation warrant. His sister, bearing 34-year-old Edmar Alves Araujo's medication, was repeatedly turned away at a local police station.

In Utah, you might have noticed that media updates on those six trapped miners refer to three of the men as "Mexican nationals" or "Mexican immigrants." CNN reports that a language barrier is frustrating the family of Manuel Sanchez, 41, as they maintain vigil for his survival. The Mexican consulate in Salt Lake City is assisting, says Deseret Morning News. The A.P. follows with a piece highlighting the presence of immigrants in the mining industry, which as the story points out is really the second large wave of miners coming up from down south.

* Links: "Father of fallen soldier now battling deportation," "Sister says police refused medicine for Milford man," "Frustrated family of miner clings to 'one string of hope'," "Mexico assisting relatives of miners," "Accident highlights influx of Latino into state's mining industry." Also, the USC Institute for Justice and Journalism 'Just News' blog.

* Photo by Deseret Morning News.

On the death of gifted DJ Disco D

Disco D was a successful, rising beat-master for 50 Cent and others before he killed himself in January, by hanging, in his parent's basement in Washington D.C. He was 26. Just read the sad tale at this recent feature in the Village Voice. URB posted on Disco D's suicide shortly after it happened.

The comments bring the story alive: "i just wish we could talk i see your number's in my phone everyday and just want to hit and send and call you man..... i been hurten man.... i love you so much we'll meet again soon k- i love you i can't say it enough you were a huge part of of my life and still are and always will be." Link and link.

Human Mark Hunter at Daft Punk in Montreal

Not to over-hype a single music act here, but all summer long I've been sent or I've come across photos or clips of Daft Punk aurally destroying massive audiences from Berlin to London to L.A. The robo-Frenchmen were recently in Montreal, and L.A.'s own Mark "The Cobrasnake" Hunter was there to shoot the scene. I feel less human for not being there. (Check this sparkle-motion homegirl.) Remember that Hunter initially aspired to be a concert photographer before his shots of the fashions and candid antics of the hipster libertine class began upstaging his other work. The rest is history. He says he's seeing Daft Punk again tonight in New York.

* Previously, "Cory Kennedy: Young, fashionable, famous, eating."