Internal and External perceptions of LA

"I just want to be in a swimming pool, eating tacos and signing autographs" - "The Smithereens" the movie one of the down and out character's says about moving to LA while living in a scummy basement apartment in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.

They say that when you visit Venice, Italy you need to arrive at it by the sea.  Venice is a magical place where all your romantic impressions from movies and history come true.  And this perception is solidified if you literally approach it properly. I, on the other hand, arrived to Venice for the first time by train.  Which means I passed through Mestre before I got to Venice.  Actually, my hostel was in Mestre and I stopped off and walked around that city for a couple hours before departing for Venice.  If Venice is a magic dreamland then Mestre is an industrial nightmare.  Most cities have a mix of "nice" qualities and necessary, but "ugly" qualities, but when faced with a place that needs to exist as a fiction then all the necessary aspects of it get shoved into a nearby area and the local commerce tries as much as possible to get visitors to ignore it.  Or sometimes, like in the case of North Vegas, be afraid of it.
Still, I was absolutely glad I went through Mestre and got a chance to see what a completely rejected working class construction zone was like where there is practically nothing "nice" or "beautiful" about the entire place.  I guess it might seem strange, but I have never really agreed with most of society on these terms of "beauty", "good", "prosperity", etc.  Often I find things that are supposed to look beautiful to actually look very ugly and visa verse.  This particularly true with modern architecture.  As one of the last created cities on earth Los Angeles as some of the most diverse architecture and it can change dramatically within a span of 10 feet.

One of the most apt and concise descriptions of the conundrum of LA I found in a somewhat creative bureaucratic text book from 1955 titled  The Metropolis: Is Integration Possible? which is part of the series Metropolitan Los Angeles - A Study in Integration [the entire book is quite facinating because it give eloquent and complex descriptions for a purpose that is clearly supposed to be quite dry given chapters titled "Local Governments - Your Concern", "Water Supply - Your Heritage", "Protective Forces - Your Safety", etc]:

"Los Angeles and its environs are many things to many people.  The metropolis spreads out across the coastal plain and its surroundings valleys in a turning areas, farm lands and orchards, industrial centers and oil fields.  No other metropolitan area in the United States, or perhaps even the world, is so diversified and decentralized.  Consider the dilemma of the visitor from New York or Chicago who is completely at a loss because he can find no particular place to pause, as in Time Square or The Loop, and say to himself, 'This is Los Angeles'."

With such a short history as a city Los Angeles approaches itself in a very "modern" way.  If cities were humans who had personalities then Los Angeles reached adolescence and its most influential time period in the 1950's.  The biggest explosion of the cinema industry, automobiles, suburbs, microwave dinners and disposable products.  It is a disposable city.

How can a city express an adjective such as disposable? If you spend any time in virtually any city that is older then LA you quickly notice that there are a lot more older and classic buildings then in LA.  However, often, especially in California, many buildings are not necessarily older then LA, but they are much more cared for.  Simply spend some time in downtown Los Angeles and you can see a dozen buildings that are over 100 years old.  There are a few, like the Eastern Building, that are pristine and well cared for, elegant, beautiful and decadent.  However, there are hundreds of others that are decaying, rotting and falling apart.  Why?  It's quite easy.  Just like the City Market of LA (which I describe in a previous entry) many buildings in LA develop a certain amount of decay where it becomes more of a nuisance to repair then it is to destroy entirely and rebuild a new building entirely.  It a way it's a perpetual process.

Let's take a recent example at my armamada, the University of Southern California.  Just a few years ago they constructed a new Building for the Cinema School.  The Lucas building.  This was to replace the old Lucas building (both created from huge donations from, you guessed it, George Lucas).  The old building was only built sometime in the 80's, but just over 20 years later the University needed to fix so much in the building and, according to the Dean, there were so many new restrictions in relation to earthquake safety that it was cheaper and easier to just tear down that building and build a new one all together.  So, now the old building is just a memory.  It is disposable. Get rid of the old to make way for the new.  When the old is just out of style that it's an eyesore and just before it becomes beautiful again as a historic relic.

So, this is what real estate developers do.  They wait for a building to die, in a sense.  They want a building to become an eyesore (or become a hazard) in some cases for much older buildings that have a historic value to it.  That way they can bypass city laws forbidding destruction of historical landmarks.  It might take 5 or 10 years, but eventually they will have their way and the city looses more of it's historic culture and instead is replaced with the cookie cutter machine of big industry where everything should look the same. Every Walmart looks the same, every high rise, every 7-11 and eventually everything will look and be the same.

Enjoy it while we can.

Obituary for the LA City Market

For those who don't know. The most amazing complexes in the entire city of LA is the City Market of Los Angeles. This is the long giant two square block complex of loading docks that appears to be at least 80 years of age. Surrounded by San Pedro, 9th, 11th and San Julian streets the complex is one of the most negelected, over used and amazing constructs. More then anything this building represents the beauty of collective construction, neglect and pieced together necessity. More specifically the entire place was originally used for loading and unloading of goods. Huge trucks would move in and out during the peak of it's life time.  There were a few major accidents and thousands of minor accidents most were left as is and only a few times did the owners decide to try fix any damage done.

It was originally build to house businesses and make it easy for trucks, vans and other vehicles move in and out.  Chances are there were at least a few dozen deaths and maybe even one or two murders within the life of the premises.  It also appears that there there a few different parts of the building that once had extensions to it.  Therefore, there are some walls and doors that were once interior, but for some reason or other a part of the building needed to come down and now the wall or door was exposed to the outside world when it was not intended to.
The image to the right is a perfect example of a walk-in fridge door that was no longer in use and mix of laziness necessity to keep the door permanently closed someone decided to use a 2x4 to block it off and the need to mask the wall as much as possible by painting it the light camouflage green in order to conceal the door just enough so that people won't casually notice.  In a way this turns into that "truth is stranger than fiction" or I would call it "accident is more beautiful than art".  What artists in their right mind would even think of creating a door and even creating a door in such a fashion?  And yet I have never seen anything so beautiful.

So, now in it's latter years with an inch thick layer or rust and it's 10th coat of paint the owners have decided to tear it down.  It's age has reached the eclipsing point where the asphalt that was crudely added in the 60's or 70's has worn away enough for the elegant tiled brick ground to peak through and just a tiny amount of the old railway has shown through as well.  Now the complex if half gone.  The amazing Art Deco sign has turned in to a vulgar Billboard and the cranes have already ripped apart the entire north corridor of the complex.

In speaking with one of the owners I mentioned that this is one of my favorite places in LA he replied "Ya, but it's unsafe."  And it was the most obvious explanation that made me realize and masochism of my aesthetic appreciation.  Reason why I love this place is 1) because if has an old classic look to it (in a strange way it's like being in Italy - but this is a totally different time period) and 2) it's totally neglected.  There were hundreds of thousands of decisions that lead to people decided to clean something up either in a half-assed fashion or deciding not to fix something at all!  AND this is the very reason why it must be destroyed.  There is simply no way for this space to be usable and safe.  It's like an old dog that you love, but it's so old that it's body hurts by just existing.  You can't be so selfish to keep it around when it's in so much pain.  It must be euthanized.  Still, I'll always wish I had more time with it.

When I first saw that space I knew I wanted to have a crazy huge installation of art, video projections, DJ's - just one crazy huge festival of art and music. Certainly, the best time to visit is night. Unfortunately, that will have to be left to my dreams.

Good-bye, old friend.

Broadway Bridge example

Here is a fairly simple example I did with some footage I shot the other night riding over the Broadway bridge.  I used After Effects stabilizer because the footage from riding my bike is extremely erratic.  I'm also using temp music from Languis.  I will want to work with them once this project gets more legs (and hopefully funding so I can pay them), but I'll also want to work with other ambient music artists as well.  But I think it works really well.  There's just a couple parts where the AE stabilizer just completely fails that I'd like to fix up.

More to come.

"East" texts and info

This new project is all about different parts of LA that are over looked.  I am currently calling "East" and the other day I had an explosion of ideas about what I want to shoot and how I want to put it together.

I will open with the following quote from Robert Smithson from his article "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey":
 "Picture in your mind's eye [a] sand box divided in half with black sand on one side and white sand on the other.  We take a child and have him run hundreds of times clockwise in the box until the sand gets mixed and begins to turn grey; after that we have him run anti-clockwise, but the result will not be a restoration of the original division but a greater degree of greyness and an increase of entropy."

Then I want to follow that with this text that I wrote the other day:
"Just as popular media neglects important topics, under represented people and identities it also neglects places.  In the most photographed city in the world there are endless miles that are rarely if ever exposed to the world.  This area is know as East LA."

I made these notes:
Show multiple scenes & places and between each location have a matching shot - i.e. from Vernon zoom into the Sears Building then cut to Sears and neighborhood.

each location ~ 5 min
~ 120 min in total
24 locations
19 locations and 5 interludes

Interludes timelapse x2 timelapse 1: night, lights, driving cars timelapse 2: sunrise/set etc 2nd Street Tunnel 6th St bridge tunnel chopper ride over LA ($ permitting) Blueline ride

Locations Vernon Chinatown Watts - Inglewood downtown - Bway theatres Santa Fe and Train yard LA River Sears Building (Boyle Heights) Fashion District Jefferson Park (empty hotels) Griffith Park - abandoned Zoo Little Tokyo Highland Park El Sereno Monterey Park Baldwin Park Linclon Heights Olvera St Cypress Park El Monte Skid Row

I also forgot to mention that I'm planning on shooting as much as possible by bicycle (or hand held) and then later stabilizing it (there is soo much jittering on a bicycle it doesn't look very good).  I want to make this film in the most alternative way possible.  I never want to be in too much control of the scenery (unlike Hollywood that wants to lock off every bit of our world), use as little dirty energy as possible and do this almost completely by myself.  I hope to have some friends help me shoot. Mostly cause I'm afraid of shooting with a $1K camera in some of these areas all alone.  This is usually how I make things and it's not exactly a new technique, but often people use the term do-it-yourself to try and get away with poor looking productions.

Here is an example that I shot a few weeks ago on the Blueline train going north.