Artist Shepard Fairey said he will insist on removal of his Robert F. Kennedy mural if LAUSD paints over controversial artwork at school

La 1544934976 ke96omgc4c snap image
Photo by Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Korean activists called for removing this mural from the RFK Community Schools complex, saying the sun rays remind them of the Japanese imperial battle flag. Artist Beau Stanton denies any connection. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles Times reports:

If the Los Angeles school district moves forward with plans to paint over a controversial mural at a Koreatown campus, artist Shepard Fairey said he will insist on the removal of his large outdoor portrait of Robert F. Kennedy at the school named after him.
In support of artist Beau Stanton, Fairey told The Times that he would call for the removal of his mural of Kennedy at the RFK Schools campus on Wilshire Boulevard. Kennedy was murdered at the site of the then-Ambassador Hotel in 1968.

What disturbs the Korean activists, however, are the sun rays emanating from Gardner’s face. The Japanese battle flag has 32 bands of uniform proportions, in alternating red and white around a centered red disk representing the sun. Stanton’s mural has 44 varying bands of blue and reddish-orange, surrounding a much larger and different central image. Sun rays are a common art and design motif.

“Yeah, these things happened and they’re part of a terrible history, but this mural has nothing to do with that,” Fairey said Saturday. “What he has in his mural is nothing close to the battle flag. It’s not the same color scheme. It’s not the same focal element. It’s stupid to me. I thought that cooler heads would prevail because this is absurd.”

(click here to continue reading Artist Shepard Fairey said he will insist on removal of his Robert F. Kennedy mural if LAUSD paints over controversial artwork at school – Los Angeles Times.)

Kudos to Shepard Fairey for his insistence that just because something is similar to something offensive, it isn’t enough to be destroyed. The mural doesn’t have swastikas, it has a motif that somewhat resembles an oppressive fascist government’s flag.

 War flag of the Imperial Japanese Army

By the way, the Stars and Stripes are in a lot of paintings, and America exists due in no small part to genocide of humans who already lived in the New World. 

Note, click the LA Times article to see the photo. I couldn’t walk over and take my own, unfortunately. 

Los Angeles, City of Water

A Vacuous Dream
A Vacuous Dream, Manhattan Beach, CA.

Wild! So there is hope that our upcoming Water War won’t be as dire. Well, maybe the Water War will get delayed long enough for the rising ocean to make it moot anyway…

LOS ANGELES is the nation’s water archvillain, according to public perception, notorious for its usurpation of water hundreds of miles away to slake the thirst of its ever-expanding population. As a character in “Chinatown,” the noirish 1974 film starring Jack Nicholson that churns through the city’s water history, puts it, “Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water.”

Recently, however, Los Angeles has reduced its reliance on outside sources of water. It has become, of all things, a leader in sustainable water management, a pioneer in big-city use of cost-effective, environmentally beneficial water conservation, collection and reuse technologies. Some combination of these techniques is the most plausible path to survival for all the cities of the water-depleted West.

One sign of Los Angeles’s earnestness is its success in conservation: The city now consumes less water than it did in 1970, while its population has grown by more than a third, to 3.9 million people from 2.8 million. Two projects — a nine-acre water-treating wetland constructed in a former bus maintenance yard and a water management plan devised for a flood-prone district of 80,000 people — won awards this year from the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure. The city itself won one of the first water sustainability awards given by the U.S. Water Alliance, in 2011.

(click here to continue reading Los Angeles, City of Water – NYTimes.com.)

We're Going To Find Out
We’re Going To Find Out…

2013 Year End Music Reviews – The Seeds – Future

The Seeds – Future

rating C+

The Seeds, L.A. garage rockers from the 1960s, included on the Nuggets series, with the great song, “Pushing Too Hard“, and the even better song, “Can’t Seem To Make You Mine“. Both of those are worth seeking out…

but this album does not do much for me. More than a couple of songs sound nearly identical to each other, or to “Pushing Too Hard“. I think they just ran out of ideas by this, their third album. If you want to get a Seeds album, their self-titled is better. Much better.

or as Mark Deming puts it:

The Seeds had long hair, a gloriously lamentable fashion sense, an attitude that was at once petulant and lackadaisical, and music that sounded aimless, horny, agitated, and stoned all at once. Is it any wonder America’s delinquent youth loved them? The Seeds’ aural signature was as distinctive as any band of their era, and they got a bit fancier with their formula as they went along, but they never captured their essential seediness with more impressive concision than they did on their self-titled debut album from 1966.…there are few albums of the era that mirror the delicious arrogance of a beer-sodden teenage misfit with the effortless simplicity of the Seeds, and it’s justly celebrated as a classic of first-wave garage punk.

(click here to continue reading The Seeds – The Seeds | Songs, Reviews, Credits, Awards | AllMusic.)

Photo Republished at 12 Drool-Worthy Photos of Vintage Signs in the Valley

Helms Olympic Bread

My photo was used to illustrate this post

Have you ever been to California? You should try it. Sure there are the beaches and the national parks and the movie stars and the big red bridge. There’s also the delightful consequence of near-perfect weather all year round. Stuff just doesn’t rust. Even when it rains.

… Final image via Seth Anderson.

click here to keep reading :
12 Drool-Worthy Photos of Vintage Signs in the Valley

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My Favorite Uploads to Flickr in April 2013

 I thought last month’s total was light, but I only worked on 51 images in April, probably my least productive month in a long, long time. Although, two of these made Flickr Explore…

Flickr: Archive of your uploads to Flickr in April 2013.

I was fighting off a few illnesses1, plus my birthday, plus general slackitude. C’est la vie.

Without additional blah-blah, here are my personal favorites processed in April, 2013.

Constitution of the United States
Constitution of the United States

Hail To The Thief Redux
Hail To The Thief Redux

Byrrh
Byrrh
I have only had this once, at the bar at Arami while waiting for my table. I’m going to find a bottle of my own eventually.

Drink to the Men Who Protect You and I
Drink to the Men Who Protect You and I

While Your Traces Disappear
While Your Traces Disappear
I’ve mentioned this photo before. I made myself a 16″ x 20″ print mounted on bamboo from The Darkroom. Turned out nice.

Peel Back the Sky
Peel Back the Sky

Your Arms Were Shaking
Your Arms Were Shaking
I wonder how many photos of the West Loop at sunset I’ve taken? A lot, I’m sure.

My first ever Vesper
My first ever Vesper
James Bond doesn’t have the best taste in cocktails. Martinis should really be shaken, not stirred, so he got that right, but vodka and martini are two words that should never be joined in the same sentence.

Each Has His Burden
Each Has His Burden
Lovely white birch in front of the lovely Bahá’í Temple in Wilmette.

We Have Never Been Very Pure
We Have Never Been Very Pure
Manhattan Beach, LA. I’ve mentioned this photo before. I should make a print of it too.

Feel of rain in the face
Feel of rain in the face
Manhattan Beach, LA.

Birthday Pie
Birthday Pie
I wasn’t kidding, I did have a birthday this month. Cherry pie, of course.

Pinhole Self Portrait Circa 1994
Pinhole Self Portrait Circa 1994 I scanned this recently, unfortunately, the print is fairly damaged. Some friend of a friend who was a grad student at the ARTIC back in the mid-90s built the pinhole out of a coffee can, and brought a flash. I just posed.

Trust In Your Calling
Trust In Your Calling

Science Won't Change You
Science Won’t Change You

Take A Walk Through The Land of Shadows
Take A Walk Through The Land of Shadows

An Approximation of the Anticipation
An Approximation of the Anticipation

A Harmony Not Rarefied
A Harmony Not Rarefied

Footnotes:
  1. yes, plural []

Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence

Sam McPheeters writes a paean to a favorite film of mine, Repo Man. Repo Man has been out of print recently, but now The Criterion Collection has rescued it, and restored it as well. I’m really tempted to get a copy. For many years, the phrase “Let’s get sushi… and not pay!” has been an oft repeated phrase in my monologues.1 Also, “I don’t want no Commies in my car!… No Christians, either!” in my best Harry Dean Stanton Old West voice…

Repo Man, released in early 1984, was the first feature film by a twenty- nine-year-old British UCLA film school graduate named Alex Cox. Even now, the film’s existence seems implausible. It is an apocalypse tale with no doomsday, a punk movie with no concert, a science fiction story with less than ten seconds of aliens. Most of its now classic music was on the far, far edge of American society in 1984. It mines a world of drugs, crime, and capitalist peril for absurdist yuks (when Cox showed the film to his contacts in the real world of Los Angeles auto repossession, they found it to be a diluted version of their much more terrifying jobs). The project, originally envisioned at one-tenth of its final budget, was picked up by Universal Studios. That backing launched the green director into the unfamiliar universe of teamsters and lawyers and the watchful eyes of a studio that could smoosh the project with one phone call.

Criterion Repo Man

Criterion Collection – Repo Man

How a major studio allowed such a vehemently odd movie to exist really is a mystery. Its outlandishness isn’t forced; it’s forceful. This is a film that expands a singular style of humor into an entire worldview, a physics as vast as the Force in Star Wars. But part of the mystery is also that Cox could gather so much talent in one place. Granted full autonomy in his casting, he somehow assembled a flawless ensemble. Emilio Estevez’s Otto is a pitch-perfect mix of blank ambition and obliviousness. Matching this is the world-weary exhaustion—dubbed “the Old West/cadaver look” by a friend of Cox’s—of Harry Dean Stanton’s Bud. Otto is a baby-faced punker initiated into a secretive trade by Bud, who listens to obsolete music, dresses square, and dreams small. Their worldviews collide in the new terrain of early eighties America, an era of subtle but rapid change from the Me Decade to the Greed Decade.

(click here to continue reading Repo Man: A Lattice of Coincidence – From the Current – The Criterion Collection.)

I know I saw the Repo Man film in the theatre, but I don’t know if it was during the first run, or after the soundtrack made a splash. In those old dusty days, before the internet, before cable television, before DVDs and streaming video services, I saw a lot of movies on opening weekend. I do remember it being a mostly empty theatre, but laughing hysterically at the cans of generic food…

Repo Man thrived largely because of its music. The soundtrack not only resurrected the theatrical run, it also stoked interest in the video release. The film had the wonderful serendipity to enter the VHS market during the golden age of video stores. In the mideighties, “cult film” was both an aesthetic and a status facilitated by scarcity. Video connoisseurs of the pre-Internet world foraged through shelves and bins, propelled by word of mouth and employee picks. Even if you managed to catch the infamously edited television version of Repo Man (with “flip you” and “melon farmer” dubbed over saltier insults), you would have had to own a VCR to share the experience with friends. The film bloomed as a phenomenon not just because it had to be sought out but because it delivered on expectations when finally found.

Musically as well, it’s hard to think of another nondocumentary film with the preposterously marvelous timing of Repo Man—Cox had the most vibrant and diverse punk scene in America to work with. And certainly no other film used such good fortune to such novel effect. Consider the cameo by the Circle Jerks. That scene shows one of the mightiest lineups in the first wave of American hardcore—Keith Morris, Greg Hetson, Earl Liberty of Saccharine Trust, and the celebrated drummer Chuck Biscuits—in that incarnation of the band’s only recorded performance, as a drum-machine-backed lounge act.

If you haven’t seen the film in a while, or ever, give it a spin…

Repo Man Poster

Repo Man Poster

Footnotes:
  1. conversations, dialogues, whatever []

Flickr Favorites Uploaded in March 2013

I processed and uploaded 113 photos in March, much less than February’s total. Probably my ear troubles ate into my productivity, but that’s just an excuse. 

Anyway via Flickr: Archive of your uploads to Flickr in March 2013 here are my 22 personal favorites created in March. Click image to embiggen.

Go Back To Where You Have Been Again
Go Back To Where You Have Been Again

Take What You Have Gathered From Coincidence
Take What You Have Gathered From Coincidence

Money Isn't The Only Answer
Money Isn’t The Only Answer

Devil's Paintbrush - Upper Yurtistan
Devil’s Paintbrush – Upper Yurtistan

Butterfly - Upper Yurtistan
Butterfly – Upper Yurtistan

Wine is Good For You
Wine is Good For You

Minister of Design and The Future, Blue
Minister of Design and The Future, Blue

Somebody Please Tell This Machine I'm Not A Machine
Somebody Please Tell This Machine I’m Not A Machine

Ready For Take Off
Ready For Take Off

Guardian of Marfa East
Guardian of Marfa East

Assembling Tian
Assembling Tian

Fanoenix by Debbie Mullins
Fanoenix by Debbie Mullins

Heracles Shoots the Sun
Heracles Shoots the Sun

Cold Was the Ground
Cold Was the Ground
I don’t love all of this photo, but I do like how the clouds were filtered.

Where The Air Is Fresh And Clean
Where The Air Is Fresh And Clean

George playing the piano
George playing the piano

Let True Love Win
Let True Love Win
Garfield Park Conservatory

Fulton Vortex
Fulton Vortex
West Loop weirdness

Not A Simple Binary Choice
Not A Simple Binary Choice
Loyola Campus

Off The Grid
Off The Grid
Lake Michigan beach in Wilmette, IL

Towers
Towers
Bahá’í Temple, Wilmette, IL

Eliyahu Was Thirsty
Eliyahu Was Thirsty
Hipstamatic closeup of Elijah’s cup, a few days after Passover

Continue reading “Flickr Favorites Uploaded in March 2013”

We Have Never Been Very Pure

We Have Never Been Very Pure
We Have Never Been Very Pure

Click here to view larger on black.

Venice Beach, last February.

Hasn’t happened in a while, but this photo made it into Flickr Explore April 9th1, reaching into the lower 200s. Funny, I spent less than ten minutes processing it in Photoshop (tweaking the contrast, cropping, then converting into black and white), and yet it became a hit. Go figure. There isn’t a prize or anything, just satisfaction in knowing that this photo is popular with the masses, and humbling, when you look at all the other great photos also contained in that day’s batch. I would not say each of those photos are my favorites as well, but a great number are super images.

I do like my own photo, don’t get me wrong. And in fact, I like it better viewed at a larger size.

Shameless hucksterism, prints are available for purchase.

I don’t have a clever story as to the photo’s title: probably a willful mishearing of a song lyric or something. Titles are a challenge, as we’ve discussed before.

Footnotes:
  1. top 500 photos uploaded to Flickr on a particular day []

Flickr Favorites Uploaded in February 2013

In January, I only uploaded 83 photos to Flickr, however in February, I took a vacation in a new-to-me city (Los Angeles), so of course, I took and subsequently processed lots more photos. Seriously, lots more. I haven’t even finished going through all of my LA photos, but I’m close. Anyway, here are a few of my favorites, roughly in date order.

Archives / Posted in / 2013 / February (191 items)

(click here to continue reading Flickr: Archive of your uploads to Flickr in February 2013.)

Click a photo to embiggen…

You Could Get Used To It
You Could Get Used To It

Times Passes Slowly
Times Passes Slowly

Strolling on the Sand
Strolling on the Sand

more below the fold, mostly because I have entirely too many favorite photos this time. 38 by my rough count, or nearly 20%. And there were a couple others one the cusp…

Continue reading “Flickr Favorites Uploaded in February 2013”

Favorite Photos from January 2013

I’m vowing to do a better job of posting my personal photo favorites uploaded to Flickr each month. I started this last year, but then got lazy, and didn’t post every month. Yadda yadda, 17/83 is 20%…

Archives / Posted in / 2013 / January (83 items)

(click here to see more  Flickr: Archive of your uploads to Flickr in January 2013.)

Lusty Leaves Quite Gone

Lusty Leaves Quite Gone
Lincoln Park

Not Everything Matters As Much As You Think It Does
Not Everything Matters As Much As You Think It Does

I Know You Want To Dance Polapan Blue
I Know You Want To Dance Polapan Blue

Kodak Cameras and Film
Kodak Cameras and Film

I’ve Waited Patiently For You
I’ve Waited Patiently For You

Do Just What You Used To Do
Do Just What You Used To Do


Urban Melodrama
Urban Melodrama

The Muttering Retreats of Restless Nights
The Muttering Retreats of Restless Nights

Don't Let Me Change Your Mind
Don’t Let Me Change Your Mind

Elevator to Gallows
Elevator to Gallows

Murphy Car
Murphy Car

Ice Age in the West Loop
Ice Age in the West Loop

Passing Strangers
Passing Strangers

Your Forgotten Melodies
Your Forgotten Melodies

Manhattan Beach
Manhattan Beach

Union Station - LA
Union Station – LA

Dome and globe, Los Angeles Central Library
Dome and globe, Los Angeles Central Library

Vacation in El Porto California

As you might have noticed, I spent a few days visiting Manhattan Beach, ostensibly to help celebrate my mother’s birthday. I had never visited Southern California as an adult, so I took full advantage of the opportunity to be a tourist. We had a great time in Los Angeles, spectacular, in fact. I hope to visit again. 

I won’t post every photo I took (including photos taken with Hipstamatic, I snapped nearly 500 images over 5 days), but all the decent ones will end up in a Flickr set called Manhattan Beach 2013 (slideshow is Flash-based). If you get this blog’s daily email, you will only see 7 images a day, as that is the limit that Google/Feedburner allows. Most days I don’t process that many images, but I probably will for the next few days while the memories are still fresh.

Anyway, here are a few photos that I uploaded to Flickr yesterday. Double click to embiggen, natch…

AA - 0651 - ORD
AA – 0651 – ORD

Loading Up
Loading Up

The Spirit Of Ecuador
The Spirit Of Ecuador
unfortunately, did not get to sample this, but the bottle was interesting

Parking Lot - El Porto
Parking Lot – El Porto The view from our host’s front porch

Keep Outta Venice - Number 237
Keep Outta Venice – Number 237
Number 237 a quasi-inside joke re: Stanley Kubrick. This was photograph number 237 on my camera

Happiness Starts With Prohibited
Happiness Starts With Prohibited
I was riding shotgun as we were driving away from LACMA, and saw this poster while stopped at a light. We discussed it in the car for a moment, but I didn’t get out my camera quickly enough. I was about to ask to turn around so I could photograph it, but then at the next stoplight, there was another version, and even closer, so I got a better photo.

Spicy Chicken Bánh Mì- from Cali Bánh Mì
Spicy Chicken Bánh Mì- from Cali Bánh Mì
Yummy…

From a food truck outside of LACMA

Cali Bánh Mì
Cali Bánh Mì

Reading Around on August 1st through August 3rd

A few interesting links collected August 1st through August 3rd:

  • The Unofficial Thomas Pynchon Guide to Los Angeles – Little known fact: Thomas Pynchon, the paranoid poet of the information age, is LA’s greatest writer. To be sure, Los Angeles—whose aerial view he likened to a printed circuit board—has always been central to the elusive writer’s weird weltanschauung, his hallucinogenic stir-fry of Cold War hysteria, high tech anxiety, and low-brow pop-culture references. But did you know he actually lived there in the ’60s and early ’70s, while writing Gravity’s Rainbow, the Moby-Dick of rocket-science novels? His latest effort, Inherent Vice, is an homage to those bygone days, plus something no one expected from the notoriously private author: a semiautobiographical romp. Set in the twilight of the psychedelic ’60s, Inherent Vice is stoner noir, a comic murder mystery starring a detective who—like stories of Pynchon himself—smokes bales of weed, obsesses over unseen conspiracies, and relishes bad TV. And if you map the novel against Pynchon’s life in LA, it really does tie the whole room together.
  • Las Vegas 1953.jpg
  • Roger Ebert’s Journal: Archives The Greatest Movies Ever Made – But to quibble with specific titles, as I said, is a waste of time. We look at these lists for what we find on them, not what we don’t find. That’s why my Great Movies have never been a ranking, but a Collection, assembled in no particular order.

    Any list of great films helps breaks the hammer-lock of box office performance that grips too many American moviegoers. I can’t tell you how many people responded to my attack on “Transformers” by telling me how much money the movie was grossing, as if that had the slightest relevance. A great movie acts like a window in our box of space and time, opening us to other times and other lands. The more windows we open, the better.

    leary_psychedelic_0430.jpg

  • If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger,There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats: Seminal Image Friday #1:Frames Within the Frame (Part One) – some great images here. Cinematography is an art form worth celebrating