L.A. to LA – Midnight Ridazz in The Big Easy

BLACK LABEL BIKE CLUB NEW YEAR’S EVE PARTY

IN NEW ORLEANS

HEY RIDAZZ, START SAVING YOUR SCRATCH BECAUSE YOU DON’T WANT TO MISS

– NEW YEAR’S EVE

– IN NEW ORLEANS

– WITH BLACK LABEL BIKE CLUB

Were you sad that there was no Bike Kill this year? Didn’t get your punk rock freak bike fix? Getting the shakes for mayhem on bikes in a different city? Hoping you would see more broken bones, like that totally tasty broken ankle at Bike Kill last year?

Black Label Bike Club New Orleans is having a New Year’s Eve party in – you guessed it, motherfuckers – New Orleans!

TRAVEL DETAILS

Midnight Trainazz  Schedule-

Amtrack Sunset Limited

Depart Los Angeles Union Station:
2:30 pm, Sunday, December 27, 2009

Arrive New Orleans:
2:55 pm, Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Depart New Orleans:
11:55 am, Monday, January 4, 2010

Arrive Los Angeles Union Station:
8:40 am, Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Vangoy Schedule-

Put your name on the vangoy list in the MR thread (link below)!

Leave Los Angeles : Dec. 28TH (TIME TBA)

Leave Nawlinz: Jan 4th (8AM-ISH)

DISCUSS THE MIND EXPLODING EYEBALL MELTING EAR FUCKING TONGUE LASHING HEART STOPPING KNEE POPPING BELLY FLOPPING TO THE 12TH DEGREE INSANE-ECSTATIC-CRAP-YOUR-PANTS-HAPPY-FUN-TIMES HERE.

It’s Off to Shop We Go, Redux: Or, Why I Hate L.A. Live

[Stick with me folks…at the end of this blog I will provide you with a POSITIVE review of something! Yes! Something I read that I LOVE! I promise there’s more to me than a bundle of negative energy…]

I have recently signed a lease with the boyfriend for a space in Glassell Park.  I am leaving downtown to its yuppie gentrification.  Goodbye, empty “loft” units.  Goodbye South Park.

And most importantly, goodbye L.A. Live.  You can go fuck yourself.

And in the spirit of luvving L.A. Live, I come to you today to build upon something I said about L.A. Live in a previous blog (rant):

LA Live, too, functions similarly to [Rick Caruso’s and other similar] lifestyle centers – its buildings face inward upon each other around false public spaces, so the crowds moving within the giant entertainment developments rarely crowd the truly accessible streets of downtown L.A.

When I wrote the above, my L.A. Live experience consisted of riding my bike past / around it, marveling at the rapidity with which the hulking monstrosity was being constructed.

Now, however, I have been to L.A. Live as a consumer of its wares and its space. I have suffered through a meal at ESPN Zone (which my parents loved), cowered in front of a live feed of Fall Out Boy on the giant 42 FOOT WIDE screen in the L.A. Live courtyard (which didn’t bother my mom that much, as she is going deaf), and twitched amidst its twinkling flashing dripping blinking strobing lights (which my parents found exciting).* And as my sister’s death grip on my arm grew tighter and tighter, as her frightened desperate need to run screaming from L.A. Live as fast as she possibly could grew more and more palpable (as did mine), and as Fall Out Boy taunted from the giant screen giant speakers “I Don’t Care,” all I could think was:

I HATE L.A. LIVE.

As my parents soaked in the ESPN Zone cultural experience, my sister and I whispered possible L.A. Live culture jams. “Banner drop?” I suggested. “Zombie invasion?” she added. And as if on cue, my mother (who had not been listening to me and my sister), watching a table of law students do Irish car bombs, said “I read in the LA Times that there is an LAPD substation here because the police are concerned about drunkenness and other vices associated with the types of businesses at L.A. Live.” My sister and I deflated. And all I could think was:

I REALLY FUCKING HATE L.A. LIVE.

That’s not totally true – it wasn’t the only thing I could think.  Also flashing through my brain was something about how the LAPD substation was another perfect example of state (The State) resources protecting and fostering capitalism (by ejecting arresting criminalizing anything that might disturb or discourage consumer’s happy-go-lucky money-spending experiences at L.A. Live).  But mostly it was:

GODDAMMIT L.A. LIVE SUCKS ASS.

So I twittered:

L.A. Live has its own LAPD substaion. How to fuck LAPD + L.A. Live at same time? I wonder if my tweet is being monitored as TERRORISM? 7:26 PM Dec 16th from TwitterBerry

And for good measure, just to see if I was being monitored, I twittered:

Terrorism at L.A. Live. 7:40 PM Dec 16th from TwitterBerry

Anyways, regaling you with the above tale was mainly just to illustrate the point that I got the chance to take a good long look at the L.A. Live quote-unquote public space that night.**  And truly, it looks just like the fucking website (and the picture above): a giant insanity-filled courtyard. I didn’t venture anywhere other than the giant courtyard, although there must be more to it. The courtyard was enough, thank you very much.

And, after that night, my analysis remains the same: although there are no barriers as such – theoretically, anyone wandering around the streets of South Park could wander down 11th into said courtyard – the design of L.A. Live itself provides a barrier, an obvious delineation between the public streets and this policed consumer space.  The false shiny hard spendy surfaces, the drinking eating shopping hordes staring into onto upon around the courtyard through the panopticon windows, even the type of material used as sidewalk surface differentiates the space from the streets and sidewalks of the city.  You remember what a city is right?  Where people are supposed encounter one another, where one can experience people that are the same that are different that are suspiciously similar that are nothing like each other?

Christopher Hawthorne wrote a pretty darn good review of L.A. Live, from an architectural critic’s perspective.  Although my quote with which I opened this blog comes from a slightly different perspective (architecture and planning as fostering socio-economic xenophobia) than Hawthorne’s (we need public space for all the nice yuppies in the nice lofts to foster nice gentrification of no man’s land), I leave you with the following quotes from his review (and a recommendation that you read his review, despite its orientation):

–  Los Angeles, city of enclaves, is methodically, unapologetically building itself one more.

–  When we trap the energy of an urban crowd inside this sort of self-contained world, and when we allow developers and their architects to heighten the differences between that world and the streets around it so dramatically, we help keep the rest of our blocks underused and, as pieces of the city, undernourished.

–  I have written before about how the plaza, which sits entirely on property owned by the developer, creates an impressive stage-set version of a public square….[The problem is] that it actively discourages any of the activities we traditionally associate with the use of collective space in a city: talking, reading, sitting under a tree, even pausing with a friend for a cup of coffee.

I also leave you with a request:  In light of the LAPD presence, what can I (WE) do?  I have ideas – a bloc banner drop action, perhaps (clown bloc, zombie bloc, pillow fight bloc, dance party bloc, zoo animal bloc, etc., with the bloc distracting people from the banner drop and scattering as soon as the banner is dropped) – but more suggestions are always welcome.

So that, dear readers, is why I hate L.A. Live.  And this, dear readers is something that I love!  I happened upon a blog on the Just Seeds website about a photography book – Big Box Reuse – focusing what communities do with big box retail spaces after the retailer has closed up shop and left the giant eyesores behind:  Hooray for creative adaptive reuse of shitty architecture and the people who appreciate it!

*I love you, mom.

**…and to garner sympathy for my horrifying experience…

Hi Ho, Hi Ho It’s Off to Shop We Go

*As a prologue to my little rant about Rick Caruso’s lifestyle centers, a reminder: With Black Friday fast upon us, remember that it is also Buy Nothing Day 2008. Join in on an action, or create your own, but most of all BUY NOTHING.*

Last Monday I attended (for stupid work reasons) an awards dinner that honored Rick Caruso and The Walt Disney Company for demonstrating “exceptional contributions to positive economic development in the region.” The Beverly Hilton teemed with well-groomed real estate men in dark suits (and the sparkly, sparkly women who love them) discussing the economy, the lack of development financing, and the vision and accomplishments of Rick Caruso.  Sitting at my dinner table listening to the host wax poetic about Caruso and The Walt Disney Corporation, I had the following (grammatically incorrect) twitter outburst:

Ohmigodthisagainsteverythingibelieveinyikes. 9:20 PM Nov 17th from TwitterBerry

Rick Caruso is best known to Los Angelenos for his developments The Grove and Americana at Brand, as well as for briefly considering (but then abondoning the idea of) running for mayor. The city streets ring with lauds and praises of “Carusostyle” – “high-quality shopping malls, which he [Caruso] contends are more akin to retail streets on a par with the great piazzas of Europe” – and institutions and publications from the Urban Land Institute (2) to Los Angeles Magazine (2) emphasize his influence on architecture, design, and the city of L.A generally.

Much like the awards dinner I attended, while Los Angeles Magazine pays tribute to Caruso and his lifestyle centers, it associates Caruso with Disneyland: the editor comments that more people visited The Grove than Disneyland in 2006; the magazine describes Caruso’s lifestyle centers as “open-air facsimiles of storybook Main Streets.”  Although intended to be a positive association in the foregoing contexts, the pairing of Caruso with Disneyland unwittingly highlights what I despise about Caruso’s developments, what makes him and his lifestyle centers “against everything i believe in yikes”: the progressive Disneyfication of city life, of city experience, of human experience.

Quick and dirty look at a European retail street (i.e., why Rick Caruso is insane): Passeig del Born is part of the Born area of the city.  Although I haven’t been there for a couple of years, I have been there many, many times – Bar Rosal, one of my favorite places in Barcelona to sit and sip a coffee or drink a beer and eat green olives, is there – and I have watched it go from a quiet retail street to a trendy high-end fashion retail area. And even as a trendy retail area, it’s a “democratic” space – there is nothing blocking pedestrian access day or night. Cars have very little access, to be sure, as it is part of the old city constructed long before cars, with narrow windy roads and a beautiful emphasis on foot traffic (although Passeig del Born is more of a large open square). However, it is part of the city. To get there, you only have to turn the corner from one street to the next. You do not enter into an obviously defined private area. While people eat and drink at the clusters of outdoor tables, a tide of humanity washes back and forth: beggars, buskers, skaters, grandmothers, university students, natural gas vendors, tourists. One can even enjoy the famous Barcelona graffiti – of which one of my favorite Born examples was a single light blue stenciled word: “fucksion” – (although due to tighter regulation this is sadly a disappearing art form).

Compare this to Caruso’s European-style retail street, The Grove.* Like Disneyland, you park in a designated parking area outside. Like Disneyland, you enter into a sanitized, policed simulation of “real” life.** However, unlike Disneyland, and what makes it more sinister, is that there is no ticket required, no price of admission. This begins to blend the lines between public and private space in dangerous ways, in ways that allow unthinking, uncritical shoppers to prefer the comforts of this entirely undemocratic, not public space to the “vagaries” of true public space – panhandlers, exposure to other “lesser” classes of human beings and/or human activity that challenges the comfortable world these people gather about themselves like protective armor.

What is truly horrifying about this, however, is that it is catching on. Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga – the address of which is even North Mainstreet, one of the streets within the development – further blurs the lines between public and private by including a community cultural center. LA Live, too, functions similarly to these lifestyle centers – its buildings face inward upon each other around false public spaces, so the crowds moving within the giant entertainment developments rarely crowd the truely accessible streets of downtown L.A.***

Okay, I have to stop here – I’m even starting to bore myself. But to wrap up this discussion, I will provide for you three positive actions you can take that are in direct opposition to shopping / participating in this consumer-driven simulacrum of public space:

– Reclaim the Streets. In Recipes for Disaster, CrimethInc. describes the guerrilla action it calls Reclaim the Streets. A group of individuals blocks off an intersection or a part of a city street and uses the area for a street fair, or for enjoyment, interaction, exchange.

– Midnight Ridazz / Midnight Ridazz-style bike rides. A form of reclaiming the streets, most of the rides born of Midnight Ridazz challenge the ideology behind lifestyle shopping centers. Once again I will quote a friend of mine:

Fuck politics!
Fuck appeals to the authorities for more lenient terms of enslavement!
We are forging a new society, right now!
Every Midnight Ridazz ride, every Tren Way ride, every Sins and Sprockets ride, every C.R.A.N.K. MOB ride is a political ride.
Why? Because it’s a public demonstration of collective happiness without consumerism, without structure, without hierarchies. It’s a demonstration that anarchy is possible AND fun.

– Go to the NELA Food Not Bombs benefit this Saturday, November 29.

If you got this far, thank you for reading. If I were the type to cause trouble, I would go cause it now.

*I have only one experience with Americana at Brand: Soon after it opened, the boyfriend and I went to the theater there to see a movie. Gathered just outside its perimeter, guarding the boundary between it and genuine public space, were crowds of Glendale police. The only time I will ever enter Americana at Brand is when I finally get up enough courage to bomb through it on my bike…which absolutely must and will happen soon.

**I’m not going to get into Baudrillard (2) here even though I would like to. I have already blown past tl;dr.

***To the extent the streets of downtown L.A. are truely accessible. Of course, see The City of Quartz for what was for me a life-changing discussion of city space.

claiming space

Graffiti is illegal, and I would never advocate illegal activity.  I would never tell women to venture into the darkness with a can of spray paint and to claim the urban environment as a place for them be heard.  I would never suggest to women that rather than be conquered by the very real threat of violence against their bodies in the streets, they grab their sister or their girlfriend or their sewing circle or their basketball team and bike or run through the streets leaving proof of their existence behind, i was here and you didn’t hurt me.  And I would certainly never recommend to women the creativity of discovering how to express themselves with paint and stencils on walls and billboards and streets and signs, the fun of cavorting like crazies in ways that are simply not socially acceptable, or the satisfaction to be found in generally mindfucking social norms.

I WOULD NEVER CONDONE IT.

NEVER, EVER.