The 8.5-minute short (the last 2-plus minutes of which are the credits) centers around a Midnight Ridazz-esque group night ride featuring Jared Leto and his band pedaling along with a purported group of actual Ridazz — I say “purported” because individual close-ups reveal them all to be far too sullenly sans FUN as they journey glumly in the dark across and under the requisite downtown locations such as the 6th Street Bridge, the Second Street tunnel, and Grand Street. Seriously: Why so serious?
But everything’s great eye candy and otherwise going mostly awesome and only threatening to be hugely overwrought and ultra-serious like the song until the video’s director, Bartholomew Cubbins, decides to have a paid-actor/stuntperson get fatally creamed on his bike by a motorist near Pershing Square. Then, while everyone stands dumbly around by the body like powered-down replicants, poor Cubbins couldn’t help but trot out a hornless unicorn galloping in slo-mo up a dark street. Of course, with a visual like that the dead ridah can’t help but awaken refreshed from his unplanned road nap, and just get up on his undamaged bike to ride away.
After that there’s more of Leto singing, then a critical mass-style “circle of death” at an ironically traffic-less intersection. Then all the still way-too-bummed cyclists start wailing like a giant gruff chorus along with Leto until they magically arrive at the Santa Monica Pier where they disappear. Fade to black.
Your mileage may vary from my curmudgeonly take.
PS. If the embed’s dead up there, here’s the video’s URL:
I exited my dentist’s Miracle Mile office not long after 10 a.m. this morning confronted by the absolute beauty of the day — its comfortable crystal clarity prevented me from beelining it on my bike to work. So I took the long way to Westchester. Instead of heading south to Culver City, I cut through Beverly Hills got up onto Santa Monica Boulevard and rolled that thoroughfare all the way to its end where I paused to enjoy the breathtaking views from the palisades before cranking it south along a near-barren beach bikepath to Venice and its pier from which I observed sea lions and dolphins before snapping the above shot of the solitary surfer surveying his vast empire.
Glorious days like this are enough to bring a tear to my eye.
A crystal clear case of driver vs biker road rage? Last year, city prosecutors filed criminal charges against physician Christopher Thompson for deliberately braking hard in front of two cyclists on a narrow stretch of Mandeville Canyon. After a three-week trial, the jurors came back with convictions in hand: Dr. Thompson was found guilty of, among other charges, assault with a deadly weapon and mayhem. According to the prosecutors:
… Thompson stopped his car after passing the two cyclists and shouting at them to ride single-file. One cyclist ran face-first into the rear windshield of the doctor’s red Infiniti, breaking his front teeth and nose, and leaving his face scarred. The other was sent hurtling to the sidewalk and suffered a separated shoulder.
Thompson told the response officer that the cyclists flipped him off, so he hit the brakes “to teach them a lesson.” Thompson’s version is decidedly more benign: he says he pulled over to take a photo of the riders and thought he had left them enough room to get around his car. Which one sounds more likely?
Two lessons spring to mind. First, statements you make after an accident can be used for and against you in court, so talk to anyone at your emotionally-charged peril. And second, don’t effing use your car as a weapon to “teach” someone a lesson. No apples for you.
LA Weekly had a cheeky article a few years back titled “The Evidence Room: Five Signs You’re Gentrifying.” At the time, the primary target of gentrification was Los Feliz, Silver Lake, and Echo Park. I don’t think there’s a gelato parlor downtown yet, but clearly, for better or worse, downtown is being “revitalized” faster than you can say “doggie day care.” Enter Gary Phillips, a community activist turned mystery and comic book writer who will debut the first three pages of his webcomic, Bicycle Cop Dave, next week on October 28 on Four Story. Bicycle Cop Dave will follow LAPD officer David Richter as he patrols downtown LA and “encounters interesting characters from a lawyer smoking crack in a port-a-potty to a one-armed prophet in a Skid Row bar with his wooden tablet of odd commandments.” Phillips also promises upside down bodies below the Sixth Street bridge, an inevitable Big Bad Developer villain, and at least a comment or two about the displacement of the poor as result of old gentrifying politics finding a new battleground downtown. The story will unfold over the course of several weeks, as new pages will be published every other Wednesday until the entire comic is online. I’m hoping he’ll stray away from hyper liberal tendencies to simply demonize gentrification without providing a more weighty critique; in any case, the comic is worth a bookmark and hopefully some good discussion.
(UPDATE 10.22): I just have to drop this in at the top how deeply touched I am by the outpouring of kind words and appreciation. I’m still amazed that things played out as they did — and so successfully. As some of you know I fancy myself something of an amateur one-man Random Animal Assistance League (be it at my house, near downtown or in the wilds of South Los Angeles), but never in my craziest dreams did I think it would include such a scenario. Each and every one of you who took the time to comment blew me away and made my day, so from the bottom of my heart: Thank You!
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The first grown-up book I ever read cover to cover was “Jonathan Livingston Seagull,” which is about gulls as much as another cherished book of mine, “Watership Down” is about rabbits, but when you’re a snot-nosed 9-year-old kid still moving his lips as he reads Richard Bach’s anthropomorphic allegory was just what a wide-eyed punk needed to ever-romanticize the sea birds. Even to this day as a wide-eyed old dude whenever I see a flock of the feathered fiends I’ll pick one out to be my own personal JLS.
Well one picked me out yesterday while I stopped on my bike ride to work along Ballona Creek at Centinela to feed some old bread destined for the dumpster to the birds there. Except it had a big problem in the form of a nasty three-pronged fishhook embedded in its mouth, which prevented it from enjoing the tasty bread bits, closing its beak… or perhaps even living for much longer:
I go into deathless elaboration on the ensuing rescue mission here, accompanied by some long unedited video clips that I’ve embedded after the jump. But if you’re in need of a little bit of a happyendingness or just want to hear a grown man weep, check ‘em out.
I’m running out the door and don’t have a lot of time to spend on this one at the moment, luckily two other local bloggers have the full scoop on this inside and out. Basically the jist is this: California Vehicle Code does not require bicycle licenses but allows individual cities to require them on their own (you may recall a recent skuffle with the LAPD suspending it’s own bike license law due to misuse and poor enforcement.) But this isn’t a wide open do whatever you want policy, CA CVC specifically states that if a city does require bike licenses, the fine for not having one can not exceed $10 (ten dollars) and will not include any jail time. Well, apparently Santa Monica doesn’t give a shit what the state law says and they have a law on the books stating that anyone caught without a bike license riding a bike in Santa Monica can be fined for up to $1000 (one thousand dollars) and be sent to jail for up to 6 months, it also allows the crime to be bumped up to a misdemeanor and put on your record. Nice work Santa Monica, way to continue making life hell for people who ride bikes.
What happened to the freakin’ week? I meant to post about this days ago so just in case you haven’t read about it elsewhere, and have even the slightest interest in pedaling around this place we call home here’s what’s happening October 2 at 8 p.m. at Little Tokyo’s Aratani/Japanese American Theater (244 S. San Pedro St.):
The Library Foundation of Los Angeles, as part of its ALOUD series of lectures, readings, performances, and discussions is presenting “Cities, Bicycles and the Future of Getting Around” featuring musician and author of “Bicycle Diaries”David Byrne and guests Bicycle Kitchen Co-Founder Jimmy Lizama, UCLA Professor of Urban Planning Donald Shoup, along with LADOT Senior Bicycle Coordinator LADOT Senior Bicycle Coordinator (or as I like to call her: Fully Assimilated Bureaucratician) Michelle Mowery. She’s absolutely FAB-ulous.
Be a part of what I expect will be a spirited conversation on how we can shape this city into a more bike-friendly place and less car-adoring like Audi insultingly did in this Los Angeles-filmed ad currently spoiling the airwaves:
Tickets are $25 and proceeeds will go to support ALOUD’s free programs at the Central Library. Bicycle valet parking provided by the L.A. County Bike Coalition.
So in case it didn’t blip on your radar, the LA County Bike Coalition (LACBC) is staging the first-ever official Los Angeles Bike & Pedestrian Count this week. In the grand scheme of the city’s transportation issues, this may seem like a whole bunch of nothing much, but trust me, this count is a never-done-before big deal whose hard data can be put to use not only to demonstrate that people do walk and bike in L.A., but more importantly to encourage cyclist and pedestrian inclusion in urban planning.
With all the commuter cycling I do I figured I’d better step up and volunteer my services as a tallyman. So I visited the LA Bike Count website, picked a time and an intersection, printed out the necessary forms and instructions, and arrived at the interesection of 8th and La Brea at 7 a.m. this morning to spend the next 2.5 hours adding up the walkers and the pedalers.
By the time 9:30 a.m. rolled around I’d finished up with 141 pedestrians and 58 cyclists (23 of whom rode on the sidewalks; 22 without helmets; 5 of them female; and 1 dude who was actually smoking a cigarette and riding in flipflops — I try not to judge but what the hell is up with that?).
I deviated from my usual route home this evening to drop off the results to the LACBC’s headquarters on Spring Street downtown, and though my work is done if you’re reading this suddenly jonesing to get your tally on and help with this historic process (that may or may not include the occasional nicotine-addicted hipster pedaling around in a poor choice of footwear), you can help this Saturday from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. So scope out some intersections found on this map, and if there’s one that’s in need of a counter, contact the LACBC’s Yogi Hendlin to find out if it’s still available.
I’m not much for gates along Ballona Creek — especially in the wake of last year’s attempts by residents to close off access near Culver Drive and Sawtelle in hopes of detering crime. Thankfully such misguided efforts were never carried out — or at least continue to be postponed.
But I’ll make an exception in the case of the below gate, found at the Inglewood Boulevard access to the Ballona Creek Bikeway in Mar Vista (and closed only for purposes of this picture), because it so wonderfully replaces its predecessor, a nondescript, rusting and bent blockade of the craptastic chainlink variety:
(click for the bigger picture)
Since I exit the bikeway here coming to work in the mornings and re-enter it coming home in the evenings pretty much every weekday, I’ve been monitoring the progress being made on this little pocket park beautification effort for the last couple months. And it was last night on my way home that I found the final piece of the project installed which marvelously depicts a flowing creek’s edge scene with a heron looking on as two egrets angle for a snack.
Other than the gate being one of three funded through the Mountains Recreation and Conservation Authority (the other two are upstream at the creek’s Sepulveda Boulevard access and downstream at McConnell Avenue), I couldn’t find any information about the artist, but this one looks very similar to the one found a couple blocks west at Centinela Avenue, which was done by Brett Goldstone. Goldstone also did the Great Heron Gate on the Los Angeles River at Fletcher Drive.
I’ve beaten the dead horse about the things you can find when you give yourself the chance to look at the city out from behind a windshield. One of my passions is the “streetfiti” I discover either on my bike or my feet — most of it rather happenstance, such as this amazing one I found today. I’ve passed the bus stop on the west side of La Brea at Wilshire hundreds of times, but it was only on this morning’s bike commute that I happened to be stopped behind enough cars at the red light to be immediately adjacent to it. And looked down.
(click for the bigger picture)
Unlike most of the concrete hand-scrawlings I find that feature a name and maybe a year, this one provides both and in greater detail: it’s signed “G.I. Shoes” (or at least “Shoes” is my best guess) and posts a definitive date of “5-12-44.” But in conjunction with the date and name, it also offers some rare and compelling (if misspelled) biographical information “Returned from Itay” (Italy is my guess). Given the date and the “G.I.” it all points to the writer being a soldier who arrived back in Los Angeles after serving his country during World War II and felt compelled to immortalize his homecoming in some fresh concrete. Sixty-five years later, it’s still there.
I Will, I Will Mock You igetrad red line a few years back. saw a dude with his shirt pulled up under his chin furiously picking away at scabs... girlvaughn Flossing. seriously. So disgusting. Also – agree with nail clippers. The sound of it makes me gag.
