Riding with Jornaleros

On Saturday City of Lights held its first group ride with participants from the CARECEN day laborer center near MacArthur Park and the IDEPSCA center in the garment district.

Our spoke card graphic, which I really really like, was made by artist Ernesto Yerena, a rising star who has collaborated with Shepard Fairey, among others.

Group rides have a special place in the hearts of the LA bike scene. From their start with Critical Mass, to the ongoing fun of Midnight Ridazz, group rides offer novice and experienced cyclists alike an opportunity to ride around and own the city together. Personally I prefer daytime rides to nighttime ones, since I like swooshing silently through the quiet streets with my panoramic views of downtown LA after dark, and I don't like facing aggressive drivers during the day. So I appreciate opportunities to ride en masse while it's bright out.

Our thinking with this ride was to use a popular model from the bike community in LA, the group ride, as an outreach tool to make stronger connections with cyclists who don't usually ride for fashion and fun.

My assignment as a City of Lights organizer was to hang out at the IDEPSCA center until the ride arrived from its starting point, CARECEN. I sipped coffee with another ride participant, an REI staffer who came all the way from Huntington Beach to ride with us. We chatted while the TV played coverage of a professional bike tour, entertaining the ten or so men sitting in the center. I got a brief lecture from someone about the benefits of green practices (I tried to explain to him that I live at an ecovillage, etc., but he just wanted someone to talk at, not with), and then Ernesto, the staff on duty, told me about an upcoming silkscreening workshop they're going to hold to raise money for jornaleros (day laborers) to join a soccer league.

Then I saw a bunch of cyclists ride up to the center's storefront, and the day had begun.

Here's a picture of the ride just before we started out from IDEPSCA's center at 18th and Main.



(I was filming the scene from across the street, so I didn't make the picture.)

We had ride support from the Bicycle Kitchen, with cooks Arlen, Scott, and Pedro helping out with flats.

We rode through downtown on Main, stopping at Placita Olvera for a brief historical overview from a docent.



Then we crossed the river and made our way to Mariachi Plaza in Boyle Heights, where we pooled our resources and paid a few performers to serenade us with "Cielito lindo."



Since this was our first try at organizing a ride with jornaleros, the ride organizers planned just a few stops. So we ended after Mariachi Plaza at Hollenbeck Park, where City of Lights organizer Andy had prepared a feast!



I filmed some short snippets of interview with a few guys who shared their thoughts about the ride. Everyone had fun, none of the jornaleros had been on a group ride before, and new group ride enthusiast Daniel suggested that our next one take us to the beach! Great idea.

We rode home over the 6th Street bridge and swam through traffic downtown because of the big corporate sponsored event going on this weekend.



Since my next big project for City of Lights involves collecting ethnographic interviews with program participants, I made arrangements to start a Spanish/ English conversation exchange with one the riders. That'll kick my university Spanish into street gear!

I'm happy to be part of such a cool team as the City of Lights organizers. At first Allison and I had a hard time finding volunteers who were both bilingual and understood that it was not our intention to belittle cyclists of circumstance because their bikes were poorly maintained or because they ride "wrong," on sidewalks. It's exciting to be part of this not only because we're making our own opportunities for urban cultural exchange, but because I'm part of an activist project that has anthropological convictions at heart.

Bike Count!

This afternoon I sat outside the Casbah Café at the corner of Sunset and Hyperion for two and a half hours, sipping cold mint tea, twitching to the disco sound of ELO, and making little hash marks with a pen on some funny diagrams to indicate the passage of bicyclists and pedestrians through the intersection. That's right, I did a shift for LACBC's bike count, the first in this city!

Turns out I'm rare, at least in Silverlake, since I'm a helmet-wearing, bike-riding girl. Only about one lady cyclist went by for every five guys on bikes. And helmets? Ack, don't crush the hair! Or whatever reason people have, they're eschewing helmets like crazy.

I saw a lot of Chicano teenagers, all boys, on bikes, breaking out some bricolage with their gangbanger attire and monochrome fixies. Most didn't fuss with traffic laws. Oh to have the lust for danger that courses through a teenage boy! Scratch that, I'd probably get into waaay more verbal altercations with drivers.

As I listened to "Confusion" for about the tenth time, I thought about other things it would be fun to count:
- Number of people walking around with iced drinks in hand
- Number of people walking with friends or by themselves
- Who violates traffic laws more, cars or peds or bikes?
- Number of cars occupied by just one lonely person
- Number of pampered pooches using crosswalks

Many people passed through the intersection more than once. It was a pretty fun site to watch cause there's a lot of struttin' that happens along Sunset. I saw several bunches of teen girls holding their asses out at a juicy angle, the better to look uninterested behind their oversized shades. As a young person better schooled in Portland hipsterdom, I find LA hipsters too processed for my taste; where in Portland you'd find a soft fuzz, here there's a bunch of dead hair poking out of a suit that isn't quite old enough to be interesting. In Portland there are worn out sneakers, here there are stressed jean cutoffs. And butts come out a lot more here, that's for damn sure! Hot stuff.

After my shift was done, and I thought my eyes were going to bug out from all the concentrating, I went into Kelly Green down the street and bought some eco bourgie stuff. One of the people I'd seen walking a dog across the street like five times was in the shop, so we chatted, and I found out that the bike count was covered on NPR (nice work LACBC women!). She also sheepishly admitted that she was only out walking cause she'd lost her car keys. Ha! Well, she chose the right time to walk around her neighborhood, cause I got her down for like four solid crossings.

Park(ing) Day Unwelcome at MacArthur Park

There's this ongoing annual arty/ architecty event called Park(ing) Day that happens all over the country. This year it happened on Friday, September 18.

In LA, it's taken the form of nonprofits setting up the usual temporary "park" in a parking space, feeding the meter and providing some diversion to passersby while simultaneously promoting their project. My amazing friend/collaborator Allison planned a park for City of Lights on Wilshire in MacArthur Park. We wanted to combine the public space statement that is a temporary park in the street with our ongoing efforts to publicize the bike movement to Latino cyclists in Central LA, so the activity Allison designed invited passersby to draw their ideal bike routes on maps of this part of town.

We had a nice park set up, with five people sitting under a shade canopy, many LA-appropriate succulent plants in pots, and my little Vox amp blasting Café Tacuba, when a police car approached. It slowed, and a window came down. We chatted with them, explaining what we were up to in the parking space, that we'd fed the meter, and that they were welcome to stop and have some orange juice. They drove on, and I felt my adrenaline drain away slowly. I'd never heard of any Park(ing) Day parkers getting harrassed by cops, and assumed it was totally legal since it's such a popular, national event, so I figured that was the last of it.

However, the same car circled the block, and pulled up behind us. This time the two officers got out of their car, and questioned our choice of parking space. We were set up on a curving part of Wilshire, the block that goes over the park on a bridge, and there were no other cars parked along our stretch. Right in front of us was a bus stop, and the signalized intersection of Park View and Wilshire after that. The officers were skeptical about our safety, since drivers routinely speed along that stretch of Wilshire. What if we had some traffic cones? No problem, I called Bobby, and he said he'd bring some from the ecovillage, where there's a bunch. This seemed to satisfy the police, who left to sit in their car.

But no, they still didn't like the whole idea of the thing, so they called in back up. Then we had four officers, including Iris Santin, who has been building a reputation as a bicycle-friendly officer in that district, questioning our presence. We repeated over and over that this event happens all over the city, all over the country, for just a few hours one day a year. Among themselves the officers decided we needed to get out of the street.

I called friends at another park, just a few miles west on Wilshire at Western, and they gave me the name of a police officer who had stopped at their park, seemed enthusiastic, and gave them a number to call him if they had any problems. They passed on that number to me, I called it, and reached a police department switchboard. I asked for the officer they'd named, but apparently the dude was on his day off. I explained the situation to the lady on the phone, who put me on hold and then let me know that they'd sent a superviser to our location. As I hung up the phone, I realized that the superviser was already there, bringing our total to five cops and three cars, agreeing that we needed to get out of the street.

I entered the conversation, keeping my voice steady as I explained, again, that this event was happening all over the city with no problems; why should our park be an exception? I told them the name of the friendly officer who had visited Wilshire and Western, and they dismissed that with "he's off today."

The superviser had a hard time understanding why we were in the street to begin with, confusing Park(ing) Day with bike lanes or something. At one point they claimed we should get out of the street because a pedestrian had been killed right near where we were set up the day before.

During this conversation, a car pulled up next to our space and three women tumbled out, beaming at us and asking about our park. "We're from the CRA," they told the police, who told them to get back in their car and move along because they were blocking (hypothetical) traffic. I explained to the police that people knew to look for us here because of the Park(ing) Day map distributed online, trying to emphasize, again, that we were part of a larger event.

When we asked if we could set up in a different parking space, like on Park View, which is a lower traffic street, they just repeated that we could not be in a parking space because were were not a vehicle. Iris Santin stormed off to her car after I continued to express my confusion over what, exactly, we were doing wrong, and I tried to reason with the superviser, but, eventually,
we got out of the street.

We schlepped all of our many accoutrements down to a corner that the officers had decided it would be okay for us to use, though the shade canopy was out of the question on a sidewalk.
After calming down for a bit, we moved across Wilshire to a shady area and re-set up our park. Passersby commiserated with our situation, and eventually the day went on like it was supposed to.

Bobby called the office of Ed Reyes, the councilperson for District 1, and someone there spoke with the police superviser who had kicked us out of the street. The superviser told the council office staffer that we could set up in a space on Park View, directly contradicting what they had told us earlier in the street. As we'd already spent another 30-45 minutes re-setting up our space, we decided to stay where we were.

I left for a few hours to visit other parks, and found a lot of astroturf and happy people, but no similar stories of police harrassment. I guess MacArthur Park just isn't allowed to have something that many other parts of LA welcome.

At least Allison was able to collect many bike route suggestions from people who stopped at the park.

City of Lights organizer Andy Rodriguez speaks with a passerby on Friday. Photo by Allison Mannos.

Here's Allison's entry about the day on the LACBC blog. Sadly we were too caught up dealing with the police to take pictures of our first park on Wilshire.
A photo of us also got posted on LA Streetsblog.

I've been reading a lot of interpretations of Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty this week, so I understand that the officers are just unable to see possibilities outside of their own daily routines, but man, is it ever disheartening to struggle for change in LA sometimes!

Unfathomable Mystery

I was idly reading a book when I heard Adonia in the kitchen exclaim in increasingly incredulous tones "what the fuck... what the FUCK??" She then invited me to guess what was in the toaster. I peered in and spied a blackened mass. Fearing the worst (fried mouse or giant cockroach), she rattled it out to reveal a mostly melted kryptonite bike lock key:



We have two working theories. The cats like to carry small objects around, so it is conceivable they could have moved the key. However, they are not known to frequent the counter the toaster is on. In addition, even for a cat it seems ridiculously idiosyncratic to drop a key in the toaster.

The second is that in the hustle and bustle of moving last March, the key could have been jostled into the toaster. This seems slightly more likely, since we were moving only a few blocks and moving with great haste (1 minivan, 6 hours, a Gadda-Lugo record). Since we did zero packing ahead of acquiring the services of a minivan, we were creating bizarre packages of objects. The toaster could have been thrown in a pot that also had a small cactus and a bowl of loose change and keys in it.

This leaves the troubling implication that it has been melting in the toaster since March, and that we did not notice the fumes of plastic and batteries melting (it's the kind with an LED light built into it), potentially consuming trace amounts of burnt plastic in our toast. On the upside, the key still works, so now we have a backup for that key if I manage to lose it.

Chick Strand's Short Films at the Egyptian

Last night I went to an LA Filmforum tribute to Chick Strand, a filmmaker who passed away in July. I'd been intrigued by her bio, which includes a training in anthropology, and I wanted to see if her films could be considered ethnographic. That's a big yes.
Not only did she film a lot in Mexico (which, in the grand 19th century tradition of studying the "other" would make her work automatically ethnographic), her work paired sound and images in very evocative ways (which is ethnographic in my own reading, focusing more on ecstatic experiences than on narrative).

Her "Guacamole" (1976) moves from a market where a woman hunches under a huge side of meat, lifting it off a hook, to some dark interior where light filters through orange and red pebbled windows. Meanwhile the music's tone gets darker and darker, while a woman's voice undulates in gitano style, singing about the soul of a child. The play of light and water, droning tones.

One of my favorite shots was in "By the Lake" (1986). She shows a staircase flanked by dozens of blooming geraniums, pink and red bursts with green, vaguely geometric leaves. Some beautiful tone is building in the background, and then water starts darkening the stairs, which frees the music and it wanders.

We sat clapping in the dark for a woman who is dead. During the long pauses between films, as the projectionist loaded the next volley of images, I half expected to see this gypsy woman's form appear in the gray theater. What a strange incantation it was, since so many of her films evoke the angelic with shades of the demonic. But she stayed gone, at least to me, who did not know her.

Then when I got home people were sitting in the street enjoying a campfire. I joined them, though I'd missed the s'mores.

Two Options for Public Space

1. Fill it with people
2. Fill it with cars.

On Saturday our neighborhood got together to paint the street outside the ecovillage, with inspiration from Mark Lakeman of Portland's City Repair.

I wasn't really sure how many non-ecovillagers would show up, since we're actually not that well known in the neighborhood. It turned out that a few people had gone door to door in the week leading up to the streetpainting day, and had let neighbors know that we'd be hosting a fun event for kids. So the kids showed up in force! I hung out with three siblings whose grandma lives across the street. They enjoyed my cats, the fish in our lobby's aquarium, and the chickens in the courtyard.

My neighbor Kathy took a lot of pictures of the process, which can be viewed here.
And Erik Knutzen wrote about the day here.

We painted for hours and hours. There were tasty vittles available, and I didn't even notice that I was straining my muscles by squatting for hours at a time while painting a new streetcar line where the old one used to be. I made a brick stamping device from foamcore, an old broom handle, corduroy, and a lot of duct tape. Behold the results:



My neighbor Joe wrote a good description of the old H Line that ran down our street from 1920 to 1947. The lettering was done by another neighbor, Kwan Wu, who is currently studying signmaking at LA Trade Tech.

The trolley tracks connect up with the main design of a lizard DJ'ing on a bike wheel through a really neat wave section:



At the top of that picture you can see the green tarp enclosing the lot that will soon be a community garden, thanks to the efforts of ecovillagers and others who lobbied LAUSD to reconsider their plans to put in a parking lot on the site.

At the end of the day we decided to use an old coffee cart as an experimental free store outside our main building, moving all the things that had been gathering dust on our free table out there. People have already been taking things, which is good.

It was a lot of fun taking over the street and watching kids play wherever they liked. You do not see kids playing outside in our neighborhood until there is a space created for them (and their parents) to feel safe. Many drivers use our little two block street as a way to avoid traffic on Vermont, and gun their engines through the piddly stop signs that are meant to calm them down. Ecovillagers are now committed to reclaiming the street as often as possible, and have already shut it down again for a potluck since Saturday.

And now for that other way to use public space: fill it with cars. The Brewery is an arts complex in Lincoln Heights, just NE of downtown LA. I'd heard about it for a while, and we rode there for a friend's birthday party after Saturday's painting was done. Since the space is a converted industrial facility, I assumed there would be a visible emphasis there on sustainability as an aesthetic principle. Not so, unfortunately. The place is a fortress, with inward-facing units, and the courtyard is full of cars. There wasn't even bike parking, we just locked up to a rail. I could see some artists hanging out in their doorways, trying to experience the "colony" aspect of the place, but with so many cars parking and parked in front of them I don't see how they can even make eye contact. Maybe some artists there will soon revolt and be like, huh? Why should our courtyard be given over to cars? But I guess that explains how they can have lofts for $2,000 in somewhat ungentrified Lincoln Heights: secure parking for the Benz.

More Bike Riding in South Orange County

Since finding doctors is an annoying hassle, I've been making an inconvenient trek down to Laguna Hills to see mine since I moved back to So Cal in 2007. Fortunately and unfortunately, my insurance is changing this month, so on Wednesday I made my final trip to the hellish medical tower that houses my doctor's clinic.
I'd figured out a route from the Irvine Train Station to the Laguna Hills Mall area last year, but this time I decided to try a different route since I would be starting from UC Irvine. I've mapped the new route, which follows Moulton Parkway, and added it to my South Orange County bike map on Google:


View South Orange County by Bike and Transit in a larger map

Riding through Laguna Woods, a massive retirement community behind gates, I had to climb some long, steep hills. For some reason, though, I didn't start getting honked at till I turned onto busy El Toro Road, where a downhill let me fly. I think I even got honked at by a bus (!) that had a bike on its front rack (!!?).
Moment of triumph: I finally reach the medical tower and start locking my bike up to the railing I've used as an improvised bike rack since they lack bike parking, and a little old lady comes up to me and says, "How did you get here so fast? I was turning out of Laguna Woods, and saw you creeping up the hill, and you're here already?" I explained that since drivers in Orange County do not know how to behave properly around bicyclists, I tend to ride as fast as I can to keep up with traffic. "Well, you look great," she replied as she walked away.
So not only did I get to interact with one of the drivers of those seemingly impenetrable luxury OC cars, it was a positive one to boot!