Westward Ho!

Descanso

If you've ever passed a place with "Descanso" in the name (such as L.A.'s Descanso Drive) and wondered what that meant, here's a rather depressing explanation:

Descanso is the word given to a roadside memorial that commemorates the site where a person was killed, typically as the result of a vehicle-related accident. The descanso is often marked by a cross with an inscription of the person's name and brief biographical information. The descanso is usually created and maintained by family members or friends of the person who was killed. Unlike a grave site headstone, which marks the place where the body is laid, a descanso marks the last place on earth where the person was alive. A descanso symbolizes a loved one whose life was taken in a violent and unexpected death.

The origination of the practice of erecting roadside crosses in the United States is uncertain. One possibility, born perhaps from American folklore, is that pioneer travelers were forced to hurriedly bury their deceased companions in graves close to the trails or roads, and they erected simple crosses to mark the graves. The origin of descansos as a term that denotes a roadside cross or memorial is more certain.

You Learn Something New Every Day

I don't know whether it's because of the namesake waxes, the curvaceous women, or the reputation of the country as a place where good times are to be had, but it seems to me somehow fitting that the Brazilian Consulate is located in the (Larry) Flynt Publications building.

(I was at the Consulate to hand in my visa application -- I'll be visiting Rio for a few weeks in June.)

More on the Elevators of the Central Library

David Bunn envisioned two passenger elevators in the Tom Bradley Wing as more than a way to get from one floor to another. The artist transformed them into “observation pods” traveling between subject divisions by using some of the Library’s seven million catalog cards rendered obsolete by the new state-of-the-art automation system. With these cards Bunn papered the inside of the elevator cabs and lined the shafts which are visible      through a viewing window in the cabs. The elevators also display a digital readout of the Dewey Decimal numbers for each floor the elevator passes. “The elevators and the card catalog together form a kind of ‘core sample’ of the library,” explained Bunn. “As the catalog dutifully classifies and finds a place for every book, so the elevators travel deep through the center of the building, encompassing and accessing all the building’s holdings.”

Source: http://www.lapl.org/central/art_architecture.html

My Favorite Library

(title sung to the tune of Robyn Hitchcock's "My Favourite Buildings"...)

I have to put in a good word for the Central Library in Downtown L.A., one of the most beautiful and underrated buildings in the city and a personal sanctuary for yrs truly whenever I'm killing a few hours in the area. They were actually close to demolishing this in the '70s, which wasn't such a radical idea at the time, just another bit of ye olde history-doesn't-exist-here modernist mythmaking and self-fulfilling prophecy. But they didn't demolish it, and a few decades and some nips and tucks later, it's stunning, full of detail, a cross between 1926 "Spanish" deco (think L.A.'s Union Station, although that's from 1939) and a small, vaguely exotic revision of the "City Beautiful"/Beaux-Arts ideal.

It's also locally infamous for being one of the only places downtown where anyone can loiter, sleep, or use the bathroom without being reprimanded by security. Downtown L.A. is thought to have the highest concentration of homeless people in a city that's cited widely as being the homeless capital of the United States, and guess where many of them go when they get kicked out of the shelters at sunrise, or just get tired of walking all day and want to take a leak and look at a magazine? Libraries are great for stopping, refreshing, collecting yourself. Better than Starbucks, and cheaper. The Central Library even has a cafe, if coffee has to be part of the equation.

The elevators are completely amazing -- the walls are clear fiberglass panels with the old printed catalogue cards lined up behind them, floor to ceiling, in alphabetical order. I think this transparent-walls-displaying-cool-innardy-shit is a trendy design concept lately, feeding off the building-materials-mania of a few years ago -- I just heard about an idea for a school (K-12 or somewhere in between) where the building itself would be part of the curriculum and students would get full visual access to the support beams, aluminum siding, wiring, etc. (Back when I was a product of NYC's decaying public school system, we didn't need prize-winning architecture to see any of this stuff, and we got asbestos as an added bonus.)

Anyway, yeah, there are books, and signs that helpfully tell visitors that most of the collection is deep-stacked away somewhere out of reach, and ask for it if you can't find it. But for a main library circa 2007 (libraries in crisis omgwtf), what's on the shelves ain't bad. It just about made my day yesterday when i saw a copy of Excelsior You Fathead.

These pictures don't do the library justice, but oh well. If you're in L.A. you've probably seen it a million times anyway.

Manhole Covers

Tonight in my Infrastructure class we got off on a tangent about manhole covers. I sheepishly mentioned that a few years ago someone gave me a book about manhole covers for my birthday -- and everyone in the class who knew me started cracking up. I guess I've been elected class weirdo.

How Many Meth Labs Are In YOUR Town?

Find out on the DEA's National Clandestine Laboratory Register. The City of Los Angeles had seven, while the County had a supermegafuckload. Since I'm in the borough of Brooklyn, NY (a/k/a "Kings County") right now, I looked that up -- only one meth lab, and it's in Bensonhurst. I can't say I'm especially surprised.

Housing Inspection

Since August, my neighbors and I have complained about the conditions in our university-owned apartment building -- gates that don't lock properly, rusting metal, rotting wood on door frames, broken exterior bricks, smelly/dirty carpeting (I got mine replaced), holes in the walls (I bought spackle the day I moved in), broken bike racks, a hedge out front that homeless people were using as a naptime area (we got this removed), not to mention problems with crickets, roaches, waterbugs, mice, and at least one snake (the pest-control issue is being dealt with case-by-case, but something much more comprehensive needs to happen). But we've been collectivizing and reaching out to various people, and later this morning, at last, the big guns are coming in: the Los Angeles Housing Department is inspecting for code violations. What that means is...

Properties that do not meet City and State codes regarding issues of maintenance, use, or habitability are cited with a "Notice to Comply". Property owners are generally given 30 days to have the required repairs completed. A re-inspection is performed to verify that the corrective work was done.  

If repairs are not completed within the time period specified on the Notice to Comply, the owner will be summoned to an administrative hearing at the Housing Department to determine the reason for non-compliance and when the required repairs will be completed. If further enforcement steps become necessary, the file may be forwarded to the Office of the City Attorney as a criminal complaint.

The news came in the form of a flyer on my door Tuesday morning, one day after an internal inspection by the university's housing office -- I don't know the overall results of that survey, but the checklist they left behind on my kitchen counter suggests that I've been doing my part to keep things up to whatever their departmental code is. (Basically, my smoke detector works and there aren't any immediate fire hazards or accumulated garbage -- but then, I'm paranoid enough that I take out my trash nearly every day now.)

My fear is that our building will just squeak through the LAHD inspection and our housing people will continue to do the absolute minimum and spend the least money they can until they can get us out of here in May (when our contracts end) and start work on the extensive teardown/renovation/miracle transformation they have planned.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Planetizen has just published its 2007 Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs, ranking the top 25 schools in the U.S. and Canada. (The top 25, both overall and by reputation alone, were all in the U.S.). My school did well enough -- number 9 overall on a list populated by Berkeley, MIT, and some Ivies -- but the results are definitely skewed towards the coasts, with a few outliers in the Great Lakes, Ohio, and the western coast of Florida. It's a bit sad that our major universities aren't better-distributed across the country. I think our fixation on Ivies (and maybe the top California schools?) has created a brain drain on parts of the U.S. that desperately need that intelligence. Moreover, cities in the inner South and New West (Phoenix, et al) are only going to move further towards complete privatization and increasingly piss-poor social services unless someone steps in and gets people thinking about public planning, civic engagement, and issues that are more important than just protecting property values and shutting down adult bookstores. I realize that the deck is stacked against universities that don't already have built-in "reputations" -- and many of those less-famous universities are in those critical geographical areas, e.g. Nevada. But with Nevada's population growing tremendously, what can it do to retain bright students and put a school like UNLV on the map for more than just sports? Because the image above troubles me.

Dome Day

A quick note to pass on word about a benefit that Chaki's band Mystic Defender is playing -- the purpose is to generate enough money to preserve Dome Village, "a non-profit organization which offers a structural alternative for homeless people unable or even unwilling to live in traditional shelters or return to the 'mainstream' life style." The 20 Omni-Sphere geodesic domes that make up the village were designed by a one-time student of Bucky Fuller. The site's landlord, responding to the shocking surge in downtown land values, has raised the tenant's rent by 700 percent, or as a Downtown News article states, from "$2,500 a month (plus $10,000 in annual taxes) to more than $18,000 a month."

While I don't agree with the across-the-board assertion of founder and soi-disant Republican Ted Hayes (who himself is homeless) that homelessness is a choice and a full-stop rejection of mainstream values, I appreciate that countercultural ethic (I've been learning about the street politics of the post-neoliberal world and trying to steal material from Neil Smith's The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City for an upcoming paper). I'm torn between applauding the hyper-romanticized outlaw nobility of the hobo/squatter aesthetic and the fact that Hayes' survivalist-wackjob philosophies trivialize the very real plight most homeless people have, namely mental illness and addiction and just plain horrible circumstances. His project's emphasis on self-sustainability and personal responsibility is admirable though -- if a little uncomfortably like a bizarro-world Ayn Rand. But for those homeless people who have all their mental faculties intact and didn't get their legs blown off in a war and have even a smidgen of optimism about their future, Dome Village's "workshops in computer literacy, jobseeking, legal issues, and children's theatre, a community art program, two cricket teams, [and] community garden programs" may very well prove useful.

Discovering L.A.

There's so much I'm still discovering in this town. Tonight I finally get to check out one of the hipster "urban pioneer" outposts of the still-sketchy New Downtown, a bar called the Golden Gopher (which I've seen a few times from the 37 bus as it goes east on 8th). I don't go out much at night (the plight of the carless in L.A.), so I'm always really grateful when I can coordinate an evening get-together with someone who does have access to a car.

In this case the coordination at the top level was done by the Associated Students of Planning and Development, the student-run organization that puts together extracurricular social, professional, and academic events. I've been attending some of their meetings and am starting to get involved with their "scholarship committee" -- as far as ideas, I've been thinking about how to use the (physical) city to help make first-year planning students more passionate about and invested in what they're going to be spending (at least!) the next few years doing.

I love the enthusiasm and commitment my professors (and their favorite theorists/leaders/crackpots) have, and how there's a spark there that transcends the drudgery of academia. My fellow students are quite intelligent, but it seems like a lot of them have just come out of undergrad and still have this sort of "college" context for what they're doing -- looking at all this as a bunch of cumbersome homework and Supreme Court opinions to be memorized and grades to be gotten, and you can tell who the older students are, the ones who've been out in the field or on the battleground, by the glint in their eyes and the shake in their fists when they talk about bureaucracies, interest groups, personal heroes, sworn enemies, bungled decisions, and brilliant ideas.

The madness of The City (TM) is thrilling, even on those days when I feel like strangling it with its own red tape. I get this feeling from the Ph.D.s and second-years in one of my upper-level classes, but it would be so terrific to see more of this from the younger kids, as well as more desire to just get cocky and try to conquer the sheer volume of history and information and photographic/filmic evidence and tactile, sensory stuff out there. Learn with our eyes. Learn with our feet. Our tastebuds too, maybe (when I first got here I figured out my way around town with printouts of Jonathan Gold's restaurant reviews in one hand and an MTA route map in the other).

My idea is to have groups of students and faculty do self-guided walking tours of Southern California communities by their particular planning history -- not just focusing on one pivotal event (like slum clearance or freeway construction), but a long and winding narrative that accounts for trivial changes as well as major ones, visual totems of consensus, dissent, compromise, what is versus what would have been if one small variable were different. And things that haven't changed at all, that have remained extant against all odds (not so much stuff that's been preserved by law, but places that have just... survived). It would be fun to focus on the Valley, which is just rife with secret history and the ghosts of Charles Phoenix housewives and roads to hell paved by kooky cigar-chomping land speculators. And I'm kinda thinking about touring some of the sleepier, less-trod parts of unincorporated/general-law northeast L.A. County -- like Montrose and Sierra Madre.

I hope we can pull this off (just once or twice, even). I've been a total hermit since school started and I'm dying to go exploring again.