The Bus Bench

Dead Escalator Report Ten: 18 Jan 2008

A  person  at  the  beginning  and  end  of  this  video  of  Pershing  Square  at  5th  elected  to  not  get  involved  with  the  fight  (out  of  sight,  on  the  lift)  that  was  breaking  out  just  as  I  stopped  filming. 18 Jan 2008.

 

 

 

 

A rare stop at the Beverly-Vermont stop provided me with the inevitable dead escalator.

 

 

I am finding it tiresome that the MTA obviously does not care to do more than place yellow cones where it does not work:

 

Dead Escalator Report Nine: 17 Jan 2008

The UP escalator has been down for well over two weeks now. What gives? And why do the good people of Los Angeles believe that this dilapidated agency—the MTA—can possibly build a world-class subway system if they cannot even keep the relatively few escalators working?

Westlake-MacArthur Park south entrance on 17 January 2008

 

 

I think you’re being a little too sensitive. Downtown LA. 01/16

Bastards of The Party post-talk
Video sent by shametrainla

Went to a lovely film festival at the Red Cat about black LA and how it started.

The African-American community in Los Angeles started around Central Avenue, because if you were coming over from the south on the train to escape racism, you weren’t allowed to go into Union Station.

You know, because of racism…possibly that should have been a sign to turn around, but at least the weather out here is nice.

Yes, LA used to have trains and Central Avenue was a stop, but we still have racism though. (I wouldn’t talk about it, but certain fucking assholes won’t let it go, keep reading my story.)

Central Avenue was on full blast through the 30s and 40s. There was a burgeoning music scene. One of my dreams currently is to buy a spot on Central Avenue.  At the end of the 40s the African-American community even had a little mini civil rights movement, but then Chief William Parker moved to town.

You know Parker Center. It was named for that asshole.

Up until the 1950s the black community in LA was just extorted by the cops, which in retrospect was much better than what happened in the 1950s.

1950 is when Chief Parker came to Los Angeles and decided that black people needed to be controlled (but he wanted to be fair, so he also made it very hard for Latinos), so he specifically recruited cops from Alabama and Mississippi just getting out of the military who knew exactly how to treat black people.

“Chief Parker wasn’t corrupt, just a steadfast racist,” Mike Davis.

(Reference for people not intimately aware of the details of how most black people got to the US: Alabama and Mississippi, is viewed as a very scary place for black people, more specifically older black people. It’s down river. As a slave in America, which is how most black people got to North America, West Indies, Central, and South America, we worked as slaves for over 300 years…I’m half Garifuna my father's people got to the Honduras on route to be sold into slavery, probably America, but we decided, fuck that. Anyways the worst place to get sold in America was down river, because there were huge plantation and people would beat you and not feed you and it was hot, and they had enough money to let you die and replace you with another one, because you were property, so Alabama and Mississippi holds a special place in African-Americans lives, back when they were negroes. The people who remember the people who experienced that are dying off now and America likes to pretend that slavery didn’t happen and most Americans get really annoyed if you bring it up. Some of you are probably annoyed reading this right now.)

I told the story of how the LAPD went to the south to recruit cops to several of my friends and everyone sort of doubted it, “They wouldn’t hire certain kind of people just to fuck with black people,”  but luckily I took some of those friends with me to Disney Hall’s Red Cat to see a series of film on the Legacy of the Black Panther movement in LA, it was very interesting.

I was actually shocked that the Red Cat had an exhibit about black people and racism in America, more specifically Los Angeles. They usually like talking about race in that abstract way where you sort of forget it’s about race. For some odd reason no one likes discussing the MAJOR race issues that are going on in Los Angels.  It’s not even February and there are like three black people left in LA, well  actually since we’re all gone, I guess its ok to talk about race on that level in regards to us. No one left to get mad but a bunch of college educated “please like me and of course you can touch my hair” and skidrow black people.

Both groups are completely harmless.

I used to very much like downtown LA, punks are nicer than yuppies, but it has been becoming increasingly uncomfortable for me. I went to Ciudad and they actually looked shocked that I came in.

I mean they did that pause thing.

They looked at me like I was an alien. It was really fucking embarrassing. Three of the people who worked at the front.

You try to go to dinner with your friends and then you have to deal with that fucking look and they didn’t even have enough common fucking sense to be discreet about it, so your friends ask you stupid questions like, “Why were they looking at you like that?”

Why the fuck do you think they were looking at me, because the only black people they see in downtown are begging for change. And the reason they are begging for change is because there are no fucking jobs for skilled or unskilled labor anymore. They are begging from change, because they are the decedents of slaves that just got the right to vote in the 1960s and then in the 1970s all of the factories that provided people with working class jobs moved out and people are prejudice. You know like they prejudge you and assume you must be a certain way simply because you look a certain way.

And I'm also a bad reminder of how fucked up the system is.

That’s why they fucking looked at me like that.

Stop asking me stupid fucking questions.

(Advice, if your friend of color has to experience a racist event in front of you unless you're willing to walk out or shoot someone, don't say anything. Don't ask why is this happening? Oh and don't do this little philosophical conversation on race and how it doesn't exist in your mind and how you're not that way and how maybe it's not race but my radiant beauty that forces people to stare. If I were that beautiful I would be a super model and this non-action and fake concern does nothing, but make your friend want to smack you. I'm not saying it's right, I'm simply saying what the reality is.)

See that’s racism right there, that kind of bullshit can impact if I make money or not, because who is going to want to work with someone who gets funny looks at a restaurant.

And I know those assholes at Ciudad have seen a black person before this is LA. We’re pretty much working security for a little above minimum wage at every museum and office building in downtown LA.

Oh and by the way Ciudad is a fucking horrible restaurant. I paid like 50 bucks for some soggy nachos and the bathroom that is about on par cleanliness wise with the public toilet on 5th and Hill.

Anyways, I was vindicated in all my statements. The southern law enforcement imported to LA, the no jobs equals lots of violence theory (shooting down the silly arguments of god, morality, and all that other bullshit; if people can’t eat, they will kill you that's a promise) downtown LA was a horribly racist place that is trying to recapture it’s vintage roots of exclusion based exclusively on appearance. I swear to God if another person looks at me funny I’m going to end up in County, because this is really getting on my last fucking nerves.

We watched a film where the filmmaker talked to Mike Davis who wrote a book called City of Quartz which said the exact same things that I had been saying for years. 

Though I think he’s probably been saying longer, since he is older, but I figured out the same stuff, by just being in LA.

I need to buy that book and carry it with me.

“It sure is true, here look a white guy said it too,” Browne whose vagina and skin color makes her credibility questionable. It also according to some makes her status of non-homelessness also questionable, though this white guy because he agrees with too many brown people, credibility also comes into question, but still crazy white guy more believable than not that crazy brown chick.

I’ve always known if you can get a white guy to say it, even a crazy one, atrocities sound more believable. That’s why LA City Beat has two white guy British writers. They can talk about tough issues without the credibility issues that they would have with someone like me saying the exact same thing.

Thank you Mr. Liberal White Guy, seriously...

by Browne

The Bus Bench attacks A Safety Car

Wandering round the central city last night when a scraping noise captured my attention. The bus bench at 5th and Olive, long since unmoored and neglected by the MTA, City of Los Angeles and who knows what other negligent agencies, apparently had had enough. It scrambulated across the tarmac toward the "safety car" parked nearby, and pounced. I managed to film it just before it made the kill.

No ice-skaters nor incense-sellers were harmed or killed in the bizarre attack.

-BusTard

 

 

Dead Escalator Report Eight: 15 Jan 2008

Today was a record-setting one for the number of dead escalators: five between Westlake-MacArthur Park and Pershing Square NOT including 7th/Fig. (Sometimes my olde arse just ain't up for walking to all three exits as well as throughout the late afternoon rush-hour crowds.)
What the hell is going on when so many escalators in so few stations along the Red Line—during rush hour, to boot—are out of service? Is this the way Roger Snoble, Pam O'Connor and the perpetually duplicitous MTA board members are trying to make up for the burgeoning fiscal deficits?

Anyhow, here they are:

 

 

 

 

 

-BusTard

Report Seven: 14 January 2008

It has been a long and grueling weekend, and I had to give the MTA a rest so as to tend some long overdue chores. (Perhaps I should bill the MTA for all the escalator monitoring, seeing as they have lately had far fewer dead ones despite the continuing absence of personnel on teh platforms.)

Anyhow, Monday meant business as usual. I skipped doing the usual Westlake to Union Station, and hit only three stops. Nevertheless, two of those three stations each had an escalator out of service.

-BusTard

Wilshire-Vermont from street, 14 Jan 2008:

 

Pershing Square platform, 14 Jan 2008

 

Tire Fire on Saturday, 12 January

I had hoped to get these shots up over weekend, but I was too busy re-gifting cinder blocks to passing motorists (haha)

No, really, I was wandering round the L.A. River and saw the smoke. I scrambled atop a nearby building and started recording what I though were an oddly intense house fire. I found out later that it were this.

 

-BusTard