The Bus Bench

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

From the makers of transformer toilets....

First we brought you transformer toilets, then we brought you when toilets don't work, now the directors of those two great posts bring you:

"The toilet door is broken, but fuck it we'll just pry it open and use it anyway..."

We don't have a clip of the guy urinating with the door open, but we do have the pried open door.

 

Monday Morning APT Maintenance

Early Monday morning I spied a CBS/Decaux van on 5th at Hill. The APT panel was open and I took the opportunity to look into the bowels.

 

-BusTard

The Continuing Saga of the Ever-broken APT on 5th and Hill

The Automatic Pay Toilet on 4th and Hill remains closed. No LCD panel, no news, no nothing. What the hell is going on with the assholes who are supposed to get this over-priced hunk of green metal going?


Round the corner at 5th and Hill, the APT was again out of service:

APTbrokent5thHill08Dec2007
Video sent by shametrainla

The APT at 6th and Main was working, as was the one outside the URM on San Pedro. (The latter is never not working, as the mission probably keeps a close eye on it.)

Yes, I am obsessed with the maintenance of these things, as should be our negligent "city."

-BusTard

APTs go AWOL

A new wave of municipal idiocy is sweeping the city: the crotchety olde kiosks employed to peddle all manner of not-quite-newspapers are being forced to don a green sheath that may be uniform in their appearance to the infrequent Automatic Pay Toilets being potted hither and thither.

Gone, soon, will be the splintered, split-door bodegas, of a sort, that tend to spew questionable print media, Tijuana bibles, tabloids and the even L.A. Times; in their stead will be the twin of the shit-buckets coloured as glamourously as IBM PCs in the 1980s.

Speculation abounds that the extended police powers will allow a constabulary reach that circumvents the distinct boundaries of the First Amendment: the new deal allegedly holds that the skin of these great green closets are a gray area that allow the long of the arm to rifle through the nether regions of commercial print products, even as the former newsagents were supposed to have some control of the interior.

The APT "coin" panel on 5th at Pershing Square.

The APT on 6th at the edge of Skid Row L.A.

That is all yet to be seen.

Meantime, what the hell is with the elimination of the two bits entry fee to the APTs and that are, to be blunt, fucken broken? What difference does it make if a pay toilet is free if the god-damned thing is not available to the public?

Here is a hint that bean-counters (not you, Tony V, nor the extramarital beans you been counting under the covers) of Los Angeles: the half-million for each APT is gone, so stop wasting tax money on services not available. Strip the APTs, cite the private contractors who failed to maintain them, and install a chamber pot on every corner.

The BusTard pleads you do this, lest his winged bastard arse fly over that stilted Art Deco attempt on Temple and drop a load of what he really thinks.

Transformer Toilet. Pershing Square

As promised (from last week's wee teaser) here is the exciting full-length feature of the Pershing Square Public Toilet in action.

The John Williams Inadvertent Choir was in town; after begging some change from the nearby news agent, we stuffed all two of the so-called singers into the waterless closet along with a listless photographer and an alleged lawyer. (The latter was in case we had to evict some bum, crackhead or whore wanting to enjoy the low rent of 25¢ for 20 minutes.)

What can we state? A few minutes, two bits and an urgent desire to shit (or at least piss) will prompt the exciting action from any given quarter-million-dollar public toilet in a way that will leave one wondering: all that noise, all the waiting, and all the hullabaloo. . .  for a commode that secretly flushes itself?

TransToilet
Video sent by shametrainla

Transformers: Toilets in Disguise!

There has been a fair amount of coverage regarding the great green over-priced public toilets in downtown L.A. (And there is presently a new toilet nearly built at Santa Monica and Vermont.) And yet there has been one question not asked (at least not publicly): what happens during the wash cycle after someone steps out of the kiosk? Are there little trolls that come out of the quartered floor? Is the interior bathed in nuclear radiation? Would someone die or be hideously mutilated were they to find themselves trapped inside when the wash cycle starts? Or are these small monstrosities pods for the Transformers, and the movie is soon to be reality?

Of course, we here at ShameTrain/The Bus Bench had to have the answer to the shitty question that normal folks most likely would not bother asking. With a pocket full of quarters and a day of nothing to do (no special day, granted, as that is most every day for us), we stood in line while a bunch of simmering, piss-filled people waited and vocally wondered why the hell everyone in line seemed weird. (We learned that if you enter the toilet and then exit before the door has automatically closed, the door will not open for twenty minutes, owing to the absence of a person to engage the "unlock" button inside. A few other people learned it, to, or so I imagine, because when we realised what we had done—upon getting the last bit of footage—
we quickly departed to let everyone stand for another 20 minutes in the noon-day sun illuminating Pershing Square.

Enjoy the teaser, and check back in later this week for the full-length video.

-BusTard


TransToiletTeaser
Video sent by shametrainla