The Bus Bench

Could These Be Unsold Embezzled Metro Drivers' Day Passes?

There is all sorts of wrong with Metro's poor compensation of bus drivers. The public's safety is but one facet (and apparently an insignificant one) of hiring drivers for rates at which even a lowly newspaper production schmoe would scoff: "Trainee Rate:$11.09 p/hr - Start Rate:$14.38 p/hr - Top Rate:$22.12 p/hr."

As such, it is no wonder that the Daily News found out about a Metro drivers' scam that has been employed for quite some time.

Lost and—now—Found: Skid Row After Shave

After the last three, or four, or however many days of the last weekend of the Summer, what better than a lost bottle of Skid Row After Shave upon which to stumble when returning those unread copies of War and Peace and The Trial to the library what is best known for a two-DUI mayor and a gubernatorial goober who is not fluent in the language printed on posters promoting hizzoner?

-BusTard

Holiday Zombies. Auto-Cannibalism. Upper West Side. New York. 12/25

Crime is down in the city of Lost Angeles and things aren’t that bad or so they say.

It’s Christmas in Los Angeles and I feel as if I’m in 1929, but with 1939 Berlin propaganda.

All of the happy blogs are talking about buying stuff with the occasional sad story about sick people, but sickness is random. In general if you look at the blogs and even the newspapers everyone is trying to be positive.

A few months ago I was waiting for the MTA 180 at Hollywood and Western and I read I think it was the Daily News and they said something about being more positive in their coverage in general. They actually talked about it on the front page.

Doom and gloom I guess is out of fashion.

You’d think that this was the early 80s or maybe the go-go mid to late 90s, but the economy is shit. I don’t how many new emoitcons get made. I don’t care how many stories people try to push on me about stupid fucking idiots running around inside the fucking mall with Santa Clause suits or about stories about how stupid, some asshole hipster thinks about the amount of lights that a suburban family puts on their front lawn.

In general I don’t care about any of the many stupid holiday stories in the blog-o-sphere that’s sole purpose is to get me to buy something or mock someone that everyone should feel superior to.

Who the fuck do these people think they are, taking pictures of private citizen’s lawns and laughing at them. Fucking assholes. Beat downs should come back seriously. I wish one of these assholes would take some random picture of something that I own and laugh at me on the internet. I’d go down to Los Feliz or Echo Park or wherever the little asshole lives and beat the shit out of them at Akbar.

“Why are you so hostile?” a prick.

People should probably start suing major websites who feel it's ok to mock them for being uncool.

I’m not stupid and I feel insulted. I feel insulted by blogs owned by advertising agencies (but I’m not sure, because who owns blogs and what they do seem to be a secret for some odd reason, what the hell are they hiding for) who run these blogs who think they can just create whatever reality that they want, by just not talking about certain things.

The economy has taken a nose dive and pretending like it’s not happening isn’t going to make it go away.

There are people who are living in tent cities less than 50 miles from where I live. They have run out of money and have been run out of their homes and this is just the beginning. 90% of the people I know are out of work or about to be out of work.

The only people who still have jobs are people who don’t really need jobs, bureaucrats gov’t employees or are very fucking lucky. That is it.

Everyone else, their jobs are fucking gone and they’ve been disappearing at an alarming rate since about 2005.

The people who  are “lucky” have jobs as “temps” or “freelancers” and have to paste together three jobs and work usually over 50 hours a week, so that they can continue to eat and with the WGA strike it’s gotten even worse.

I’ve heard the TVs in my building stay on longer and longer and get louder and louder.

“Are you ok?” me.
“Of course, this strike is funny,” my worried showbiz neighbor.

No this isn’t funny. The economy going to hell isn’t funny. There are lots of things that aren’t funny anymore, top of the list sarcasm and bullshit. These two things are no longer funny.

I feel like at times that I’m Charlton Heston in the movie Soylent Green. I want to yell to all my friends and my neighbors “Solyent Green, it’s people!!!!!”

To me the mindless just keep doing what they are doing, it is a sort of auto-cannibalism. It’s like LA is a city of zombies, that even after people’s bank accounts are almost dry and they are essentially dead economically they continue to keep coming and eating.

Why is Los Angeles like this? Why are people continuing to just charge things when their jobs are gone? When there are more and more people living on the streets? When millions of Americans have had their houses foreclosed on? When the job market is abysmal? When I see over 100 homeless people a day when I walk around my city and when the government for some odd reason doesn’t seem to care.

The liberals don’t care. Look at John Stewart and Stephen Colbert, they make fun of the right and the greedy conservatives, but they are the right. They are greedy conservatives they were just using the rest of “I hate Bush” America to make money.

They have jobs and they are like “Fuck you and your jobs.” They don’t even care about the people that they work with. They are rich. They don’t have to work. They can practice what they preach, but even green, electric driving movie stars when it comes down to it, they don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.

But yet the zombies keep moving and feasting.

At least people who are conservative are relatively honest.

This will have a trickle down effect. The crime will go up. People will start beating the shit out of each other again, the crime in the big city is related directly to the economy (sorry Chief Bratton, it’s not the size of the gun) and in LA it is quickly not becoming the island it once was.

You can’t move all of the poor people to Lancaster.

The people of LA are hungry, but they don’t have enough sense to not eat their own fingers.

by Browne

Project Homeless Connect Day

I went wandering round Skid Row today (not uncommon, but I had in mind seeing the fire damage done to the Union Rescue Mission on San Pedro; there was none visible on the exterior) and came across the annual Project Homeless Connect Day taking place on 6th Street between San Pedro and Wall Streets. I did not stay long, as they were setting up. I had hoped to return, but the day's activities prevented me from doing so.

 

-BusTard

How to play with others. 11/26

Yesterday on my daily walk I was on skidrow (which plays pretty nicely with the toy district) looking for a toy to set on fire for an art project. As I waded through the fragrance of piss, pigeons, and people who lived on the sidewalk with matted hair (on accident, not on purpose) I saw this vile disgusting glib thing in a “gallery” window.

I did a project just like this in jr. high and you know mine captured irony more than whatever this is supposed to be is.

Everyone is anti-social promotion except when it has to do with L.A. art and then no one will say anything bad about anyone, because you know “they tried” or they are “community builders.”

Fuck community builders. In art it is just an euphemism for people who “clean up” the neighborhood for business to throw all of the artists and interesting people out.

Do you think Gustav Klimt was a community builder?
Do you think Picasso was a community builder?
Do you think Egon Schiele was a community builder?
Do you think Andy Warhol was a community builder?

Artists aren’t suppose to be nice little networkers that keep suits happy. Artists are supposed to disturb the balance of the community. At least the suit community.

Accountants are community builders. Politicians are community builders. Teachers are who are married to accountants, politicians, and business people  are community builders.

In what century did fine artists become community builders?

Artists with any salt are supposed to be narcissistic assholes that burn a trail of destruction wherever they go or at the very least vomit on the host.

Community builder “artists”  and "indy" are people who will soon be given their walking papers after everything is nice and clean and safe.

Don’t believe me? Notice what happened to all the indy record stores and bookstores? Remember Midnight Special. It was a cherished member of the Santa Monica community until the community got safe and nice and clean and then it became a blight that needed to be gotten rid of.

Yeah everyone acted sad, but it's gone.

This is LA. Everyone is acting.

Remember when Venice was home to real artists. Not graphic artist who work in film and advertising and did art on the side, but real fine artists. The kind who could actually draw. The city was so happy they were there, because they got rid of crime and added a pleasant element. Then people realized they could get big bucks for the places that those artists were living in and now all of those artists live in Seattle.

You think corporate galleries aren’t coming? They’re coming. Just like corporate bookstores and corporate record shops and corporate coffee came.

The above picture is not art. Not even close. I’m not going to even mention where it was, because my point isn’t to crush people’s dreams or make people feel bad. My point is to simply give people options to read the other side of the coin.

And to put out an argument as to why people in the arts shouldn’t be so fucking pro business all of the time. Have some backbone, because real estate agents, politicians, and all the rest of them don’t give a shit about art.

If you’re an artist, you’re going out. At least have some dignity when it happens. Make them have to repaint the doors and redo the plumbing when they throw your ass out.

Don’t leave, pay them for the full month, though they threw you out in the middle of it. Don’t paint and clean out all of you stuff and then let them fuck your sister.

Business people and politicians care about money. And the people in bed with them who claim to be in the arts don’t care about art, they couldn’t, because you can’t do art if you’re connected to politics (see FoLAR fiasco for more info on that.) You can't do the art that changes the world. You can't do the art that makes people think. There's no way.

Real art picks a side and business and politicians don't have a side, because they might have to switch depending on which side is most beneficial.

People in the arts who you think are your friends and are in bed with politicians what they care about is money. Why should my tax dollars help some "greedy, selfish, doesn’t give a fuck about anyone else and doesn’t care about art and at the end of they day they simply want to make money" jerk.

Nothing is wrong with money or capitalism, but my tax dollars shouldn’t have to finance that.  I run my business myself with no grants. You know how?  I do things that people like. I know an amazing concept. Produce something that people like and work hard at it. Amazing concept I know.

I hate nonprofit art. I hate it. In LA not only does it attract the “money hungry, but doesn’t want to get a real job” types. It also tends to foster crap.

Nonprofit art is just water to grow the Venus Flytrap of business.

This isn’t Germany or France where people who actually love art get money. It’s LA, where the pleasant kiss asses get all kind of funding and continue to make LA a joke within the art world.

New York has a base of quality, but LA;  it doesn’t have that strong of a base to be handing out grants in regards to networking ability. It should be based on the quality of work and that’s obviously not how the money is doled out.

I’m for nonprofit agency for kids, nonprofit agencies for people without houses, nonprofit agency for people to better themselves, but I’m anti-nonprofit for upper middle class circle jerkers who are artless.

People always talk about making your own way. Doing it your way, except when it has to do with welfare for the upper middle class. You know student loans, tax breaks, and grants. It’s odd the same people who tell people to do it themselves always have their fucking hand out for some government money for their vanity projects.

I’m anti my tax dollars going for the above pseudo art. An art program that is directly helping people on skidrow or kids who live in the neighborhood I am completely for, but my money going to help so a suit can realize that they open up another piece of corporate commerce, no, I’m not for that.
________________________________________________________________________
Want to see the how to play with Barbie inappropriately correctly or just curious to see where the above person might have stolen the idea from and then reinterpreted pretty badly? Check out Kari French.

Oh for fun want to see where Murakami might have stole playing with corporate America from. Take a look at Jeff Koons.

You need to acknowledge that Murakami. Andy Warhol, yeah I see that, but you know you’re Jeff Koons doing Andy Warhol.

Murakami’s work is so close to Koons it’s practically plagiarism.

You know people in LA will buy into anything if they get a damn email saying it is cool.

Browne

Lofties Complain about Alcohol at Art Walk

OK, so it is not so much the alcohol at the downtown Art Walks about which the lofties are bitching, but that they are no longer safe in wandering from gallery to "gallery" with wine in hand.

It was not so long that I recall people at the Poet's Walk—which usta to be in conjunction with the downtown Art Walks—talking about how LAPD would roust the undesirables (i.e., non-Art Walk-looking walkers) even as less-scruffy looking folk, with plastic cups of wine openly in hand, watched from a close proximity. There was one incident in particular, whereby a sidewalk hair cutter did so while a crowd of alcohol-imbibing art walkers watched, and not ten feet away, the LAPD rolled up on some guy who was drinking from a brown bag. For some reason, no one seemed to care of the hypocrisy.

Too few seemed to understand that, once the undesirables were all gone, the LAPD would look elsewhere to justify their existence. (Surely one does not believe that ANY police force will do their job so well as to eliminate the need for a constabulary presence, hm?) Now, sure as shit, the inevitable has occurred.

In the 26 Oct-01 Nov edition of Los Angeles Garment and Citizen, Richard Coulter complains of a recent vice sting:

Overwrought About Undercover Cops at Art Walk

I watched in disgust as undercover Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers entrapped people holding cups of wine in front of galleries during [the recent Downtown Artwalk]. Having a glass of wine and going from gallery to gallery has been the way for years. Now, like mercenaries on a bug hunt, these guys infiltrate and sting.

They should walk through the crowd in uniform and tell people to go inside or they'll be ticketed. That would be the fair way to change the situation.

They're going to kill the goose before the city gets its golden egg. If I were a developer I'd be getting very nervous about how I was going to fill the glut of over- priced soft lofts that are supposed to feed the new entertainment district Downtown.

If anybody is considering buying into these places because they think there's a new burgeoning scene of fun developing, they might want to think again.

These lap dogs chasing somebody with a cup of wine and a stick of brie should think about the bigger picture.

The city should cancel all those tickets, and apologize for these over-zealous tactics.

Richard Coulter
Downtown

Well, Richard—and everyone else who thought that this new development would never occur, let us cite the following bit of poesy:

First they came for the Communists,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics,
  and I didn’t speak up,
    because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me,
  and by that time there was no one
    left to speak up for me.

-Rev. Martin Niemöller, 1945

Granted, I am sure there will be complaints over the analogy. But I contend that a Zen fashion should be applied: the attitude of those who desire control over others will do so by any and all means.

-BusTard

"Honk if You Love Open Space"?

Over on some blog that is too concerned with white-washing the reality of this dinky, two-bit town's cretinous core, we could not help but read, bug-eyed, the hypocrisy of some wanna-be west-siders acting arty in their laughable attempt to be green. A comment was posted, but we do not expect it to be there when our drunk collective arse comes to, sometime Saturday night, so we decided—as is the tradition by our asshole team leader, whose journeyman status harkens back two full decades in New York and Los Angeles publishing—to slap that shit on our own decrepit vehicle.

http://www.blogdowntown.com/blog/2879#comments

Surely this is a joke, right? Did Margaret Cho divorce Rev. Al because he has resurrected the L.A. Cacophony Society?

L.A. remains a laughing stock of any real metropolis—size does not matter, despite the sprawl of these sixty, seventy or too many more suburbs in search of a city; as such, eLAy will never be a cosmopolitan spot owing to the collective demeanour such as what Mr. Fuentes so eagerly offers above. And any real PR firm will be on the receiving end of two to a few grand for such "organic" PR. (I know, having worked with Priority, Delicious Vinyl, Atlantic and EMI Records/Music for some sixteen years, as a free agent.)

The harrowing irony of "Honk if you love open space" is simply astounding. Why not get your McAss out of your McHybrid, and make public transportation viable? Or work to get bicycle lanes created? Or make the wreck of wasted space, Pershing Square, something more than its most defining icon: a quarter-million-dollar public toilet that barely operates properly? (Pershing Square is the way it is today for no other reason than it used to be the town square; the activity of such a public space frightened the powers that-be and so the space underwent several changes to disabuse the once-popular notion that it could be a centre for speaking up. Just try walking on what passes for grass there, if you wanna find out where your tax dollars are being wasted.)

I may well have made a mistake to come back out here. Instead of wasting my time bitching about obvious hypocrisy, I could have taken the 1 uptown to 116th, walked through the gates and languished—with a good book, of course, or maybe just a fat flask of single malt scotch—under the trees on the east side (where the Wi-Fi works best, just inside the little wire "fence") of Columbia's quad, or some other green open space. (Or, as it is now the weekend, gone downtown from there to The Park for a car-free, HONK-free day near the Reservoir, or down to the round Orchard at Houston, to enjoy that which the hicks in this two-bit shanty-town cannot seem to do: STOP DRIVING CARS and START MAKING A DIFFERENCE.

Do I really have to belabour the bleeding obvious? If you have to "honk if you love open space," you contribute directly to the paucity of it as well as the ugliness of what is left in southern CA.

I can only imagine that if some bums pushed an Ag[gro]bin—from what usta be Skid Row—into a parking space in front of Meléndrez there on Olive, and put out a sign that said, "Honk if you think I give a fuck about your open space," the "greenanistas" would be seeing red.

In the end, there would be just another parking space taken up, temporarily, and vacated in a more violent fashion when one of the Melendrez Sisters called the cops.

When I lived on 9th and C, and went uptown to 110th (for the express desire to wander through The Park to 59th), even my New York gait of seven MPH (a lazy gait, that; be sure to check your rear view mirrors when my Brooklyn boot-leather gets going) is average yet requires some TWO HOURS. I spent many years in Downtown L.A. long before the lofties arrived (can anyone tell name the unique aspect of the olde post office at 5th and Spring, down the street from the Valuta —where KOMA, Feral House, Transparency and Angry Thoreauan were housed?) and it were no more than a quick juant up to Temple, then back to the office, then on down to the little cafe where Spring split, and if I wanted to start to stretch my legs, down to Washington Blvd. I was back to my own space in an hour. I imagine I passed a few "parks" by any Los Asseleno's defintion, not to mention some self-serving architects narrow perspective of "open space."

-BusTard

http://www.transportationalternatives.org/
http://www.nycsr.org/

Not Yet Water Under the Bridge. Center of Inquiry. 9/16

We went to see Gil Garcetti at the Center of Inquiry.  The Center of Inquiry has some interesting programs, they hate god and church and things. They say it’s not that, but they want you to think. Yeah sure. Nothing is wrong with hating god, but if you hate god, just say you hate god. Don’t have things early on Sunday mornings and then say it’s about helping people not be addicted to god and to help people think. It's obvious the Center of Inqurity is a bit obsessed with god and his mininions and it's more than just thinking it's stupid.

God and the forces that created him don't want you to think. God wants you on your knees. And I'm sorry while I love the programming of the Center of Inquirty it feels a bit churchy to me and I don't like that one aspect of it. Don't really need a religious alternative. Maybe I'll start a philosophy club on Wednesdays...

So anyway owing to that usually when I go to the Center of Inquiry everyone is old and Jewish and liberal, I got family members in the demographic (marriage, divorce, adoptions…) I knew it was going to be lots of questions, that weren’t really questions but statements of how “ok” everyone was.

“When I was in Africa helping the poor and fly infested I taught 12,000 people to read,” helpful old person.

The book is beautiful. Gil is a great photographer. The exhibit at the Fowler you should go see. I hope what I’m typing here doesn’t discourage you from appreciating his art, because it should not.

As an artist I respect him immensely and will spend large quantities of my not very hard earned money on anything that he puts out.

But he’s into this water thing. Water safety for people in West Africa. When I came in all the old people were like to me directly “He’s talking about West Africa.”

You know I kind of knew that. That’s why I showed up. The Center of Inquiry isn’t some place you just wander into.

I guess it was weird to see a West African (ok, I’m half, but close enough)  at an event about Africa. I’m not saying that in my normal sarcastic way, but in a that’s a real reality kind of thing in LA.

The thing I wondered though is that while this is all great. Why didn’t Gil do anything about the poor people in LA while he was the DA. Skid row was a scary, nasty, crappy place while he was working right up the street, of course this judgment is harsh. But I’ve bought over 300 dollars in books by this guy, so I can think I’m allowed that question.

I know we could all do more. I suppose it’s always a bit easier to do more for people in an exotic foreign locale. If people are in a postcard they seem more pure. Little kids that don’t speak English and carry jugs of water on their head seem a bit more pure than a 16 year old junkie prostitute that will suck someone off for a rock. In person people aren’t so pure and you sort of can’t help but feel that they got in certain situations because they must be evil in some ways. It’s like they are intentionally incorrigible. I sure as hell don’t want to help that bum that wanders around Hillhurst, maybe that’s why. Familiarity breeds contempt.

Or the bad guys in LA have better publicists.

Browne- ShameTrainLA