Los Angeles has only started to reveal its secrets and it is already time to go. Tomorrow we will take our mobile video rig back out for some more rock shows and this time we will board a plane bound for Chile. Over the next two weeks we will be here:
3/1 Santiago
3/3 Buenos Aires
3/4 Buenos Aires
3/7 San Paulo
3/8 Rio de Janeiro
3/9 Belo Horizonte
3/12 Bogota
3/14 Caracas

Tags: touring

I am slowly morphing from tourist into a Los Angeles resident, as I set out on my daily driving missions armed with print-outs from Google Maps and a GPS backup. I have established some ground rules for these solo missions. The first of which is that I can only travel on surface roads, avoiding all highways. This is generally my rule with city driving, except when I am passing through, which is all I have been doing this year.
However, I already see some geo-relationship problems looming on the horizon. Yesterday I called Johnny while stopped at a red light and asked; “If I am at the intersection of Pico Blvd & Crenshaw, then what neighborhood am I in?" A few Los Angeles friends have offered to loan me their Thomas’ Guide maps, but I have declined with a “No thanks, I have a GPS”. But I am coming to realize that the GPS is best for getting from point A to Point B but the technology encourages a lack of interest in the spaces between the start and end points and provides no clues to how neighborhoods fit together to create the larger city of Los Angeles.
Yesterday, I followed my GPS over to Venice Blvd in Culver City to visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the new-ish exhibition BIRDFOOT: Where America’s River Dissolves into the Sea at The Center for Land Use Interpretation. I had heard about CLUI's birdfoot project while working with Matthew Coolidge in Houston, and while Matt’s first-hand stories are more colorful, the CLUI slideshow provides a muti-directional overview of this seriously downstream delta region. The delta terminology birdfoot or bird’s foot originates from the bifurcated nature of this unique watery terrain. These narrow lobes of Louisiana land are located between branches of the Mississippi River, as it nears the Gulf of Mexico. This is remote and delicate land that has been hard hit by the recent hurricanes.The CLUI presentation in Culver City reveled a landscape that is dangerously over engineered to accommodate the demands of the petroleum industry.

photo is from the CLUI exhibition BIRDFOOT & links to their website

Tags: LosAngeles

Crowdsourcing video- "larger than any of us, made possible by all of us"
The collective video HOPE.ACT.CHANGE was created in support of Barack Obama's run for president & the video grows as participants upload their campaign photos onto Flickr and tag them with "hopeactchange".This is a smart project that lists Obama as the CEO of Inspiration- fantastic- it sounds like a line from a George Clinton/ P-Funk song.
Speaking of crowdsourcing- I am now running out to my first class at THE PUBLIC SCHOOL, an experimental school based on peer to peer learning that is taking place at the TELIC Arts Exchange in Chinatown, Los Angeles.

Tags: ideas

Robert Smithson, excerpt, 1970

Tags: art

Slideshow - I took a trip out to Wendover, UT with Matthew Coolidge from the Center for Land Use Interpretation and graduate students from the Curatorial Practice Program at the California College of Art. We were talking about 'curating space' while exploring the wide open basin of the Great Salt Lake and the hidden military history of this region. We also made treks to visit famous works of Land Art; such as Smithson's Spiral Jetty, Holt's Sun Tunnels and the CLUI's Wendover Complex. It was a fantastic field trip & I cannot wait to see the project this curatorial team will execute out in Wendover next month.

Tags: ideas, travel

This rig we are hauling down the highway is huge, but nothing compared to the size of Texas. For two days it felt like the state was endless, but we finally pulled through and was welcomed into the West with an awesome sunset over the mountains of New Mexico. Endless thanks to Delicia, John & Hayden who helped us get out of Houston on schedule.

Tags: travel