Click here to listen. This is all mixed LIVE. Really cool.

Thanks to EPICponyz for spotting this!

 
Led by Grammy-winning ex-Digable Planets MC Ishmael “Butterfly” Butler—who now does business under the moniker Palaceer Lazaro—Shabazz Palaces have been turning out some opaquely produced, envelope-pushing tunes for a couple of years now.

Early on, almost two years ago now, they got director Khalil Joseph—who recently directed Seu Jorge’s “The Model” video—to put together something for their tune “Bellhaven Meridian.” Lots to love in the untypical video, including the fact that it’s one take. But Joseph takes an interesting short detour to recreate a scene from Killer of Sheep, African-American director Charles Burnett’s poetic black & white neo-realist film from 1978.

Depicting the trials of a Watts slaughterhouse worker, his family, and his community, Killer… went unreleased for a while due to the prohibitive licensing costs of Burnett’s proposed soundtrack. It was finally restored and resurfaced in 2007 and is available on DVD.
 

 
After the jump: check out the powerful scene from Killer of Sheep that Joseph mimicked…

 
If I was to send one Christmas card this year, then it would be Alessandro Cima’s beautiful short film Glass Boulevard.

Cima is a film-maker and editor of Candleight Stories and he has just directed this enchanting short film, Glass Boulevard, which was shot in “the dullest imaginable environment of shops along a major Los Angeles street at night when the shops were closed.” This is Cima’s Christmas film and it is one to be smitten by - a cinematic poem reminiscent of Kenneth Anger’s work, filled with delightful images loaded with suggestion and meaning.

The music is “There’s Something in the Air” by Artie Shaw and his Orchestra, from 1936, with Peg La Centra on vocals. 
 

 
As Brad noted last year at this time, it behooves us to remember D. Boon, guitarist and singer for one of L.A.’s most innovative punk bands The Minutemen. His death after a van crash in Arizona 25 years ago today shook the entire L.A. scene, and nothing was the same. But the influence of the band survives and thrives, in no small part due to We Jam Econo, the Minutemen documentary directed by Tim Irwin. Here’s part one—if you like it, buy the DVD!
 

 
Get: We Jam Econo - The Story of the Minutemen [DVD]

 
If you are looking for a great Christmas present for one of your rock snob friends, you could certainly do worse than picking them up a copy of Ann Summa’s new book of classic Los Angeles punk photos, The Beautiful & The Damned. I look at a look of books like this and turn my nose up at them, usually for the fact that most punk-era photographs have become way overfamiliar, but this is certainly not the case with Summa’s work, as much of the work here is previously unpublished.

Taken from 1978 to 1984, the images are mostly of L.A.‘s original punk bands such as The Germs, The Screamers, X, the Cramps and the Gun Club, and some of the more avant garde “art stars” of that scene like the Kipper Kids and Johanna Went. Visiting groups from the UK are represented, too in Summa’s book and include The Clash, PiL. Magazine, The Fall, The Slits, Bow Wow Wow and the Pretenders. New Yorkers like Lydia Lunch, Television, James Chance, Laurie Anderson and Talking Heads are also included as well as a few “elder statesmen” who influenced the Los Angeles punk scene: Captain Beefheart, David Bowie and Iggy. What amazing work on display here.

The Beautiful & The Damned was edited and has an introduction by Kristine McKenna, a mark of quality and distinction itself in this household. You can’t go wrong with this one for certain “types” on your holiday shopping list, that’s for sure.

Buy The Beautiful & The Damned at Amazon.

A gallery of Ann Summa’s work on Boing Boing

Ann Summa website

Below, one of the greatest (and sadly unrecorded) bands of the original Los Angeles punk scene, The Screamers, performing “Vertigo,” live at Target Video.
 

Smog makes it hard to see the Los Angeles Civic Center on Jan. 5, 1948. Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive/UCLA Library
 
In this age of climate-change consciousness, we’ve been thinking of pollution in epic-scale terms for so many decades that it’s become difficult to perceive it locally or episodically. On Wired.com’s This Day in Tech blog, Jess McNally notes  that on this day 67 years ago, residents of Los Angeles initially suspected that the unseasonable eye-stinging haze descending on their city was a Japanese chemical attack:

As residents would later find out, the fog was not from an outside attacker, but from their own vehicles and factories. Massive wartime immigration to a city built for cars had made L.A. the largest car market the industry had ever seen. But the influx of cars and industry, combined with a geography that traps fumes like a big bowl, had caught up with Angelenos.

 

Susan Morrow (left) and Linda Hawkins wipe tears from their eyes on a downtown street during a smoggy day in October 1964. Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive/UCLA Library
 
It took Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, a Dutch scientist working at the California Institute of Technology, to point that out, but that wasn’t until the early ‘50s. Although the term smog—a portmanteau of smoke and fog—was coined in the early 20th century, L.A. made it truly famous.

Check out Wired’s fascinating selection of photos from the UCLA Library depicting the Southland’s struggle against smog from the 1940s through the 1960s.

(above image: Van Nuys Police Station 1951 via Valley Relics)
 
As our fair city continues to scramble to find more jobs and programs to cut due to massive budget shortfalls it strikes me as more than a little counter-productive to shutter hundreds of thriving, law-abiding small businesses. It’s amazing to me that in 2010 there are those who still fear the demon weed as if it’s anything more than a simple plant capable of providing relief to the ill and inspiration and tranquility to the healthy. People are dumb.
 

Los Angeles has lost over 150,000 jobs in the past year, is on the brink of bankruptcy, and experienced an unexpected 16 percent decline in sales tax revenue last year. And it’s located in a state with its own dire fiscal situation that is also facing unexpected gaps in tax revenue. Yet this week the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office made a move that’s certain to make things worse for its citizens: forcing over 400 functioning businesses to close shop, under threat of jail time.

Don’t worry, though. It’s no big deal. Those businesses are only selling medicine.

Medical marijuana, that is. As detailed in my May Reason magazine cover story, Los Angeles struggled for years with regulating medical marijuana storefronts—which thrived in L.A. as in no other city. In January the city finally came down with an ordinance imposing a variety of new restrictions, including how the businesses handled cash, provided security and lighting, and paid their employees, as well as insisting that the shops were not technically allowed to make a profit.

But the ordinance’s most important effect will be to reduce the 500-plus functioning storefronts serving the city’s medical marijuana community to a mere 70 (with some possible grandfathering that might bring the eventual total higher).

 
Reason.com: Los Angeles Destroys Functioning Businesses in a Recession
 
thx Giga Granada Hills !

 
Sadness in the streets! The Bodhi Tree, one of the best bookstores, period, and THEE very best New Age and Spirituality bookstore anywhere on the planet is closing. Although in recent years I’ve not gone there nearly as much as I used to, in the mid-90s, I went to the Bodhi Tree every single Saturday morning without fail and poured over the shelves of the used books annex. There I found Leary first editions, tons of rare Crowley and even signed firsts of Terence McKenna’s The Invisible Landscape and True Hallucinations. I’d comb through this store sometimes twice a week. For book hounds into the occult and weirdo culture in general, the Bodhi Tree was like an intellectual candy shop. I felt great pride to see my own books and DVDs for sale there. But sadly, those days have passed. With Amazon and Barnes & Noble taking massive bites out of the profits of niche booksellers—Shirley MacLaine probably shops on Amazon—it’s hard to run a business on fumes. Even storied operations like the Bodhi Tree, in the end have their life cycles. I wonder what it will reincarnate as?

From the LA Weekly:

Owners Phil Thompson and Stan Madson informed their staff last Wednesday that the cozy Melrose Avenue shop, a nationally renowned and much beloved spiritual center, will be shutting its doors in a year’s time.

After some eight months of discussion, Thompson and Madson decided to sell the property to a local business owner who leases space to several other nearby retailers. The Bodhi Tree opened in 1970. Land values in the area have risen dramatically since then. Meanwhile, the business of selling print books has been on a steady decline. For years, real estate agents had been circling the Bodhi Tree like vultures. In the end, selling the property became a much more profitable option than continuing to sell books.

Thompson and Madson started the bookstore when they were in their 30’s. They are now both in their early 70’s. They were aerospace engineers who left a life of science for one of contemplation and meditation.

“Twenty years ago we felt like it was an expanding situation,” says Madson. “We were concerned the store was getting too big. We had a staff of 100. Publishing was expanding. Spirituality was expanding. But what changed was that the market became widely dispersed.”

 
It’s considered by some to be a controversial appointment, but the news of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch taking over the top spot at the embattled Museum of Contemporary Art comes off as a stroke of genius to us.

Speaking myself as a longtime New Yorker—before I finally wised up and put down roots in Los Angeles— I’ve long regarded the rise of Deitch and his Soho galleries to be the best—as in the single best—thing to happen to Gotham’s art world since, well, Andy Warhol died. That’s saying a lot, obviously. Deitch’s shows and opening-night parties were always the highlight of art-world socializing, mixing the highbrow and lowbrow crowds in way that only someone with Deitch’s Rolodex and social connections could deliver. His championing of emerging stars such as Ryan McGinness, Kembra Pfahler and E.V. Day was never short of visionary, and the art scene of Los Angeles gained much with Eli Broad and the MOCA board’s unanimous vote of confidence in Deitch’s hiring.

A great deal of the brouhaha seems to revolve around the fact that Deitch is an actual businessman, and a successful one at that, when it’s customary for museum directors to be cherry-picked from other museums or academic posts. Why this might prove detrimental to his performance in the job—Deitch is a Harvard MBA, a good business head is something MOCA desperately needs—is a complete mystery to us, but there have been calls for Deitch to divest himself of what must be a fairly substantial (to say nothing of quite valuable)  collection of Modern art. Why? Should Eli Broad and David Geffen be required to do the same? Because Deitch has proved himself to be a shrewd operator in his chosen field of endeavor, he should therefore be penalized? Makes no sense. It’s hardly like the guy is a corporate lobbyist. This is the art world, after all. This is the way it’s supposed to work…

I, for one, welcome the arrival of Jeffery Deitch to the best coast with open arms. Smart move, MOCA, just make sure you spell my name right on the guest list.

Cross posting this from Brand X

Los Angeles is the strangest city in the world. I swear it as a true and faithful relation.

Every cult in the world has an outpost in Los Angeles. I suppose it?

 
As a proud Angeleno since 1991, of course I’ve noticed the various small oil rigs along La Cienega Boulevard and elsewhere, but I didn’t realize there was one in… the Beverly Center? Would you believe there are several under the Farmer’s Market too? Am I pulling your leg? Nope! There are oil wells all around the city—particularly in Beverly Hills—disguised as buildings, islands and even palm trees. Before L.A. was firmly established as a movie and TV town it was an oil town. In fact, Los Angeles is part of a region that is third largest oil producer in America with over 20 billion barrels of oil yet to be extracted under our feet! Who knew?

Nate Harrington, a local DJ and publisher of the “Constantly Pregnant” zine filed this video report for Vice Media’s new online series “Uneven Terrain,” peeking behind the scenes to uncover LA’s hidden oil rigs residing within hollow office buildings, the camouflaged rigs standing right next to high schools, and the ones concealed within popular shopping malls. Fascinating!

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Limelight-loving L.A. City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has been making headlines and television appearances in recent weeks with his all-out legal assault on medical marijuana dispensaries. Unfortunately for Trutanich, U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder feels that prosecution of medical marijuana patients should be a low priority for law enforcement officials and said so in a memo released Monday. Ouch. Trutanich and L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley got another setback on Monday as well when a circuit judge ruled that the city’s moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries was illegally extended. Double ouch.

But what might be the most compelling reason of all for Trutanich and Cooley to back off the cannabis biz is the overwhelming support for medical marijuana of the voters who elected them both in the first place.

As John Hoeffel reports from the L.A. Times local desk, over three-quarters of eligible voters are strongly pro-medical marijuana and would prefer to see the dispensaries regulated and taxed, not forced to close:

The poll, completed Monday and Tuesday, also found that 74% support the state’s medical marijuana law, while 54% want to see marijuana legalized, regulated and taxed.

The Marijuana Policy Project, based in Washington, D.C., commissioned the poll by an independent firm, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, after Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley threatened all dispensaries in the county with prosecution.

—snip—

The poll of 625 voters found that 77% of voters want to regulate dispensaries, while 14% want them closed. Both Democrats (83%-7%) and Republicans (62%-30%) support regulation over prosecution. The Los Angeles City Council is on the verge of adopting regulations after two years of debate and almost 13 years after voters passed Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act.

Even with the stated 4% give-or-take margin of error of the Mason-Dixon poll, this is a uniquely compelling report for Trutanich and Cooley to pay close attention to, especially since it will be these very same voters who’ll be determining their reelection prospects in the future.

Medical marijuana poll: Most L.A. voters support dispensaries by John Hoeffel

Cross posting this at Brand X

Cannabis Orbs by Sookie Sooker

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