Eva Recinos

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Southern California's First 'Parklet' Asks the Question: What is a Park, Really?

If you felt like Downtown needed more nature to counteract its vast plains of concrete, consider your pleads heard -- somewhat.

Earlier this month, the City of Los Angeles and Downtown Los Angeles Neighborhood Council (DLANC) unveiled two parklets on Spring Street between 6th and 7th Streets -- in front of L.A. Cafe and Syrup Desserts -- to encourage residents to walk and bike more often. By definition, a parklet uses the space normally given to a parking spot and turns it into a mini-park.

Last year, a similar parklet sprung up in Long Beach as part of the project Park(ing) Day. The original inspiration for parklets came from San Francisco's "Pavement to Parks" program, and besides giving a different look to public space, the parklets serve as experiments in a larger project. For 14 months, the Spring Street Parklet Impact Study brings together USC's School of Architecture, the DLANC and the Lewis Center at UCLA to analyze the effects of the parklets in the city.

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Wendy Gilmartin

Coke drum rolls down PCH

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Last night, Chevron began moving two of six 500,000-pound coke drums -- that's oil industry lingo for processing units -- up from the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro to its refinery in El Segundo. Technically, Chevron's drums moved across the city in much the same way the Space Shuttle Endeavor and Michael Heiser's Levitated Mass boulder did last year, but like a D-list version of L.A.'s great street-closing spectacles of late, this cavalcade was met with virtually zero fanfare. And that's just the way Chevron likes it.

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Photo by Joseph Lapin

It was raining in Los Angeles during the 2011 Christmas week, and the traffic on the 405 near the Getty Center was jammed. I had left Long Beach two hours earlier, and it would still be another hour before I arrived at work in Woodland Hills.

That morning the red brake lights were staring at me like blood-shot eyes. Angelenos have no idea how to drive in the rain, which causes both accidents and soul-sucking congestion. I wanted to kick out my windows; I wanted to lie on the horn; I wanted to turn around and forget about this city of freaking angels.

This wasn't matching the fantasy I'd created back in Massachusetts. Before I moved, I studied pictures of the Pacific Ocean and devoured Kerouac and Stegner, the stories of the beautiful people and the musicians, actors and writers who made their dreams come true. I had bought into the California dream, and I wanted my piece. So years later, at 25, I became one of the many who crossed the desert like ancient wanderers, driving until the Pacific Ocean, suddenly, was in view before me. I had never seen anything so vast, so stunning.

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Wendy Gilmartin

Google headquarters

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*More tech stories from L.A. Weekly
*Fugly Buildings: Our Series on the Most Hideous Buildings in L.A.

Since the arrival of Google in Venice last year, westside beach communities like Santa Monica, Playa Vista and others have seen an influx of tech companies, startups, investors and software businesses of all kinds burst into the neighborhood now dubbed "Silicon Beach."

As they scramble to get a piece of what many think will be the next big boomtown, companies are snatching up all the commercial real estate they can find. But this is L.A. and appearances mean everything.

LA Weekly explains what a handful of companies' choices in office buildings -- essentially their outward projection to the world -- says about their style in general.

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Jim Simmons

Grand Park downtown

We spend most of the year criticizing Los Angeles' ugly buildings and other unfortunate aspects of the local built environment. Here's our chance to rundown some of the thoughtful, inspiring and downright stellar projects that make us L.A. proud, and that make our burg a better place in general.

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Metro Art

Andrew Leicester's "Foothills Basket Bridge" above I-210 in Arcadia

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*Top 10 Most Memorable L.A. Art Events of 2012
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*Our Latest Theater Reviews

This week, artists contemplate the end of the Mayan calendar, Metro debuts its strange new Gold Line bridge and a group exhibition experiments in portraiture.

5. Live-streaming the end times
The supposed upcoming apocalypse triggered by the end of the Mayan calendar has become a fixation. This weekend, there are end-of-the-world dance parties, dinner parties and one-night-only operas. Artist Jonas Becker, who is interested in end-days myths in general, is taking her camera to Mexico and spending the evening of Dec. 21 driving among Mayan ruins, filming and interviewing spiritual leaders, conspiracy theorists, tourists and others. Her footage will stream live during the concurrent Apocalypse Now? party in a Highland Park storefront. In addition to Becker's live stream, there will be beer by Dry River Brewing, karaoke and drawing supplies for people who want to express their end-of-world sentiments through art. 5118 York Blvd.; Fri., Dec. 21, 8 p.m. (951) 522 - 8573, beckerprojects.com.

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Wendy Gilmartin

We can thank the developers and architects who built the Alessio apartments on Centinela Avenue in Westchester for this one. To all those visitors to L.A. who emerge from LAX's arrival terminal and head north up the 405, this is what greets them: A seven-story-tall, poo-brown colored wall -- which almost makes the Promenade at the Howard Hughes Center across the highway look dynamic.

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Twitter user @bshigeta via Instagram

A Silver Lake billboard that recently hawked Avion tequila took on a very different tone last month. "SUPPORT PUBLIC EDUCATION OR FACE CATASTROPHE!" read the near-apocalyptic message in stark black type. On Santa Monica Boulevard, the wisdom of Robert Frost crept by in the same foot-tall, all-caps characters, wrapped around a Metro bus: "Education is the ability to listen to almost anything without losing your temper or your self-confidence."

This campaign, which launched in October and has quickly become both the best-looking and most ubiquitous advertising on L.A.'s streets, is produced by art organization ForYourArt to benefit the Los Angeles Fund for Public Education (or LA Fund for short), a nonprofit co-founded by LAUSD superintendent John Deasy last year. And the artist is none other than the legendary Barbara Kruger, whose signature black, white and red graphics -- like a public service announcement meets reassuring Mad Men-era advertising -- reads spectacularly well in L.A.'s urban environment.

The LA Fund is hoping to raise $1.5 million by the spring to fund a new initiative called Arts Matter and Kruger's work -- actually an original, site-specific piece named Untitled, (Human History) -- is meant to work on two levels, says LA Fund executive director Dan Chang. The campaign is meant to both communicate the critical importance of arts education funding to Angelenos and deliver that art to the city in a kind of mobile gallery. "It's about the awareness of getting public art into the streets of L.A. and making it accessible to people who wouldn't otherwise see it."

Over $4 million in ad space was donated by Clear Channel and CBS to support the campaign, making it pleasantly unavoidable.

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Metro

Sam Erenberg's artwork at the Roscoe station

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*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.
*Fugly Buildings: Our Series on the Most Hideous Buildings in L.A.

The Expo Line's opening last spring may have snagged all the headlines, but a few months later, the Valley debuted its own transit triumph: the Orange Line busway completed its 18-mile route connecting North Hollywood to Chatsworth. This light-rail-on-wheels has become an internationally recognized and locally beloved institution, and a new exhibition showcasing its public art program, explaining the process behind the artworks that are at 18 stations now dotting the San Fernando Valley.

Twenty artists are featured in the show, which is on view until Dec. 13 in a gallery tucked into Los Angeles Valley College's art building in Valley Glen. The roster includes lead artist Renée Petropoulos, whose vision was to create a "necklace" of artworks that string through the Valley, so each station is portrayed as a link in this chain, with uniform elements like elliptical mosaics and porcelain enamel steel panels. Even the Orange Line's landscaping is a work of art: we learn that landscape artist Jud Fine chose the distances between trees, for example, to create a sense of movement.

For the rest of the 18 artists, who are all working in California, the exhibition shows the explorations that led to their site-specific works as well as photos of their work in context at each of the stations. Seeing them together, themes emerge. Most artists, for example, chose to nod to one of the Valley's major exports like agriculture, entertainment and tectonic shifts (no porn industry references, however).

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Flickr User jericl cat

Familiar to anyone who drives the 110 near Exposition Park, the recently altered Felix the Cat neon sign at Felix Chevrolet has become the focus of preservationist ire after owners replaced its neon lights with LEDs.

Says a letter from Los Angeles historian and preservationist Kim Cooper, who is circulating an online petition to save the sign:

The cold, thin light of LEDs is a pale imitation of the beautiful natural gas glow of neon -- the neon which made this sign historic, unique and beloved by Angelenoes.

The sign was very nearly designated a historic-cultural monument by the Los Angeles Cultural Heritage Commission in 2007, but the designation was thwarted by objections of Felix Chevrolet's owners and of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Councilwoman Jan Perry, who argued that the designation would inhibit business growth in the area.

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