Four men onstage (and a bonus man on the wall)

This is the fourth installment of our Pacific Standard Time Presents diary, tracking modern architecture happenings all over the city. Check out our previous entries:
*The Getty's Big, New Exploration of L.A. Architecture
*SCI-Arc's Gala and a Concert at Jackie Treehorn's House
*Everything Loose Will Land, A+D and Machine Project

"Where are the women?"

This was the question posed to me via Twitter last night as I dutifully documented the latest Pacific Standard Time Presents panel. "So many men" chimed in my friend on Instagram. Over on Facebook, critic Mimi Zeiger sparked another conversation lamenting the dearth of females in the lineup for tonight's "Why L.A.?" event. The same could be said about this one. Or this one. Or this one.

Yes, it would definitely appear that many of the featured speakers in the Getty's architecture project look much like the Getty itself: Big, bald and white.

(Okay, maybe they're not all bald.)

For the museum exhibitions themselves, I kinda understand: It's tougher to feature the role of women while focused on a time period when there were few practicing female architects in the city. But it would seem that these events around the shows would be a fantastic opportunity to engage not only the legends of the era but all the amazing women working in L.A. today.

Not that females haven't been featured: Denise Scott Brown was in town for the Getty's "Minding the Gap" event last week (and the subject of another gender-biased controversy), and I've written about the contributions of ladies like Sylvia Lavin and Deborah Sussman in this column. But I'd really love to see more women speaking about how this influential Modern era shaped their contemporary practice. Especially since so many of the organizers of these events are dynamic, amazing females themselves.

This is a diary, not an op-ed, so I'll get back to the champagne sloshing in a second. But my challenge to all the organizers is this: We have a whole PSTP summer ahead of us. Add more speakers! Add more events! Let's diversify and try to include some different perspectives. Okay? Okay.

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Arthur Africano

Elijah Sedustine meets the LA River

"I feel a little itchy, I'm not going to lie." Tyler Sedustine has just emerged from the Los Angeles River, his dripping wet two-and-a-half-year-old son Elijah ensconced in his arms. That his first instinct is to hose off will likely strike few Angelenos as strange. Just twenty-four hours previous, the idea of dipping your toddler in the our eponymous waterway could have been deemed not just mildly odd and possibly toxic, but also illegal.

On May 27, however, the city threw open a 2.5-mile stretch, known as the Glendale Narrows and located between Fletcher Drive and Oros Street, for the first time since the whole river was encased in concrete and re-classified as a "flood control channel" back in the late 1930s. Suddenly on the list of approved activities are boating or fishing for the bass, tilapia and catfish who call the river home. "I've been told they're good eating," swore Fernando Gomez, Chief Ranger for the Mountains Recreation & Conservation Authority (MRCA), on hand for the official kickoff.

And yes, incidental exposure has been deemed safe, though Gomez doesn't blink an eye at the question. Patiently wrapping people's heads around the idea that it's less concrete wasteland than honest-to-god ecosystem is a major reason why MRCA has joined the Los Angeles River Pilot Recreation Zone program, donating more than a dozen rangers and numerous volunteers to patrol the area during its run from Memorial Day to Labor Day, Sept. 2. "The river is why L.A. is where it is," said Gomez, noting that it once served as the local fresh water resource. Food for thought in our age of reinvigorated water wars.

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Eva Recinos

See also:
*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

See also:
*20 Ways to Pose for Photos at the LACMA Rock
*LACMA Rock Finally Opens. Does It Live Up to Expectations?

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

See also:
*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

See also:
*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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