Gendy Alimurung

The Los Angeles Speed Project runners gather at the Santa Monica pier.

See also:
*A Celebration of Boston, in a Santa Monica Bar

To the young men who bombed the Boston Marathon: You picked the wrong people to fuck with. Or so say the members of the Los Angeles Speed Project runners group.

It's the crack of dawn two days after the April 15 bombing, and they and about a hundred other marathoners are at the Santa Monica Pier stretching and hydrating and jogging in place and otherwise getting ready to do what they do best: run.

"Marathoners are warriors. They don't quit. Their spirits aren't exactly easily broken," Blue Benadum declares. He's team captain of Los Angeles Speed Project, which organized today's impromptu tribute run.

The project comprises six extreme runners — "extreme," of course, being a relative term. To these six athletes, it means both distance and speed. It means running 300 miles through the desert — from Los Angeles to Las Vegas — as fast as you can. It means running and running until every ounce of fat has melted from your body, and then running some more.

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Juan Tallo

"Transmedia for Change" panelists, left to right: Moderator Henry Jenkins, Katie Elmore Mota of Pranja Productions, writer/producer Mahyad Tousi, Creative Director of Sandpit Sam Haren & documentary filmmaker Katerina Cizek

I was a little nervous about attending USC and UCLA's joint annual Transmedia Hollywood Conference, whose focus this year was on how social media and storytelling are changing the face of digital marketing and philanthropy. Sure, I'm interested in web entertainment, but am I eight-hours-of-panels interested? I didn't want to fall asleep and embarrass myself. Especially not wearing a press pass.

The minute the moderator introduced the panelists to the packed UCLA auditorium by means of video clips and more humorous slides, I knew we were in good hands. For the rest of the day, the audience of professors, students, movie studio execs, digital consultants, filmmakers and I were treated to a fast paced crash course on how the companies and technologies we interact with every day are transforming the way they market and how that affects us as consumers and as potential employees. Who knew your Instagram account might be part of your next job application? Or that MTV's 16 and Pregnant is acting as a vehicle for social change and was pitched as such?

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Gabrielle Canon

Volunteer Ken Perry accompanies performers

It is midday last Thursday and Georgia Berkovich is rushing to ready the Day Room of the Midnight Mission, where she works as the community relations manager. L.A. musician Ken Perry tunes a guitar before accompanying a man wearing a reflective vest, as he sings "Dead or Alive" to a room-full of empty blue plastic chairs. "That's my shit right there," a man in a beanie mutters as he passes through the room.

A few more people trickle in through a door that opens to an outside patio. There, brightly colored tents, sleeping bags and tarps contrast the dark clouds hanging over the downtown Los Angeles high-rise horizon. With heat lamps blazing, this warmed courtyard provides refuge for homeless people who reside on Skid Row.

The event planned for the day is an open mic and participants are free to perform just about anything. Most decide on music, while some showcase their poetic or comedic talents.

Berkovich says it is one of the Mission's most popular events. It calls on this community to be both entertainer and entertained. "I also try to get the staff to perform so it is not 'us' and 'them,' it is just 'us,'" she says gesturing in a circular motion.

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Eva Recinos

On a small grass field, a group of young students walk in a row lugging paint cans. Last Saturday, early in the morning, some of the younger members of A Place Called Home -- a South Los Angeles non-profit organization that helps 8-to-20-year-olds through mentoring, art classes and more -- gather excitedly to begin a new project. They sift through a bucket of black aprons, lay out material to protect the grass and tease each other in the way only elementary school students can.

Then David Choe arrives.

To the students assembled, Choe is just an artist coming to help them out with a mural for the day. But for those familiar with the name, Choe resides on the more famous side of the art spectrum. Besides creating his distinctive style -- with explosions of color and weird characters -- Choe cemented his name in popular culture through works like the album cover for Jay-Z and Linkin Park's Collision Course.

Then came the Facebook commission, a job that put his name on even more lips. The mission was to transform the company's headquarters with spray-can murals, in which he got free rein -- and perhaps even encouragement -- to go as visually lewd as he wanted. Choe chose stock as compensation for his work and since then, Facebook relocated, expanded and did a stock IPO -- making Choe worth around $200 million, putting him in the league of wealthy artists like Damien Hirst. Today, more than 34,000 people follow him on Twitter. He follows no one.

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Steve Mullins, a straight man in Sylacauga, Ala., didn't know what to say when his closeted gay friend, Billy Jack Gaither, told him out of the blue that he'd like to suck his dick.

So Mullins remained speechless. But his mind was racing.

In fact, the 25-year-old Mullins would later tell author David McConnell that his first thought was, "I gotta kill you."

"The key was the shock, the surprise, the sneaky-seeming unexpectedness, not just the idea of homosexuality," McConnell writes. "Mullins says he immediately started telling people he was going to kill Billy Jack. It was a matter of honor."

Mullins' story is one of a half-dozen McConnell explores in his chilling new book, American Honor Killings: Rage and Desire Among Men, due out in March.

McConnell, who has two novels to his credit, acknowledges that the title of his first nonfiction work is deliberately confusing. "I wanted to stir things up. I wanted to get people thinking differently about these cases," he tells the Weekly. "It's too easy to just classify them as hate crimes and be done with it. Hate is a factor in all of them, but it's much more complex than that."

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Bayan Mogharabi

SoulPancake core staff: Rainn Wilson, Shabnam Mogharabi, Golriz Lucina, and Devon Gundry

In 2008, Actor Rainn Wilson (NBC's The Office) wanted to create a space on the internet where people could discuss life's big questions with total strangers. You know, what Socrates and Plato would have done if they had access to adequate bandwidth and a YouTube deal. Knowing nothing about building websites (Wilson referred to the site for a while as a "flash page thingy"), he partnered with friends Joshua Homnick and Devon Gundry to create SoulPancake, an interactive website full of conversations, activities, photos and calls to action through which users could explore what it means to be human.

As it turned out, lots of other people also wanted a safe place to discuss these questions too. Within 3 months of the website's beta launch in 2009, they had more than 3 million page views and 20,000 active members. Within two years of launching, the SoulPancake founders published a New York Times bestselling book and began producing weekly Sunday morning short programs for the Oprah Winfrey Network.

This July, SoulPancake launched its YouTube channel, one of the 169 channels actually funded by YouTube as part of its effort to bring diverse, high quality programming to the site. They now boast 71,000 YouTube subscribers, 100,000 active members on the website, 3.3 million video views and 9 different web series, with more slated for 2013. Thanks to the advance from YouTube, SoulpPancake was able to rent its first real office in Atwater Village and bring its staff together from all over the country, where they had been working remotely.

The most recent new web series from SoulPancake is Stories from the Street by filmmaker Justin Baldoni. The show features short interviews with people who are homeless and living on the streets of L.A.

"We wanted to keep them really short: Boom this is who this person is," says Baldoni. "Our hope is, after watching an episode, the next time you walk by the homeless guy you walk by every day on the way to work, this time you'll stop and say hi. You might not have a dollar or fifty cents, but what you do have is the ability to make eye contact with them, to say hello and ask them how their day is."

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Won't Back Down

See also:
*California's Parent Trigger
*Parent Trigger's Second Try

Teachers' unions don't want you to see Won't Back Down, an underdog film that opened Sept. 28, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal as a working-class mother in Pittsburgh who will do anything to give her young daughter a great education -- even if it means battling the local teachers union and public school bureaucrats. Viola Davis plays an elementary school teacher who reluctantly teams with Gyllenhaal to take over a chronically substandard public school through a little-used mechanism called the "Fail Safe Law." The two women then inspire parents and teachers to join their cause.

If the plot sounds familiar, you're right. Won't Back Down was inspired by the real-life Parent Trigger movement in California, which started in 2010 when working-class parents and a Los Angeles-based organizing group called Parent Revolution used the little-known Parent Trigger law to attempt to take over a failing school in Compton. Just like the characters in the movie, the parents and organizers in Compton faced charges of being anti-union for using a petition drive to turn a public school into a private one that didn't have to be unionized.

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Photo Courtesy of Ehrin Marlow & Maia Rosenfeld

Bryan Bertone, left, Allison Mattox and Shermel Carthan in Short Ends

Earlier this month the L.A. Weekly broke a troubling story that starkly illustrates the growing chasm between the haves and the have-nots in today's society. The article brought to light the callous actions of Ronnie Teasdale, owner of L.A.'s Crossfit Mean Streets gym, who plastered his gym's Facebook page with supposedly "hilarious" photos that demeaned several unfortunates of the homeless community from the neighboring Skid Row district.

In the photos, Teasdale and a handful of bare-chested CrossFit gym fanatics gleefully strike macho poses while hovering over a man who has passed out in the gutter. Other photos, with mocking captions, show unconscious men with gym T-shirts draped over them. Apparently it takes a real he-man to humiliate the less fortunate.

Meanwhile, across town at Open Fist Theatre in Hollywood, director Amanda Weier tackles our perception of the homeless in a different but equally confrontational fashion with Short Ends, an evening of short plays by controversial playwright Neil LaBute. An effusive and friendly young man, seemingly crippled and kneeling on a small trolley, is stationed outside the theater doors on Santa Monica Boulevard prior to the show, begging theater patrons for spare change. He even propels himself into the lobby and then onto the stage. It's only when he whips out a piece of chalk and starts writing the title of the first of the five short plays onto the stage floor that it becomes apparent this transient fellow is a character in the show.

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Kevin Scanlon

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here.

In 1993, Luis J. Rodriguez published a book about fighting his way through the mean streets of East L.A. He wrote about friends he'd lost to gang warfare, drugs he'd snorted, girls he'd screwed. And he wrote about how art, and activism, had saved him -- how they had helped him leave behind la vida loca. Called Always Running, it became a sensation, earning Rodriguez a six-figure paperback deal and selling a half-million copies.

Last year, Simon & Schuster published the sequel: It Calls You Back. Rodriguez's second memoir, which came after well-received volumes of poetry and fiction, focuses on the difficulty of fully abandoning la vida loca. Years after leaving it, he found himself still wrestling with its siren call.

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Courtesy of Los Angeles Poverty Department

36 portraits of Skid Row visionaries by street artist Mr. Brainwash

At first glance, L.A.'s Skid Row doesn't seem like it would have a flourishing performance-art scene.

But Skid Row's Los Angeles Poverty Department -- abbreviated as, yes, LAPD -- was founded by director John Malpede in 1985 to develop the arts and culture of the city's well-known home to the homeless. Though its focus is interdisciplinary, LAPD is also the first performance group in the nation to be made up primarily of homeless or formerly homeless people. Its theory of social justice: Create change and supplant stereotypes by placing the community's narrative into its own hands.

This Memorial Day weekend, LAPD will host a three-day-long parade called "Walk the Talk" that will take place across Skid Row, led by a brass band called Paradigm Brass as well as pick-up musicians. Dozens of performances will take place at approximately 31 stops, each a symbolic site that will honor one of 36 men and women who have positively shaped the Skid Row community.

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