Home Schools

Dozens of family homes on residential streets throughout Koreatown have been converted into businesses, and a high number of these are focused on caring for the young -- pre-schools, schools, schules, academies, kindergartens, child care centers... 
I’m often curious about these home-based businesses:
01. Do the owners live in the house?
02. Does having a commercial business increase or decrease the value of the nearby family residences?

03. Do the owners know that there’s a 90% chance that their signage could be improved by 90%? 

I could go on about this all night, but let’s look at the photos instead. 
(Click to enlarge.)

Wilshire Smiling Tree, Child Green School / Wiz island, Sunshine Pre-School;

Morning Star Education Center, Preschool After School, Kinder Schule;

San Marino Academy Children Center, Shin and Kim Family Child Care, (unknown);

Serrano Lily Academy, Christian Kindergarten, Key’s Wonderland School;

JC Education, Academy Children Center, Dreamland Children's School.

Judge a Book By Its Cover

Recommended: The Book Cover Archive

William Burroughs: Thanksgiving Prayer

If you’re feeling a little dispirited this Thanksgiving, this video won’t help. Directed by Gus Van Sant back in 1991, it features a sad-eyed William Burroughs reciting his poem, Thanksgiving Prayer, amidst an montage of American icons. Happy holiday, anyway.

Drive-By Shootings: The Kitchen

One of my favorite paintings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is Angel’s Flight by California artist Millard Sheets. 
I like the painting’s sense of isolation, with the two women positioned high in the frame, regarding the goings-on below, absorbed in their own thoughts. Geometry dominates the painting, and the women seem to be all angles and elbows, with their A-line and trumpet-flare skirts softly echoing the diagonal roof lines, stairs and fire escapes. Stairway to heaven, this isn’t. Perhaps they prefigure Damiel and Cassiel, watching angels who long to be corporeal, in the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire.

A mural covers an outside wall of The Kitchen at Fountain, a stone’s throw from Sunset. Its elements are the antithesis of Angel’s Flight -- the colors, less vibrant; the view from below, rather than above; a crowd, rather than isolation. Yet there seems to be a sense of contemplation and longing reminiscent of Sheets’s two women, although, with the absent-minded S-curves dual silhouettes, appear to be more harmonious with each other than the members of the mural’s shoulder-to-shoulder populace.

Loneliness takes many forms. Isolation and solitude are not synonymous concepts.

Angel’s Flight, Millard Sheets, 1931

Three images from “The Kitchen,” Silverlake.

The Fountainhead

 

A water main on Pico near Fairfax broke late last night, creating a geyser that shot higher than the sign for the $5.99 Hi-Fashion store.

Within moments, the fire department showed up to put out the water.

By the time I drove around the block and then turned back for another look, cars and neighbors had gathered at all corners of the intersection.

I love the $5.99 Hi-Fashion store, although everything I've ever purchased there has been $12.99.

My friend Dawn prefers Fallas Paredes, which is  by our gym.

Neither of us knows the correct translation of Fallas Paredes. 

Fashion Parade? Fashion Paradise? Fa-la-la?

Fa-La-La is a much bigger operation than $5.99 Hi-Fashion. It has its own website, and it’s part of a nationwide chain.

On the other hand, the exterior of $5.99 Hi-Fashon is hot pink, which makes it cheerier and more inviting than Fa-La-La. Plus the store has an endearing set of rules: no trying-on before buying; no credit card transactions below $15. Which means you’re encouraged to pay cash if you’re only going to buy a pair of lime green razor-slash ho leggings to wear with your scuffed white stilletos and ripped Fame sweatshirt without leaving a trail that leads straight to Citibank. Plus, who can resist a dazzling water feature?

Pop Takes a Holiday

If you’re a fan of Andy Warhol, and if you like Christmas, too, click here 
to see a Corbis Fine Art slideshow his of early commercial illustrations. 
Above: Merry Christmas Shoe, 
Andy Warhol

Kahn Artist

Louis I. Kahn, Architect. Drawings for City/2 Exhibition: The Street 
is a Room, 1971. 
Charcoal. 34" x 34"

Drive-By Shootings: The Living Room Re-Do

These days I commute so much that I often forget which road I’m on. Wilshire, Beverly, Normandie, Vermont, Heliotrope, Fountain, Hyperion -- they blur into one.
Sometimes I navigate by way of food joints: one block from Mandarette, by Jollibee, or across the street from Porto’s. A ridiculous, yet reliable method.
But now more ephemeral points have started sinking sharp pins into my mental map -- murals, drawings, graffiti -- work easily destroyed by a clean-up crew, a wrecking ball, rain, wind, or sun. Or covered up by another artist or vandal, recycling a wall as though it were a canvas.
Back in the 1970s, architect Louis I. Kahn observed, “The street is a room by agreement / A community room the walls of which belong to the donors / The ceiling is the sky”.
Which leads to my minor theory: Los Angeles is a living room and everyone keeps redecorating it.

Words To Live By

“There’s nothing like unrequited love to take all the flavor out of a peanut butter sandwich.” — You’re in Love, Charlie Brown

It’s National Peanut Butter Month, and here’s what I’ve noticed: if you love peanut butter, it won’t love you back, but it will stay by your side (especially your backside) forever.

Drive-By Shootings: Ladies First

Sometimes Los Angeles seems like an outdoor art gallery of the best kind, with mostly blue skies and wealth of nice days, which can make just about any building or sculpture appear significant. Same thing with the murals, paintings and graffiti scattered around the city -- turn a corner at a side street off Hollywood Boulevard, and there’s a wonder to behold, or get stuck at a stoplight on Wilshire or mid-town Beverly and there's something interesting to see on a brick wall fifteen feet away.