Chris Leavens: April 2007 Archives

Schwarzes und Weiß!

I'm not, nor do I think I ever will be a fan of tags or taggers, but this one accidentally turned out OK. Once a mural depicting the streets of Los Angeles, this slab of concrete has become a canvas for numerous graffiti "artists" who've scrawled everything from their signature scribbles to new buildings on the multi-colored wall. Only a few bits of the original art remain. I liked this particular portion because it looks like the bus is escaping the choke of graffiti closing in on it. And the police are courageously driving full-speed into vandalism's neon maw. GO 5-0!

Even greater wonders lay beyond those windows. If only I had remembered my polarizer that day.

Note the clever reappropriation of letters.

I'm back from Hawaii, so I'm continuing the Western Ave. series with this gem. I'm not really sure what this store's called or what it sells because my Korean's a bit rusty, but I found the shop and its resident Kong entertaining, so here it is.

Adriana and I are in Hawaii right now, Oahu, to be exact. We ate at a Hawaiian restaurant today and we tried poi. To quote our waiter, "It tastes kinda like glue. I like it."

This one doesn't fit the absurd/funny profile so much (well, at all), but I liked the way it came out so I'm plopping it up here as an intermediary step between some of the other Western Ave. photos.

Western Ave. is big mix of architectural styles, but one aspect of L.A.'s premiere tenets of urban design reigns this mighty slab of asphalt: a perpetual cycle of tearing down and rebuilding with almost no regard for history or preservation. In Los Angeles, "new" is always the new black.

Western Avenue spans a good north-to-south swath of Los Angeles and along the way samples the city's mish-mash of culture, high and low. Botanica Amazonica sits on the northern edge of L.A.'s Korea Town in a transitional area populated by a mix of mostly Latinos and, of course, Koreans.

I highly suggest you click the above photo and view the larger one for greatest impact.