Not a snowball’s chance in hell will Millenium tower project hater Sandy Summer make a dent in the inexorable flow of luxury residential construction but she did make a nifty prop and the sometime-art department buyer took her case to the steps of Los Angeles City Hall, and that’s commendable. While an organized opposition has voiced a myriad of reasons to squash the development, Summer’s main gripe is aesthetic; she finds skyscrapers unappealing and she don’t want the damn view of the damn Hollywood sign obscured. But the fact is those who got it like that will pay top dollar for a clear view from a lofty lux abode, and down at the bottom some minimum wage gigs will be generated by the mixed use property.

With the shuttering of the King Eddy last December not only did Los Angeles lose its remaining Skid Row saloon but the public lost access to a luxury for the common man; a double-wide urinal. Now encounters with extant examples of deluxe pee porcelain of a bygone era are to be cherished; we noted the other night a fine one remains in service at the Five Star Bar in Downtown LA. Some might think the joint grandiosely named, but we assure the re-purposed hotel with its intricate tile and ornamental plaster detailed ceiling make it all that. There’s the eight buck pitchers when the Clippers play, two fifty Schlitz and nightly bands too, the latter apparently chosen by roll of polyhedral dice.

Everyone’s heard of the missing tourist whose body was found floating in the rooftop water tank at The Cecil Hotel, Downtown Los Angeles, but few saw the five star review that got yanked from Yelp.com today:***** Very helpful staff, any and all questions were answered in a timely fashion. “Do you have running water?” “Of corpse we do” WAKA WAKA WAKA
We appreciate the painterly sign, saved from ghost status albeit by crude craftsmanship by some cowboy who certainly wouldn’t have gotten a guild gig in 1927 when the building went up. The layers of crimson over the complimentary green ground add depth to the compostiion, and distinction to the Downtown LA cityscape. Just enjoy the view from outside.

Catty-corner from Pershing Square this animal duo keeps watch while passersby remain oblivious; the latest surveillance apparatus of private security deployed by the Downtown BID/ police state?

If I could scrounge up 35 cents: Hovering at 50 degrees, what better way to ride-out today’s extreme chill then by taking in a News-reel? Maybe catch up on how the boys are doing fighting Tojo in the Pacific, what wacky Howard Hughes is up to with his millions now? This eight-story vestige of a bygone era seen from Spring Street, in the time capsule that is Downtown Los Angeles.

He endured a US conviction, caught a beat-down abroad, and now Obama’s “Hope” poster plagiarist/artist’s got beef in his backyard. This Shep Fairey polychrome mural on an LA parking structure got some criticism the other day- actually some 60 feet worth of critique- and it can’t be cleaned off; Shep’s going to have some retouching to do, we learned at the scene. But the sheer ambition of this tagger leads us to think there may be more to come, and Shep might be doing more repainting than “re-purposing” images this new year.

Not brought up in the presidential debates; the issue raised in this biting cartoon, a street art piece we found in Downtown Los Angeles en route to an all you can eat Korean bbq joint, rightly urging us to “say something” about the miserable treatment Americans have become inured to at the hands of the intrusive Transportation Safety Administration. In ten years TSA has caught not a single evil doer but succeeds in delaying, humiliating, outright robbing American travellers. It has grown to deployment outside of airports under President Obama’s watch. And Obama has carried out a far more egregious assault on our civil liberties details author Chris Hedges , “…including signing into law Section 1021(b)(2) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) which permits the U.S. military to detain American citizens, strip them of due process and hold them indefinitely in military facilities. When a U.S. District Judge struck down the law in September the Obama administration immediately appealed the decision. The NDAA has been accompanied by use of the Espionage Act, which Obama has turned to six times in silencing whistle-blowers. Obama supported the FISA Amendment Act so government could spy on tens of millions of us without warrants. He has drawn up kill lists to exterminate those, even U.S. citizens, deemed by the ruling elite to be terrorists.”