Posts in the ‘Los Angeles’ Category

East Hollywood ArtCycle

Yesterday, Evan and I headed over the East Hollywood ArtCycle to check out the scene and see some art. While it wasn’t quite as large an event as we’d imagined, it was still quite nice. There were bands and other groups performing — our favorite that we saw was a band called Confessions of a Corn Silo.

There was plenty of food, from bake sale type stands with delicious looking vegan cupcakes, cookies and brownies (I’m pretty sure there were some non-vegan varieties as well), to local cafes and gelato shops. We had some really delicious Guinness Chocolate gelato, and were intrigued by the other very inventive flavors.

There were also, of course, various artists showing off their work, and there were bike tours that would take you around the neighborhood. Unfortunately, neither Evan nor I have a bicycle at the moment, so we couldn’t partake in the cycling fun. A lot of people did bike over to the event, and there was a great hipster-cyclist vibe, with people on double-decker and other tricked-out bikes.

Local galleries were also open, so we could look at some more art. We didn’t get to too many galleries, but we really enjoyed the Fake Gallery, which had a rather funny exhibition by “fake” artists, complete with placards giving great personal bios of artists like Roy G. Biv, the color-blind paint tester. The centerpiece of the fair was a large, undulating wooden sculpture (a small portion of which is photographed with Evan, above.

Another neat part of the fair was that they had the guys from Grinding Gears custom screen printing making t-shirts on the fly. I actually brought my own shirt to be printed on, and was able to choose from about 5 designs. I chose a design that had lyrics from Tom Waits’ song, “Broken Bicycles.”

I also got a very cute necklace from Kiki Designs. It was hard to choose just one from the creative and beautiful array of jewelry. I bought the necklace directly from Kiki herself, who was really nice, and it came in a takeout box!

Check out more photos from the event in my Flickr gallery.

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March 1st, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Los Angeles

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The First-Ever LA Tuttle Club


The first Tuttle LA group: Amir, Caroline, Mark, Geoff, Jeb, Me and David

Today we had the first-ever meeting of Tuttle LA. Maybe it should be called Tuttle LB, as we were actually in Long Beach. In any case, Geoff and I had been planning for this for a few weeks, but weren’t really sure if anyone was going to show up. Thankfully, we didn’t have much to worry about — we had a nice small group of 7.

The Library was a cool place. It felt a bit like someone’s living room, with couches and coffee tables and walls painted different colors. The coffee was good, too.

We talked about mobile phones, as Jeb had recently returned from Mobile World in Barcelona and had quite a few Nokias for people to play with. We also talked a lot about music, since Geoff manages a band and Amir is a musician, as is David, who joined us after listening in on some of our music conversation.


Jeb and Geoff

We also talked film (Amir is also a filmmaker), Twitter, and of course social networking strategy. Mark also told us a bit about some new social networking tools and concepts, and we discussed how social networks can create ambient awareness as well as AI technologies for social networks — as in, do you want a social networking app to be able to predict your behavior on a certain day or time since it’s been tracking what you’ve been doing, or is that creepy?

We of course talked a lot about our inspiration for meeting up — the London Tuttle Club. We made a Qik video and said hello to Lloyd, we decided that Jeb was the new Whatleydude as he was letting everyone try out his various mobile phones, and we talked a lot about Solobasssteve, since he was the one who convinced us to start something up here in the first place.

And just like in London, the gathering went long — we started at 10:30 and hung around until just after 2. And though I had good intentions of getting some work done and brought my laptop with me, it stayed in my backpack. There’s never really any time for solo work at Tuttle.

We’re having our second meeting two weeks from today, on March 13, so mark your calendars if you’d like to come — and let me know if you want to carpool from LA.

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February 27th, 2009 - Events, Los Angeles

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West LA Tweetup

Last night there was a Tweetup — the first I’d actually attended in LA (I know, I’ve been a bit of a slacker since getting back into town what feels like a very short 6 months ago). In any case, when I heard that people were getting together nearby after attending Gravity Summit, I thought I should stop by to meet some new people.

The Tweetup was at Palomino in Westwood, a very popular bar and restaurant — I want to go back and try their thin-crust pizza because it looked delicious. The place was packed with a lively post-work/post-conference crowd, and I meandered around a bit before Rodney Rumford saw me looking a little lost and made some introductions (thank you!).

There was quite a big crowd, so I didn’t even come close to meeting everyone, but I did have some nice conversations with Ben, Dustin, Tony, Ricardo, Alan, Angie and John. I also ran into Jon Rognerud, who I worked with when I was an editor at Entrepreneur.com — we’d never met in person, so I didn’t even realize who he was at first!

It was great to get out and meet some new and interesting people. And tomorrow I have another event — the first ever Tuttle LA. If you’re available tomorrow morning and can make it to Long Beach, I’d love to see you there.

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February 26th, 2009 - Events, Los Angeles

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Driving Through Dramatic Weather: Road Trip Photos

This past weekend’s trip to Mammoth was incredible. The snow was powdery, we ate lots of good food, and we got to spend some time with friends. The drives up and back, however, were rather trying. On the way up, we had heavy rain and even some snow in Mojave before the clouds parted to reveal some sunny skies. On the way back, it snowed for about three hours of the drive — until we got well below 3,000 feet, then was a mix of wind, rain, a bit of hail, and even an extra dollop of snow in the mountains just outside LA.

Here are a few photos I snapped on my iPhone…


On the way up, after a few hours of rain, the clouds started to blow over. The strange part was that it happened very quickly, and at this point, the sky was half sun, half seriously ominous clouds.


On the way back, it snowed for hours, then rained so hard it felt like we were driving through a car wash. When the clouds finally broke for a bit, the sunshine on the wet road and windshield was very dramatic.


I tried to snap some photos of Joshua trees in the snow, since I’d never seem them covered in powder before, but this one turned out to be my favorite.


I just had to take a photo of the snow on highway 14, just outside of LA and by Escondido Canyon Road. Thankfully it wasn’t coming down at that point.

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February 17th, 2009 - Los Angeles, Travel

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Hanging Out with Iron Man: The Legacy Effects Open House

A few weeks ago, Evan and I went to the Legacy Effects open house to check out the new location and see Evan’s former Stan Winston co-workers (Legacy Effects is the new name for Stan Winston Studio, the visual effects company that did things like the Jurassic Park dinosaurs and the Terminator).

The studio was full of fun things to see, from Terminator models to Edward Scissorhands, to Iron Man. We also got to see where they make the molds — and touch some of the materials they make their creatures out of — and there was footage up of a lot of the testing and filming with the models. There was even a shot of Evan in a pig-lizard suit for Galaxy Quest from his early days at SWS. Apparently he fainted in the parking lot shortly after getting out of the suit since it was so hot and cramped in there.

They also had themed drinks, based on the movies they’d done effects for, like the Alien. And there were some characters from commercials, like the Aflac Duck and Death (he was in a Super Bowl commercial this year for something… Pizza Hut? I don’t remember).

We weren’t allowed to take pictures ourselves, but they had some photographers walking around, which is where these shots came from.

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February 13th, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Los Angeles

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Data + Art at the PMCA

Last night, Evan and I went to the opening of the Data + Art exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The show explores how data can be explored, visualized, filtered and even set to music for the sake of understanding, expression or art.

The opening display was a collage mosaic of photos, charts, medical diagrams and more with the quote, “Humans will very likely generate more information this year than in the cumulative history of our species.”

The exhibits were all thought-provoking and were striking in how different they were. They ranged from micro-etching to 3-D photos of Mars to light- and wind-powered drawing devices. The drawing devices were some of my favorites.

The light-powered one, Phototropic Drawing Device by David Bowen, featured two small robots with charcoal on their feet waddling and hopping around a large sheet of paper. They would change their direction depending on which lights were on, and they looked like two mini moon rovers searching for something.

The wind-powered drawing machine was completely different, but equally charming. The same artist, David Bowen, attached autumn leaves to long wires weighted down with rocks that had a piece of charcoal attached and would create small wind drawings. The drawings were created in Hungary by Lake Balaton. The devices as well as many of the drawings were on display, and it seems that nobody could resist blowing on the leaves to try to encourage a drawing right in the museum.

There were also some interesting music exhibits. One was a piece called Jiyeh by Jonathan Berger that took satellite imagery of a Mediterranean oil spill off the coast of Lebanon and correlated the changing contours of the spill into musical notes and phrases, which became the foundation for the composition.

Another music exhibit translated data from tumor biopsies to different noises, with benign cells represented by various bell noises and malignant cells represented by percussion sounds. The idea behind this piece was that mapping data to sound, pixel by pixel, will allow you to listen to a higher dimension of data that cannot necessarily be seen.

Though we’d seen something similar at MoMA in New York, we still couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the giant flight map of all the flights in a single day in the U.S by Aaron Koblin. The map would switch between cities and also show a full-country view. Watching the planes take off and land and do their turns was interesting, as was seeing ones coming from Europe and Asia, some traveling over the north pole.

There was also an interesting Flickr-driven display by Jim Bumgardner. For one piece, the artist took all the photos labeled sunrise and sunset and put them on a graph showing the day of the month and the time of day. For the other piece, the artist took all the photos labeled breakfast, lunch and dinner, and plotted them according to the time of day they were taken. The photos were made translucent, the brightest spots are when the most photos were taken. I love that from the graph you can see that breakfast has some popularity all day while lunch and dinner and much more time-specific.

Though I couldn’t take any photos that would do them justice, there were some neat 3-D photos of Mars, the closest you can get to feeling like you’re on the red planet. And there was also the original pixel-by-pixel hand-rendering of the first close-up Mars photo ever sent back to earth.

Another display I found interesting was a graphic representation of the size of Napoleon’s army as they headed to Russia and retreated from Russia, losing nearly the entire force on the way. The map-based graph by Charles Joseph Minard represented the number of troops in the thickness of the line showing their march, and to see it go from a robust swath to a thin line was quite impressive and an interesting way to graphically show a historic event.

One display I felt needed more explanation was a piece called Spam Architecture by Alex Dragulescu that apparently took input from spam emails and translated them through some algorithm into a 3-D drafting program to create structures. It didn’t give much information as to how the structures were created, and though they looked impressive and the piece was quite enjoyable, it’s hard to imagine how spam could translate into 3-D spaces, most of which actually looked structural, or at least like boxes with extra pieces added on. I’m curious to learn more.

There were also displays of solid smoke, MRIs of a developing quail egg, which showed the development of the skeleton and internal organs in amazing detail, and an entrancing light-through-water seismic display that encouraged visitors to step on or tap the metal plate the water bowl was perched on to create different light images on the wall.

Another neat display, called 10,000 cents by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, was a large $100 bill that was divided up into 10,000 rectangular pieces, each drawn by a different person paid 1 cent using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The idea was that the cost to produce the piece was $100, and on close inspection, you’ll see that not everybody followed directions when it came to drawing their square — there are cat faces and stick figures and other anomalies in the bill.

I’d highly recommend this exhibit, so head on over to the PMCA at 490 East Union Street in Pasadena. Admission is only $7, and it’s free the first Friday of each month (so February 6 should be a freebie). The exhibit runs until April 12, and there’s also a neat exhibit of David Sharf’s microphotography called Micronautics that’s worth a look.

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January 25th, 2009 - Art & Entertainment, Los Angeles

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Racing Through LA with High Trek Adventure

Yesterday, Evan and I participated in a High Trek Adventure race in LA. We didn’t take it too seriously at first — Evan was determined that we weren’t going to run despite my excitement every time I saw other teams jogging by — but as it turns out we did quite well, coming in at about 10th place (not an official number, since we don’t have our official time, but we had no penalties and we were the 10th team back according to the list).

So what is a High Trek Adventure race? Well, I didn’t know about them until a week ago, so don’t feel bad for not knowing — HTA is a company that sets up scavenger hunt-type races in various cities across the U.S. We met at a location in Hollywood to start the race and we got an all-day transit pass (LADOT was a sponsor) and a packet of clues (10 regular clues and two bonus clues).

We had to figure out the clues, which would take us to locations across Hollywood and Downtown LA, take pictures of various signs, statues, people or locations — which we had to be in as well — and get back to the starting location as fast as possible using only buses, subways or our own two feet. We were also allowed to use our phones and the internet to figure out clues, so people immediately started calling their friends for help while we immediately turned to Google on our iPhones.

Looking back, we did our clues in a really smart order, since we never had to backtrack. We started with the west-most location in Hollywood, Cantaloop, at Hollywood and La Brea, from the clue:

Find this all natural dessert spot location within a quarter mile of the Roosevelt Hotel that shares its name with a pop song of a jazz-rap group from the early ’90s. Here’s a sample of the song in question:

Yeah, yeah, yeah — what’s that? Diddi-diddi bop
Funky funky — yeah yeah — diddi-diddi bop

From there we went to find the hand prints of the star mentioned at the beginning of “We Didn’t Start the Fire” — Doris Day.

We also needed to take photos of 7 different Hollywood signs — not too hard when you’re actually in Hollywood (the alternative was taking a photo with 10 strangers plus us and the Hollywood sign, which we also attempted, though we sort of miscounted and only had 8 strangers and the Hollywood sign was fogged over for the photo).

Then we unscambled Boris Karloff’s name and found his star over on Vine, right in front of the Avalon. And then we went over to Toyota of Hollywood to see how many tries it would take us to unlock a car — we did it in two tries, so we didn’t get any time penalty.

We realized we were pretty well done with the Hollywood clues — there was one more, but we decided it would be the one we’d skip (we only had to do 9 out of 10) — so we headed over to the metro stop at Western and Hollywood, which was a bit of a walk, and went downtown.

We stopped at the Transit Mall to take a picture of a wall tile with the Joker on it, then headed over to Pershing square to take a photo with the Betthoven statue — our way of showing we added up which two actors had the most combined Oscars from a list.

From there we went up to Grand Central Market to buy an Apple from La Casa Verde. I had no idea that giant market was even there — I’d love to go back and check it out some more. That also took us right by Angels Flight, to which both Evan and I said, “LA has a funicular!?” We had no idea it was there and had never seen the bright orange cars, though we learned that they haven’t run since a serious accident where a cable snapped and a car sped down the mountain, killing a man and injuring others in 2001.

The last stop we had to make was Axis Physical Therapy by the Disney Concert Hall, which meant getting up a hill. I ran part of the way up, and we saw other teams running down the hill. We took the photo quickly, not waiting for the other two teams at the site, then started running back down the hill toward the Red Line stop.

Another team was right on our tail as we ran around the circular subway entrance. As we started down the subway escalator, we could hear the train coming, and we had to run down another flight of stairs to get to it. Evan got there first and I was concerned because my shoe was untied and I had an apple placed pretty precariously in my pocket, but Evan was able to hold the doors open just long enough for me and the other team to get on. Were we ever tired when we got on the subway!

What we didn’t realize was that we got on the Purple Line, which stops at Wilshire and Western, and not the Red Line, which goes to Hollywood and Highland, where we needed to be. Of course, nothing on the train indicated that, but when we reached the last stop the two lines shared, there was a very quiet announcement. We heard it, and though we were slightly unsure about the decision, we decided to get off the train to wait for the next one, which should be the real Red Line. The other couple didn’t even seem to consider getting off, and sort of looked at us with a “suckers!” look when we decided to get off the train.

We did make the right decision, and the next train was the right one. We felt guilty about not making it more clear to the other team that they were on the wrong train, but it was a pretty split-second decision because the announcement was made at the station where we needed to make the switch, and we were slightly unsure of the decision ourselves.

We got back to Hollywood and Highland and took a quick photo of some A-list celebrities (on a billboard), since it was one of the bonus items. We also looked around for anyone in a jersey or a shop that sold them, another bonus item, but didn’t see anything immediately, so we decided to just head back to the starting point as quickly as possible to save time. We ran down Highland towards Sunset, and got to the Catalina Jazz Club about 2 hours and 20 minutes after the race started, and we were surprised to learn that we were only the 10th team back. I think there were more than 50 teams of two to six participating.

We had some iced tea to celebrate finishing the race — and I forgot to mention, our team name was Unsweetened Iced Tea — then took some time to catch our breath. We waited around until about 4:30 so we could see the awards, even though we were pretty sure we wouldn’t win one. We didn’t, but we found out that some teams took close to five hours to complete the race, and we did have a great time getting to run around LA and see the other people who were interested in this sort of thing, too.

There were plenty of people who’d participated in these types of events before, whether it was other HTA races, Race LA events or even The Amazing Race, so we were really proud of ourselves for doing well and working as a team, and we’ll definitely be on the lookout for other similar events. It was a great way to spend a Saturday and to get a really unconventional workout.

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January 25th, 2009 - Los Angeles

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