About chimatli

In the fourth-grade, I won second place in the Humphreys Elementary School poetry contest. It's been all downhill from there.

LA Eastside Outings: Taking Over, Part Two

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photo by Cindylu

Welcome to Part Two of the Taking Over reviews. A couple of reviews are still making their way through the LA Eastside digital transport, so please revisit this post in the next few days. (New review from Pachuco 3000 below!)
Part one can be found here.

Cindylu:

I’ve lived just a few minutes away from Downtown Culver City since 2000 in Palms South Robertson*. Despite living here for 8+ years, I only recently started spending any significant time (and money) in the area. Previously, there was nothing to do after 5 pm and a dearth of any other sorts of entertainment.

That’s all slowly been changing. The Kirk Douglas Theater playbill featured an article about the “revitalization” (aka gentrification) of DCC in recent years. In a small area you can find several architecture firms, art galleries, a couple of theaters, and several restaurants. On Tuesdays, local growers set up a farmer’s market on a 1-block long Main Street. If you go during a weekend night, you’ll find the 5 or so blocks between the Trader Joe’s and Kirk Douglas Theater quite busy. Now, I regularly shop at Trader Joe’s, buy fruit and vegetables at the farmer’s market, watch movies at the Pacific Theater and eat at some of the restaurants. I’d never gone to a production at the Kirk Douglas until last week. And yes, I can see the inherent contradiction of watching a play on gentrification in my neighborhood due to the gentrification in the area.

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LA Eastside Outings: Taking Over, Part One

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A play about gentrification? Sounds like an outing for LA Eastsiders! We made our way across town to see if the play would live up to the hype. Did it? Read on…

First, a short summary of the play from the Kirk Douglas Theater website:

OBIE Award-winning solo artist Danny Hoch returns to Center Theatre Group with his riveting new work, Taking Over, a show that brings to vivid life the residents of his Brooklyn neighborhood.

In rapidly changing Williamsburg, the melting pot is boiling over with strained ethnic relations and economic tensions—and the threat of gentrification, which threatens to crush the city’s diversity. Hoch masterfully depicts this community in transition with compassionate and hilarious results.

Read more at the Danny Hoch website. Taking Over ends February 22, that’s Sunday! Oh, and don’t bother watching the opening night video clip on the Kirk Douglas website, lame.

Reviews below, more coming tomorrow…

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New Design for Sixth St Bridge

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Sixth St Bridge – photo courtesy of LAPL.org

According to the Los Angeles Times, the unveiling of the new design for the Sixth St bridge was met with disappointment by Boyle Heights residents and the 6th Street Viaduct community advisory committee. Many feel the bridge is too modern and spare looking and lacks historical continuity.

“I said as far as I am concerned, if you are going to put this bridge with cables there, you might as well not put a bridge there at all. I would rather not see one there,” said Victoria Torres, a board member of the Boyle Heights Historical Society. “It’s very disappointing when the city is trying to push something on you that you didn’t agree with.”

The bridge is in a state of irreversible decay and is plagued by some kind of “concrete cancer” that can lead to a collapse in a heavy earthquake.

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Eastside Greasers


Lincoln Heights Greasers

El Chavo originally spotted these youngsters a few months ago. Today they were out and about looking for something fun to occupy their time.

Me: Can I take your picture?
Them: Sure!!!
Me: What do you call your style?
Them: Greasers
Me: How long have you been into this style?
Them: Four years
Me: Thanks! Have a great day!
Them: You too!

If you look carefully, you’ll notice they are chomping on Flaming Hot Cheetos, the #1 snack on the Eastside.

South Central Farms comes to Northeast LA


Apologies for the poor quality of the flyer. I carried it around folded in my bag before I actually read it.

I was pleased to discover this flyer at Figueroa Produce this past week. It’s an idea other independent grocers would do well to emulate: team up with local growers and farmers to deliver low cost produce to urban areas. I know we already have farmers markets but I think this idea might be easier to implement on a smaller scale.
I’ll try a box next week and get back to you with the results.
For more info: South Central Farmers Cooperative

Purgatory Pizza in Boyle Heights


Large cheese and mushroom pizza $14.50

The other day I was talking to my buddies from the Bus Bench and the subject of pizza came up. They seemed like connoisseurs on the subject, so I asked what their favorite pizza was and they both said “Purgatory Pizza!” I’d never heard of it. I imagined it would be in a neighborhood I probably don’t visit much and catering to New Yorkers or something but they said the place was in Boyle Heights.
Boyle Heights???
“On First St. near Mariachi Plaza.” Hmmm, it’s not that I didn’t believe them or anything but I had to see for myself. I drive through that area quite often (Boyle Ave between Cesar Chavez and Whittier is one of my favorite streets in Los Angeles) so on my next trip I found the pizza place – right in the heart of Aliso-Pico!

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La Crisis: 99 cent Lives


photo courtesy of the Los Angeles Times website

If you didn’t live in Los Angeles during the early 90s, count your lucky stars. It was a rough time to live in my beloved city, there was a crack epidemic, people were in dire straits and I knew folks that were either getting shot or doing the shooting. And then there were the riots…I’ve been thinking a lot about those times lately, the economy is bad and that means people start getting desperate. Two events today are reminiscent of those dark times.

I was at Figueroa Produce today on York and Figueroa stocking up on my veggies and Mediterranean products when the police rush up in a patrol car, sirens wailing to the nearby 99 cent store. An employee or guard has a guy on the ground outside the front door. The police order him to stand up and to put his hands on his head. There’s an ambulance there. Did he shoot someone? And two firetrucks. Could one man cause so much trouble?

I remark on the drama to the young clerk at Figueroa Produce, she shrugs and says “You know the economy’s getting bad when they start robbing 99 cent stores.” Ah, from the mouth of babes, indeed.

Tonight in the industrial section of Lincoln Heights, a woman was found shot in her car. Her life was worth a 41 second clip on KCAL news. The story was being reported from a helicopter. Women in our neighborhood are not worth a newsvan.

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Awkward moments in Los Angeles


My grandmother, her mother, her sisters, my grandfather (in the baggy pants), friends and neighbors at their first Echo Park home. The home no longer exists and the neighborhood is now called Historic Filipinotown.

I wrote this a couple of months ago but was hesitant to post. But as a friend of mine (a prolific emailer and a notorious drunk – a bad combination) once told me “just close your eyes and press enter”

My friend and I tried to go to the Stories Bookstore opening in Echo Park. We walked by 15 minutes before the opening party was due to start and got a handful of stares from the young guys silk screening in the store window. Hmmm, no sign of opening party anywhere and the sign on the door says “open next week”. Perhaps it’s a private party, oh well.

We walked into the Time Travel Mart, I’d been curious about the place. It looked cool in photos. My friend walked in with me but leaves immediately because he cannot tolerate pretentious irony and the store was chock full of it. I thought the place would be more interesting somehow but it wasn’t. It could be me, I just didn’t get it.
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Botanitas: January 29, 2009


The infamous tumbleweeds of Lincoln Heights. This one was found at the foot of Holgate Square.

Botanitas is an ongoing feature bringing you stories and news from various sources, upcoming events and other bits of ephemera that might be of interest to LA Eastside readers. Suggestions welcome!

Read below for ten-cent conchitas, North Broadway nightlife, CNN tacos, the Eastside extension, details on who is Taking Over and a bonus guilty pleasure!
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Happy Year of the Ox!


Ji Chou 己丑-Year of the Ox-新年快乐

It’s the Lunar New Year’s Eve and here in Lincoln Heights, the normally dark houses are lit, the front doors are open, the altars are decorated and the smell of incense wafts through the streets. The firecrackers started up around 4pm. They are not so numerous as in years past when the rat-tat-tat seemed to go on endlessly for days ahead of time and the acrid smoke drifted in the windows. Perhaps US customs is much stricter with checking for illicit cargo or maybe many of the Chinese and Vietnamese families have moved on to the easterly suburbs such as my neighbors who recently moved to Rowland Heights.

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Saladitos, Food of the Playground

Before Flaming Hot Cheetos, Eastside kids coveted these – especially the saladitos with chile. They were sometimes eaten a little at a time and some of the macho kids bravely managed to consume them whole. I’m sure you can still find these all over the place but this package was bought at one of the last Japanese-American markets in the South San Gabriel area, Tozai Foods.

Sunday mornings in Lincoln Heights

I woke up this morning to hear my neighbor blasting Cumbia del Rio from his truck and I told myself “Ah, another beautiful morning in Lincoln Heights!”

Back when I first moved to my street, I lived next door to a three house complex of paisas and their cholillo kids. I knew some of them previously as they used to be my neighbors on the street I had moved from a few blocks over. (In Lincoln Heights this is totally common for rental residents to move around to different blocks and inevitably you end up next to be people you left behind). Anyways, this was back in the mid 90s and like all good paisas, they had a massive sound system in their truck which they would blast every Sunday morning (the sound mingling with my other neighbor’s roosters.) I loved this auditory wake up call but what I couldn’t understand was why the singer they kept listening to had such an awful voice. I would go around mimicking it because it sounded so out of tune and nasal-y. Eventually, the bad singing grew on me and I became to find it kinda charming. Guess who that singer was? The infamous Chalino Sanchez.


Las Nieves de Enero-Chalino Sanchez

Have a great Sunday!

Decent article on Chalino Sanchez by LA Weekly.
First part of article here.
(Thanks, Soledad en Masa!)