Quartz City – Page 37 – by Chris Barrus

Adventures in the UCLA Los Angeles photo library

Everyone has been linking to UCLA’s new on-line library of historic L.A. photos and I just had to point out some of my favorites:

Automobile crash into billboard on Wilshire Blvd. and Mansfield Street in Los Angeles, Calif., circa 1942.

Los Angeles-based comedian, Pee Wee Herman (Paul Reubens) posing with stuff monkey on Melrose Ave. in Los Angeles, Calif., 1984

3,500 pound industrial robot, Unimate, pouring coffee for a woman at Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, Calif., 1967

Artist Salvador Dali seated in a bathtub at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Calif., 1944

Two female musicians entertaining passerbys in front of Los Angeles office of Air France on Bastille Day, 1965

Airplane being transported down Wilshire Blvd. to the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, Calif., 1937

Coyote on the prowl in La Brea

Somewhere awhile back I read that coyotes were being sighted in Hollywood. I certainly didn’t expect to see one as far south as Detroit and 4th St. near La Brea. This guy was just loping along 4th probably looking for some grub and/or water. I suspect that after the Griffith Park fire, there’s probably a lot of critters looking for the same.

(Blurry phone cam picture shot out my car window)

My Bruce Sterling moment…

…going to a lecture about futurist city design and architecture inside a re-purposed wind tunnel owned by an art school while a brush fire threatens to burn the city down.

Yet another good BLDGBLOG event though I wish there was more time to lift it out of the show-and-tell blitzkrieg. The one question I wanted to ask the panel was if they considered and/or incorporated the temporal nature of city evolution. As a sci-fi artist for movies, it seems the tendency would be to tilt toward ground-up master planning, but cities aren’t hegemonic areas, they grow, go broke, get blighted, get hit by deorbiting star destroyers, get rebuilt, attacked by Godzilla, new stuff built on top of old stuff, etc.

The last couple of Star Wars movies hinted at that evolution, but not nearly as thorough as portrayed in Blade Runner or perhaps A.I.

Griffith Park fire right now

Taken outside my workplace in Glendale about 10 minutes ago.

The ScannerBuff Network is streaming radio traffic from L.A. County Fire’s Mutual Aid channel if you want to listen in. Also see Flickr photos tagged fire.

Ex-Detectives track up

Over the course of their life span, every blog has to hit several content stereotypes. One is cat pictures. Another is “What ‘xxx’ am I?” quiz graphics. Another is band hype.

I haven’t owned a cat in fifteen years, but I can check off another blog stereotype by mentioning that an Ex-Detectives track has been posted over on the MySpace page. Yay us!

Apocalypse News

I can’t be the only Los Angeles blogger that has noticed the similarity between this

And this

Sheesh, KCBS only just moves out of Columbia Square to their new Studio City digs and already they’re declaring war on Los Angeles. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in the focus group that approved this ad campaign.

The New Earth

The only thing that’s more amazing than the announcement of Gliese 581c is the artwork that the Daily Mail used to illustrate it.

The new planet is apparently a 1950s cover to Fantasy & Science Fiction. Really the only thing missing there is a tri-tailfinned rocket and someone in a bubble-headed spacesuit. Maybe the way to kick-start a new space program isn’t with Apollo-era iconography, but with pulp SF guns, girls, and ghouls.

Somewhere out there Chesley Bonestell is grinning…

Bambi vs. Godzilla vs. Super Mario vs. Homer vs…

I haven’t looked into the emulation / 8-bit world for a long time… Most of my gaming time has been limited to short runs of MAME OS X (finally a universal version!) and that’s about it. I don’t understand how I’ve missed M.U.G.E.N all these years. It does for 2d fighting what GURPS did for RPGs: provide a common set of parameters so that characters from different games can compete against each other.

What does this mean? It means you can finally see what happens when Godzilla meets the Mario Brothers.
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All I have to say about this week

I always find it interesting that political action groups will spend millions of dollars in commodifying their rage against video games, violent movies, and guns but aren’t willing to spend a cent in providing basic mental health care that could help prevent kids from snapping in the first place.

On the last cross-country road trip I stopped in at Blacksburg for a visit. Ended up spending the whole late morning/afternoon in town. Liked it a lot. I can’t imagine what’s going on out there right now but I’m postive that what they don’t need is minions from both the Church Of Scientology and Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church descending upon them. My only hope is that both groups will encounter each other and annihilate themselves like matter/anti-matter.

BLAM

In lieu of any other kind of post at the moment, I’m somewhat traumatized after the trusty New Hampshire amp lost about two-thirds of it’s volume during last night’s practice.

1. I have to get it fixed since the only sound the Ampeg reliably makes is a 60 cycle hum.
2. Is this when I finally break down and buy an AC30? Anyone have a blue-speakered Vox they want to sell?