What were we up to today? Oh, nothing much, chilling in our garden. We had to relax before tonight’s big meet up across the world to discuss the latest issue of our quarterly magazine, The Cities Issue: Starring Los Angeles. Click through to find out how you can participate!
It’s apparently pretty-lights day around here. Check out this awesome story about neighbors each chipping in to sponsor a lightbulb and get this historic sign re-lit.
“You don’t have to be Bill Gates or Warren Buffet or Oprah,” to help someone in need says Los Angeles attorney Tony Tolbert. The 51-year-old is certainly walking the talk in a seriously inspiring way. He gave his home—rent free and fully furnished for an entire year—to a homeless family. And he’s moving back in with his parents so he can do it.
Tolbert’s mother, Marie, says when she first heard about her son’s plans, she asked him, “Have you lost it?” But the family has a long tradition of service and extending a helping hand to those in need. Tolbert’s father, Jimmy, who was a prominent entertainment lawyer before getting Alzheimer’s, set an example for his family by always opening a spare bedroom to people who needed a place to stay.
Tolbert reached out to a Los Angeles shelter for help finding a family which led him to Felicia Dukes, a mother of four, who recently moved into his home. As you can see in the video above, the tears flow when Dukes talks about Tolbert’s generosity. “My heart just fills up,” she says. “I’m just really happy.”
“Kindness creates kindness. Generosity creates generosity. Love creates love,” says Tolbert. “And if we can share some of that and have more stories about people doing nice things for other people and fewer stories about people doing horrible things to other people, that’s a better world.”
With the joy of Carmageddon behind us (tell us how you celebrated!), it’s time to start thinking about the future. A future which, in Los Angeles, will hopefully include some better transit options. But L.A., as we all know, was built for cars, from the country’s first freeway to the extra-wide side streets. To move this city forward, we first have to consider what Los Angeles would be like with fewer cars. We’re partnering with Rethink LA: Perspectives on a Future City, an exhibition which opens at the A+D Museum in August, to imagine the city when it has moved beyond cars.
Imagine sitting in traffic during your daily commute and instead of seeing the clutter of countless billboard advertisements you see gardens floating in the sky. That’s the kind of green experience Los Angeles-based artist Stephen Glassman wants us to have as we travel through our urban landscape. His Urban Air project hopes to transform the steel and wood frames that hold billboard advertising into suspended bamboo gardens.
Glassman’s been creating large-scale bamboo installations across Los Angeles since the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. He came up with Urban Air because—like many of us who live in congested cities—he saw a need for more fresh, green space, and a greater connection to humanity. The idea won the 2011 London International Creativity Award and proved so inspiring that Summit Media, a billboard company based in Los Angeles actually offered to donate billboards along major streets and freeways.
As you can see in the video above, to create the garden billboards, Glassman and his team simply remove the commercial facade and modify the existing structure by installing planters, filling them with live bamboo, hooking up a water misting system and connecting them to a wifi network that monitors the environment. Then, says Glassman, “when people are stuck in traffic” on the 10 Freeway instead of seeing advertisements, they “look up and they see an open space of fresh air.”
The project’s hoping to raise $100,000 through Kickstarter to structurally retrofit the first prototype billboard, secure licenses, permits, and insurance, and pay for cranes to help install everything. They hope to spread the idea across the globe so they’re also producing “a system ‘kit’ that enables any standard billboard to be easily transformed to a green, linked, urban forest.” While it can be argued that that’s a hefty sum for just one billboard and a toolkit, seeing a beautiful garden suspended in air sure beats having to look at another advertisement, right?
What do you love? GOOD senior editor Cord Jefferson took us on a public transportation tour of Los Angeles to show us all the little things he loves. Here are 10 of them:
1 Weddings 2 Burritos with fake meat in them 3 Arizona 4 Los Angeles (and the Randy Newman song “I Love L.A.”) 5 Getting haircuts 6 Steely Dan 7 Skipping town for the weekend on a whim 8 Very sad movies 9 Driving around and listening to music late at night 10 LAX to HNL
I always wondered why it was so difficult for drivers to just pay attention and not be assholes. Then I moved to Los Angeles and got a car. Here, we do not operate our vehicles so much as we hang out in them. Hunkered in my sedan, I’m now comfortable juggling an iced coffee and the radio dial while “courtesy” honking the car in front of me. Only when I jump back on my bicycle do I become a little bit scared about the person that I become when I’m behind the wheel.