Los Angeles Visionaries Association

The Black Surfers Collective, Heal the Bay, Supervisor Mark Ridley-Thomas, the Santa Monica Conservancy  and other groups will offer a day of surf lessons and activities for young and old to commemorate the life of Nick Gabaldon (1927–1951), the first documented surfer of African American and Mexican descent, and the heritage of the historical African American beach site, sometimes formerly called the “Inkwell.”  The day is a celebration of our California seaside, cultural and historical heritage, and outreach to promote historical studies, surfing and ocean stewardship.

Instructor: longtime professional costume maker anf LAVA member A. Laura Brody, currently working with Nickelodeon and Disney XDTV. Ask Laura about class details at http://www.dreamsbymachine.com or at laurabrody@verizon.net.

Staple draping is a fun but practical technique for creating clothing, slipcovers, sculpture, car covers- anything made from fabric. No special skills are needed to start and the tools are easy to use. We’ll use our fellow students to create art right on the body. You will come away from the class with a real-world skill you’ll use again and again. Staple draping isn’t permanent. That’s why we’ll take your staple draping and turn it into a pattern to use with any fabric you like. In the last class, we’ll staple drape furniture.

CLASS SCHEDULE:
Saturdays, March 30th- April 20th
Saturdays, May 4th- May 25th
TIME: 12 PM- 3 PM
COST: $45 (due at registration) plus $20 materials fee for scissors, fabrics, ruler, staples and a stapler.
AGES: 16 years and older
REGISTER ONLINE/by PHONE/ in PERSON at http://www.cityofpasadena.net/reserve or (626) 744-7500

On the east side the Los Angeles River, some of the most fascinating Southern California stories are waiting to be told. Join Esotouric, L.A.’s most eclectic bus adventure company, on a century’s social history tour through the transformation of neighborhoods, punctuated with immersive stops to sample the sites, smells and cultures that make our changing city so beguiling.

Voter registration, citizenship classes, walkouts, blow-outs, anti-Semitism, adult education, racial covenants, boycotts, The City Beautiful, Exclusion Acts and Immigration Acts, property values, xenophobia, and delicious dumplings—all are themes which will be addressed on this lively bus and walking tour.

THE SAN GABRIEL VALLEY:

In the mid-1920s, Monterey Park was poised on the brink of becoming the Beverly Hills of the east. The Wall Street crash put an end to opulent residential development, but left some beautiful remnants of what might have been. In the 1950s, a thriving Italian-American community settled in the hills, and established some of the area’s most beloved landmark businesses. Since the 1980s, the communities of Alhambra, San Gabriel and Monterey Park have transformed themselves from sleepy suburban bedroom communities (bursting at the seams from a 1950s housing explosion) to the nexus of a pan-Asian megalopolis. Fueled by immigration and investment from Taiwan, Hong Kong and South-East Asia, these communities have found their 21st Century identity, and their economic base—but at the expense of aging long-time residents, who have seen familiar neighborhoods and retail zones become unrecognizable.

BOYLE HEIGHTS:

In the 1890s, Rev. Dana Bartlett ministered to and taught the Russian Molokons in the cramped riverside neighborhood known then and now as “The Flats.” Today, the area contains public housing projects--a belated mid-century solution to the social problems that worried Bartlett, and an ongoing challenge for residents and city planners. In the 1960s, the Chicano Moratorium emerged from the same streets where in the 1920s and 1930s Jewish activists helped change the face of labor in California and the nation. Using the organizing tools first honed by their Jewish neighbors, young Chicanos stood up and rejected the military machine that sent so many of their peers to die in Vietnam, and developed an empowered social identity that lead all the way to the Mayor’s office.

SO GET ON THE BUS:

This whirlwind social history tour of some of the most interesting and dynamic neighborhoods on the east side of Los Angeles will include stops at:

• The Vladeck Center
• Libros Schmibros
• Hollenbeck Park
• Neighborhood Music School Association
• Evergreen Cemetery
• The Venice Room
• El Encanto & Cascades Park
• Divine’s Furniture
• Wing Hop Fung for a complementary tea tasting and no-host wine selections

This is NOT a tour about beautiful buildings--although beautiful buildings will be all around you. This is NOT a tour about brilliant architects--although we will gaze upon their works and marvel.

The Lowdown on Downtown IS a tour about urban redevelopment, public policy, protest, power and the police. It is a revealing history of how the New Downtown became an "overnight sensation" after decades of quiet work behind the scenes by public agencies and private developers. This tour is about what really happened in the heart of Los Angeles, a complicated story that will fascinate and infuriate, break your heart and thrill your spirit.

So join your host Richard Schave, the founding director of the Downtown LA Art Walk non-profit, on a tour that reveals the secret history, and the fascinating future, of this most beguiling LA neighborhood.

This is a tour about the populated, vibrant mid-20th Century Downtown Los Angeles you've only heard about, and about the 21st Century Downtown that can rise again with a richness of heritage and quality of life leaving natives and visitors gaping in disbelief. This is a tour about Downtown's invisible neighborhoods and great public spaces which managed to escape the wrecking ball. This is a tour about how gentrification sprung up on the city's meanest streets, with all the conflicts that go along with a major socio-economic shift in a small community, and about how the free speech concerns of Occupy LA protesters came into synch with those of homeless rights activists in a challenging moment for LAPD and the arts community. This is a tour about the real and evolving Los Angeles, the city even natives don't know. Get on the bus for the real Lowdown on Downtown, as no one but Esotouric's Richard Schave can reveal it.

Our tour begins in the corporate public spaces of Bunker Hill and Pershing Square, each the result of deliberate social engineering (the razing of old Bunker Hill which displaced 9,000 residents; the elimination of positive public space in Pershing Square to thwart public address and gatherings). We segue to the underappreciated yet extremely successful public spaces of the Historic Core and then to the emerging live/work community of The Old Bank District, where developer Tom Gilmore’s gentrification and the popular monthly Art Walk are bringing life to spaces which have been dead for decades. The tour concludes with a visit to an underground arts space.

Having studied under architecture critic Reyner Banham in the mid-1980s, tour host Richard Schave has taken it upon himself to correct his teacher’s gross oversight of downtown Los Angeles, relegated to a dismissive coda in his seminal Los Angeles guidebook Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. Richard and his wife Kim Cooper work extensively with the history and lost cultures of downtown in their bus tours, in their work placing Art Walk into a non-profit, on blogs including On Bunker Hill, In SRO Land and 1947project, and through public lectures on the subject.

This tour has a significant walking component, down the stairs along Angels Flight, around Pershing Square, through several other pedestrian locations. It is broken up, but please be advised to be ready to stretch your legs.

Locations on the tour include:
Angels Flight
Grand Central Market
Mercantile Arcade Building
Bloom's General Store
An underground arts space

This tour is just one of our Reyner Banham Tour Series.

This Sunday night at 8pm, either outdoors in front of a fire and an inflatable movie screen in the Silver Lake Bowl (if it's a hot night) OR indoors in front of a fire in Roger's movie theater (if it's cool), we are proud to present to you: The Event Formerly Known as Nerd Nite!  

Nerd Nite is a series of informative and entertaining audio-visual talks where community speakers share some of their intense interests and areas of professional or lay expertise.  (Apparently there is a real organization that uses this name, and we are not that organization, which is why our event is now "formerly known as...")  

Our first speaker is Meagan Ramsey, who works as a medical social worker and also is a Gallery Interpreter at the LA County Natural History Museum.  She will talk about spiders, and ask the question: "Aversions to spiders are incredibly common in Western culture, but why do we fear them when other cultures do not?"  She’ll examine the roots of this fear, explore spider '101' and ‘fact vs. fiction’, along the way identifying our local spider species and whether they deserve our shrieks and shivers.

Our second speaker is Erica Li, a newly minted MD who works as a pediatrics resident at Harbor UCLA.  She and her slide show will discuss reproduction and sex differentiation, and ask the question: "When you were an embryo, how did your body know whether to develop male or female genitals?  What did your genes say to your forming gonads, and what did they in turn say to your budding genitalia?"  And: "How do people with Disorders of Sexual Differentiation shed light upon our perception of maleness and femaleness?"

Our third speaker is LAVA Visionary Laura Brody, a costume designer, who will talk about (and demonstrate) her specialty design and construction method: staple draping!  Using re-used fabrics, staplers, scissors and basic geometry, she'll show you how to create clothing on the fly.  Brave volunteers, come and let her staple you! 

So - bring your family, friends, and perhaps a bottle of something to drink, and come learn and enjoy.

Please register for your free ticket!

Curated by Richard Polysorbate and held in conjunction with the Downtown Long Beach Artwalk, Sea Witch Night will be held in an artificial cave created by Paul Wilkens. Music of a form to be determined by whim will be provided by Nora Keyes and Erin Schneider. Paul Koudounars will present a lecture and slideshow involving certain fantastical problems caused by ghosts, which may be more or less loosely related to sites he photographed for his book The Empire of Death, to be determined by whim. IF THERE IS ANY CONFUSION at the building, you can call or text Rich at 310-525-0179.

It's time for the 10th annual gathering of the Robert Benchley Society. This national group holds its annual Robert Benchley Awards dinner in a new city each year. This year's gathering is in Los Angeles, home to Mr. Benchley and Mrs. Dorothy Parker from the thirties through the fifties. This year the Society will gather for various activities the weekend of October 12th, including an Awards dinner hosted by "LAUGH IN" star, Arte  Johnson, at a private club in Santa Monica on Saturday, October 13th.  Evening dress or 20s-30s attire required at the Awards dinner. Must purchase ticket in advance. 

The Bob Baker Marionette Theater continues its 52nd season with “Bob Baker’s Halloween Hoop-Dee-Do” playing October 6-November 10, 2012. 

One of the theater’s perennial favorites, “Bob Baker’s Halloween Hoop-De-Do” first played the theater in 1963.  Featuring a fantastical cast of over 100 Halloween themed puppets, from the Purple People Eater and the Invisible Man to a gaggle of Roaring 20's skeletons dancing the night away in Hernando's Hideaway, “Bob Baker’s Halloween Hoop-De-Do” will whisk you away to “the place where imagination dwells”.  

These celebrated marionettes are presented in Bob Baker’s now famous “In the Round” cabaret style, with the puppeteers not only exposed to the audience, but serving as an integral part of the proceedings . . . and also making the audience part of the show. 
 
“Bob Baker’s Halloween Hoop-De-Do” is an hour-long revue. After the performance, guests are invited to visit with the Puppeteers and have refreshments in our Party Room.

To purchase a ticket for this special event, click here. If you'd like to be contacted when another crime lab tour and lecture are scheduled, subscribe to LAVA's occasional Crime Lab Newsletter.

Visionary Professor Donald Johnson, in association with LAVA and Esotouric, invites you to participate in a special four-hour event at LA's regional crime laboratory, on the campus of Cal State LA. Space is very limited and pre-reservation required for this unprecedented opportunity to tour the crime lab, learn from working forensic investigators and educators, and discover the real art and science of crime scene investigation.

"Arson Murders and Fire Death Investigation" is is hosted by Ed Nordskog, an active arson/bomb detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, and is a half-day exploration of the scientific investigation of fire-related felony offenses, revealed through methods of evidence analysis, profiling and select case histories. Attendees will also have an opportunity to tour Cal State LA's state-of the-art teaching and research facilities in the Criminalistics Department of the Hertzberg-Davis Forensic Science Center.

This program will explore the extraordinary challenges of dealing with fire death investigations. The destructive effects of fire and fire department suppression operations greatly skew an already complicated death scene. In addition to an in-depth a discussion of the Sandi Nieves case (Santa Clarity resident convicted of asphyxiating her four daughters in their home in 1998, then staging a fire to obscure her crime), the program includes discussion of body dumps and staged suicides involving fire.

Please note that the presentation includes extremely graphic crime scene photos, and is not for the faint of heart. No children will be admitted.

ABOUT ED NORDSKOG: Ed Nordskog is an active arson/bomb detective with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. He has been a detective since 1990, working specifically in the arson and explosives world since 1997. He has conducted over sixteen hundred fire investigations and as of this writing has personally arrested and interviewed over 250 persons who were convicted of fire setting and related crimes. He has testified in court as a recognized expert in this field on over fifty-five occasions. He has been consulted by prosecuting attorneys on death penalty cases involving arson and murder on three occasions. He has been personally involved in over twenty serial arson investigations. The author has a master's degree in emergency services management and is certified as a fire investigator by the California State Fire Marshal and the California Conference of Arson Investigators. He is a graduate of the National Fire Academy Arson Investigation Course, the ATF Advanced Arson Investigation Course, the Forensic Fire Death Investigation Course, and numerous other arson investigation courses. He is involved in course development and teaches fire scene investigation, major arson case investigation, serial arson investigation, and arson murder/fire death investigation. He is a course developer and instructor for the state of California's Arson and Explosives Investigation Course. He is an instructor for the state of California's Homicide Investigator's Course. In 2004, the author was named Arson Investigator of the Year by the International Association of Arson Investigators and Law Enforcement Officer of the Year by the International Association of Special Investigations Units; both of these awards are for his work as the lead investigator on a massive arson for hire scheme, involving fifty-five burned properties. He has received over eighty-five commendations, awards, and medals throughout his law enforcement career related to successful criminal investigations. He is author of the book 'Torchered' Minds: Case Histories of Notorious Serial Arsonists. His website is here.

Writers Homicide School, 2-day seminar in Santa Monica presented by Retired Sergeant Derek Pacifico of the San Bernardino County Sheriffs Department. With 22 years in the field and hundreds of murders, shootings, stabings and other felonious assaults under his belt, you are sure to learn the realities of an actual homicide investigation, the way it is really done. 

Learn about: Real police work from a real homicide detective, crime scene investigations, blood spatter interpretation, interview & interrogation, police procedures in general and specific detective responsibilities and so much more. Ask questions, interact with the class and the instructor. Learn more in two days than you could spending months doing research on the web. hear real stories, see real cases!

For more information and to register, please check out www.crimewritersconsultations.com.