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LA Legends…. Hollywood Legends….

Robert De Niro and Al Pacino… Mister Cartoon and Estevan Oriol… A collaboration like no one has ever witnessed….

This is it… the iconic “Righteous Kill” movie poster created by Mister Cartoon and Estevan Oriol before it hits the streets.

Keep an eye out for an SA Studios / Righteous Kill Downtown LA Experience. Word is out, this is going to be a historical tribute to SA Studios’ two favorite actors, De Niro and Pacino. The “Righteous Kill” experience is set to open up in August 2008 right next door to the “The Last laugh” Mister Cartoon’s & Estevan Oriol’s retail spaces along side the Upper Playground retail space located on 6th and Los Angeles Streets in Downtown Los Angeles

Also in August 2008, SA Studios and Righteous Kill in collaboration with Upper Playground will release “Righteous Kill” limited edition merchandise and lithographs signed by the designers of the “Righteous Kill” iconic artwork, Mister Cartoon & Estevan Oriol.

The upcoming feature film from Overture Films, “Righteous Kill” starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino, will be in theaters 09-12-08.

I heard Upper Playground is now open and Estevan & Toon’s retail space will open in a couple of weeks.

Operative “J” sends us a cell shot of SKULLPHONE’s digital achievements via Send2Taco… another picture on supertouch, and another below from lead.salad on Flickr:

We’ve long sung the praises of Gold, the patron saint of Los Angeles food writers and a giant among pygmies in the local rags. The Pulitzer prize winner has made his name with articles like the one we excerpt below, and if you have a spare week or two, keep reading through the Weekly’s excellent archive of Gold.

For a while in my early 20s, I had only one clearly articulated ambition: to eat at least once at every restaurant on Pico Boulevard, starting with the fried yucca dish served at a pupuseria near the downtown end and working methodically westward toward the chili fries at Tom’s No. 5 near the beach. It seemed a reasonable enough alternative to graduate school. After I’d finished work each day at a legal newspaper near city hall, I would walk to the next restaurant on Pico. After dinner I would buy an orange from a street vendor and catch a bus the rest of the way home. (I should mention here that I actually lived on Pico, over a kosher butcher shop near Robertson.) When the enormity of the adventure seemed overwhelming, I might buy a taco at one restaurant, a hamburger at the next and a bowl of chilate y nuegado at a third. I never made it to the beach, but I did eat my way almost to Century City that year, from the El Salvador Cafe all the way to the old Roxbury Pharmacy grill. I grooved on the Persian-Jewish neighborhood around Beverly, the remarkable strip of soul food between Fairfax and Crenshaw, the pan-ethnic zone around Westwood. I especially liked the neighborhood — mostly Central American — that had sprung up between Vermont and the Harbor Freeway, the thousands upon thousands of Guatemalans and Salvadorans who crowded Pico until dark, choosing toys from big displays set up in grocery-store parking lots, buying mayonnaise-smeared ears of corn from street-corner pushcarts. The restaurants in that neighborhood were good, too. I learned about everything from marinated octopus at El Pulpo Loco, El Parian’s Jalisco-style goat stew, and Salvadoran pupusas to El Nica’s giant Nicaraguan tamales, Cuban fried rice, Guatemalan pepian and Ecuadorian llapingachos.

You can read the rest of the article at laweekly.com. Photo by Waltarrrr from the excellent photoset Pico Blvd.

Blogmeister Tony Pierce of the LA Times has scored a major coup– Kareem Abdul Jabbar is blogging on the Times website. We wanted Kareem to blog at LA Taco but apparently the Times had the inside track; we’re just glad he’s doing stuff on the web. Besides being one of the greatest basketball players of all time, Kareem is a noted historian, author, LA legend, and all-around amazing person. So far his blog is focusing on sports, black history, music, and politics. It rules, and so does Kareem.

Kareem and Bruce Lee

Lee Hazlewood might have been born in Oklahoma, lived in Sweden, and died in Nevada, but like a lot of modern American music figures, he spent a considerable and important period in LA. Although his most famous work was for Nancy Sinatra, his production influenced other LA transplants like Phil Spector and Gram Parsons, and his style was mined by both groups shitty (like the Eagles, who latched onto his pioneering country rock boogie) and artists spectacular (both Marvin Gaye’s break-up masterpiece “Here, My Dear” and Bob Dylan’s “Blood On the Tracks” can be easily credited to Hazlewood’s “Requiem For An Almost Lady”). In recent years Hazlewood’s music was devoured by a new generation of fans, as contemporary musicians had varying degrees of success in tributes to Hazlewood (Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley did a strong version of “A Cheat,” but Primal Scream and Kate Moss’ dancey cover of “Some Velvet Morning is fucking atrocious), and many films have either featured his music (to powerful effect in “Morvern Callar”) or strangely neglected it (”Little Miss Sunshine” was named after a Hazlewood tune but its soundtrack had none of his work). After’s Hazlewood’s passing this weekend, his family released a statement that ended with a quote from his song “My Autumn’s Done Come,” but I thought first of his song “If It’s Monday Morning,” with its poignant and striking verse.

Download If It’s Monday Morning mp3