A black-and-white border rocking an enigmatic cult icon under, above, or alongside bold lettering. If Shepard Fairey didn’t kickstart the contemporary poster renaissance, he certainly established a few molds that have been followed, appropriated, mocked, and straight-up stolen while the artist himself has moved on to worldwide fame, an endless string of promotional deals, outlets in all media, and no doubt a lot of scratch. It didn’t take long before everyone’s mom seemed to have their own posse, among other fringe characters, fame seekers, and subversive jokers with a penchant for fucking up city property.

(Image by Aiko)

Fairey has seemingly always been straight-forward about appropriating imagery, telling TACO that every time he does, it’s both on purpose and meant to be recognizable as such. We certainly know his army of Andre the Giants, Misfits skulls, Subcomandantes, Malcoms, and Assatas were self-aware tributes that recontextualized and subverted known imagery rather then creating wholly new icons. Like many fans of creative vandalism, we admire Shepard and have been stoked on his success and what it means for the hundreds of other artists who are coming up.

(2-Cents)

Staring at the online invitation TACO received for Fairey’s show opening this past Friday at New York’s Jonathan Levine Gallery, I couldn’t believe the image looking right back at me, though I must have seen at it the Charity By Numbers Show…a small girl holding a grenade very much in the style of Aiko, with a flower sprouting from its top. New Yorkers might not have caught this, but anyone with a middling interest in Los Angeles street art would recognize the grenade/flower juxtaposition from the work of our friend 2-Cents, whose black-and-white grenades with flowers sprouting from their tops have covered boxes, billboards, and marquees from the sea to Downtown, and are even sold by MOCA stores around Los Angeles.

What happens when an artist much more famous than you is inspired by the same idea, and all your hard work gets attributed to someone else? Contacting 2-Cents in the same week we’d discussed the unlicensed use of his grenade vase poster on Colin Hay’s recent album, 2-Cents said about the internationally-circulated Fairey image, “I don’t know what to do about it. I may have overreacted a bit with some of my posts I did concerning the matter. But on the other hand, I feel that people needed to know what was happening. It kinda got to the point where I had to say something. People that follow my work know that my main iconic image is the grenade vase. That is what I’ve been bombing around L.A. for the last two years. I sell my grenade vase print alongside Shepard’s work at Los Angeles MOCA Stores. In Santa Monica, my print is literally hanging on the wall right next to his Andre print in the MOCA Store. It just kinda sucks for me ‘cuz it takes some wind out of my sails.”

From top: Banksy, the original photograph, Bast. More on this particular image here.

A lot of things flashed through my mind as I considered 2-Cents’ words. In a genre where we borrow and are inspired liberally by one another, how damaging can it be to a young artist’s career when their work is recycled, knowingly or not, by someone with worldwide fame? Though there be nothing new under the sun, something about 2-Cents work is arresting and fresh to those who come across it– will the effect be dulled once Fairey’s huge show gains momentum?

Which leads us to the big man himself…

(Continued)

The LAPD is getting interactive online, with maps that show you what crimes took place where over the past week. It would be more interesting to use the maps for historical comparisons (if you could go back, for example, 10 years and see all the crimes in the database). Another thing lacking from the presentation is anything on arrests and convictions for these crimes. Obviously a week isn’t enough time for that info, but it would be interesting to be able to look back in history and see the conviction rate in various parts of the city and for various crimes on the map. Still, it’s another interesting layer of data for the city’s crime watchers. If you find anything of note on the maps, please post in the comments.

Sometimes, the urban man or woman or needs to get away for some fresh air for his or her lungs. It stands to reason that the urban man or woman should also get away every once and a while to get a fresh vista for his or her eyes, an environment free from visual pollution. As much as we love livin’ (”just enough”) for the city, and as much as we love focusing on design and text and graphics arts for LA Taco, it can get a bit stultifying in this dense urban environment. Some might go as far to describe it as a “visual assault”; others might describe it more lyrically, as in the Five Man Electrical Band 1971 hit/Tesla 1990 hit, Signs: “Sign, sign, everywhere a sign/ Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind/ Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?”

For a sign free environment, we can head to one of a few places: Joshua Tree National Park, the Neubau district of Vienna, or São Paulo, Brazil.

(Continued)

The UCLA Special Collection has made thousands of old news photos available under a Creative Commons license. We now bring some of our favorites to you, and encourage you to check out the entire collection and share your favorites in the comments.

1950, Los Angeles. Suspect Arthur Hall being interviewed by police, as officer displays marijuana plant recovered in raid

Primo Desidero performing freestyle skateboarding as crowd looks on in Venice Beach, Calif., 1984

Chavez Ravine residents wave good-bye from truck

Customers at taco catering truck in Los Angeles, Calif., 1987
(Continued)

Jonathan Gold has won the Pulitzer, and all of us at LA TACO would like to congratulate him. Mr. Gold’s influence on taco writers and food eaters in Los Angeles cannot be overstated. He is the maestro, we bow to his knowledge and writing skills, and his pimped-out Goldmobile– a converted AMC Pacer, equipped with special scent-detectors which allow him to sniff out new ethnic food eateries that have been open for mere seconds. We hope Gold stays in LA forever, without him we’d be lost.

Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Nothing Gold Can Stay, by Robert Frost

An oldie but a goodie from Straight Outta Compton, the one that shut down concerts back in the day. Spotted in the wild on the internet and shared with you here for your weekend parties:

download Fuck the Police by N.W.A.

… and they nail it. LA Times if you want to know how to make your paper better, make it more like TACO. Be about LA! LA is a universe.

The latest Los Angeles magazine has a long feature story on Taco trucks which is unfortunately not online. It’s well-written and gives a very interesting look into the day-to-day reality of a truck that is still working on building up its business. That truck is called Tacos Jeesy’s, and throughout the article I kept wondering, “well, how are their tacos?” Some descriptions in the article made it sound like the truck had some serious potential.

Well, it doesn’t need to said again but Bandini is the #1 Taco man in Los Angeles. Not only did he read the article and comment on it, he went out and tracked down Tacos Jeesy’s and sampled their tacos. Were they any good? You’ll have to go to The Taco Hunt for the answer…

Inglewood Ave and 134th Street ~ Hawthorne

As always, there is what you see on the surface, and then there’s what you get when you look a little bit deeper. Indeed, the PSA billboard entitled “On the Down Low,” which can be found in Hawthorne at Inglewood and 134th, deserves careful review. At first glance, it seems like a relatively innocent scene of people enjoying themselves at a park. If you look deeper, however, you see the seething sexual tension underlying this idyllic portrait of family and leisure. The man in the blue T-shirt on the right looks affectionately engaged with his family, and it seems that the man in the background, in his matching white wife-beater and Kangol, is just out for a stroll—you know, just chillin’. But the body language between these two men is more revealing. The Guy in White is striking what an article in August’s Oprah Magazine has taught me is called a “crotch display,” a posture that poses to onlookers the question, “Like what you see?”
(Continued)