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About

"written photography of the cityscape. and else. current city: Los Angeles. next city: unknown. this is federico's blog. when asked "what do you do besides blogging?" federico responds: "a bunch of stuff". this blog documents some of it. and the city, yes. always the city."

mute socialite Sunday, May 11 |

as if muteness was a precondition for these affairs i found myself -wait, did i find myself?- at the new ilcorral (self described as "an experimental all-ages artspace devoted to the periphery where you can be free to enjoy the strangest, newest or most familiar experiences and artists") now called ZeroPoint. although calling it the new ilcorral might be tactless altogether; some things Change, and that is it. some things change and that is all about it. change, move, relocate, migrate, evolve? mutate... sadly enough it did move quite a distance from it's previous reincarnation were we enjoyed a good many shows just a short bike ride away. such is the nature of cities. things move to cheaper rents and larger spaces as bubbles boiling to the the outer edges of boiling planets. nonetheless we did manage to show up at zeropoint last night to see our friend astronovazz and as an added surprise we got to see, to discover, to stumble upon this band. oh, i so Love that feeling of finding a band -or being found by one- that strikes your senses in one clean swoop. beautifully slender grRrl on the guitar, two drummers, solid bass player and the occasional trumpet (soon to be a full member of the band i hear), the only vocals were sung through a salivated guitar pickup. "Jolting, hocketing rhythms, atonal surf riffs, and blackened salsa grooves combine to create a singular brutal, polyrhythmic spasmathon. A primordial beastie unleashed on the world in either fury or love! " (self description on their current rupert murdoch owned website - as accurate as words get). i'm starting to think that oakland has more than a fair share of good bands.

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LaRouched! Saturday, May 3 |

political propaganda gets a makeover (click to see a larger image):

third |

then again, the best thing someone told me about my latest birthday was: "welcome to the third floor", you know juan is way clever like that. but he made me feel welcome indeed, since aging sometimes feels like being pushed into the future like being pushed into a party one was not invited to. i guess the celebration has been going on longer than imagined.

fun home Monday, January 28 |

this is one awesome comic book. my friend Joe handed it to me and said “this is one of the best comic books i have read, ever”. i was very surprised, joe is a total old school comic book geek you know . so i took a good read at this. and guess what? it’s beautiful. it made me cry. it’s delicately narrated. a little distant, but it’s a sort of “sensible distance”. or sensitive distance. it’s full of those “comic book moments”, i mean, do you ever see something and think “that could have never been done in a movie, or in a book, or in a song…” i mean, there are things that fit perfectly into their format. it’s not like, say, a movie is a better format than a short story, or a photograph is better than a painting. it’s more like they have their particularities and there are effects that each one of those formats is capable of and the other is not. and with a disputed genre/art form like comic books i’m always tempted to find those “moments” and say: see, see: comics are unique, they have a way of their own, they can do things unachievable by other means. so this one book does it all the time. beautiful instant one page cross referenced palimpsestual story telling/literary criticism. words and pictures and layout telling the complexity of life and lives. and its dark. oh so dark. read this and then pass it with blankets by craigh thompson for a glimpse of the subtleties of american life.

A picture to say goodbye 2007 Friday, December 28 |

i can't believe it. so many months since i last posted something here. so sad. life changing. really. sometimes changes are hard to blog about as they happen. fast. and they absorb. suck. take you away. but it has been a brutally exciting, interesting and rewarding year i must say. and i'm debt with so many people. Thank you, Thank you all. those who cannot read me or hear me and those who can. Thank you so much. i love you all. even if i'm not here (or there).

and here is a picture to say goodbye to this year 2007. an insect i saw in San Francisco about a month ago. gripping to the glass (i guess this is my version of this picture).




happy new year. be well. enjoy your bugs.

passion Thursday, August 2 |

i'm fascinated with vines in the city. i like the way vines borrow other structures, inhabit them, make them their own. trees, fences, buildings, lightposts. vines climb, enshroud, hide and dress.


i've been thinking about taking pictures of vines in the city. morning glories are all over L.A. but this time i found this really striking passion fruit vine on hudson and 3rd street (link to map)
, right at the south end of the wilshire country club on the area of 3rd street that is at the same time a thrill and a scary stretch to cyclists. the country club makes the area cooler but the cars speed as if enchanted by this parenthesis of rural feeling in the middle of the city.

i stopped and ate a bunch of this little fruits with red entrails. and i even collected some:




the flowers are particularly beautiful, the yellow thing on top of the flower is a bumble bee with a back full of pollen.




the fence:



what fence?

bicycle ATC's Tuesday, June 26 |

i was commissioned to make some bike related Artist Trading Cards for a Bicycle Film festival related event. i made 24 of them and here are my favorite 8 cards. i wrote previous post on ATCs on this blog. enjoy!








trash, bags, golden, ratio, make, pod, casts Friday, June 22 |



Bre (his illustration above) from MakeZine.com did a video podcast building a messenger bag with plastic bags using the pattern i published on this same blog some time ago. it's really cool. i like that plastig bag technique. so many things for these bags came out of the trash that in a way using plastic bags was just a natural develpment.
check out the podcast here:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/06/make_a_messenger_bag_out_1.html
and a PDF with instructions here:
http://cachefly.oreilly.com/make/wp_messengerbag.pdf

here, i'll embed the video as posted on You Tube but make sure to check the link above:


think/faith Tuesday, June 12 |


how this book came to my hands. that's a story i must tell, or write. or something. it's a story like other stories. it's a story hypertext. which is like saying that no story lives on its own. or that stories are linked in mysterious manners. or this is just my fingers warming up to the keyboard.

picture this, a huge plaza in mexico city, la Plaza de las Tres Culturas, the site where in 1968 the Tlatelolco Massacre took place, around 200 students killed. and there in 1999 i was standing watching a rock concert where punks and ska punks and metal heads and old school rockers shared the space as the bands came and went. when a punk band was on stage, a bunch of punks would take over the main area and the metalheads would go to the corners. and when a metal band was playing punks would go away. a shifting of tribes.

long haired metal head i was, but i was also a traveler, so i was paying attention. and when this
punk band named graffiti 3X was playing and image got branded in my memory. i mentally tagged the image as "post-apocalyptic". picture this: brown skinned, green tall mohawk, gas mask, fucked up shorts heavily pierced no future kid dancing in the middle of the mosh pit. mexico city smog sky. and i thought. that's it. that's the image of apocalyptic despair.

fast forward. 2007. i'm taking this permaculture design course. long haired no more. metalhead still. big apocalyptic city and now i'm again surrounded by punks. mohawk wearing black dressed vegan punks. and my post-apocalyptic tagged image is replaced by a strange feeling: punks excited about compost.
yes. urban looking military boots and band t-shirt wearing punks... excited about compost.

and it's great. and among them was the bright william faith.

but let me be clear. i always admired punks. particularly in mexico. a lot punks are well organized, dedicated and strong workers. between the two tribes (punks and metalheads), punks seemed to me the most compromised. so in way it's not really surprising. but it's still beautiful.

so william faith told me that the first time he heard about permaculture was from mexican punks. and that certain image that also transformed him was to see a group of punks plastering toxic walls in mexico city with cob (a building material consisting of clay, sand and straw).

and so was william faith the one that helped organize this urban permaculture design course through radical change L.A.

and so was william faith the one who one weekend asked me, so have you read any of the crimethInc. books? and i said, yes, i have seen one of them, and the following weekend he shows up with this two books (Days of War, Nights of Love, and Recipes for Disaster) and after 20 minutes of excited browsing on my part i ask, so when do you want them back?
and he says: they are for you. since the first time i heard you speak i knew you would love these.
and william faith was right. i just finished reading Recipes for Disaster and i love it. i recommend it, i would say please read this book. please put these recipes into practice. and please visit the crimethInc. website at www.crimethinc.com (they need some support these days) and while you are there read this excellent Introduction to Anarchism
and Resistance in Bogotá
.

i have, in way, recovered my faith in a bunch of words and feelings by reading these. and my D.I.Y'er spirit has been enlightened. so here, i'll leave with a quote stolen from this book:

The raw awareness that you have the power to change the world is more important than any other resource - it is the hardest one to develop and share, and the most essential. Giving your endorsement to political representatives, social programs, or radical ideologies will be of little avail if the fundamental problem is that you don't know your own strength.
Self-determination begins and ends with your initiatives and actions, whether you live under a totalitarian regime or the canopy of a rainforest. It must be established on a daily basis, by acting back on the world that acts upon you- whether that means calling in sick to work on a sunny day, starting a neighborhood garden with your friends, or toppling a government. You cannot make a revolution that distributes power equally except by learning firsthand how to exercise and share power- and that exercising and sharing, on any scale, is itself the ongoing, never concluded project of revolution.

M.I.S.S Saturday, June 2 |

let me begin by saying that i have missed you. yes i have. they way i miss things back there in the corner of my mind, or my body. i've missed them, as in "i missed my wallet". but i found it again in an unexpected place. i missed you too. yes you. and i hope i didn't miss you as in "i lost you" for lack of attention. some things are just like that. lack of attention. i'll say it once more in g.steainian kind of way. some things are just like that - lack of attention. some things are just like that when the lack of attention. some things are like that when attention lacks. but as always, there is only so much attention one can give. and then, so many things. so many things requesting my attention. and i, for love of all those things, also gave them some. and now. for love of all the things too, must deny attention to some of them. so i can give it to others. or so i can learn to deny. to deny as in saying no. or to deny as in saying yes in different kind of way. like when someone sees a loved being fall and remains still. because someone must say yes to the fall. someone must fall to say yes. someone falls to say yes. saying no to movement.
and then. after the "no" that was a yes in a different way i found you.
again.
and here i'm am. i will not be forever.
but i'm here now.

chainlink fence mint Saturday, March 3 |

more adventures on planting things. i like mint. fresh mint. so i set out to plant some more around me. since chain link fence is so underused, and no one was really going to complain about it (you know, around here garden space is prime real state) i planted it on a few found baskets. i lined the baskets with nearby found palm tree leafs and hung them from the fence. i wanted to save water so the idea is that you water the top basket and then water trickles down the others. the diagonal positioning also allows for maximum sun catching.
here is a picture taken about a month ago:


and here is a picture taken today:


and a close up of the basket in the center:


the grassy looking stuff to the left are some onions. cool thing about onions. you can cut them and they'll grow back. another advantage of using baskets for mints is that since mint creates rhizomes it'll grow all over the place if it's not controlled. but that is another reason for me to like mint. there is this book that was very influential to me some years ago, "rhizome" by deleuze and guattari. i think i'm still trying to live up to that book. rhizomes and fences, such is the poetry of the last half a decade.

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Berggarten Sage Wednesday, February 14 |

i have been planting things. and today, when i cut a piece of sage (i read i could propagate sage by dividing a piece of the plant), planted it, watered the cutting and the original plant, someone came through the gate and gave me a piece of their mind. not because i had done something wrong. or because of the plant. really, i don't know why. but i listened, patiently. and the the person left, grateful. and i am in awe of the directness of this sage.

Card Trade Monday, December 4 |

i've been redescovering the joy of small. i stumbled upon this website http://www.swap-bot.com/, it lets you organize and join mail swaps and found that a lot of people were swaping ATC's. ATC'? i said. holy bat-acronyms. and after a good search i found that it stood for Artist Trading Cards (click for wikipedia entry). oh, i've seen those, i thought. i've traded those before (once walking around philadelphia with J. and L. we went into this art gallery and made a couple of cards and traded them for the ones we liked that were on the wall).
the concept was created by swiss artist M. Vänçi Stirnemann around 1996 and now there is a ton of activity around the format, or "art form" if you wish. althought i'm not much of a collector i've found them quite fun. they allow for a lot of experimentation and quick results.
making a card size frame (2.5 x 3.5 in) and framing things is quite effective. recycle old drawings. reframe other materials. mini collages are fun too. there is something about being so aeclectic. it fits me well. here are some of the ones i've crafted lately:










Know Thy Neighborhood 2 - Life Electrical Tuesday, October 24 |




















(above) electricians try to disguise their doings by using a lot of right angles. following the right angle based geometry of our built enviroment. cracks might be wiser.









and how is this last picture electrical? well, the cute trans-wall cylinder comes the jobsite of our dear girl-electrician Murphy.

Know Thy Neighbor(hood) Sunday, October 22 |

Signs






the thing that strikes me about this sign is the bicycle. it is not a car, oh no, it is a bicycle. i imagine you can say it's a symbol of freedom (death=freedom), whatever.






above is the work of Invader, check it out at http://www.space-invaders.com/. he is one prolific, international and well organized street artist.






Slanted




Plants can make it anywhere


346 Glendale Blvd, or the alternative uses of electrical boxes Sunday, October 15 |








364 Glendale Blvd (map).