This is the most obvious and least dangerous form in which white supremacy expresses itself.My colleagues and I spill a lot of metaphorical ink referring to business improvement districts and their Boards of Directors as white supremacists, and we certainly stand by that position. However, it’s recently come to my attention that not everyone in our audience is familiar with the literal meaning of the phrase. Evidently it strikes some people as a generic, semantically empty insult, or else they’re confused by the fact that the phrase refers to at least two fairly distinct ideologies. Thus I thought it would be useful to explain in detail why BIDs are in a very literal sense white supremacist organizations.
First let’s get the definitions straight. As always, our friends at Wikipedia give us a good starting place. Their article on white supremacy tells us that the phrase has two principal meanings. The salient one for our purposes is that white supremacy is:
…a political ideology that perpetuates and maintains the social, political, historical and/or industrial domination by white people
Thus it’s hard to understand why it’s not good enough to appear on the signal boxes of Hollywood.
See here and here for the background to this post.
Dear Councilmember O’Farrell,
As you may already be aware, the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance is presently holding a competition to choose artwork to adorn signal boxes in the Hollywood Entertainment District, which they contract with the City of Los Angeles to administer. As you know, the L.A. Department of Transportation requires your approval for this project to move forward. I am writing to ask you to withhold your consent from the HPOA’s plan pending a revision of their stated rules which, regardless of the intent, have the effect of significantly lowering the chance that Latino artists working in some of our most vibrant local traditions will be chosen for this honor.
The problem is that the BID’s stated requirements for submissions include the proviso that “NO Cartoon Images or Graffiti work of any kind will be considered.”1 Graffiti art and cartoon styles are associated in L.A. with Latino, especially Mexican-American artists. Work by Los Angeles artists in these genres has brought world renown, not just to the artists themselves, but to our City. Thus it’s hard to understand why it’s not good enough to appear on the signal boxes of Hollywood. The mystery only deepens when one considers that the HPOA’s requirements also state that “Text Art” will be given full consideration, as if Graffiti art were not also “Text Art.” Continue reading An Open Letter to Mitch O’Farrell Regarding Signal Box Art in the Hollywood Entertainment District→
Graffiti art in Los Angeles is a world-famous cornerstone of local Latino culture. Perhaps this is why the Central Hollywood Coalition, with the explicit approval of Mitch O’Farrell, hates it.We reported a couple weeks ago that the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance had put out a request for artists to submit works to adorn local signal boxes that explicitly excluded graffiti art and cartoon art. This despite, perhaps, given the BID’s vicious white supremacism, because of the fact that graffiti and cartoon art styles are a cornerstone of indigenous Angeleno/Latino culture. Well, if you live in the area, you may have noticed that the Sunset & Vine BID, controlled by the Central Hollywood Coalition, the HPOA’s not-quite-so-evil twin sister, recently put up artwork on ten signal boxes in their district. Their call for artists incorporated the same restriction as the current HPOA one: “No Cartoon Images or Graffiti work of any kind will be considered.” A picture of another white hipster band, approved by Mitch O’Farrell and placed on a signal box in Los Angeles by the Sunset & Vine BID.
We thought we’d investigate the circumstances under which this project was undertaken and approved, and it turned out to be quite illuminating. Continue reading Mitch O’Farrell Explicitly Approved (in Writing) of Sunset & Vine BID’s Racist Public Art Guidelines Even Though They Arguably Controverted LADOT Regulations→
The Rusty Mullet at Hollywood and Las Palmas. Fabio Conti hates it. Carol Massie hates it. Marty Shelton hates it. Peter Zarcone hates it. The LAPD accused it of murder. Tomorrow the City is holding a hearing on whether to shut it down.Listen, this isn’t a joke. First get a copy of the hearing notice in the matter of the Rusty Mullet, being held at the Zoning Commission tomorrow morning. Then read the LAPD summary:
Los Angeles Police Department arrest report and crime analysis documentation of: multiple violations of Conditional Use Permit conditions including, failure to have an operable electronic age verification device, failure to implement a Designated Driver Program, failure to post mandated hours of operation, excess number of seats, allowance of amplified music to extend beyond the premises, allowance of live amplified music, allowance of dancing, allowance of loitering, and allowance of patrons to queue in line outside the premises; as well as, murder, rapes, aggravated assaults, assault with a deadly weapon, batteries, physical altercations, kidnapping, possession of a weapon, narcotic drug violations, grand theft auto, robberies, burglary, thefts, service of an obviously intoxicated person, failure of security guard to possess valid security guard license, public drunkenness, disorderly conduct, disturbing the peace, vandalism, and violation of State of California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control required operating conditions.
Mitch O’Farrell and his staff: gleefully kicking “frustrating” homeless people out of your neighborhood since 2013.How does the City of Los Angeles decide which homeless encampments to target for cleanup? How do they decide when to target them? Well, if these two email chains from City Council District 13 about encampment-breaking on Vermont Avenue and Marathon Street in Koreatown are any indication (one and two) they target them when non-homeless people call CD13 and tell them to clean out the homeless people.1 And what do they get out of targeting them? Well, they’re politically savvy enough to turn down free lunches offered in exchange for their dirty work, but they will accept an offer of bused-in political supporters to astroturf the public comments section of a Council meeting. First let’s look at the players involved.
Bryan Kim is a partner in Koreatown based property management company Kim and Casey, which doesn’t seem to have a website.2 They do, however, have a Yelp page. This is notable for having uniformly one star reviews, which include comments like:3
They would tell me I was picky about the filth they’d promised to clean up before I moved in but never took care of it. They wouldn’t accept responsibility and blamed everyone and everything else until they were legally forced to take control of the growing sludge and cesspool that had been forming for I don’t know how many weeks .
Aram Taslagyan: “Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. … Please let me know if it starts up again at any level.
Or, even more colorfully:
I had my sink drain burst and when I asked them to fix it they said “NO”. The reason they gave me was that I had a bathroom sink to use and I dint really need the one in my kitchen. … What kind of management company is this? Also, one day as I was looking out my window, I saw one of the three guys who were walking the property from Kim and Casey Kick my neighbors cat at he was walking down the path way. It was the middle aged guy of the three that were walking the property. I don’t know his name and don’t care to know such a scumbag.
Dan Halden of CD13 forwards links to MK.org around to his colleagues and tells them not to reply. What’s up with THAT, we wonder, although we could certainly make a guess!Last Wednesday our faithful correspondent and a small contingent of other MK.org staffers hit the 704 Eastbound on SMB to the Echo Park Office of Hollywood’s own Mitch O’Farrell, where he had an appointment with Hollywood Field Deputy Daniel Halden to look at both oodles and scads of very highly miscellaneous emails and other goodies.
It was our intention to follow our traditional course of conduct after such missions and hit up the loveliest Brite Spot at the corner of Sunset and Park, but ’twas not to be. For some reason known only to them and their accountant they’re closing at 4 pm throughout the Summer. One can only hope and pray that they’ll get back to normal hours later. But we digress. The Brite Spot in May 2016. This is your brain on diners.Here is a link to the raw scans, which we’ve barely had time to sift through. Some are renamed, but most are not. Extraneous blank pages have mostly not yet been stripped. If you’re interested in reading hundreds of pages of emails from her highness, Queen Laurie Goldman about random multi-use monstrosities in Hollywood and why Robert Silverstein is pretty much Satan incarnate we’ll hook you up! There’s even a letter from Silverstein to someone about something in there somewhere. We got a few emails about recent anti-nightclub conspiracies between Mitch O’Farrell and the cops (recall that we reported on this a lot last year). But the real gems (that’s sarcasm, of a sort) we’ll reveal below the fold! Continue reading Dan Halden and Mitch O’Farrell’s Staff are Among the Readers of this Blog and Other News from a Batch of Highly Assorted Emails from CD13→
Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell, dressed as Neville Chamberlain and performing for tips on Hollywood Blvd, holds up a copy of agreement with HPOA Executive Director Kerry Morrison announcing his willingness to cede control over the Sudetenland Hollywood and Highland to her in exchange for peace in our time.According to an article in today’s Times by Emily Alpert Reyes and Nina Agrawal, the Los Angeles City Council is set to act today1 on Council File 15-0798, opened last June by Mitch O’Farrell and Tom LaBonge, ordering Mike Feuer’s office to write a draft ordinance regulating street characters on Hollywood Boulevard between Highland and Orange.
We have a lot of really pretty trees in Los Angeles. Let’s not let the BIDs prevent us from taking good care of them for our children just because they’re too fricking cheap to pay for a permit.Last week I reported that the Bureau of Street Services’s response to O’Farrell and Ryu’s motion on tree-trimming was set to face some opposition from business improvement districts. Well, tonight, Jessica Lall of the Southpark BID, who seems generally sane, but evidently is not, has fired the first shot across the bow of the proposal in the form of a letter to the Committee. You can read it. It’s the usual bogus anti-government whining about layers of bureacracy and don’t impede the private sector and blah-de-blah-blah-blah. Anyway, I fired off my own letter to the committee, which you can read after the break, but, more importantly, which you can download here in Microsoft Word format so you can send a copy of your own. I know it seems bogus to sane people that a bunch of cookie-cutter letters would have an effect on our Councilmembers, but it seems that, in fact, they do. The necessary email addresses are:
Well, in April, BSS came back with a list of proposed amendments to the City tree-trimming ordinance, and they mean to put some teeth into it, and as we know, our old friends the Hollywood Property Owners Alliance just hate to have to follow any laws at all since, they think, laws are what criminals break and we’re not criminals.
![Aram Taslagyan: "Hi Bryan, [the homeless encampment that was interfering with your pending property inspection] is all clean now. ... Please let me know if it starts up again at any level.](https://michaelkohlhaas.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/CD13_Photo_Aram_Taslagyan1_WEB.jpg)
