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I had my biannual visit to the dentist this morning, his Miracle Mile office of which is conveniently located only a couple blocks from a freshly installed exhibit featuring sections of the Berlin Wall and commemorating the 20th anniversary of its fall.

So of course afterwards I deviated from my normal home-dentist-work route to go back over and check it out, and joy of joys you can walk right up to the panels and touch ‘em and everything. You can even get all touristy and strike a pose with or without your bike in front of eight of what will eventually be 10 panels, spanning some 40 feet — reportedly the world’s largest stretch of the wall outside its hometown.

It will be up on Wilshire Boulevard across from LACMA until November 14 when the order will come to “tear down this wall” and install it permanently at the Wende Museum in Culver City.

My Flickr photoset is here.

I had a custom plank I’d put together and purchased at the famous Val Surf back in 1977 that I rode like a crazed wanna-be Dogtowner through the rest of my junior high years. Cherished though it was, by the time I hit high school it was reduced to gathering dust in the long spaces between those rare days I’d roll it around the neighborhood or ride it to/from school. And in the end it suffered the ignominious task of ferrying the apartment building’s 10 garbage cans I’d roll out of the garage to the curb the night before pick-up day  — a chore negotiated with the landlord that gave my mom a $20 break on our rent — hey, every little bit helped us back then.

After completing one such weekly trash transfer I left the board with the cans for some unremembered reason, and learned for the umpteenth time an important rule of life: Just because one’s regard for something is low, doesn’t mean it’s held in the same depleted esteem by the rest of the world. When I returned from whatever to retrieve it, it was gone.

I never replaced it.

A few weeks ago La Mano Press in LIncoln Heights was having it’s farewell sale, and Susan and I visited the place on its last day open to the public, wherein I browsed  around somewhat noncommittally until I came upon the board you see at right (cliackable for slight biggability), the bottom of which features a segment of the awesome woodcut titled “Infinite Night” that master printer Artemio Rodriguez created (and was later used for the 2007 Dia de los Muertos festival at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where he was the featured artist.

I went into immediate WANT mode.  I think I even uttered some rather embarrassing mewing sounds and my outstretched hands made grabby gestures.

Artemio was gracious enough to autograph the other side of it and for the last few weeks it’s sat near my desk not whilst I mulled what sort of trucks and wheels to match it up with — oh hell no. I was more interested in figuring out a way how to display it — the perfect solution for that coming in my finding plate hangers at Home Depot yesterday.

Post RIDE-Arc ride, rolling back home solo I had to stop at the bright lifelessness of Chris Burden’s “Urban Lights” installation outside the L.A. County Museum of Art (click to humongify).

It may seem odd to some, but those late hours are some of the most enjoyable to be on a bike in the city.

(click to quadruplify)

Snapped from the saddle Saturday biking back home from a trip to the Sherman Oaks batting cages with Blogdowntown’s Eric Richardson. Eric wisely opted to subway it back to town from the North Hollywood Red Line station. I on the otherhand didn’t and subsequently got drenched when the rains that weren’t supposed to come until later, came early…. about a mile after I took this picture.

P.S. The only thing the batting cages showed me was that if I can’t hit for shit against a machine, how the hell do I think I can make contact against a human?

Rolling home from work yesterday I detoured up Fairfax* to Wilshire and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to see the official lighting of Chris Burden’s “Urban Lights” sculpture in the museum’s courtyard.

Flickr set here.

* Point of order: Passing all the restaurants along Fairfax through the Little Ethiopia district when you’re hungry is a hard thing to do.

Owing to my understanding that an untouched mural can be a fleeting thing and my new year’s resolution not to put off until later what one can do now, I stopped meaning to stop and snap this yesterday  and instead did (click to quadruplify):

In the lower right looks to be the artist’s name and the date — 1993.

Found on the front of Monkeyhouse Toys store on Silver Lake Boulevard (click to triplify):

Color this Sunday afternoon football-free and art awesome: Susan and I are gonna get on our bikes at noon and head downtown to catch the 1 p.m. matinee of Cloverfield at the Laemmle’s Grande on Fig. After that we’re gonna scoot on over to the Central Library to catch the last day of the Julius Shulman’s Los Angeles photography exhibit. And then as if that weren’t enough we’re gonna pedal over to MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary space to take in the Murakami show. From there we just might roll up to Olvera Street for margaritas and a late lunch/early dinner at La Golondrina before deciding whether to bike back or to hop a bus home.

Thanks to Elise Thompson over at LAist, yesterday I learned me a new limerick that’s 98 years old:

The Pelican

A wonderful bird is a pelican,
His bill will hold more than his belican.
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week;
But I’m damned if I see how the helican.

– Dixon Lanire Merrith (1910)

Here’s am eastern brown pelican I snapped November 2007
atop a tidal marker at Murrells Inlet, South Carolina.
(click to triplify)

Susan and I made good on plans to partake in the festivities infusing the second-annual Frogtown Artwalk, and as a bonus Susan and I biked all the way over there and back where we took a river tour led by Joe Linton and then met up with friends Stephen and Alice to explore the various participating studios, culminating with a visit to the Brand Name Label space to marvel at the daring doers who strapped themselves in for wild rides aboard a 32-foot-long 360-degree industrial swing, like this happy lass:

Afterward the four of us rode over to Gingergrass (Susan’s and my first time there) and I enjoyed the shaking beef dish and Susan savored the walnut shrimp. Flickr photoset can be viewed here.