As our daily news reminds us, these are chaotic and violent times. I was recently reminded by Los Angeles poet SA Griffin with his "Poetry bomb" project, that sometimes only the arts can bridge the gap over the gray areas of human understanding and relations. This is why music and poetry have been the ultimate mediums for expressing the wide range of human emotions since the dawn of man. Songs like Marvin Gaye's "What's Goin' On," and Allen Ginsberg's poem, "Howl," become seminal because they tap into the zeitgeist of their era and offer a deeper insight. Working in this light, this week L.A. Letters pays tribute to jazz trumpeter legend Donald Byrd and an anthology of poetry titled, "Words of Protest, Words of Freedom."

"Words of Protest, Words of Freedom," published by Duke University Press, is an anthology of poetry from the Civil Rights Era that is over 300 pages long and includes almost 100 poets. Editor Jeffrey Lamar Coleman writes, "Poetry, due to its ability to speak concisely and directly or metaphorically to any given situation, was the art form writers and everyday people chose to voice opposition to social and political conditions."

Coleman is a well-researched literary scholar, and his anthology reflects the breadth of his poetry knowledge. Besides publishing the expected celebrated Black Arts poets, there are several unexpected voices from other worlds of poetry, including W.H. Auden, John Berryman, Charles Bukowski, and Robert Lowell, along with Beat Poets like Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti. This diverse range of poets makes the book feel extra comprehensive.

"I hate working the theater," Mark "Rat" Ratner (Brian Backer) laments to friend Mike Damone (Robert Romanus) in the classic comedy "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." "All the action's on the other side of the mall."

Indeed, Rat's wide-eyed stare focuses on the food court, populated by establishments like Bronco Burger, Mexican Dan, and, where his new crush Stacy Hamilton (Jennifer Jason Leigh) works, Perry's Pizza. Written by Cameron Crowe and directed by Amy Heckerling, the short scene in many ways captured a dominant aspect of 1980s SoCal adolescence.

"Fast Times" was one of two Hollywood films from the early 1980s that came to define a new, suburban phenomenon: the California mall culture. Along with "Valley Girl" from 1983, the films also defined an often maligned genre -- the high school comedy -- and established character archetypes that persist to this day. Moreover, to the credit of both films, gender and sexuality are treated in ways that highlight America's paradoxical relationship to the sometimes taboo subject.

Cardboard discourse visited Capitol Hill this week when the ethereal statements by L.A. installation artist Ramiro Gomez Jr. were timed with the Senate hearings on immigration policy.

The National Day Labor Organizing Network flew Gomez to Washington D.C., and provided the paint and cardboard that was waiting for the artist. It was not the usual size he was used to. "I had to source larger materials at Costco," he said by phone from D.C., adding that it helped make the work he had developed in Los Angeles stay authentic.

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Read more columns from Jeremy Rosenberg's "Arrival Stories" series

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Every Thursday, Jeremy Rosenberg (@LosJeremy) asks, "How did you - or your family before you - wind up living in Los Angeles?" Today, in honor of Valentine's Day, Rosenberg presents instead an anthology of some of the many love stories that have played a role in the Arrival Stories column series.

Crossing continents, oceans and national borders isn't the only journey taken by the Los Angeles migrants and immigrants who populate the weekly Arrival Stories series.

Many of our participants tell of the journey their hearts take, too.

So on this Valentine's Day, enjoy this annual round-up of some of the courtships recently chronicled by this ongoing column series. Click through the links to read the complete stories.

Love stories don't get much more famous, much more geo-politically charged, or much more grand as Olga Connelly's.

I Am Los Angeles is a video portrait series created by journalist and filmmaker Joris Debeij, showcasing the unique people and their ideas that make L.A. what it is. KCET Departures will be featuring these videos as part of our continuing coverage of the shifting cultures of Los Angeles.

All it took was to witness one well-executed kickflip, and Theotis Beasley knew he wanted to skate.

It was a lazy sunny day when a cousin asked if Theotis wanted to see something cool. His cousin proceeded to demonstrate one of the best-known tricks in skateboarding, and young Theotis was impressed. He wanted to skate all day and all night after that.

"Los Angeles is a great place to skate," says Theotis. All of L.A. is a skate park, because you can find good spots everywhere and it's not so hard to run into your skating cohorts. These days Theotis can usually be found skating in and around L.A. in the neighborhood where he grew up. Some note Inglewood to be a rough part of town with high crime rates, and Theotis himself will tell you it can be kind of "sketchy". But for Theotis, this is home, and it's fairly easy stay out of trouble if you know the rules.

The young skater is proud to be from the south side of L.A., and he carries it with him in the most positive way possible. He doesn't forget that he is representing Inglewood everywhere he goes. They call him the nicest kid in skateboarding, because he's always smiling and friendly as can be. Inglewood will always be home to him, and his Inglewood is a place for good skate, good food, good friends and more good food.

Originally published on I Am Los Angeles, 2011.

Check out more video portraits at I Am Los Angeles.

Posted Mondays, Jeremy Rosenberg's (@LosJeremy) Laws That Shaped L.A. spotlights regulations that have played a significant role in the development of contemporary Los Angeles. These laws - as nominated and explained each week by a locally-based expert - may be civil or criminal, and they may have been put into practice by city, county, state, federal or even international authority

Ed. note: Jeremy Rosenberg and James Rojas -- a planner, artist, and California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellow -- have previously collaborated on the Laws That Shaped L.A. column about the Laws of the Indies and also this column about Jitneys. Recently, Rosenberg and Rojas have been in touch regarding both Rojas' ongoing series of neighborhood and city models and about what, if any, effect early National Park legislation has had on contemporary cities? Rosenberg's voice returns to this column next week. Today, he turns over the rest of this space to Rojas.

Related

Read more columns from Rosenberg's "Laws That Shaped LA" series

Read columns from Jeremy Rosenberg's "Arrival Stories" series

This Week's Law That Shaped L.A.

Law: Yellowstone Act
Years: 1872
Jurisdiction: Federal
Nominated by: James Rojas

By James Rojas

Building models of various places in Southern California helps me make sense of our happenstance built environment by highlighting the geographical, social and cultural forces that created the region's eighty-eight cities and countless communities.

Each model I construct begins with an investigation of the natural and built environment through the examination of maps, street grids, old photographs, postcards, topography, and streetcar lines.

I pay particular attention to identifying buried creeks, leveled hillsides, and lost names of places. I read about how places were founded to understand the human drives that have created them. I make site visits and ask myself what visual or graphic features do people recognize and identify with their community? These features may be natural or man-made. I combine hard data with visual cues and interject my artistic/urban planner perspectives to create a diorama that uncovers the past and provide people with access to the future their community.

From constructing twenty-five models of various SoCal communities, development patterns have emerged. The mountains, hills and beaches are the most visually popular feature of many these older cities in our region.

Fresh with a Ph.D. in History from Harvard, Elliott Barkan came to the West Coast and saw a history rising.

With the meticulous care of a curious scholar, Barkan began taking photographs of the region as soon as he arrived to teach at Cal State San Bernardino in September of 1968.

"I was teaching in the field of early America, but becoming more aware of civil rights," he says, recalling showing films about conditions in urban America. After receiving a doctorate in early American history, he shifted focus to to contemporary American situations. It became, what he calls, "a dual regime of very early America and very modern America." He taught those parallel courses for 38 years.

"My training in early America gave me a broader perspective for understanding earlier immigration," he said.

His passion for photographing urban enclaves came while he was a Manhattan cab driver. "That prompted me to search out other communities in New York City, but especially in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Miami, and Detroit."

Considering that February is African American History Month, this week L.A. Letters features two important books that expand, as well as question, the canon of 20th Century African-American Poetry.

"Every Goodbye Ain't Gone," published by the University of Alabama Press, and "Renegade Poetics," published by the University of Iowa Press, work well as companion books to accentuate their common theme of redefining African American poetry and celebrating Black poets besides the usual suspects like Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka. There's no dismissal or criticisms of these giants; rather these two books open up the lens and feature many other less known but uniquely gifted poets, like Russell Atkins, Jayne Cortez, David Henderson, June Jordan, Ted Joans, Bob Kaufman, Ishmael Reed, Ed Roberson, Lorenzo Thomas and Melvin B. Tolson, among many others. These two books showcase many innovative writers that have been left out of many critical discussions because they didn't match the paradigm of their era.

"Every Goodbye Ain't Gone" is a collection subtitled, "An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African-Americans." Featuring 38 poets including the figures above, editors Aldon Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a powerful cavalcade of poetry. Their introduction, "Fear of a Black Experiment," sets the tone for the poets featured: "We offer this collection as a means of remapping the ground in ways that may shift our historical comprehensions of African-American poetry in recent years and our anticipations of critical comprehensions to come. The present collection affords a fresh perspective on the more experimental poetries created by African American artists in the decades following the Second World War."

There is something dark and gloomy about the little slip of Griffith Park that surrounds Fern Dell Drive. Once a village of the Native American Gabrielino tribe , the area is green and tan. Indigenous stones are landscaped to create a canal for a trickling river and paths for hikers heading up towards brighter trails and the gleaming Observatory high on the mountain. There is one lonely pile of tagged, terraced stones to the right of the road where there are picnic tables and two child-sized water fountains. Between the fountains-one works and one is dry- there is a plaque placed by the women's rights organization Soroptimist International in memory of one of its favorite members, a forgotten hero of Los Angeles who would have gotten that fountain fixed come hell or high water.

Fanfare and foosball welcomed in two newly constructed public parklets camped on Spring Street between Sixth and Seventh Streets.

These parklets are small spots, once dedicated to vehicles, recommissioned into public space -- an über urban hipster idealogy of reclamation seen with CicLAvia and Park(ing) Day.

Spring Street, along with York Boulevard in Highland Park, where a parklet was just dedicated last Saturday, and later Huntington Drive in El Sereno, where a parklet will be dedicated February 16, are working toward making a greener and more pedestrian friendly city, say the believers.

Before it is declared as another step in a "Portlandia" transformation of an urban core, this is a park with curb appeal. The community driven declaration extends a sidewalk by carving out a common seating area for people to congregate, take in recreational games, or jump on stationary bicycles.

The parklets on Spring Street were introduced as "adding to the excitement that we feel for downtown," by District 14 Councilmember José Huizar, explaining that the hardest sell about this project was not bringing the parklets in, but changing public policy in Los Angeles that has promoted cars over people.

They are emblematic of a time when people knew their neighbors and interacted with each other face-to-face, added Huizar, who envisions that Los Angeles can be like that again. "Parklets may be small in scope, but they are tremendous in impact."

Gathered with Huizar were those who worked pro-bono on a zero dollar budget to create what he called "the Taj Mahal of Parklets."