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.

Some people spend their whole lives chasing someone else's idea of success. In fact, at times it can seem to be that Los Angeles -- and especially Hollywood -- have a monopoly on this notion. Sacha Dunable, while a Los Angeles native, doesn't fit this description. For a living, Sacha simply does what he loves to do, all the while admitting that his chosen path might not be likely to make him famous.

But for Sacha, that was never the main goal anyway. Instead, he seems content just to be living his life on his own terms. Sacha is a musician, and he has found personal success doing something he thoroughly enjoys: building and playing music with guitars.

If not touring with his band Intronaut, Sacha can be found in his workshop building and fixing guitars. Sacha has found success doing what he loves without seeming to feel much pressure from the outside world to make things more complicated.

Los Angeles is a place full of people with an agenda, and some will stop at nothing to get what they want. But amongst the chaotic scramble of people trying to make a name for themselves, there are gems like Sacha who manage to live content by the simple notion that in some ways, it's better to want what you have, and go from there.

Originally published on I Am Los Angeles.

Check out more video portraits at I Am Los Angeles.

One can only imagine the energy in the air when a group of twenty artists known as the Bloc of Mural Painters assisted David Alfaro Siqueiros on the creation of "América Tropical" just over 80 years ago. If there is any way to witness a similar creative consciousness today, it would be with the artists selected to create the interior mural at The América Tropical Interpretive Center. Painter and museum educator Sandy Rodriguez was with that handful of artists during the mural's production, and she shares that experience in this guest editorial installment for "Writing on The Wall."

by Sandy Rodriguez

Exhibition designer Thomas Hartman created a digital composite depicting the opening night of "América Tropical." The scene featured a who's who of the L.A. cultural scene based upon a variety of sources, as no photographic documentation of the opening night from 1932 exists. Thomas invited artist Barbara Carrasco to paint "Opening Night" as a mural for the América Tropical Interpretive Center. They had worked together previously on the Chicano Art Resistant and Affirmation (CARA) exhibition at UCLA, in 1990.

Last August, I got a call from Barbara, an old friend of mine. She invited me to come over to take a look at the mural she was working on. I arrived at an unmarked red door at the side entrance of IQ Magic, an exhibition design space across the street from 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica. Barbara was working on the central portrait of Siqueiros. Sitting next to her was Elizabeth Perez, who was working on a profile portrait of Marcel Duchamp.

I walked around the space, which had cement floors, high ceilings, and blacked-out windows. It was filled with materials: long tables were covered in reproductions for the mural design, while others were loaded with dark, medium and light gray tones of Nova Color acrylic paint, tubs with tongue depressors, plastic plates, plastic bags, acrylic paint retarder, paint brushes and tiny spray bottles. A set of plastic caddies was set up with tools and scaffolding was set up in front of the canvas. My fingers were itching to paint.

By the time I came on board, Barbara and John Valadez had been working on this twenty-by-eight foot black and white scene for two and a half months. There were just six and a half weeks left until their deadline, so Barbara invited a few more artists to help paint the remaining portraits and figures. Shizu Saldamando had painted a portrait of the mustachioed architect Summer Spaulding. Elizabeth Perez had worked up several figures, and Laura Alvarez also lent her talents to the project. Barbara invited me to join the team; I started the next evening.

There were dozens of chalk outlines of figures, floating heads and bodies without faces. The first portrait I worked on was of Harold Lehman, WPA muralist and member of the bloc of painters who had worked on "América Tropical." We had a clear image of the artist from the 1940s, but needed to adjust the style of his clothing to match the painting's earlier time period. I had never painted a male portrait with tight curls, so I was a bit nervous.

A few hours later I had completed the first portrait, using a transfer technique that Barbara had devised by drawing with white chalk on a grey ground. My next portrait was of Angelica Arenal, Siqueiros' widow. Her photo was from much later time period, so I had to soften her age in the portrait. As I worked up layers with thin glazes of acrylic paint, Barbara told tales from 1978 when she traveled to Mexico and met with Angelica to study her husband's original drawings. When I completed her portrait, Barbara reworked her hair and pearls to perfection.

To better understand the tragedy of man's inhumanity toward man, first observe any motorist regarding any other motorist. Dramatic though that may sound, I do think about the finer points of mechanized depersonalization whenever I ride the Los Angeles freeways. Behind the wheel, the sweetest, most forgiving person you know appoints themselves humanity's stern judge, unanimous jury, and zealous executioner. No possible set of circumstances could put them in the wrong; any unpredictable movement from another car signals the incompetence, malice, or hopelessly diminished mental capacity of its driver. I find the rare occasions I actually drive the freeways myself endlessly fascinating, though in the same way I find the crueler university social experiments of the sixties fascinating: they function as designed, sort of; they express a kind of frozen-in-time fashionable genius; and they show us something about ourselves, though not necessarily something we want to see.

Some find negotiating the freeways a harrowing experience. You could chalk that up to the supposedly unparalleled aggression of the driving Angeleno, but I wouldn't; that sounds suspiciously like one of those mythically harsh urban creatures, like the legendarily brusque New Yorker, with tales of whom big-city residents reassure themselves. Despite finding other drivers' behavior mild enough, my own glimpse of the abyss comes whenever I can't quite suspend my belief that these freeways actually function. That cars generally flow through as we expect them to strikes me as little short of a miracle; why, I tend to wonder, don't they constantly careen against one another, metal and rubber endlessly striking metal and rubber, a horrifying pinball machine on a colossal scale? Yet we know the system, with its infinite number of failure points, does fail: we've all caught nauseating flickers of the grisly wreckages that routinely occur at freeway speeds, especially in the late nights or early mornings. During these same dark hours, though, untroubled by traffic jams or even slowdowns, we glide across these sweeping concrete arcs recapturing, if only for a moment, the elusive promise of the midcentury American dream. The midcentury American road engineer's dream, anyway.

The budget that outgoing Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has proposed for fiscal year 2013-14 continues to drain money away from the Department of Recreation and Parks (RAP), instead of investing more money in healthy parks and people. The city should be investing more funds to improve access to parks and recreation, alleviate disparities in access to parks and health, and create a healthier, more prosperous city for all.

Park and Health Disparities

Hi Everyone,

The Laws That Shaped LA is going on hiatus.

I have started a new job, as Assistant Dean, Public Affairs and Special Events, at USC's extraordinary Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

To read all of my columns -- and all of the guest columns -- so far in the sixteen-month old Laws That Shaped LA series, please visit the column archives, here.

Also, to read all of the columns in, Arrival Stories, my other KCET Land of Sunshine series, please visit those column archives, here. That column will go on hiatus later this month.

Great, great thanks to all of you who have read, shared, complimented, complained about, and of course, contributed to both columns.

Great, great thanks as well to the incomparable Juan Devis at KCET for the invitation to create three blogs over the past few years. (The original, Think Tank LA, was here.) Also thank you to Gary Dauphin and Yosuke Kitazawa and the rest of the KCET.org forward-thinking crew.

I'm looking forward to seeing all of you again soon upon my return to these pages. In the meanwhile, enjoy the good work from my colleagues elsewhere on the KCET.org site - and please free to stay in touch with me via @LosJeremy on Twitter.

Fight on,
Jeremy Rosenberg

The San Gabriel River watershed is a 60 mile waterway beginning high up in the San Gabriel Mountains that eventually empties into the Pacific Ocean near the Los Angeles and Orange County border. This week L.A. Letters explores the landscape, built environment, and cultural history of the San Gabriel River, with special attention focused on the southern half of the river's path from Whittier, Downey, Santa Fe Springs, Bellflower, Norwalk, Cerritos, Lakewood, Hawaiian Gardens, Los Alamitos, Long Beach and Seal Beach. I know the area especially well because I grew up riding my bicycle along the River.

First a quick note to those that do not know: the 605 Freeway flows the path of the San Gabriel River, and the 710 Freeway follows the Los Angeles River. This is obvious to older generations, but many of the younger population know nothing about the power and storied histories of the waterways that run parallel to the 605 and 710. Thanks to titans like Lewis MacAdams and the Friends of the Los Angeles River (FoLAR), the Los Angeles River has been the subject of expensive studies and covered in a plethora of film and literature. The San Gabriel River has received much less attention, even though it is 9 miles longer than the 51-mile Los Angeles River. Moreover, MacAdams once told me that in extreme flood years, they were really just one big river anyhow. Fortunately after being inspired by FoLAR, a few organizations have come to rise in recent years to represent the San Gabriel River.

There are thousands of pathways in modern Los Angeles. Hiking trails, sidewalks, and 6499.5 miles of paved roads. We spend an enormous amount of time on these congested roads, and we curse the hours wasted. We listen to music, talk on the phone, eat, text, put on makeup, read -- creating such a little bubble that often the only way we notice the world outside is when a fellow driver does something we perceive as wrong. The endless duplexes, high rise offices, and fast food restaurants we pass are a blur, and the city somehow feels very ancient and worn.

So much of our city land is covered in concrete and sprawl that if you are like me you often forget what a new city Los Angeles is, what a new state California is. And then at the Mid-City mess of intersections where San Vicente meets McCarthy Vista, you see an island triangle of green land, a breath of fresh air in the mid-morning traffic. This little deserted park boasts one magnificent tree and some seemingly stranded rocks and boulders. Under the tree a solitary 7 feet bronze statue stands. It is a young man, handsome in a Disney Prince kind of way. On closer inspection there are cobwebs hanging from his chin, but he is oblivious, lost in the mining pan he holds, forever searching for gold.

The memorial at first sight seems to honor the spirit of the 49ers in general, and D.O. McCarthy in particular. They were the California dreamers, the men and women who pushed through the underbrush and passed over the mountains less than 200 years ago to carve out the pathways we now take for granted. But what many don't know is that this was a monument from a son to a father, and that it took a hell of a lot more than honor, determination, and good Christian values to turn this temperate natural paradise into a thriving concrete metropolis.

"The problem of this era is that we tend to see people in boxes. You're lesbian, and I am white and heterosexual and he's black," Asian American film director Quentin Lee told journalists in 1998. "All these identities have become essential and stifling ... With [Shopping for Fangs] we wanted to liberate these identities and ideas and put them back in play."

Co-directed by Quentin Lee and Justin Lin, the 1998 feature film "Shopping for Fangs," which turns fifteen this year, attempted to deconstruct the rigid boundaries of Model Minority tropes that have circumscribed Asian American life and representations in popular film and media. Addressing issues affecting "GenerAsian X" -- homosexuality, identity, and consumerism -- Lee and Lin explored the parallel lives of Phil (Radamar Agana Jao), Katherine (Jeanne Chin), and Trinh (also played by Chin), three Angeleno Asian Americans of varying ethnicities, as they intersect over the course of 90-plus minutes.

Taking place in the surburban/urban space of San Gabriel Valley, a region distinguished by its mix of Asian and California culture, Lee argued that no other space better demonstrates the late 1990s metaphor for "the subjectivity of Asian Americans a post-modern vision, comfortably juxtaposing bits of 'Asian' and 'Western' culture in a montage." Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas agreed, noting in his review of the film that San Gabriel Valley symbolized modern hybridity, replete with "cultural load star[s]" like the film's Go Go Café -- where one can get a club sandwich or dim sum, all to sounds of Cantonese torch singing in the background.¹

As pointed out by Sarah Projansky and Kent A. Ono, the film represented one piece of a larger movement in Asian American cinema, which focused less on the immigrant experience and more on the post-modern reality of being Asian in America.² However, while "Fangs" might have sparked academic discussions and cult followings, it failed to break into the mainstream, remaining a provocative but, for the most part, little seen film.

Related

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

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

Each week, Jeremy Rosenberg (@LosJeremy) asks: How did you, or your family before you, wind up living in Los Angeles?

Today, he hears from actor, model and basketball player Kamal Moummad:

Chapter One

I was born in the suburb of Paris in a city called Mantes-la-Jolie. "MLJ," like we call it back home, is located in "Les Yvelines," France's 78th department. I was raised in Mantes-la-ville, a wonderful middle class city adjacent to Mantes-la-Jolie. I grew up as a French citizen with a Moroccan decent. I have six sisters and three brothers, so needless to say I come from one big happy family!

My parents are originally from Morocco in Northwest Africa. My mother is from Agadir, a beautiful city located on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean in the Southwest part of Morocco. Agadir is near the foot of the Atlas Mountains, just north of where the Sous river flows into the ocean. My father was born and raised in a small village called Ouled Driss near M'Hamid El Ghizlane. Ouled Driss is a very hospitable and loving village located southeast of Zagora, a beautiful ancient town in the valley of the Draa River in the Southeastern part of Morocco.

Morocco became a French protectorate after the "Treaty of Fez" in 1912. In March of 1956 that protectorate ended and Morocco regained its independence from France and Spain, as the "Kingdom of Morocco."

My mom and dad were already married with four children and had no intentions of moving to France. But after World War II, France was pretty much leveled, and what came next has been referred to as "Les Trentes Glorieuses" or "The Glorious Thirty."

For thirty years after the end of World War II (between 1946 and 1975), France underwent a process of reconstruction that spurred strong economic growth and major expansion. In order to maintain positive economic trends, the French government and European countries alike figured that the expansion of their economies required a larger manufacturing and labor force. The French government therefore established policies and institutions that facilitated the greatest immigration period in French history. There was a lot of work then -- a lot of projects with people trying to rebuild their economies.

So what the French did -- and this was also true for Germany, Spain, and England, just to name a few European nations -- they went  to their ex-colonies and contracted cheap labor. My father was literally at home when people knocked on his door and said, "You look like you are healthy. You have to go help rebuild France. This would be a great way for you to both serve and honor Morocco." So my father had to leave my mother behind and, at the time, his four children. 

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.

There's something a true artist of any discipline knows better than everyone else in Los Angeles. It's the fact that opening up your heart and expressing yourself to the world without reservation sounds simple but can be one of the most difficult things a person will ever do. Balancing this act with the natural inclination to seek acceptance and approval from others is an extremely delicate thing.

Eliot Rausch was an emotional kid growing up in the South Bay area, and he could tell that not many others were like him. He didn't feel like he fit in, but he did grow up in a loving and supportive family. Once he was a teenager Eliot found himself on a very dark path involving heavy substance abuse, which continued for some time. Some people never make it out of this mode, but Eliot would have an experience that would change everything for him.

One night when Eliot was out riding in a car with a friend, there was a terrible accident and the car crashed. Both Eliot and his friend walked away. It was a miracle, and a sign too strong to be ignored. Eliot had to face himself, and consider whether he would keep walking this path or make a drastic change in his life. Eliot chose courage, and embraced the love from his friends and family. With time he learned to accept himself and his vision as an artist. He resumed work on his craft of filmmaking, and today enjoys considerable success on account of his talent and vision.

We highly recommend taking a look at his work.

Originally published on I Am Los Angeles.

Check out more video portraits at I Am Los Angeles.