BLOG 4 Los Angeles

This week I went to Hollywood for the Valentine weekend. I went out there and stayed in my friends loft in down town Los Angeles. Now you might think the place was trashy but in actuality it was really nice. You could not even use the elevator if you did not have a certain key and as for security there where about twenty security guards through out the building. But this is not what i want to talk about. what i want to talk about is the down town LA in general.
Down town LA is not a place you would raise your children or live there. Ii is surrounded by old dirty abandoned buildings, drugs, bums and poverty. Every where you turn is a old building or a bum. What i was tripping on is the difference a block can make. Now on one hand where i was staying at it was very nice and just right down the street is a place of bums and poverty. While i was walking down the streets with every step i took it seemed like it was getting worse. The question that i have is why is this like that? Why is there poverty on one end and wealthy on the other?

Week 4 blog for 2-10-09

This week I attended a Cal Poly Pomona open mic night session. It is held every Thursday at the Cal Poly Pomona down town center(Gallery). It is a relevantly new place that attracts many poets across the Inland Empire. It is a very nice and dark place perfect for poets to come and show case there talent and be surrounded by people that love and enjoy poetry. You have every type of poetry you have the rappers the meaningful and sympathetic poetry, poetry about love and many other things. This is a perfect place to escape from life at least for an hour or two, and while you escape you listen, learn and love.
Even though I am not a poet myself I enjoy listening and being surrounded my a room full of poets. It is a warm feeling, it makes me feel as if this were a second home in which no one judges you for who you are or what you think. When people step up to the microphone they seem as they are nervous but as soon as the first word comes out of their mouths they seem happy and free as if they just escaped from prison after fifty years. Even though this place is a poetic sanctuary it is still only a place a place in which people feel at home and are not judged, a place of poets.

This week I attended a Cal Poly Pomona open mic night session. It was held at the Cal Poly

Kunstler's Feel...My OPINION

I feel Kunsler's argument is very well put. There are not enough places that we "Care about" in America. Could you imagine all the possibilities we as a country could have if we built better, nicer places in which we occupied or surrounded by. We can possibly boost the economy by making more jobs available to the places we "Cared about", we can get more tourists traveling to and around the places we " Cared about", and mainly we can lessen the amount of places that are not being used because of either its poor structure or poor commercial setting. Why as Americans do we not adopt the mentality of the Europeans for example, they use only a small block of land but in that small block they have everything from a bar to a restaurant to a grocery store. Instead we as Americans have to travel across town to a poorly built structure that has no appeal and no charisma and is bigger then the European block yet the European block has twice as much variety, twice as much appeal, and twice as much people yet still smaller. If we as Americans adopted this type of mentality our economy can possibly make a dent in the right direction. But yet we seem to follow our stubborn ways and build a Target and nothing else around it and expect people to come. If we cared about our structures and buildings we can make a stride in the right direction by making America a country in which people from other countrys say "America Cares".