![]()
Afew years ago I picked up my friend David from LAX and, bound for the Fairfax District, turned off La Tijera onto La Cienega. The fog had come in, and after we crossed Slauson, the wells of the Inglewood Oil Field suddenly appeared. Operating since 1924, the 1,000-acre Baldwin Hills site is one of the country’s largest urban oil fields. In the mist, the scattered, silhouetted rigs looked vaguely menacing, a petro-noir landscape of bobbing pump jacks. Then David said something unexpected: “I love those wells. That’s just L.A. to me.” I knew what he meant. It’s not like I’m chanting, “Drill, baby, drill,” each time I fill up my tank, but I’ve always thought of Los Angeles as an oil town, too. Though the…
View Original PostThe post Above the Surface and Below, L.A. Is Still an Oil Town appeared first on Los Angeles Magazine.
Unless you’re a fictional version of Benedict Cumberbatch, you probably have a mediocre memory. We all do. Like, Monday morning rolls around and you run into Suzy from marketing at the office toaster (hi, Suzy!), and she asks what you did over the weekend, and you pause for a moment to think about it and realize you have no idea. Life is a constant stream of largely mundane, occasionally exhilarating experiences that you mostly just forget. Sure, you can recall the highs and lows of 2011 when your memory is jogged, but 99 percent of your life experiences—whoosh, oblivion. That’s why there’s an app called 1 Second Everyday. RELATED: These Apps Are an Absolute Necessity If You Live in Los Angeles Here’s how it works. You take…View Original Post
Traffic sucks more when it’s ironic. This is what I think on the clogged freeways en route to an office park near UC Irvine, where a team of undergrads is working on a cure for traffic and, in a way, for the problems of distance. In one corner of an empty warehouse, 23-year-old Patricio Guerrero Gertz shows me an artful assembly of valves, electronics, and metalwork. It’s a hyperloop pod designed to float on compressed air and brake with magnets that’ll amnesiate your phone. “This is kind of a little over-built, honestly,” he says. “But you have to do that when you’re going 230 miles per hour.” Guerrero Gertz put together his team, HyperXite, in 2015 to compete this month in a terrifying soapbox derby…
If there’s any universal human experience, it’s that deep paranoia you experience two days a week when you can’t remember if you moved your car to the non-street sweeping side of the street. Coming out to your car and seeing that red and white paper envelope tucked under the wiper blade is the most infuriating thing that can happen to a person (besides being tied to a chair and forced to watch those tiny cooking videos). It’s not so much the $73 fee that hurts as it is the extrasensory awareness that a parking enforcement official is secretly watching you from their little white car thinking suckaaaaa as they sip a diet Shasta. Also it’s the $73 fee. But the city is finally working to make that happen less. Yesterday, Los Angeles Department…
No one knows exactly what 2017 has in store, but one thing we can probably count on is the increasing presence of virtual reality–no longer as this thing that’s out there that we all know is coming, but rather as a medium that has started to arrive. In advance of what many are convinced is an impending gold rush, content producers have kicked up production. Los Angeles in particular is a hotbed of activity. Whether it’s used for immersive, cinematic storytelling, hands-on applications in medicine, or 360 gaming experiences, the potential of virtual reality as a medium becomes clearer the more you study the companies at the forefront. Within Spearheaded by Chris Milk, Within has produced some of the most profound journalistic virtual reality experiences…
Are you jonesing for a Shack Shack burger but a little light until payday? The NYC burger phenom (they opened four burger joints here last year) has you covered with a genius little marketing ploy to promote their new App. Starting today, when newbie users download their Shack App, create an account, and use the code “Shackappy” at checkout, they receive a coupon for a burger that is good until Feb. 28th (don’t get delusions of grandeur – it’s for a single burger only). RELATED: Five Things to Know About Shake Shack, Opening In L.A. Next Year A photo posted by SHAKE SHACK (@shakeshack) on Jan 19, 2017 at 1:37pm PST Your coup is good at any L.A. location (West Hollywood, Hollywood, Century City, Glendale) and while…
Chuck E. Cheese is about to go public and is estimated to generate over a billion dollars. The animatronic-filled pizza palace was created in 1977 by Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and is now controlled by the New York private equity firm that owns Caesar’s Palace and Harrah’s. That company, whose art-loving CEO spent $120 million on this painting, has added booze to more locations and smoothed over some of the rough edges of Chuck E., making him more extreme skater dude and less streetwise street rat. Back in the days of this training video you might want to cross the street to avoid these characters. To celebrate the company going public, we dug up this gem from the early years. But as anyone knows, if we’re…
The butterfly effect is hard at work: In the summer of 2015, a rat drags a slice of pizza down a flight of stairs into a New York City subway station, step by careful step. Somewhere in Los Angeles, a company profits. This is not gentle wings begetting hurricanes. The rat and the pizza and the subway may have been in New York, but their images—the very soul of what became the popular #PizzaRat meme—floats in the IP heaven of L.A.’s Jukin Media, right beside Chewbacca Mom, a guy getting kicked in the head by a train conductor, and other collective memories as valuable as they are shareable. Jukin scours YouTube for feel-good clips—cat videos, baby ducks eating soup, the dramatic but minor physical calamities…
In the virtual reality series theBlu, you might find yourself floating in azure waters above a brilliantly colored coral reef or surrounded by hundreds of luminous jellies or looking into the enormous eye of a passing blue whale. Depending on how you feel about the ocean, the experience can be either discomfiting (all those jellies; that massive, unblinking eye) or magical. For many, it’s a bit of both. TheBlu is one of the most popular creations from Wevr, a VR studio in Silicon Beach. VR has been in the works for years at local companies, from smaller houses like Wevr, Specular Theory, and Emblematic Group to major operations like Fox and Warner Bros. as well as veteran video game giants such as Electronic Arts and…
The industries that have sustained Los Angeles have often been conspicuous: oil derricks, phalanxes of tourists, sprawling aerospace facilities, the port’s towering gantry cranes, and the garrisoned studios of the Dream Factory. But the businesses that compose what’s called Silicon Beach tend to be hidden, untethered from physical space. All you see of them are the buildings that house the staff and the Teslas that signal their bosses’ wealth as their algorithms and innovations dictate our daily cyber-cadences and transform the neighborhoods they populate in Silicon Beach. The prosperity of L.A.’s tech sector can be felt up and down the coast, from Santa Monica to El Segundo. Since setting up shop in an old Craftsman on the Venice Boardwalk, Snapchat—or Snap Inc., as the company…
It’s a beautiful day outside, but you’re stuck with a pile of work that needs to get done. How do you balance the need to be a productive member of society (or screenwriter) while also getting a little bit of fresh air? Skip the coffeeshops, grab your laptop, and head out to one of L.A.’s wifi-enabled parks to set up shop. The “Oh, Ranger!” project to roll out wifi access to park spaces started back in 2014. While the goal of being able to get online for free from any public place is still far off, you have six options spread across the region where you can get online for free al fresco. 1. Cabrillo Beach A post shared by Los Angeles, Ca. (@_g1no_) on…
Fire season is nothing to celebrate, but at least we can look forward to the dramatic display of the Los Angeles County Fire Department’s aerial fleet. While converted DC-10 airliners and helicopters play essential roles in taming the flames, none do it with the amphibious flair of the airplanes known as Super-Scoopers. The county leases two Canadair Bombardier CL-415s from Quebec’s Ministry of Transportation, usually from August to October or November every year. Here’s a flyby. The Engines With their two 2,380-horsepower engines, the propeller planes can fly at about 200 mph, which helps them get from the Valley to blazes all across the county in just five to ten minutes. The Foam In two smaller tanks the planes carry a soapy concentrate that is…
Ambitious and occasionally controversial serial entrepreneur Elon Musk—the man behind Tesla, Hyperloop, SpaceX, PayPal, and other projects—really hates L.A. traffic. So much so that last December he launched The Boring Company to create a new network of underground traffic tunnels. And lest you think ten months is nothing on the timeline of a massive infrastructure project, Elon Musk has taken to Instagram to show you he is already making considerable progress. The Boring Company tunnel under LA A post shared by Elon Musk (@elonmusk) on Oct 28, 2017 at 1:51pm PDT Right now, you probably have been a lot of questions about how Musk and his Boring Company, like, get to do this. Why does building a single Metro station seem to take years, but this…
Afew years ago I picked up my friend David from LAX and, bound for the Fairfax District, turned off La Tijera onto La Cienega. The fog had come in, and after we crossed Slauson, the wells of the Inglewood Oil Field suddenly appeared. Operating since 1924, the 1,000-acre Baldwin Hills site is one of the country’s largest urban oil fields. In the mist, the scattered, silhouetted rigs looked vaguely menacing, a petro-noir landscape of bobbing pump jacks. Then David said something unexpected: “I love those wells. That’s just L.A. to me.” I knew what he meant. It’s not like I’m chanting, “Drill, baby, drill,” each time I fill up my tank, but I’ve always thought of Los Angeles as an oil town, too. Though the…
Oil wells are hidden all over Los Angeles, some more cleverly than others. From the so-called Tower of Hope to a facade designed to look like a synagogue, here are a handful of spots where black gold is being pumped to the surface. 1. Packard Well Site Built in 1967, what looks like a windowless beige office building along Pico in the Mid-Wilshire neighborhood hides 52 oil and gas wells owned by Sentinel Peak Resources. A derrick on tracks moves from well head to well head within the roofless structure 2. Beverly Center Tucked on the western side of the Beverly Center, this Sentinel Peak Resources rig peeks out from behind tall walls and foliage, barely visible to passersby on San Vicente. From the top…
Just east of the shop-lined streets of Old Pasadena on Colorado Boulevard, a narrow storefront resonates with whirring drills and clinking metal as a small group of men work on a factory line. It’s not a scene you’d expect in the retail district, but the electric scooters they’re building aren’t typical either. An upside-down metal V with two teeny wheels, the Urb-E is foldable and light enough to carry. Which is why the scooter is being marketed as one way to address what transportation folks call the “first/last mile” problem: how to get people to and from Metro stops and stations. In fact, along with the Hoverboard, it’s one of only two “rideables” (i.e. super-portable electric vehicles) Metro and Metrolink allow on buses and trains.…
From furniture to auto parts to electronics, roughly 40 percent of imported goods enter the U.S. through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Located in San Pedro, the L.A. operation is the nation’s busiest port by container volume, and 144,000 jobs in the city are connected to it in some way. All that cargo comes at a cost, though: The two-port complex remains the largest stationary source of air pollution in the region. Here’s how the Port of Los Angeles works while working on mitigating its environmental impact. The Cargo The colorful “intermodal containers” revolutionized the freight industry when they were invented in 1956. The steel boxes come in standard sizes (the most common are 8 feet wide, 81⁄2 feet tall, and either…
I’m a silent presence inside a tidy office, observing as one woman and two men work into the evening. The boss enters the room and he’s quickly impressed with the woman’s work. There’s something in the way he’s behaving, though, that’s unsettling. He mentions wanting to take her on an upcoming trip to New York. She says that she can stay with her sister, but he answers that this won’t be feasible. Meanwhile, covertly sent texts pop up on my phone. Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks there’s something strange about this exchange—but how do we respond? This isn’t your typical anti-sexual harassment training session. It’s Vantage Point, an immersive approach to teaching people how to identify and respond to sexual harassment in…
Chances are you’re already one of the 2.2 million people who’s been roped into playing HQ, the live mobile trivia game started by Vine co-founders Rus Yusupov and Colin Kroll. But if you’re not, now’s a really good time to download the app. On Wednesday, HQ is rolling out a bonus game on top of its regular noon and 6 p.m. shows. That third game is sponsored by Warner Bros. and tied to the future releases of three different movies, the first of which is this week’s Ready Player One (out March 29). It’s the second of two inaugural sponsorship deals announced via the app, electronic billboards in New York and L.A., and social media platforms (the first partnership was with Nike and aired Monday night—four winners split…
In the wee hours of Saturday, May 5—4:05 a.m., to be precise—NASA’s InSight will launch from Vandenberg Air Force Base, northwest of Santa Barbara, and begin its journey to Mars. This is exciting for several reasons. For one thing, scientists will be using this mission to learn all sorts of things about the Red Planet that were heretofore unknown, like how large its core is, how thick its crust is, and what it’s like when an earthquake (ahem, marsquake) hits. They may even get a better sense of how the planet was formed. It’s also the first time NASA has launched a planetary mission from the West Coast. According to the New York Times, the spacecraft’s southward trajectory means early risers (or night owls, depending)…
At the Petersen Automotive Museum’s first-ever Future of the Automobile conference on May 3, much of the discussion revolved around autonomous vehicles and how they’ll change our lives. Car culture is a huge part of life in Los Angeles, and it’s hard to imagine that we’re all going to sit back, relax, and let robot cars take us where we need to go. But according to the experts at the event, which was co-presented by the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, we might as well get used to the idea. Jeffrey Cole, Director of the Center for Digital Future at USC, says, “Driverless cars aren’t just coming. They’re here.” He explains that driverless cars are classified from Level 0 to Level 5. “Level 0 is the car…
