palewire

While walking to work this morning, I came upon Gasoline. Bike courier by day, graffiti artist by night, he told me his cold-blooded companion, an unnamed snake, enjoys soaking up the sun on warm days here in downtown Los Angeles.

Gasoline said his buddy is a python. I’d like to believe him, but I’m not sure. Palewire massive, what say you?

This afternoon I experimented with my first effort at photo stitching, using a program called Hugin to piece together the view from my window. Click for greater detail.

As you can see, it’s hardly a perfect job. But I think it fits together well enough. The most obvious flaw seems to be the shift in color that splits St. Vibiania’s in half. I’m a long way from a photo expert, but I suspect that’s caused by the automatic adjustments my camera makes as it saves images in jpg format. There’s probably some easy way to avoid that (shooting all of the photographs in a manually selected adjustment scheme, or RAW format), but I’ll leave figuring that out for another day. But if you are an expert, or if I’m totally off base, please feel free to chide away. I’m eager to learn.

So I’m out on a casual stroll in downtown LA the other night, and what do I bump into? If you guessed an illegal rock show put on by a group of chicks armed with fireworks and dressed in bikinis, you guessed right. Photos below the fold.

The crowd wandered over after a show at the nearby indie club, The Smell. The noise brought down an angry loft-dweller from the nearby Higgins Building, and eventually the LAPD officer pictured below, who advised the musicians to considering holding future events a few blocks further down, away from residential developments.

For their part, the band — who go by the name Josh Taylor’s Friends Forever — played dumb, telling the cops that they didn’t realize so many people lived downtown these days.