The subway, an extension of the Purple Line, will feature 7 new stations along a 9-mile route. Graphic/Metro

Despite threats of litigation from Beverly Hills, Metro’s board of directors sent the long-anticipated Westside Subway heading down the tracks on a route that includes a controversial station on Constellation Boulevard in Century City.

The Metro board, which had previously approved the subway’s first segment, voted Thursday to give final approval to the line’s second and third phases. When completed, the $5.6 billion subway will extend Metro’s Purple Line from Wilshire and Western to the Veteran’s Administration in West L.A.

“It will be the first mass rapid transportation project for Westwood and Beverly Hills and Century City and the Miracle Mile in history—something that the area has longed for for a very long time,” said Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of the Metro board.

The board’s vote came over sharp objections from some Beverly Hills officials, including school board member Lisa Korbatov, who warned: “You’re careening headlong into a lawsuit…I’m telling you here and now: you will not succeed. We will stop you at every turn. You will be litigated.”

Beverly Hills officials have objected to the placement of the Constellation station because plans call for tunneling under the campus of Beverly Hills High School to get there. They argue that such tunneling could pose safety risks and interfere with future development on the school grounds—concerns that Metro says are unfounded.

Thursday’s landmark vote came a week after a special hearing in which Beverly Hills aired its objections to the subway plans, presented the findings of its own scientific consultants, and offered three alternate routes.

But Metro stood by its own experts, and said the Beverly Hills proposals for the alternate routes were not feasible.

Many members of the public showed up to support the project route that included the Constellation station. The first speaker got things going with an exhortation to “dig, baby, dig!”

The board voted 7-2 in favor of the project, with Michael D. Antonovich and John Fasana opposed. The vote clears the way for Metro to seek federal approvals to create final design and engineering plans for the project. Construction could begin as early as next year. Under the current timetable, the first phase of the project from Western Avenue to La Cienega would be completed by 2020, with the line reaching Century City in 2026 and Westwood in 2036. Efforts to accelerate that timetable are underway.

After the vote, Yaroslavsky said he still holds out hope that there can be “a meeting of the minds” between Metro and Beverly Hills.

“It’s a safe project,” Yaroslavsky said. “The people of  Beverly Hills and the parents of the school kids in Beverly Hills should rest assured that this can be built without any jeopardy to that school and certainly to the kids in that school.”

The heavy black line shows the route the subway will take to the Constellation station. Graphic/Metro

Posted 5/24/12

Celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D has helped popularize body art in L.A. and beyond.

Since 1998, Roger “Rabb!t” Rodriguez has been a professional body artist. Piercing, tattooing, branding—he’s seen it all. But in all his time in Greater Los Angeles, in studios from West Hollywood to Pasadena, there’s one thing he has yet to encounter: A health inspection.

That’s about to change this summer.

Starting July 1, California counties will begin enforcing comprehensive state standards for tattooing, body piercing and permanent cosmetics. The Safe Body Art Act, passed in October, is expected to finally bring some uniformity to a municipal patchwork that for decades has hindered widespread regulation of the burgeoning body art industry.

Public health officials applaud the measure, as do most established artists because unsafe practices in piercing and tattooing can lead to HIV and hepatitis. But the new law also promises to dramatically ramp up enforcement, and at the Department of Public Health, the county’s tiny Body Art Unit is braced for big changes.

“This is probably going to quadruple our workload,” says Cole Landowski, head of the county’s environmental hygiene program.

Once a sign of rebellion, tattoos and piercings have increasingly become mainstream, adorning bodies of all ages. Celebrities have taken the industry upscale, and even reality TV has gotten into the act, chronicling the exploits of high profile artists such Los Angeles’ Kat Von D. 

Oversight has struggled to keep pace, however. Until this year, California law mandated only that body art businesses register with their respective counties and receive a copy of sterilization and sanitation guidelines.

Counties were free to impose ordinances that went further, but most didn’t. Riverside County, for instance, didn’t regulate body artists until last year, after its lack of enforcement was taken up by a grand jury. Meanwhile, efforts to legislate minimum statewide standards repeatedly failed amid arguments that such regulation would drive away businesses.

Assemblywoman Fiona Ma (D-San Francisco), who helped push through the new law, noted after it passed that manicurists “need 400 hours of training before they can cut your nails, yet until [now], tattooists and piercers have had no training requirements to stick a needle in you.”

Los Angeles County was, for many years, one of the few to regulate piercing and tattoo parlors. “We’ve recognized this as a public health issue for a long time,” says Terri Williams, assistant director of the Environmental Health Division of the Department of Public Health.

The county passed an ordinance in 1999 requiring practitioners to not only register, but also obtain a county health permit and receive blood-borne pathogen training.  Facility owners also had to obtain health permits and adhere to standards of design, maintenance and sanitation.

But the county ordinance only extended to unincorporated areas and the 14 smaller cities that opted into the county requirements. The rest of the county’s 88 cities, including the City of Los Angeles, had little, if any regulation beyond business licenses and zoning restrictions.

“I’ve been doing this for 14 years professionally and at no time do I ever recall being inspected,” says Rodriguez, a nationally known piercing artist whose current shop, Ancient Adornments, is a West Hollywood fixture.

Rodriguez’ various workplaces were outside the county’s jurisdiction, but even within it, enforcement was a challenge. At last count, some 480 facilities were licensed in the unincorporated county and contract cities, Williams says, and those are just the ones operating in the open. Rodriguez and others note that many more body artists work underground, setting up un-permitted shop in homes and barrooms.

The three environmental hygienists doing body art regulation must squeeze between 10 and 25 inspections a month into their other duties, which range from noise and odor complaints to asbestos and mold inspections.

“Our hands are pretty full—actually, they’re really full, ” says Francis Pierce, who does most of the county’s body art inspections. (For the record, Pierce has no tattoos or piercings, although he jokes that “several hundred people have offered to do it, for free, even, but what can I say? I’m 53 years old and I have no tats.”)

Now comes the new law, which will require body artists from throughout the county not only to obtain health permits by July 1, but also to renew them annually instead of every three years.

County public health officials know they’ve got a huge challenge ahead of them, given the size of the Body Art Unit and the mounting numbers of establishments that will require inspections. The unit will be responsible for every city except Pasadena, Long Beach and Vernon, which have their own health departments. That means the unit could see its caseload quadruple to as many as 2,000 establishments covered by the new law.

“We suspect that we’ve just been hitting the tip of the iceberg, as it is,” says Landowski. “Who knows what we’re going to run into in the cities? Some of those parlors in Hollywood are the size of postage stamps. Then there’s Venice. . .”

Still, Williams says she’s confident her squad, which she expects to grow by five staffers, can handle the job. Already, the department has been assembling a database, putting together registration packets for establishments and artists, hosting training sessions and doing outreach. 

“We’re going to do this well, and be organized in what we do,” she says. Admittedly, it will take time (“They may not all show up saying, ‘Yoo-hoo! We’re here for our health inspection!’”), and everything might not get done before July 1. 

But, she says, “we’re looking forward to a positive working relationship. In my experience, it’s a very cooperative industry.”

Rodriguez, the body artist, says he welcomes the scrutiny.

As a member of professional organizations and a former emergency medical technician, he has made scrupulous sanitation his hallmark, but resents being undercut by competitors who endanger the public with careless work and subpar jewelry.

“A lot of artists have no clue,” he says. “They’re just Joe Schmoe, working at a tattoo shop. Putting the public first—that’s what the benefit of this law is going to be.”

West Hollywood body artist Roger Rabb!t Rodriguez says he welcomes the upcoming county inspections.

Posted 5/24/12

Outdoor movies, like this 2010 screening of "Swingers" downtown, are popping up all over L.A. this summer.

Even as movies shrink to fit onto our computers, tablets and smart phones, Tinseltown seems to be thinking big this season, with outdoor movie screens popping up all over greater Los Angeles. With Memorial Day weekend marking the unofficial start of summer, this might be a good time to turn off the iPad, stretch out on a picnic blanket and start making plans to share a little cinematic magic under the stars.

Perhaps the highest-profile al fresco offerings come from none other than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The inaugural season of “Oscars Outdoors” debuts this June in a brand new open-air venue complete with a 40-foot by 20-foot screen. The Academy hopes the film series will give audiences a more social movie-going experience.

“The idea of having an outdoor screening facility, which could offer an ‘outside the box’ approach to our screenings and programs, seemed like a wonderful way to return the feeling of community to movie-going,” said Randy Haberkamp, Managing Director of Programming, Education and Preservation.

The season kicks off with the Casablanca on Friday, June 15, and goes on to feature other classics like Shane and A Star Is Born, in addition to more recent fare like Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Dreamgirls and Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal. The season concludes Saturday, August 18 with a “sing-along” screening of The Wizard of Oz. Tickets for non-members are $5.

Another new outdoor movie series is “Eat/See/Hear,” which takes its shows on the road using cutting edge technology, including a three-story inflatable screen (“the largest west of the Mississippi,” boasts its website). As the name implies, the shows offer more than movies.

“We have this amazing weather and we’re the city that started the food truck revolution, so we thought, ‘Let’s mash up food with the movies and throw in some of the best local bands,’ ” said Sharon Sperber, co-producer of the events, which are presented by the online movie ticketing company Fandango.

Eat/See/Hear’s 2012 program kicks off at Santa Monica High School this Saturday, May 26, with Anchorman, music from Islands and The Diamond Light and 10 different food trucks. From there, the show travels to Pasadena, Brentwood, North Hollywood, Beverly Hills and other locations in the area. General admission is $10.

Other ways to get your outdoor film fix this summer include free programs such as Movies on the Green at the Valley Cultural Center and the Old Pasadena Film Festival, which will screen classics and family-friendly films over four weekends in July.

Not all the outdoor movie programs are newcomers. For the past decade, Cinespia at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery has been showing vintage films and cult classics, projecting them onto the white marble wall of Rudolph Valentino’s tomb. Cinespia’s 2012 schedule is already underway, with Sabrina and Grease coming up this weekend, on Saturday, May 26, and Sunday, May 27, respectively. A $10 donation is requested.

Another quintessentially L.A. outdoor movie-going experience takes place at the Hollywood Bowl, where audience members, many of them in costume, can sing along as Grease and The Sound of Music are screened, on July 14 and Sept. 22 respectively. Tickets start at $9.

The world’s entertainment capital has never been mistaken for a small town, but as this summer’s outdoor film bonanza rolls out, it just might feel like one. See you at the movies!

Ilsa, Rick and the whole "Casablanca" gang will be part of the Academy's outdoor summer film series.

Posted 5/23/12

Two heavily-traveled sections of the 405 Freeway will be closing on separate nights next week.

Segments of the 405 will close overnight next week to accommodate construction activities associated with Metro’s I-405 Sepulveda Pass Improvements Project.

Preliminary closures of some southbound lanes between Getty Center Drive and Sunset Boulevard will begin around 10 p.m. on Tuesday, May 29, with all southbound lanes slated to close from midnight until 5 a.m. Wednesday. The pattern will be repeated with the northbound lanes between Moraga Drive and  Getty Center Drive starting at 10 p.m. Wednesday, with full closures of all northbound lanes from  midnight through 5 a.m. on Thursday.  Traffic will be detoured to surface streets during the closures.

The overnight closures are the latest to hit as the 405 Project pushes towards completion in 2013. When finished, the project will add a 10-mile northbound carpool lane, widen existing ramps and bridges, and improve the supporting infrastructure of the notoriously congested freeway. Keep tabs on the project with the 405 Report.

Posted 5/23/12

Flags honor the fallen at Los Angeles National Cemetery in Westwood.

From parades and pageantry to solemn ceremonies and candlelight vigils, there are many ways to pay tribute to fallen members of the U.S. Armed Forces this Memorial Day weekend in Los Angeles County.

In addition, active duty, returning and retired personnel are being honored at events including the 2^nd annual “Walk for Warriors” at the V.A. campus in West Los Angeles on Monday, May 28. They also can enjoy free admission to attractions such as the Queen Mary and Knott’s Berry Farm.

The Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs has compiled a list of this year’s options for services and other Memorial Day weekend events in communities across the region. Click here to find out how to make this a weekend to remember—in the best sense of the word.

Posted 5/23/12

The Rock first met The Slot at LACMA in April.

Southern California’s favorite 340-ton megalith will be unveiled to the public on June 24 at a dedication ceremony for “Levitated Mass,” the Michael Heizer art installation in which the now-famous boulder dubbed “The Rock” will perch atop a massive, walk-through slot on the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

At the top of the invitation list to see this new heavyweight attraction on the international art scene are the folks whose communities the boulder passed through on its slow-mo journey from a Riverside County quarry to LACMA. All residents who live in the 61 ZIP codes traversed by The Rock are being offered free admission to the museum and its grounds during the week of June 24 through July 1. Proof of residency, such as a driver’s license, will be required. Click here to see if your ZIP code’s on the list.

It’s intended as a thank you to the communities—from Jurupa Valley to Rowland Heights to Long Beach to Los Angeles—that played a part in The Rock’s epic voyage. The trip turned into a festive happening all along the route, with thousands turning out to marvel and, perhaps, plan their first-ever visit to LACMA to behold the boulder once it’s on permanent display. Our video showcases The Rock’s voyage into Southern California history.

As The Rock meets its public for the first time in its new home next month, the museum will also open an exhibition called “Michael Heizer: Actual Size,” a collection of large-scale photographs and projections of other works by the reclusive Nevada artist who created the installation. Heizer lived for a time on the LACMA grounds while “Levitated Mass” was being assembled.

“We live in a world that’s technological and primordial simultaneously,” Heizer said in a statement released by LACMA as part of its announcement. “I guess the idea is to make art that reflects this premise.”

Posted 5/21/12

Experts for Beverly Hills say Metro doesn't need to tunnel under the high school to get to Century City.

Scientific experts and lawyers representing the city of Beverly Hills and its school district told the Metro board on Thursday that the agency’s research into placement of a Century City subway station is flawed and inadequate, and urged the board to delay making a final decision until extensive new testing can be performed.

“We implore you to take the time—because you have the time—to make the right choice,” Beverly Hills City Attorney Larry Wiener said toward the end of a special hearing the city had requested under a rarely-used provision of the state Public Utilities Code.

The city has objected to plans to tunnel under Beverly Hills High School in order to build a Century City station at Constellation Boulevard as part of the Westside Subway project, saying it is potentially unsafe for students and would interfere with future campus development.

Metro’s own experts—including noted earthquake authority Lucy Jones, part of an independent review panel that assessed the agency’s findings—say the Constellation location would be safe. They say that an alternate location on Santa Monica Boulevard—which would avoid tunneling under the high school—is unsuitable for a station because of active earthquake faults there.

Beverly Hills’ experts disagreed on a number of key points.

They said there is evidence that earthquake faults along Santa Monica Boulevard are inactive and thus pose no threat. They also contend that Metro has not performed adequate scientific testing and risk analysis to determine whether the Constellation location is safe.

Beverly Hills commissioned its own trenching studies on the high school campus and its experts have produced a series of reports intended to challenge Metro’s findings on the route the subway should take to get to Century City. (The Beverly Hills reports are here; Metro’s responses to the reports are here, along with other scientific and environmental documents.)

On Thursday, Beverly Hills experts testified that their trenching method was more extensive and produced more accurate results than Metro’s method of boring into the earth and taking samples at the high school site. The Beverly Hills experts said they found no earthquake faults on the campus. And they said they found it curious that Metro’s experts, who had determined that there are faults on the campus, changed the mapped location of those faults after reviewing the Beverly Hills findings.

One of the consultants testifying for Beverly Hills, Tim Buresh, said that Metro’s tunneling plans could interfere with future underground development on the high school campus—which prompted some skeptical questions from Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, a member of Metro’s board of directors.

“There is no way in the world that the school district is going to build a six-story building underground, is there, Mr. Buresh?” Yaroslavsky asked.

Buresh insisted it was “entirely possible” that the school might eventually do so.

Buresh, a former executive with the California High-Speed Rail Authority, also drew skeptical questions from another Metro director, Richard Katz.

After Buresh told the Metro board that “you don’t gamble with children’s safety, ever—period,” Katz asked him why he had once advocated running a high speed train under another school, Miramar College in San Diego, saying it would have only “insignificant impacts.”

Buresh replied that he left the rail agency before he had a chance to change his position on that, but said he would have ultimately advocated another route that avoided the college.

Other than a handful of questions from the Metro board, the hearing was devoted entirely to speakers representing Beverly Hills.

The Metro board has approved the Westside Subway’s final environmental documents, but has deferred a decision on placement of the Century City station until after the Beverly Hills hearing could be held. The earliest the board could take up the matter would be at its regularly scheduled monthly meeting on May 24.

Toward the end of Thursday’s 3½-hour-long hearing, an attorney representing Beverly Hills, Robert McMurry, presented the Metro board with three alternate routes that he said would make it possible to build a station at Constellation without going under the high school. He urged the Metro board to hold off on any decision about the siting of a Century City station until it can gather more information.

“Now is not the time to make that decision. Otherwise, you’re going to shortchange us, you’re going to subject Metro to greater delays due to litigation and even worse consequences if you lose the litigation,” McMurry said.

Yaroslavsky said the Metro board will consider the experts’ opinions on both sides of the issue before making a final decision.

“All in all, I thought the city and school district of Beverly Hills made a professional presentation. Not surprisingly, their experts’ conclusions are diametrically opposite of Metro’s, so we will have to review the testimony and reconcile the differences before making a final decision on the subway alignment,” Yaroslavsky said. “This is a problem that can be solved, but the hysteria that has characterized some of the debate needs to be dropped. Today was a good start.”

Posted 5/17/12

The New York City contest had 600 entries. Here are the finalists, with the winner at bottom right.

There are a million free condoms in the naked city, and the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health sees a branding opportunity in that.

In an effort to help curb sexually transmitted diseases, the department’s Division of HIV and STD Programs this month will announce a contest to design an official L.A. condom wrapper to help brand the free prophylactics the county distributes to local businesses, social services and healthcare providers. Ads will invite county residents to come up with “L.A.’s Next Sex Symbol.”

“Our tagline is going to be ‘Show Me Your Package’,” says Project Manager True Ann Beck.

The lighthearted derby is part of a serious push in Los Angeles County to consolidate public health outreach on sexually transmitted diseases. An estimated 2,000 new HIV infections occur annually in L.A. County.  Last year, the department reported more than 47,500 new cases of chlamydia, more than 9,500 new cases of gonorrhea and nearly 1,800 new cases of syphilis.

Each year, grant money is distributed by the county to local health care providers to purchase and distribute free condoms, which help prevent sexually transmitted diseases. (About 250,000 have been handed out so far this year, at a wholesale price of about six cents apiece, Beck says.) The contest is a small part of a larger centralization of STD prevention that has already merged three county programs.

The design contest, which will run from May 21 to June 17, will be facilitated by KCBS Marketing with help from the county’s condom wholesaler, Boston-based One Condoms, Beck says. Entrants must be Los Angeles County residents over the age of 18.

Rules will be posted on the contest web site (LASexSymbol.com), but generally, entries cannot be trademarked, copyrighted or sexually explicit. The winner and nine runners-up will receive prizes and gift cards, plus bragging rights to a package design that will be distributed countywide and featured in future condom promotions.  All ten will be produced and distributed.

“We want to circulate more than one design so people can collect them all,” Beck says, adding that the initial plan is “to start with a million and one condoms.”

Updated 6/14/12: Learn more about the contest at the Downtown L.A. Art Walk tonight. Check out the 40-foot RV parked at 24 Main Street.

Public health officials note that contests are only one way among many to raise awareness and improve Southern California’s health. Still, New York’s 2010 contest attracted nearly 600 entries, persuaded New Yorkers to cast more than 15,000 online ballots and conferred momentary celebrity on the graphic artist who submitted the winning wrapper design—a graphic representation of a high-tech power button.

Beck says the hope is that the entries will be so smart and lively that the public won’t think of the free condoms as a government program.

“It’s going to be very light and sexy and fun. We’ll probably get all sorts of comments, but the point is to get people talking, and to get them to practice safer sex,” she says.

Posted 5/17/12

Get all the information on the upcoming closure of the Wilshire ramps at a meeting on May 24.

Things are gearing up as the 405 Project moves closer to completion in 2013. Major work is beginning on the Wilshire Boulevard ramps to and from the 405, and construction also is starting on the Sepulveda Boulevard overpass in Sherman Oaks. For specific questions or a general update, residents can attend Metro’s community meeting on Thursday, May 24.

The meeting will take place from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. in Room C of the Westwood Recreation Center, 1350 South Sepulveda Boulevard. Future community meetings will be held on July 26, September 27 and November 15, at locations yet to be determined.

Posted 5/17/12