Los Angeles in 2 Parts

I made a mini-love letter to the people of Los Angeles in the form of a 30 second video.



First is a clip of today’s police brutality march where 1,000+ of us shut down some streets of downtown LA. It was partially in solidarity with events in Ferguson, but mainly in memory of the multiple unarmed men of color the police have killed in our own city in the past couple of weeks. It’s ridiculous that this is so common of an occurrence. Apparently, someone else got shot by LAPD during our protest mere blocks away.

Shortly after, a few minute walk away, I came upon a three-block long oval of elderly Japanese women performing a choreographed dance routine to Pharrell’s “Happy.” It was cute and kind of a culture shock after shouting at the LAPD… yet also, in a weird way, kind of fitting.

We got a lot of work to do, Los Angeles; keep being awesome in the meantime.

The Money Machine

All my life, I've dreamed of being in a money wind machine (do they have a proper name?). I'm not particularly greedy, but I've just always known in my heart I'd be exceptionally good at grabbing dollars as they blow around me in an enclosed booth.

Walking down an LA street last month, an opportunity presented itself to make my dream come true. Granted, it was a T Mobile promotional booth and not a real money machine, but sometimes you have to modify your expectations to make dreams a reality.

Sometimes, however, dreams are just that… it turns out, I'm rubbish at this game. My friends just stood outside the booth, laughing and mocking my pitiful effort to grab fake crumpled up money as it whirled around me.

In my defense, T Mobile implemented a whole lot of unnecessary rules that killed any kind of reasonable strategy to do well:

• I could only grab the money that blew above my waist (most of it remained toward the floor.)
• I could not bend my knees or reach down.
• I could not push money against the wall to collect it easier, or touch the wall at all for that matter.
• I could not stuff money in my shirt or anywhere else on my person.
• The only money that would count is what was in my hands.

That's not how they do it on TV! I filled all I could fit in my hands pretty quickly and then I was kind of stuck… I had plenty of time left but only so many crumpled papers can fit between your fingers. Considering these were just T Mobile bucks and not real dollars, you'd think they'd just let me have at it. Part of me wanted to ask them, "Look, I'm not actually going to try to cash in the bucks for a T Mobile accessory ASTERISK YOU MUST ENROLL IN A NEW T MOBILE CELLULAR PLAN TO QUALIFY, which is a pretty big caveat if you ask me, so can you just let me play like real people do since I'm just using this as practice in case I ever make it on a gameshow?"

Oh well. Let me bend my knees and shove money down my shirt though, and I'm going to take you for thousands of dollars. Mark my words!