Food Distribution
First Lutheran Church
6952 Van Nuys Blvd.
Van Nuys, CA
Dec
11
Category Archives: News
Sep
15
Hollywood Homeless May Face Starvation
West Hollywood Food Coalition Under Assault by City, Cops, Big Real Estate Corporations
Class War Rages in Hollywood
The class war is intensifying in Hollywood, as it is nation-wide. With millions of foreclosures each year, more and more people are being put on the street. Combined with the exporting of good jobs to China, it’s hard for many to survive on the minimum wage jobs that still exist, and especially since a lot of these are part-time jobs. Paying rent of $800 or more for a single apartment on a part-time minimum wage job is tough. More people than ever are living in their vehicles or on the street. One reason a lot of homeless go to Hollywood to “live” is that the image-myth of Hollywood attracts thousands of tourists from around the world, making pan-handling easier there than say, Pacoima or Long Beach.
But Hollywood continues to have a massive development scheme. Big buildings, condos, and towers continue to be built. Billions of dollars are pouring into the area’s real estate. And if there is one thing the real estate moguls don’t like to see, it’s homeless people. “It’s bad for business.” It gives the lie to the image of growth and success that the moguls are trying to polish up. If they don’t keep up the “Rah Rah” then their buildings may end up vacant. Although the breaking point of rents is fast approaching, the big investors who now own so much of Hollywood’s commercial and office buildings, seem to be oblivious to the further eroding of the economy. So the word is out: Get rid of the homeless. Push them out to somewhere else. Anywhere but Hollywood.
A Lesson From The History Books
One way is to take a lesson from the history books. When the American Imperial expansion was in full swing, the main obstacle was the Native American tribes, who had been residents of the land, now called “The United States of America”, for thousands of years. Solution: kill off the buffalo, food supply for the Natives. This ultimately weakened many tribes into submission and made them dependent on food from the government. This same tactic is now being pushed in the Hollywood area. Cut off the food supply, harass them at every turn, arrest them, push them out. This combined assault by the City of Los Angeles and it’s big business backers is now threatening the 27 year old Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition (GWHFC).
The GWHFC has fed about 200-300 folks a night for 27 years. Operating on the corner of Sycamore and Romaine in Hollywood, help is there with a hot meal and often with volunteers who help the seniors and homeless with issues like health, legal problems, and psychological counseling. Now comes the class war: the Health Department demanded that all the tables and chairs be removed from the sidewalks; microscopic inspection of the food prep building; citations for anything imaginable; cops trolling the food lines trying to find homeless who have warrants outstanding; cops and B.I.D. police hanging around looking to cite anyone. If you ever wanted to know what it was like to eat a meal in a Nazi food distribution during WW2 (if there even was one), then this is it. Even during the great depression, big mobsters like Al Capone set up food kitchens in Chicago and fed thousands on the streets. The politicians of today aren’t even as nice as the 30’s mobsters. They hate the thought of feeding anyone, other than their honorable selves, of course.
Homeless Treated Worse Than Animals by Cops, City Politicos
If you are a senior or homeless and would like a free hot meal at the GWHFC nightly food distro, get ready to be treated like a dog. Not by the good folks at the Food Coalition, who are trying to cope with this attack, but by a heartless, cruel City and their squadrons of Cops. There are no tables to sit down and enjoy a meal. You have to sit on the ground. There’s no place to wash your hands, no bathrooms or porta-poties. Men, women, and children grovel on the ground for their gruel because the Food Coalition can no longer put out chairs and tables.
Americans, Unlike Other Humans, Do Not Ever Have To Go To The Toilet – An Entire Nation of Anal Retentives
Business people and some residents complain about the damage done or the annoyance in the neighborhood. “I saw a homeless guy pissing on a tree.” What do you expect? There’s no bathrooms in the area and a lot of Hollywood businesses and restaurants try to keep them out of their bathrooms. If the City can’t provide some free bathrooms, then you get what you deserve. An outsider or visitor from another planet would notice right away that Americans never go to the bathroom. These places, if they exist at all, are hidden away in secret corners, even in Shopping Malls. Contrast this with Europe. Go to London or Paris. Bathrooms everywhere. In London the “Water Closets” are manned by old pensioners who exist on tips. They work shifts and keep the places clean. Think of all the seniors here in Hollywood. A lot of them would like a job like that, just as soon as America joins the rest of the civilized world. Meanwhile, it’s “piss-o-rama” on the back streets of Hollywood and will continue to be until the City of L.A. and the Hollywood business people wake up to THEIR responsibility to provide bathrooms FOR EVERYONE. (Hey, even the beloved tourists have to “go”) And they could also find a suitable building in the area of Romaine and Sycamore and let the good folks at the Greater West Hollywood Food Coalition go about their humane efforts to feed the hungry. It is a responsibility for everyone to pitch in and help. So to the Hollywood Fat Cats and Moguls: call off the Cops and sour-faced bureaucrats and lend a hand in finding a solution. Make the world a better place by becoming anal-expulsive.
Hidden Camera Shows Cops Lining Up Homeless “Suspects” at Sycamore and Romaine
Jun
23
Life and Death in Dirty Dave’s Homeless Camp
Filmmaker Michael Arth Spent Years Documenting the Drama of
A Homeless Camp in the Woods of Florida
His film, “Out of the Woods” is an engrossing study of the folks who live in a camp in the Florida woods. Some are drunks, fighting the demons created by alcohol; some are dopers, others just out of work or homeless with no place to lay their head at night. Dirty Dave Grimsly, who weirdly has a slight resemblance to George Bush (the Junior one), takes them all in. He feeds them, cooks meals, gives them a tent or a sleeping bag, and tends to them. Because of their emotional and physical situations, the people who live in the camp provide us with dramatic statements of the personal horrors and the angst they are going through. Michael Arth is to be honored for this timeless study of those who need a helping hand, but find that the there is none from the local government. For those poor folks, the last stop is a tent deep in the woods, in a camp run by a good natured alcoholic nick-named Dirty Dave. And if there is an unlikely saint in this film, it is Dave. Every day he lives through his own hell of being a drunk and an ex-con sent to prison for manslaughter But it is Dave who gives his love and attention to a squad of lost souls who occupy the camp. It will probably be a long time before you forget some of these characters and their sad and tragic lives. Filmmaker.Arth holds up a backwards-looking mirror in which you not only see them in the present, but you see them as children, growing up, handsome and beautiful, ready to jump into the American dream. The juxtaposition of their youthful years, so hopeful and full of life, with the shocking reality of their hopeless descent into the swirling hell that lies beneath the surface of our society, is a major achievement by Mr. Arth.
Mr. Arth made this film in part to promote the construction of a project called Tiger Bay Village, to give a last chance to homeless folks in the area, a place to detox and recover their health, as well as living quarters so they can recover their personal dignity. Michael Arth has been working for years to push through this project, which is still stalled by the local government. The pathetic, actually enraging and ironic slap in the face to the American people, is that when our own folks need this kind of help it is not to be found, and our own government, year after year dumps millions of people into the U.S. as “refugees” or for “political asylum”. As this is 
written, your tax paid mentally ill rulers at the Department of State are planning on bringing one and a half million refugees from Syria into the country. What for? We don’t need them or want them. We have our own to take care of. Every war that the CIA loses becomes another humanity dump of millions more into our decaying cities. With the jobs sent to China, and the banksters pushing millions of families from their homes into the streets, the homeless population is increasing at a rapid pace. Tell Washington to STOP NOW. Get out of these foreign countries, and please, no more refugees until the American born homeless are taken care of, and that includes our Veterans, 800,000 of whom have been waiting for years for their benefits. The smells in homeless encampments are nothing compared to the stink from the politicians in Washington, D.C., the world’s biggest sewage pit masquerading as a city. Those politicians are not fit to kiss the feet of a guy like Dirty Dave Grimsley.
Watch the film below, or find it directly on youtube: Out of the Woods
Contact the filmmaker Michael Arth at www.goldenapplesmedia.com
Check out the Tiger Bay Village site at www.villagesforthehomeless.org
Jun
21
Make Your Own Candy Bars
New Book Shows You How To Make Yummy Candy Bars At Home (or in Your RV)
Skylight Books in Hollywood hosted the two authors of a new book “Hand-Crafted Candy Bars.” Susie Norris and Susan Heeger presented an evening of candy bar tasting that had the audience in high spirits. Like a wine-tasting, first a store bought candy bar like Snickers was served, then water to clean the palette, then pieces of home made Snickers type candy, concocted with a high grade chocolate and better ingredients, all without the preservatives and wax used in commercial bars. You can watch the entire event by clicking here: Candy Bars,
Or, watch the embedded version below. Skylight books in Hollywood still has signed copies of the book, www.skylightbooks.com.
Check out Sylight Books in Hollywood, click here: Skylight Books,
May
12
Venice Parking News
THANKS TO MARK RYAVEC & VENICE STAKEHOLDERS ASSOC. (VSA) OVERNIGHT PARKING DISTRICTS (OPDs) – DESIGNED TO RESTRICT VEHICLE-DWELLERS FROM PARKING OVERNIGHT – ARE BACK ON THE FRONT BURNER IN VENICE, CA!
Following a lawsuit brought by Ryavec and VSA against the CA Coastal Commission (CCC) & City of L.A (COLA) – a settlement proposal has been drawn up for submission to the CCC June hearing.
We need to put the pressure on CCC, who have already denied OPDs in Venice twice, to deny them a third time. Please sign this petition and pass along.
Permit parking in Venice would be in violation of the 1976 Coastal Act which was designed to keep public access to the CA coast free and open to all.
NOPDs IN VENICE! KEEP OUR PUBLIC STREETS FREE!
PRESERVE ALL PUBLIC ACCESS TO THE VENICE COASTAL ZONE!
JOIN WITH US IN TELLING THE CA COASTAL COMMISSION THAT VENICE STREETS SHOULD BE OPEN TO ALL – PROVIDING PUBLIC ACCESS TO THE COAST AT ALL HOURS OF THE DAY OR NIGHT.
WE DON’T WANT PARKING PERMITS ON OUR STREETS IN VENICE
Sign our petition here http://www.change.org/petitions/keep-our-public-streets-free-nopds-in-venice – each time someone signs and email is sent to City of L.A. and the CCC. You can sign, even if you don’t live in Venice – because coastal access should be for everyone !!!! Thanks, SOV
Feb
05
565 Agencies on Waiting List To Join L.A. Food Bank
An Incredible Number of Agencies In Los Angeles County Waiting For Food
U.S. Government Policy Has Led To Catostrophic Consequences As Food Supplies Tighten Across the Country – Inflation Could Now Destroy What Is Left of the Middle Class
How is it possible, you say? This great, once bountiful country, now becoming mired in a continuing food crises threatening to collapse the middle class. Let’s go back in time a few years. America had a huge food surplus – we had a Strategic Food Reserve. This was abandoned and the government started a policy of paying people to NOT grow food. Big farmers and corporations raked in millions DOING NOTHING. Our wheat surplus was shipped to Russia and China, compliments of the US taxpayers. Now we have hundreds of charities – 565 according to the L.A. Food Bank – waiting for food for their hungry wards. This situation may be getting worse due to drought, climate change and other natural disasters. It is also estimated that in other parts of the world something like 100 million people are starving, Go to www.YardEats.com website for an analysis of Strategic Food Reserves and comments on the food shortages and what needs to be done.
Dec
01
Free Clothing Sunday Dec 2, 2012
National Council of Jewish Women – Thrift Shop massive clothing give-away.
NCJW/LA Council House parking lot
543 N. Fairfax Ave. – Los Angeles, CA 90036
543 N. Fairfax Ave. – Los Angeles, CA 90036
Starts at around 8am until 1pm on Sunday. One person said that they start around 6:30 but we could not verify this. The Thrift Shop is just north of Beverly Blvd on Fairfax Ave. They usually give away 85,000 items.
Oct
29
Gallery of Missing “Crusty Punks”
Crusty Punk “Trash Can”
Click on this link to go to the blog that has photos and stories of various New York East Village nomads of the past. These travellers move across the country, usually by rail. They are called “crusty” because their clothes become stiff or crusty. Most of the nomads disappeared in 2011, and did not come back to the East Village in the summer as they always have. Probably because of what they called “asshole cops” harassing them. Another tourist attraction gone? Click Here.
Crusty Punk “Dolly”
Oct
29
Nomads Go Missing From East Village NY
“When one species disappears, others tend to follow.”
Old story from NY Times
In East Village, Harbingers of Spring Are Missing
Bob Arihood
Young, tattooed travelers gathered in Tompkins Square Park in 2009. The visitors have been absent this year.
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Published: June 14, 2011
For years, warm weather in the East Village has been heralded by an influx of young, tattooed visitors carrying backpacks and bedrolls and wearing clothes so stiffened with grit that they have come to be known in the neighborhood as crusties.
On Tuesday, the benches were empty along a stretch known locally as Crusty Row.
Their arrival in Tompkins Square Park has become a predictable harbinger of spring, a surviving custom in a neighborhood that has undergone various upheavals and changes over the past several decades.
But this year, they have not materialized. People have reported stray sightings of one or two visitors, but nothing like what the neighborhood has come to expect. No one knows if they are simply late this year or if, for some reason, they will not come at all. Either way, their absence has been conspicuous.
“It’s like the birds aren’t migrating this year; the salmon aren’t swimming upstream,” said Chris Flash, an East Village resident who runs a local bike courier service and an underground newspaper called The Shadow. “The whole ecology of the neighborhood is out of whack.”
The visitors are seasonal nomads, crossing the nation in rough accordance with changing weather patterns, heading south or west in the winter and venturing toward the Northeast in the summer months. Many travel along rail lines like the Union Pacific and the Norfolk Southern, hoisting themselves into empty freight train boxcars.
Several cities are known to be relatively hospitable to the travelers, among them San Francisco, New Orleans, Philadelphia and Richmond, Va. In New York, the group has become such a fixture in Tompkins Square Park that the area where members have generally assembled — near the park’s western edge, just south of the Temperance Fountain — is known as Crusty Row.
There, the travelers could typically be found relaxing on wooden benches and whiling away the hours talking (adventurous tales of illicit rail travel were popular), drinking (preferred beverages included cheap vodka, malt liquor or “space bags,” the name given to the silvery bladders found in boxes of wine) and smoking (self-rolled cigarettes predominated)
Dozens of the nomads would set up what seemed like semipermanent encampments along the row, at one point designating their territory with a black flag emblazoned with a skull and crossbones. Many would arrive at the park shortly after the 6 a.m. opening time and remain until the midnight curfew, leaving in between only to avail themselves of free meals handed out on Avenue A or to ask for spare change on St. Marks Place.
Last summer, a steady flow of the travelers frequented the park from May through September. During that time, a local photographer, Steven Hirsch, documented the visitors’ presence and recorded their stories on a blog, crustypunks.blogspot.com. This year, Mr. Hirsch theorized that the visitors were steering clear of their usual haunt to avoid a blizzard of summonses that he said the police began issuing late last summer for infractions like drinking in public or lying on a bench.
A street poet who goes by the name L.E.S. (for Lower East Side) Jewels, a Crusty Row regular who lives in New York year round, agreed with Mr. Hirsch. On a recent afternoon, he sat on a bench in Tompkins Square Park, away from the Row, and ruminated in rhyme on the absence of his more mobile comrades:
“It’s a park, it’s for all, for all to be,
and Tompkins Square now is just a memory
it ain’t like it used to be.
I’m sitting here in Tompkins Square,
drinking vodka like I do anywhere,
next thing you know you got a pair of cuffs on,
and those silver bracelets, they ain’t no fun.”
Over the years, some people who frequent the park have expressed distaste for the travelers, saying that too many drink alcohol openly and that they tend to create a disorderly atmosphere. Others have been more tolerant, arguing that whatever harm the travelers cause is only to themselves. Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3, suggested that many East Village residents had accepted the visitors.
“People just don’t make a big deal about them,” Ms. Stetzer wrote in an e-mail, adding, “At least they are quiet.”
On a recent afternoon, Crusty Row was empty, save for a few parkgoers. Levent Gulsoy, 55, gazed toward the empty row of benches where the travelers used to gather. “That’s not a good sign,” he said. “When one species disappears, others tend to follow.”
Oct
29
Squatters Victory in East Village
Sharing a Part of Activist History in the East Village
By COLIN MOYNIHAn
From the street, the brick tenement on Avenue C looked like any other building. But inside on Saturday afternoon, about 30 people gathered to look at a storefront space covered with graffiti and murals.
“This is C-Squat,” Laurie Mittelmann explained to one of the spectators, “soon to be home to the Museum of Reclaimed Urban Space.”
That museum, Ms. Mittelmann said, was being established to, among other things, tell the story of how activists in the East Village took over abandoned properties and over the years transformed them into permanent housing or community gardens.
She said that she came up with the idea for the museum with Bill DiPaola, the executive director of an environmental group, Time’s Up, whose members participated in demonstrations to preserve community gardens and squats.
Some of those efforts were effective. Most of the East Village gardens became permanent parts of the neighborhood in 2002 after Eliot Spitzer, then the state’s attorney general, and the Bloomberg administration resolved a lawsuit Mr. Spitzer had filed against the Giuliani administration to prevent their sale to developers.
Although the police evicted many squatters, the city called a truce about a decade ago and about a dozen squatter buildings remained. The resulting agreement cleared the way for residents of those buildings, including C-Squat, at 155 Avenue C, to become legal owners.
Still, the neighborhood has undergone startling changes over the last three decades, and Ms. Mittelmann said the goal of the museum was to preserve the memory of its recent history.
Mr. DiPaola said that he was enthusiastic about opening the museum in C-Squat, perhaps the most anarchic of the squats, and home to members of local bands like Choking Victim, Banji and Dog That Bites Everyone.
Opinion about the museum idea varied among C-Squat residents. Ultimately, a majority decided that the project made sense, said Brett Lebowitz, who has lived in the building for 20 years. Residents said the museum would provide monthly income from a tenant that promised to reflect the philosophy that was an important part of the building and the East Village itself.
Last week, Ms. Mittelmann, a neighborhood activist who lives nearby, and Mr. DiPaola signed a lease to rent the storefront for about $1,700 per month. (Up to now, the space had been used mostly as a community room.) Over the past several weeks, they have been renovating the space and assembling photographs, artworks and other materials to exhibit there.
Among the displays are old issues of The Shadow, an underground newspaper published from 1989 to 2008, which reported on the evictions of squatters, the bulldozing of gardens, and battles over a curfew in Tompkins Square Park.
And Ms. Mittelmann and Mr. DiPaola recently looked at back issues of The East Villager, a free monthly newspaper published in the mid- and late 1980s, while sitting in the kitchen of a former editor in chief of that newspaper, Heidi Boghosian.
The issues contained photographs of the Gas Station, a performance space on Avenue B created by members of an art collective called the Rivington School; an article about a rally against the eviction of squatters from a building on East Eighth Street; and an interview with a resident at the Christodora House on Avenue B, a doorman building that some demonstrators pelted with pieces of concrete after the eviction. A Christodora resident, identified as Mr. X, is quoted as saying, “I was quite irritated.”
Ms. Boghosian said she would also make letters to the newspaper available to the museum. One of the letters was from the writer Luc Sante, who in 1988 called those campaigning against sidewalk peddlers “pea brains” and suggested that they might need to “take lessons in urban ambulation.”
In addition to displaying artifacts and pieces of art, Mr. DiPaola said, the museum will organize tours like the one on Saturday, which was led by several longtime neighborhood residents.
fter leaving C-Squat, the group made stops at a squat on East Seventh Street and two community gardens before ending at Bullet Space, a squatter building on East Third Street, where they looked at a display of bottles, clay pipes and coins believed to date to the 1800s and unearthed in a backyard dig two years ago.
Later, a C-Squat resident, Bill Cashman, said the museum’s examination of the recent past had motivated him to research the more distant days of his building using tax records and other resources. The tenement was built in 1872, he said, housed a pickle store, and went through various other permutations before squatters moved in more than 100 years later.
“I’ve always wondered what was in this building before us,” he said. “Who was walking these halls?”