Update: In all the fabulosity of Saturday night, I screwed up and neglected to post the winning raffle tickets for our eight door prizes. If you were at City Listening and had a raffle ticket, check here to see if you won and email us if you did!

It’s going to be a big, fat, designy weekend here in LA and I hope that you can join me for as much of it as you can muster! First up, Friday, Saturday and Sunday is Dwell on Design, the West Coast’s largest design show and one of my favorite conferences of all time.

For the last few weeks I’ve been writing over at Dwell about all the highlights, including a beautiful tile collaboration between Heath Ceramics and Dwell, a free design clinic hosted by my friends at Architizer, Project H’s GreenAid seed bomb vending machines, David Thompson’s lovely Larchmont Village house, the announcement of a new Cleantech Corridor competition for LA, and an exciting collaboration between Dwell and Arkitip on 10 prints of 10 Dwell houses by 10 artists, including this piece by Andrew Holder (who I was thrilled to interview!). Plus, I got to go to Ed Begley, Jr.’s supergreen house—he’s talking Sunday—and we chatted about riding the bus. He does it!

If all that wasn’t a reason to come out, I’ll be speaking there, too, and I hope you can come by and say hi! Saturday at 12:30pm on the Sustainability stage I’m moderating a panel called Improvising and Improving LA Transit, showcasing how three Angelenos have taken a DIY approach to making the city’s transportation better. On my panel are three of my transit heroes: Dan Koeppel, founder of the 35-mile stairwalk named THE BIG PARADE, which I just wrote about here; Richard Ankrom, the artist who took it upon himself to improve an Los Angeles freeway sign (which I wrote about over at GOOD); and Joseph Prichard, a graphic designer who is improving bike signage, and whose Better Bikeways series I edit at GOOD.

And then at 5pm, same day, same stage, I’m moderating another panel, Watts House Project: Architecture, Art, and Sustainability, about one of the most exciting public art projects in the country, the Watts House Project, featuring Edgar Arceneaux, John Umbanhowar and Frank Escher.

And because I love you so much for reading this blog, I’d like to offer you a special discount on the Dwell conference. You’ll receive $15 off the Dwell Exhibition Plus Ticket (50% off the two-day Weekend Pass) if you purchase tickets online before Friday with the code: DWELL8B

But wait, there’s more! Saturday night, after my last panel at Dwell on Design, I’ll be scurrying up Spring Street to the Spring Arts Tower for our very first de LaB fundraiser: City Listening II.

We’ve got a killer lineup of design writers who are all going to be reading stories about LA, including Frances Anderton on “Living With Gehry,” John Chase ruminating about fun-size Twix bars, Sam Lubell reading bible verses, Tibby Rothman with an amazing (and true) art world story, Nick Adams on LA’s “subway,” Chris Nichols from Los Angeles Magazine, LA Creek Freak Joe Linton, LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, Rico Gagliano from the PRI show The Dinner Party Download, Brooke Hodge, Adrian Glick Kudler, Tom Marble, Marissa Gluck, and letters to LA from 826LA students. And yes, I’ll be reading my annual poem about design in LA. Plus, anyone who arrives by bike or transit receives a very special walking-themed door prize!

We couldn’t have done any of this without our amazing de LaB community. The event decor is currently being laser-etched by Crimson Collective (the same designers who built that giant bird nesting in the center of this year’s Coachella festival), and we’ll have a silent auction featuring items ranging from beautiful custom-built “barchitecture” by Jason King of Somewhere Something, to a walking tour of West Hollywood’s art and urban design with John Chase, to an amazing airplant sculpture by Kara Bartlet’s toHOLD. Plus, I can’t forget the tireless work of our most valuable de LaB community member: Derrick Schultz, who built our website and designed all the beautiful graphics.

We’ll also have delectable Asian-French eats by Flying Pig courtesy of The Architect’s Newspaper, vegan truffles by Nicobella, our well-named de LaB cocktails, and wine courtesy of FORM. And yes, there will be gelato, well, ice cream—did you really think I could throw a party without it? My good friends at Coolhaus will be serving up mini ice cream sandwiches with a very east-of-La Brea flavor: Horchata!

And because if you’ve read this far I really love you, I want to offer you a discount on City Listening tickets as well, if you purchase online before Saturday. Just use delab to get $5 off regular tickets, which include drinks, food and admission to the show; or delabVIP to get $10 off de LaB Groupie Tickets, which include drinks, food and show plus a guerrilla gardening kit from GreenAid, a very good chance at winning great door prizes, and an after party at the Crocker Club, conveniently located below the venue.

Bonus: If you make it to the after party, you just might get to see me collapse after this overload of awesomeness. Hope to see you there!

Yesterday I had to quickly go downtown to do some research for a story.

It was supposed to rain, and even though it never did, the air still had that crisp, post-rain feeling that made everything snap into focus.

I was there to ride Angels Flight, the “world’s shortest railway,” a funicular that was built in 1902. Today it looks like a castle among the modern office buildings.

It even has its own moat.

Angels Flight recently re-opened after a nine-year hiatus. It closed just before I moved to LA so I’ve never had a chance to ride it before.

For just 25 cents (or five rides for a dollar), you can ride all the way back to 1902. It’s a pretty sweet deal, I think.

There are even old time ads to get you in the mood.

And old time tickets.

When you get to the bottom, you can look back up at Bunker Hill and try to imagine what it looked like when Angels Flight was built.

Well, this isn’t exactly how it looked, since Angels Flight has since been moved a block to the south. But you get the idea.

I would say it’s probably the best 25 cents you can spend in Los Angeles.

I could not be more excited about being one of the first people to hitch a preview ride today on the Gold Line Eastside Extension, a brand-new rail line for LA which will officially chug out of Union Station this Sunday, November 15. I wrote a preview piece (with lots of blurry pics) for the Architect’s Newspaper, where I’ll also be reviewing the line once it opens. But during today’s ride I was also completely captivated by the little architectural gems I spotted from the train’s window, on this route I don’t think I’ve ever traveled before, not even by bus. That’s exactly the kind of response they want from passengers, said Frank Villalobos, who served as lead architect for the project—a new look at East LA. And how!

There are two historic crossings on this new line, one, the fact that a train goes over the 101 freeway on a brand-new bridge. (Remember, all photos shot through a possibly-not-clean window.)

And then it was crazy to take the train over the 1st Street Bridge, where a cable car once traveled over the same span.

The bridge is currently being widened so all these arches have been pulled off and are situated to the side.

This is the beautiful El Mercado in Boyle Heights, a Mexican marketplace full of delicious foods.

I wanted to set sail on the Ocean Queen.

The line travels by three cemeteries, and even uncovered one: Excavation revealed burial ground for Chinese immigrants, so the architects are working the community to build a memorial.

These are all in one block! The awesome mosaics of the Roybal Comprehensive Health Center…

…the beautiful gates to the East LA Civic Center…

…and on the other side, King Taco! They do take MasterCard and Visa, in case you were wondering.

And here’s the end of the line, the Atlantic station. That’s just a taste of what you’ll see from the windows of the Gold Line…and I haven’t even gotten to the station design yet! Stay tuned for more, and if you’re feeling up for a party, be sure to stop by Mariachi Plaza this Sunday for the opening, and what will likely be a world-record shattering convergence of mariachis.

Before he made Labyrinth: Easily the most incredible thing I saw all week, possibly all year. Jim Henson’s Commercials & Experiments was screened as part of Cinefamily at the Silent Movie Theater. Thanks to YouTube you can organize a mini-screening at home. Start with these Wilkins Coffee commercials (part 2, 3) featuring an early version of Kermit, some the first commercials to use humor (and rampant puppet violence) to sell products. Also behold the brilliance of the La Choy Dragon and the stunning short film Time Piece which was nominated for an Academy Award. We miss you, Jim!Good looking: The American Society of Magazine Editors announced the National Magazine Awards nominees this week and a bunch of the mags I contribute to are in there. It’s always good to see Print and Metropolis representing the design mags in General Excellence Under 100,000 Circulation. Wired is also a regular in several categories. But check out newcomer Good making a well-deserved splash in two big categories: Magazine Section (for their Transparency column) and Design! Huge congrats to everyone at the magazine for sticking to their guns. And of course, to Scott Stowell and the magicians at Open.

Saint Andrew: Metropolis’ Andrew Blum and I both wrote about Make It Right, the program that enlisted 13 architecture firms to design houses for Katrina victims in New Orleans’ Lower Ninth Ward. But Andrew nabbed the interview I couldn’t—he got to spend quality time with Brad Pitt, who’s personally heading up the project. Brad even opened a beer for him! In his piece “Saint Brad,” Andrew even manages to look beyond those smiling deep blue eyes and talk about the architecture. You can read my lowly un-Brad-ified piece in the Architect’s Newspaper.

Do as I do: If you’ve been reading this blog for a few weeks now and wondering how you can go from a blogging job that pays you cash to blogging for yourself for free, boy, do I have the class for you! I’ll be teaching Blogging Basics at mediabistro.com’s LA office on Saturday March 29. After five hours, you’ll walk out with a solid concept for your blog and how to get started. Details and registration are here.

Hallelujah!: Spring began this week, which means only one thing: Peeps® are in the air! Peeps® have a special place in my heart, and on my Easter table. Stay tuned Monday for more marshmallowy creations.

Thanks to all my Peeps®, Max, Andrew and UnBeige.

In my Eavesdrop column for the January issue of the California Architect’s Newspaper, I tackle a sensitive issue for some of you reading this blog: The redesign of Dwell.

What I didn’t get to say in this short piece is that I really love Dwell. I’ve written for Dwell. I’m going to a party they’re hosting this week. In fact, I’ve been a Dwell reader from the very beginning, something that I think has made me somewhat unnaturally possessive of the magazine. I bet a lot of readers feel the same way. So although the new fonts and dotted lines grate upon my brain, it’s not as much the way it looks as what the redesign represents. (I have nothing, however, against the use of pink. Go pink!)

I’m most disappointed because I got way excited when Dwell recently hired some very smart people: Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG; Sarah Rich, formerly of Worldchanging and Inhabitat; Aaron Britt, who is probably the second smartest person on the planet since he used to work for William Safire; design director Kyle Blue, who blogs at Arkitip; and designer Geoff Halber, who came from Winterhouse. Mind you, most of those people were hired to replace people who quit, but all of those people, I assume, have some very smart things to say about the future of where we live. The hyped-up design and scaled-down content unfortunately says Look at these cool houses! If Dwell wants to go that route, it’s probably fine for some of its readership. But then it’s just another magazine on the newsstand.

Also in January’s Eavesdrop, my recap of December’s gin-and-Tang-soaked shmoozefests Art Basel Miami Beach and Design/Miami (which is pretty much a condensed version of my coverage over at UnBeige, except for the Yves Béhar moment, which I relive every morning as I wash my face…sigh). And finally, there’s the Back of the Envelope Bush Library Contest, where sketches for the soon-to-be-designed library for the soon-to-be-former president will be judged by the highly-literate folk at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Coincidentally, just after we sent that issue to the printer, another contest to design a presidential institution was announced: White House Redux. Anyone can participate, and the winning ideas will be announced in June, which gives officials plenty of time to make the proper renovations for whoever moves in—or, uh, back in—next year.