I recently wrote about a wall in Silver Lake. But from the comments that have been posted to the article, you might have thought this wall was in Berlin. Read the story over at the LA Weekly and let me know what you think. Or better yet, add your thoughts to what’s becoming an increasingly vicious (yet extremely entertaining) thread.

It’s no secret around these parts that I’m a big Chris Burden fan. So of course I’ve been breathlessly awaiting the unveiling of his newest sculpture, Metropolis II at LACMA. It opens this Saturday but I got a sneak preview at the press conference, which I wrote about in my review for the LA Weekly. Still photos don’t do it justice, but hopefully my images and words can entice you to go see it in person. Which you must!

It’s gigantic: It takes up an entire room at LACMA. And it’s loud.

1,100 customized Hot Wheels cars move up a conveyor belt and then are released down 18 plastic tracks.

It’s like the 405 + the 101 + the 5 + the 10.

25 skyscrapers are made from everything from Legos to slotted stacking cards like the Eames Office designed.

An operator has to stand at the center to make sure no cars get flipped over or fly off the tracks. That’s also why it can only run for 90 minutes at a time, a few days a week.

Here’s LACMA’s Michael Govan talking to Chris Burden.

And Chris Burden pointing out some of the structural features.

Some parts don’t really look that different from downtown LA.

I fell in love with this little village bookended by two churches.

I was also wondering if these green panels were supposed to be parks.

Among the cars are a dozen electric trains that chug from one end to another. But they go very slow.

There are two Erector Set towers that nod to Burden’s work What My Father Gave Me, which I photographed in New York City.

And these travertine-like walls reminded me of the Getty.

The Eiffel Tower de Los Angeles!

Lincoln Logs give a nice faux-rustic look to what appears to be a very nice condo building.

Some of those Eames stacking cards. I want a real building in LA that looks like this.

Run, don’t walk to see this when it opens. Well, I suppose it would be appropriate to drive to this exhibition. As long as you don’t get stuck in traffic. Hours of operation here.

Read my review in the LA Weekly (there’s also a video there).

More Metropolis II photos.

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!

I had it in my head that the Watts Towers were gridlocked in some kind of shot-up, paved-over no-man’s land. But I got off the train in a grove of mature pines, with what looked like an early 1900′s train depot (Watts Station, I later found out, a building built for the Red Car in 1904, and the only building on 103rd Street that didn’t burn in the 1965 riots). As I walked the handful of blocks from the station to the towers, the horns from the train blaring softly in the background, I felt like I was strolling through a town in rural Alabama.

The houses, almost all original single-story homes, thankfully never saw enough money to be razed in favor of a stucco box or even trade their era-perfect woodwork for crappy plastic details. Some yards were meticulously manicured, but even if they weren’t, they had this wild, old-growth lushness to them; draped in bougainvillea, their walks studded with unruly succulents. As I walked by one yard, a rooster crowed.

Then I turned a corner and there were the towers, gray concrete crocheted against the sky. And in an electric green lawn facing them, all of Edgar’s team posing for their portrait, as well as some of the homeowners, who, in cooperation with artists, architects, volunteers and other neighbors, have begun to transform their houses into works of art (and you can help, too). I realized that in his quest to get this project rolling, Edgar, who is also one of my fellow GOOD community leaders, saw the same thing I saw in my walk from the train. A neighborhood with good bones and good people, plagued by perceptions of people like me, who just assumed it was a crappy place to live. Like any neighborhood, it only needs a little attention to make it great.

I had the best time hanging out with Rosa Guttierez and her two (of ten) kids Cruz and Ellani, who proudly showed me the improvements in their yard and home. These included painting the house blue and violet and adding a floral mural to the outside. Another of Rosa’s kids painted the hummingbird over her door. And Rosa herself designed a public bench that will go just outside their fence, for tourists to admire the towers from across the street.

But of course I fell in love with the gardens, all drought-tolerant plants in full-bloom. Rosa had planted all the flowers in these little sculptural mounds and as she watered them, we talked gardening while butterflies and hummingbirds and this creepy gigantor grasshopper picked through the blooms. But the most wonderful touch, which I didn’t realize until I got home and looked at the pictures: Poking out from the centers of each are the fluorescent orange pencil cactus you see above, mimicking the impossibly elongated spires of the towers right across the street. You can read more in my piece, “Urban Redeveloper,” and maybe I’ll see you back in Watts at one of the volunteer days.

When I went to Watts I also finally met Kevin Scanlon, the photographer who has taken all the portraits of the people I’ve written about for the past two years, plus about a zillion more (including the one you see above). An exhibition of his People portraits will be opening on Friday night from 7-11 pm at the Montalban Theater in Hollywood as part of LA Weekly’s LA Weekend, accompanied by the sounds (and hopefully the hilarious commentary) of KCRW’s newest DJ, Henry Rollins. On Saturday, the highlight is a meat lover’s panel at high noon, moderated by Jonathan Gold with carnivore commentary by Mark Peel, Octavio Becerra and Susan Feniger, chef at my latest favorite restaurant, Street.

It’s an awesome feeling to know your words are so widely distributed that they’ve become, well, disposable.

Such is the humbling nature of today, when I have four pieces published in the LA Weekly’s annual People issue. Except that the LA Weekly is free. It’s so free that for the next week, LA Weeklys will fall over the city like a light dusting of snow. My stories will be abandoned on bus seats, stuffed between Champagne flutes in moving boxes, wrapped around a dozen pink tulips at the farmers’ market.

So think of me sporting this wide, goofy grin when you come cross an LA Weekly this week. But before you use it to Windex your car windshield, be sure to read my pieces on Mathew Cullen and Javier Jimenez of Motion Theory; Ben Goldhirsh of GOOD; Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim of various Awesome Shows, Great Job; and Jonathan Wells of Flux.

And please recycle.