Kensington is back, and this show is going to be amazing. In our third collaboration with the California State Parks Department, we are going to be bringing one of our absolute favorite bands, The Dustbowl Revival, to our favorite secret location in the city.

• Kensington is a donation based, potluck, community-centric monthly music and dinner series in the Victorian neighborhood of Angelino Heights, near Echo Park in Los Angeles, CA, now expanding its horizons to include a collaboration with The California State Parks Department.
  
  

We were blessed to be the vegan option at this event. 

Today Aug 20th on Facebook
CITY LABS 1645 e. 6th st. los angeles, ca 90023
at 6:00pm - 10:00pmCome out for a night of drinking, music, and dancing while helping to create more vibrant streets in Los Angeles! 

Mayor Eric Garcetti’s as part of his Great Streets Initiative recently awarded Community Challenge grants to innovative projects that will focus on improving streets in Boyle Heights, Pacoima, and South LA. This event provides an opportunity to learn about these projects and contribute to help make them a reality. 

There will be a suggested donation of $10 at the door. Each donation will be matched dollar for dollar by the Great Streets Initiative!

Complimentary beer will be provided by Brewjeria!
Vegan Food by Baba's Vegan Cafe http://www.babasvegancafe.com
https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/baba-s-cafe#/story

COME OUT TO SUPPORT THESE GREAT PROJECTS:

Connect the Dots – Arid Lands Institute, Pacoima Beautiful, LACBC, Emerging Terrain Architects

Nuestra Avenida: Cesar Chavez Reimagined – Multicultural Communities for Mobility, Eric Heuta, KOA, Recreational Equipment Inc.

Streets Beats – Community Health Councils, Studio MMD, Ride On!, TRUST South LA

The Street Values – Pacoima Beautiful, LA Mas, CicLAvia
Youth Envisions Streets – National Health Foundation, LA Walks, LACBC, CRCD

"Dope, ill, phat, funky.fresh local talent always. The vibe is chill, foods delicious, and there's always something new goin on.May 15, 2014 · 1 Review

Duo Del Sol + Yunhe Liang

8/10/14 -- This night began with a world class performance of Chinese folk songs by master Erhu soloist Yunhe Liang, followed by amazing vegan patties made by Leimert Park's Wo'se Kofi, who also spoke to the crowd about his efforts to bring healthy food to the otherwise "food desert" of South LA. The evening ended with a rousing performance of original music by violin and guitar combo Duo Del Sol.

Duo Del Sol
Yunhe Liang
Wo'se Kofi

"The question is what is a weekday look like in Leimert Park, and why is it so different than a Sunday?  As much as we would love to get a space in Leimert Park, we are working as hard as we can to stay as close as possible. "
-Baba's Vegan Cafe

Art + Practice's opening in Leimert Park two months ago was promising for the same reason the 2014 opening of Michelle Papillion's gallery there was: It was poised to add to the vibrancy of the community, known as "the village," an oasis for African-American culture in South Los Angeles. People on the street here use the term "pan-Africanism" confidently, and on weekends you might hear music from jeweler Sika's colorful storefront commingling with sounds from a parking lot drum circle.


MacArthur genius grant-winning artist Mark Bradford and philanthropist Eileen Norton, both African-Americans who have spent time in the neighborhood, are at the helm of Art + Practice along with politics-savvy Allan DiCastro, former president of the Mid-City Neighborhood Council, who has a background in banking.

Organized as a nonprofit art center, A+P occupies an airy, white-walled studio complex on Leimert Boulevard. An art deco building on West 43rd Place will eventually become its main exhibition space and perhaps a cafe, and it also occupies two storefronts around the corner, on Degnan Boulevard.

Even before it opened to the public, A+P began offering workshops for teenagers who have aged out of the foster system — significant given that nearby Dorsey and Crenshaw high schools have more foster kids enrolled than any other high schools in the city.

Artist Dale Davis, who started the Brockman Gallery in Leimert Park with his brother Alonzo in 1967 and staged important exhibitions by minority artists there, since August has been digitizing his archives in a studio A+P provided; it's a project that a major museum should have funded years ago.

So when, on Feb. 28, A+P debuted its first exhibition — a show of meticulous new work by L.A. artist Charles Gaines, organized with the Hammer Museum — it seemed it was engaging the community already.

But certain community members have been apprehensive about A+P from the start.

Musician J.J. Kabasa runs an African drum circle and has been frequenting the neighborhood since the 1970s. "I love art and practice. That's what I'm about — I want to see that applied," he says. "Probably, Art + Practice, they've brought something to the village. But they're not connecting."

Kabasa, like others in Leimert, believes A+P's founders have purchased a number of buildings surrounding their campus, perhaps in a quiet bid to control the cultural development of the area.

A+P's founders have told L.A. Weekly that they do not own the additional buildings in question, eight historic white storefronts along Degnan Boulevard, a prime commercial strip that's currently home to Papillion Gallery and the World Stage performance gallery and once was home to Brockman Gallery.


Bradford and DiCastro, available only via indirect emails from A+P's program lead or the Hammer Museum's communications office, have used careful language. They say they are "not currently investing in other properties in the neighborhood," and that "A+P does not know who owns the property" along Degnan.

Sophia Belsheim, A+P's program lead, told the Weekly in March that A+P does have an office in one Degnan storefront and is renovating 4334 Degnan. She said it plans to sublease this renovated space to Eso Won Books, the black-owned, grassroots bookstore that moved to the neighborhood in 2006 and is currently across the street. But Belsheim said these properties had been acquired through a management company, Clint Lukens Realty, and A+P is not the underlying owner. "We're trying to dispel that rumor," she told the Weekly. "We're not interested in purchasing more buildings."

The problem with these statements is that state and local records appear to support village rumors. These records show the Degnan storefronts being purchased by a limited liability corporation, or LLC, which lists DiCastro, A+P's co-founder and interim director, as its managing member.

According to the county assessor's office, an entity calling itself MBA Mascot LLC owns the Degnan storefronts. The name resembles names of other LLCs with which Bradford and DiCastro are associated (MBA Standford, MBA Wwb), and DiCastro's name appears on the deed for the Degnan property, dated June 7, 2013. On the statement of information the Weekly requested from the secretary of state, DiCastro is the managing member listed for MBA Mascot LLC.


The state of California requires just one managing member to be named in public records, so DiCastro could have other partners, who need not be listed under the law. But if A+P's founders do own the Degnan buildings as well as the art deco building and Leimert Boulevard complex, that means they control approximately 30,000 square feet of a relatively small block — and aren't admitting it.

"Why all this pulling shade, as people say these days?" asks Rene Fisher-Mims, who runs S.H.I.N.E. Muwasi, a women's dance and drum circle that often meets in the village.

"We're befuddled," says Mari Hashimoto, a clinical social worker who serves on the World Stage's board.

It helps to rewind a few years, to the end of 2012. That's when it seemed likely the community's campaign to get a Leimert Park Metro stop on the Crenshaw line would succeed, and hopefully pull businesses out of the slump they'd been in since the recession. That's also when the A+P-controlled West 43rd Place LLC bought the art deco building that now is part of A+P's campus. At that point, few if any Leimert residents knew that Bradford and DiCastro were behind that LLC. No plans for A+P had been announced.

Then, on May 23, 2013, Metro's board of directors voted to approve a Leimert Village Metro stop — a decision that typically increases land values in the immediate area dramatically and leads to new development. Two weeks later, MBA Mascot LLC — the one state records say DiCastro set up — officially purchased the parcel along Degnan. Described in a document as a "real estate investment," the LLC will be in a perfect position to profit when the train comes in.

According to jazz vocalist and World Stage director Dwight Trible, not long after the purchase, a representative from Clint Lukens Realty told him the new owner was not currently renewing leases for existing tenants. Worried because World Stage was one of the tenants, Trible attempted to locate the owner, enlisting the help, unsuccessfully, of staff at L.A. City Councilman Herb Wesson's office. Other tenants on the block also had not had leases renewed, and were paying month-to-month without agreements or receiving pay-or-quit notices.

To raise awareness of its uncertain future, and to raise funds in the face of a potential eviction, World Stage organized a concert in October 2013. Press coverage of the event in the L.A. Times, L.A. Weekly and KCET questioned whether the coming train would stifle Leimert's distinct character and described the new owners on the block as anonymous or, in columnist Erin Aubrey Kaplan's words, "a partnership with no public face."

Then, in spring 2014, soon after Papillion Gallery opened on Degnan, the sisters who campaigned hard for the train stop decided to close their Zambezi Bazaar — a hangout and boutique that was hard to keep afloat financially — rather than navigate the uncertain rental situation. The storefront housing the Bazaar, which has since reopened around the corner, was listed as available by Clint Lukens and described as a "lovely two-level storefront" walking distance from the coming Metro station "in an up-and-coming shopping center." A+P later would occupy this particular storefront, and offer it to Eso Won Books.

In December 2014, World Stage's Trible read a newspaper story detailing A+P's aspirations and realized that DiCastro, whose name he had already found when searching for MBA Mascot LLC's owner online, was A+P's interim executive director.

Early this year, Trible emailed A+P's office, saying he thought its venture sounded admirable and that he would like to discuss World Stage's unrenewed lease with Bradford, one artist-activist to another. He was told Bradford was unavailable.

"If they're doing good work and we're doing good work, why aren't we working together?" Trible says he still wants to know.

In theory, A+P's presence on the block is a good thing, even a best-case scenario. The founders of a nonprofit that helps foster youth, stages exhibitions and supports the history of an important, under-recognized gallery are not the stereotypical faceless corporate landlords.

Filmmaker Ben Caldwell has owned the always-active Kaos Network building, a multimedia training center, on the corner of Leimert and West 43rd since the 1980s and is there most days. "We're still coming up with a definition of what this change is," he said, soon after A+P opened. "Mark [Bradford], an artist, is reinvesting money that he's gotten through the system." But, he added, "The onus of the imperial lord, it falls on you."


Caldwell thinks concerns about Leimert's future and A+P's role in it should be voiced. "We're in a slow process of learning to trust each other, changing so that the culture can get its feeling, its swag, back."

This seemed strangely possible on the first Friday in April, when Sika was burning incense in front of his jewelry shop and Michelle Papillion was installing her ambitious spring exhibition, brown paper still covering half the windows. A+P's office was dark, but next door a concert was starting at World Stage. It went late, and kept shifting. Trible sang something intimate and soulful at one point, then Kabasa's drum circle entered from the street as if on cue, and the experience felt like something bigger, and inclusive.

http://www.laweekly.com/arts/whos-in-control-of-leimert-parks-future-its-hard-to-tell-5511966

Baba's Vegan Cafe are known for the vegan veggie patties. Order for delivery or pick up in Leimert Park. 3-7:30 pm

Brian Breye operated the Museum in Black in Leimert Park for four decades until rising rents forced its closure. (Iris Schneider / Los Angeles Times)

By STEVE CHAWKINScontact the reporter

For Brian Breye, the Museum in Black was a labor of love. In the front room, he displayed his collection of African masks, intricate carvings and ornate statuary. In the back room, there were slave manacles, a framed photo of a lynching, "Whites Only" signs from the segregated South, figurines of grinning railroad porters, jars shaped like stereotypical mammies, and vintage labels for products like Pickaninny Freeze ice cream and Uncle Remus syrup, complete with the face of a smiling black man declaring, "Dis sho' am good!" Sometimes visitors took offense at the relics — and Breye agreed with them.


"I find them to be very offensive," he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. But, he said, it would have been more offensive to keep a tormented history under wraps. Young people, he said, "may never even know that it did exist … I think we fail to look back into the past, and we fail to say to ourselves, 'Never again.'"

Breye, who kept his Leimert Park museum afloat for four decades but finally had to close it in 2005 for lack of funds, died Aug. 3 in a Los Angeles hospital. He was 79.

Breye had cancer, his friend Edna Johnson said.
Johnson volunteered at the museum and brought her children there after school almost daily. Like others, she called Breye "baba" — a term for "father" in Swahili and other languages. Breye's museum became a local meeting spot, and Breye became known as "the mayor of Leimert Park" — a fatherly figure with a passion both for world history and for his neighborhood.

A grandmaster in shotokan karate, Breye ran a dojo and trained probation officers in self-defense. He sold an occasional piece from his collection and rented objects to studios for movie sets, but he never charged admission at Museum in Black.

"One week I have steak and potatoes, another week nothing but potatoes," he once said. Tesnim Hassan, a Chicago respiratory therapist, dropped in to the museum when she was growing up in the largely African American neighborhood. "I came to know him the way so many others did," she said in an interview. "I came and I stayed."

The museum opened her eyes to a history she wasn't learning in class, said Hassan, who, as a teenager, guided visitors through the exhibits. She recently asked Breye whether he knew she was ditching school when she helped out. "Yes," he said.
"Why did you let me?" "Because you were doing something important."
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Jan. 5, 1936, Breye had a rough childhood. He recalled being dressed by his mother in a white shirt, white shorts, white shoes and a bow tie before she left him in a foster home when he was 6 years old. He ran away frequently.

In his teens, he became a truck driver and later joined the military, serving in Korea and Japan.

After his military service, he traveled the U.S., sometimes on a motorcycle. At a thrift store in Mississippi, he bought an Uncle Tom doll, and later recalled the acquisition as the start of his collection.

In Los Angeles, he housed his growing trove in several spots before landing at his 3,000-square-foot space on Degnan Boulevard. One of his places was in the Dunbar Hotel on Central Avenue, a once-fashionable hostelry that was at the epicenter of the African American community in South Los Angeles.

Over the years, he picked up plantation cooking pots, a set of church pews, a pre-Civil War property inventory that included "one Negro man Joe," and 5,000 other items that wound up on display at various times.

He also acquired African art, including ceremonial masks, an ornate Yoruba ritual garment known as an egungun, and a 12-foot wooden frame decorated with brightly painted antelopes that was hoisted overhead during tribal fertility festivals in Mali.

"It wasn't uncommon to show up there and see him haggling, bargaining and trading — sometimes jovially, sometimes not so jovially," Hassan said.


When riots ripped through Los Angeles after the 1992 Rodney King verdicts, Breye helped fight a fire at a nearby grocery store. Meanwhile, his neighbors stood watch over the stacks of items he had frantically removed from the museum and set in the middle of the street — rusted slave shackles, tribal masks, books, the remnants of history.

"Nothing was taken," he later told the Associated Press. "They were watched. Not one thing was stolen."

For years, Museum in Black was on the brink of closure.

"Occasionally, the lights would go off," Johnson said, "but we'd put together the money."

In 2005, a rent increase did the place in for good. Breye stored much of the collection and continued to show some of his pieces at talks in the community.

Breye never married, and a complete list of his relatives was unavailable.

A memorial celebration in Leimert Park has been set for Sept. 27 at 11 a.m.

"The 300 Pound Vegan" will play as Chicago's defensive lineman.

David Carter, otherwise known as The 300 Pound Vegan, signed a one-year contract last week with the Chicago Bears. Though he played for the Arizona Cardinals 2011 to 2012 and the Dallas Cowboys in 2013, this upcoming season with the Bears is the first Carter will play on a vegan diet. On his popular blog The 300 Pound Vegan, Carter writes that his vegan and animal-activist wife Paige inspired him to go plant-based, and though he at first struggled to maintain his weight, he experienced numerous performance benefits, including increased strength, energy, speed, and recovery turn-over. Carter has become one of the most vocal vegans and animal-rights activists in professional sports: he tracks his diet and “plant-based muscle” building on his blog, participated in the 2015 National Animal Rights Day, and posed on the cover of vegan magazine Laika with Paige. On his blog, Carter explains that “the ethical vegan was born when ... I learned that you don’t need to take a life to gain muscle or survive … anything else is cruel and unnecessary punishment to animals, the planet, and the body as well." We hope the Bears’ home stadium Soldier Field will add delicious vegan options to its menu to celebrate Carter’s (and his fans’) cruelty-free diet.