L.A. Anatomía

As spring brings cherry blossoms to bare branches, so I’ve uploaded a new theme here at L.A. Anatomia! I think it’s a little more readable don’t you?One of the many “housekeeping” items AH and I talk about is really getting into the html coding of this site, ripping it apart and revamping it to our tastes. Alas, life gets in the way. Heck it’s amazing that life can even find a way, a la Jurassic Park. It’s just got a lot of things to juggle.Such has been the case with “Naked,” a scavenger hunt held at the Getty Museum. No, we hunters don’t go au natural. Rather, patrons are sent into the museum to seek out nude statues. Or at least that is what I understand.I found out about these scavenger hunts around August of last year. Instead of going, I participated in a sleepover at the Long Beach Aquarium. I don’t think AH or I ever blogged about it here. But. AWESOME! You learn cool things like octupi are smart, taste with their tentacles…and there is a fish with a fake eye somewhere in there. The whole evening began awesomely when a young family espied me and a friend making our way toward the aquarium with pillows and suitcases.”Are you girls having a sleepover or something?” ”Oh yes!”"Where?”"The aquarium!”And there was such jealousy as would make a dry field green.But anyway, Naked! Not the David Sedaris book, but the cultural event at the Getty. It’s coming around again, and I don’t think I’ll be able to go. But the least I can do is freshen up our little corner of the net.Enjoy! 

AH and I love food. There are great food places in Los Angeles. Ergo, a lot of entries touch on food, and this entry is no exception.

Unlike lots of Americans, AH and I lurve the spicy food good. Over a meal with other friends, I lamented my general plight to another spice lover. We moaned over how we ask for SPICY dishes, but usually, we are only served dishes that taste at least like something. Said other friends wondered how we could subject ourselves to blazing infernos in our mouths. I think our answer was quite succinct: “Loving spicy food is a slippery slope. Once you start, it’s all downhill from there.”

Now if there’s any kind of food I like, it’s Thai food, especially the hot hot kind. This search has led me to many places in which I have found goodness and great disappointment. This week, it led me into a local Thai shop that I’ve passed often but never entered till now. Smiling brightly at the cashier, who was a native Thai, I asked her to give me the real, naked truth: Was the food any good and would they make it hot?

I think food in America is often very safe. In order to cater to the tastes of a larger clientele, restaurants make their food quite bland. This is especially true for “staple” dishes: pasta, pizza, sandwiches….ok maybe lots of dishes. But it’s interesting when you come in with a challenge. When I questioned the veracity of the cashier’s statement that yes-they-serve-spicy-food was legit, her eyes gleamed. Her face brightened. She assured me that the red curry was the hottest around, that native Thai customers raved the food reminded them of their mother’s and that customers came from miles away from their food.

We laughed over Thai tourism (I’ve been). We marveled over how much good Thai cooking gets overlooked. Then, I decided to issue another challenge. In addition to my red curry, I ordered a side of pad thai. Like many people, I love pad thai, especially good pad thai. But as it is a “staple” dish, I think that a lot of restaurants make it rather mediocre. I explained to the cashier my theory that you knew you found a good place if they handled something as simple as pad thai with love.

Oh her eyes sparked! But let me say, in the end, her boasts were completely on point. The curry sizzled in my mouth and I’ve thought about the pad thai for days.  I want more.

The sugar part of this entry is in reference to a “Hawaiian” restaurant I wandered into. While studying the menu with that restaurant’s cashier, I was told that the only really, truly Hawaiian thing on the menu was the BBQ pork sandwich and sweet potato fries. The sandwich came with a faux spicy sauce, which actually wasn’t as disappointing as I would have assumed. And the sweet potato fries were sprinkled with sugar.

Yes, I make friends easily.

And oh! They stopped making the amazing chai and passion fruit cupcakes at my favorite bakery! Damn you suburbia! Get out and try something other than boring red velvet! It doesn’t even taste like anything! 

It’s been a lovely 80 degrees these last few days. That’s really all there is to report.

I took AH for her very first visit into Topanga Canyon today. 

 Topanga is like the lost world of Los Angeles. The Los Angeles is pretty much a city city, but Topanga is its heart of darkness. There is nothing but twisty canyon roads, hidden homes and survivalist colonies. It’s off the very beaten track. 

We were in Topanga, eating lunch at Cafe Mimosa off the main road. (Very fine fair; AH and I had a portobello and brie panini and chicken curry wrap with raisins and coffee and vanilla chai). Because it was off the main road, we had to make several dangerous u-turns to park—first we passed the restaurant, then we turned around and turned into the wrong road, then turned around, then turned into the right parking spot, all while carefully checking blindspots. 

On the way, we passed some very typical and atypical Topanga sites. 

Typical: The Theatricum Botanicum 

Atypical: A sign advertising a credit check company on a perilous mountain turn. It was a lonely, 81/2 by 11 in sign with the backdrop of the San Fernando Valley right behind it. 

Typical: Hidden driveways and roads. 

Atypical: a patch of snow. Typical: Artistic graffiti and the sense of bohemia everywhere 

Atypical:  a strawberry and cherry stand cause is it strawberry season already? 

Typical: The restaurant closing at 2 just cause, I bet 

Atypical: A hold-up bottleneck

Typical: bicyclists, pedestrians and people randomly walking up the steep roads

And so forth. 

Lovely Saturday afternoon for us here in la-la land! 

Perhaps I write this blog using too many television analogies, but if the literary world is loosing its hold on recognized allusions, then who am I to be a Sisyphus?

 The LOST premiere was last week, and in the opening episodes, the audience was told by one Daniel Faraday that the LOST island was lost in time. It was skipping like a record, pulling the castaways all through the years but getting them nowhere. Even though they’d been stuck on that small, measurable landscape for four seasons, they continued to find themselves in unknown territory without ever leaving. 

And that’s how I felt–acutely–this weekend as an Angeleno. I was turned and twisted around in a way that shouldn’t be normal for someone that’s lived in Los Angeles and its greater areas for a really long time. 

Here’s what happened: It started with an opera. The Magic Flute was playing at the LA Music Center in Downtown, and I really really wanted to go. A few years back, I’d seen the Ingmar Bergman version on DVD. And last year, longtime readers will recall that I re-fell in love with the whole art form when Tosca decided to take that plunge off the fort walls. The show was a Sunday matinee. I left in good time. I drove down the 5 freeway like I always do, planning to merge onto the 170, to get Downtown. But the 170 never came. 

I found myself in unfamiliar but familiar territory. I knew that I’d driven this stretch of the 5 Freeway before, but not in a way that I was crystal clear on where I was. I’d pass my junction and now I had to figure out how to get Downtown via this new route.

It’s a LA sixth sense–navigating the freeways. You need to have an intuitive grasp on how the entirety of the city is connected through these concrete arteries. This way if traffic is congested on the 10 E, you can still take the 110 N to the 101 junction that goes through Downtown to get into Hollywood. Or you could drive up the 405, merge onto the 10E, then exit off on La Brea, drive the side streets until you hit your Hollywood destination. 

I once had a foreign friend wow over the fact that she never had to plan her life and schedule around roads or freeways. Well, this is Los Angeles. 

Fortunately, I have an acquaintance who works Downtown and can read the even-more-than-usual-confusing roads like a fortuneteller over a palm. If I skipped the 170, then I had to take the 110 S, merge onto the 101 S/10W onramp and take the Grand or Temple exit. When I passed Filipino Town, I knew I’d gone to far despite directions. So I got off the freeway, merged back on and then made it to the Music Center with time to spare. 

The opera was great. It was fantastic! It was Mozart. 

But then, I was lost again after the performance. My companions and I wanted to go somewhere to eat, but Downtown on a Sunday with its crazier-than-the-rest-of-LA streets?  And stores are not in walking distance, especially in the shoes I was wearing. This meant that it wasn’t a good idea to eat there. Then where? 

My  companions and I have all lived in or around Los Angeles for years. But here was the bottom line: None of us had ever lived in or near Downtown. We had no idea where to even start looking for restaurant areas. And, because none of us had never had to get to other desirable locations from Downtown, we had no idea how to get to our suggestions from where we currently were. Just like how my world was turned into unknown territory just by skipping my regular junction, we stood dumbly in the emptying opera house wondering how to feed ourselves. 

If I had been with certain people, if I had been with a smaller group, if and if and if, then maybe I would have tapped deeply into my LA sixth sense and found a place that would have been lovely. Instead, we stuck to the beaten path and ascertained that at 6 PM on a Sunday traffic was great and Santa Monica was only 15 minutes away instead of 2 hours. We ended our evening in a creperia on Third Street, laughing over reheated fries and bready paninis. 

And when I left to go home? I did it again! Almost. I almost took the wrong onramp onto the freeway, thinking that I was heading north instead of south? Or was it south instead of north? Or was it because the northern onramp is usually on the second to farthest right lane except for this one time?I don’t know.

All I know is that it was highly undignified to be so lost. 

As one of the most iconic plays in the American and modern literary canon, I was surprised to learn that A Streetcar Named Desire hadn’t been shown on stage in Los Angeles for 20 or so years. It seems that the William estate does not allow many productions of the play, and I was suddenly quite glad that I had decided to attend.

Rewind a bit.

Tonight I was up in Valencia to see A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams at the Repertory East Playhouse. The theater is a small but cozy venue with close ties to the community. While sipping wine and chatting with patrons before the show, I learned that it was more like a four-degrees-of-separation among the audience, cast and crew.

I always like to see canonical and classical plays on stage because they open your eyes to the substance behind their fame. It’s like with Casablanca. People are able to quote more than a few lines from the movie even without having seen it. But when you finally do sit down and watch that old black and white, you know why “we’ll always have Paris,” that “this is the start of a beautiful friendship”, how “you’re shocked SHOCKED to find gambling in this establishment” and “how she had to walk into mine.”

Such is how I feel about Tennessee Williams’ play. My only background with it before seeing the production tonight was the famous Elia Kazan movie with Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski and Vivian Leigh as Blanche Dubois. I guess I could also add in the numerous references made to the play by Pedro Almodavar in his beautiful film Todo Sobre Mi Madre.

Anyway, the production was excellent. I left the theater full of thought because I’ve always been bothered by how I knew the play ended. In writing classes, teachers usually instruct students to create stories that change. Characters have to change. In plays specifically, playwriting books instruct that what characters really want has to be hidden up  until the point when it happens or doesn’t, causing change that affects the play. I’ve never really understood what exactly the pivotal change was in Williams’ play. Yes, Blanche goes crazy, but nothing else seems to really change because Blanche is still lost, Stella is still with Stanley and Stanley is still Stanley. Critical analysis and precedence would have me believe that it’s a battle royale between Stanley or Blanche. But I’ve always felt that the person with the most to lose or gain was Stella. Who’s the most affected by the change? Who should the audience be focusing on in the end when doctors drag Blanche away to the nuthouse and leave Stella crying on a chair and Stanley playing poker with his friends?

Then I began to think on the play’s strange name. The streetcar is only mentioned about three times in the play. But I wondered if the play wasn’t so much about the characters as it was about how desire is a streetcar that clanks back and forth back and forth on the same tracks for years and years and years. I also thought about how Blanche, even from the beginning, tries to open Stella’s eyes and show her sister that she is living in a trap. And then I wondered if the whole play was about how desires are a cage? Stanley and Stella are mutually codependent on their physical desire for the other. Blanche’s desires have taken everything away from her and left her in the power of Stanley; now her own desires aren’t strong enough to save her, but rather they’ll only destroy her. And I wonder if at the end, when Stella’s desires to protect her sister are finally stronger than her desire for Stanley, if she finds herself trapped on the street haunted by Desire by a husband who won’t physically let her leave and by a baby? But then I wonder if Williams’ intended for desire to be so stark? Blanche tries to paint the world with watercolors but a bucket of reality easily washes away her pictures. Stella’s life is full of her desire for Stanley until Blanche intrudes and reminds her of other responsibilities. And Stanley….Stanley is such a hard character because I wonder if Williams wanted to be a thug of a romantic?

Anyway, I’m so glad I finally saw this on stage. It reminded me why it’s famous and why it’s classic. And it makes me sad that so few people get to enjoy it on stage. I don’t know if I’d agree that less is more in the case of plays. Plays were meant to be played out and it seems a crime to rein in and closet such forces as those found in Williams’ play on desire.

For reasons that I shall never divulge to any living person (unless I do and probably shall do without hesitation), I had to come into possession of a book by Sunday, January 18. But here were the problems: 1) I didn’t know I needed the book until January 13. 2) I, for said reasons given above, couldn’t purchase the book online unless pricing and shipping were reasonable. 3) The book plus shipping even at a reasonable price and date were not doable. 4) The book, called The Typographic Workbook, is not easily found unless you look online.5) There’s a new edition of the book coming out at the end of February, which means all current copies are rare.It was a dilemma similar to the one I found myself back in when I was in high school. As a senior, my teacher sent 80 of her students out in the pre-Amazon days to find a copy of Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot. We students searched bookchains, used bookstores and libraries. But, as you can imagine, Waiting for Godot is not so popular a read. So it came down to a battle royale among us classmates–who could find the books first and claim them as their own?I found that I needed to actually do a little searching to find my typographic workbook, which in these post-Amazon days, took a little thinking.First, I tried to see if I could bum it off someone. Nope.Second, I tried to beg for more time. Nope. Third, I called my local Borders and Barnes and Noble. Neither of them had the book in stock, but they would happily order it if I was willing to wait 7 to 9 business days.Not so much.That pretty much ex-ed out all local bookstore options for me.I retreated into solitude to think.Now, I thought, this is Los Angeles. I know their are many chain bookstores and many specialty bookstores. I know there are bookstores for fiction, poetry, comics, mysteries, erotica and comics. I know that I know people who can list five places in which to find books. But I know of only one place that might have the book I’m looking for. However, being that this is the age of technology, why go to the store only to be disappointed?I hopped online and did a search. I found my book. The bookstore in question had it.So on Friday, I bypassed early-weekend traffic and headed down Wilshire to Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica. I planned to step into Hennessey + Ingalls for the first time ever to get my book. (I had called earlier to put it on hold.) I have good and bad memories of bookstores on Third Street Promenade. It used to be the home of Midnight Special, which had awesome book sections like Arabic literature. The local Barnes and Nobles also used to hold a very hip poetry series. I’d seen great and local LA poets like Marvin Bell, David St. John and Dorothy Barresi there. But like the once great indie bookstore, the poetry series is no more.But Hennessey + Ingalls is there. It’s a design and architecture bookstore, which had my book. I parked. I walked in. I bought my book and I left.I guess all adventures can end very simply–like when I found Godot. I was driving down a street when a used bookstore that I’d never visited caught my eye. Within moments of entering, I found a copy in the shelves. But the simplicity never would have come without the search. Instead of pulling a Vladimir and Estragon, it’s always better to search out some solution. Heck, that’s usually how good and necessary books fall into your seeking hands. 

AH was over last night, and instead of being Angelenos and going out to eat, we stayed in and experimented with the contents of my fridge. Overall, I have to give us a very satisfactory A+. And I felt like I had to work a bit as AH had filled me up with homemade goodness a few days earlier.Here was AH’s menu:

• An avocado salad with homemade dressing, green onions on the side
• wheat pasta with vodka sauce and spicy sausage on the side
• water flavored with lemons and cucumbers

(AH if I totally got this wrong, please fix it. Your menu was a thing of beauty.) The menu at my place:

•  pastrami salad with endives and balsamic honey dressing totally brought into incarnation by AH herself
• spicy cornmeal muffins
• goat cheese and currants
• pomegranate wine totally

It just goes to show that no matter how many “best restaurant in Los Angeles” lists we come up with, sometimes there’s just no place like home. Hmmm, a bit sappy, but food does go right to the gut.  

    After a long day of being flooded with work, Shelby’s head popped out of the waters like a mountaintop. The sea of work was being drained away, since it was already 6pm and it was time to go home. Emerging from the sea foams of forms she discovered that her hand and turned into a wooden block.

She could not be concerned with this right now, because she had to be on her way to her daughter’s piano recital.  Swamped by post-its knee deep that leeched onto her DKNY pant suit, filled with passwords she could never remember, short cuts to programs, and “MUST DO” memos, could not stop her from seeing her little girl play the piano.
Shelby sloshed through the quicksands of her managers, Mr. Brash, unending demands that kept pulling her back into the abysmal dark Congo that was work. But she was determined to make it past the corporate boogie-traps, get to her car and make to the recital on time. Because no amount of guilt or deadlines that keep getting stacked up on one another could compare to the possible disappointment she would see in her daughters big blue eyes if mommy missed yet another performance because of work.
She couldn’t bare hearing: “It’s ok, Mommy, work is important too…”
Not this time.
She was prepared to face the tidal wave of setbacks and machines suddenly jamming up and people generally messing up and needed her help because they’re a bunch of incompetent buffoons, ahead of her. Right when she turned off her PC, and brushed off the post it notes off her suit, Janet came by her workspace.
“You think you have a minute to help me with this? It’ll only take a sec…”
Shelby picked up her wooden- block hand and bashed Janet’s head in. “No” Shelby whispered and crossed over Janet’s collapsed body, making sure she didn’t step into any spilt blood and ruin her shoes. She soon turned the corner and would be entering what she called the “cubie-trap.” It was a danger zone.  If she could make it through this part unscathed, she would home free. Shelby walked the path slowly and steadily. Slithering through silently tiring to go unnoticed, when she heard the beeps, clicks and chirps of the fax machine.
“Why wont this thing work,” she head Frank shout and bang the side of the machine. Frank couldn’t work the fax machine if his family was taken hostage by the Russian mafia and all he had to do was Fax them a piece of paper…His family would get it, execution style. Frank was just that dumb. And by some sort of black magic every time he worked the fax Shelby would always be there and he would call her his “guardian angel” in that insufferable tone of his. Frank turned around and immediately, Shelby stood frozen in her tracks. Though her stance was a little awkward, she knew how to hold it because of that one yoga class she took once but couldn’t continue the session because of work…Besides being dumb, Frank didn’t have depth perception and so when things stood absolutely still he would mistake them as being apart of his environ. After a few moments of vigorous head scratching, Frank stepped away from the fax machine and went to look for someone who could help him.
Once he was completely out of sight, Shelby let out a sigh of relief and continued on her way through. She hastened her pace a bit, her heels clicking softly on the office carpet. She was able to pass Shelia who watched you-tube all day, that never did any work, and thus it was dumped on Shelby’s desk to do and finish, successfully.  There was one more trap she had to pass before she was in the clear and that was Mike the Sexual harassment monkey. He would swing from cubicle to cubicle making inappropriate jokes with all the female employees. Mike thought that a woman who chose to work was a Feminist and Feminists were women who wanted to be treated like men rather than with respect. Shelby had thought about filing a complaint but she was always too busy to do so. That Balding Bastard. What was worse was Mike had an in with MR. Brash. They were golfing buddies. Every Sunday they were at the local country club.
“Hey there, where do you think you’re going pretty lady?”
Shelby cringed when she heard the voice. It was the Monkey. She slowly turned around and found him standing too close to her, as usual. She could smell his breath: coffee and tacos. He was eyeing her. Shelby felt it. He was also playing with his belt buckle. That was the last straw. Shelby wound up her arm, like she did when she played softball in college, let her wooden block hand loose and straight into the fuckers monkey brains. Mike gasped for air, grabbed his smashed coconuts and fell face forward to the ground.
Shelby let out a sigh of relief and didn’t realize how good it felt to do that. She decided she should sign up with a local team. But after her daughter’s recital, of course. She was finally in the clear and saw the exit doors to the office head of her. She pushed the tall glass doors and was about to reach the elevators when the receptionist, Becky, stopped her.
“Oh, Um, Mr. Brash, wants you fill out these reports before you leave tonight,” Becky said pulling out a stack of papers piled at least a mile high. Shelby considered smacking Becky upside the head like Janet. Not because of the late notice with the reports, but because one time she over heard Becky make fun of an outfit Shelby was particularly fond of and thought it made her look smart and stylish in.  But on second thought, taking into consideration the destruction Shelby had just left behind she decided to lower her hand-mallet and told Becky that it would have to wait. She was already late to a very important engagement.
Shelby walked towards the elevators again and just her luck one was already open waiting for her.
“But, what should I tell Mr. Brash?” Becky called out behind her.
Shelby stepped in and as the doors were closing said:
“Tell him to kiss my – “

I was on my way to see my papou (grandfather in Greek), and for some reason I kept it on KCRW, listening to a broadcast of Santa Monica’s Council meeting.  The meeting was about the Tree Crisis that had the whole town in a dispute over what to do with the dying Ficus the city of Santa Monica had planned to cut down due to fungi infections, general decay, old age, etc.
The citizens of Santa Monica gave their voices, opinions and suggested what to do in timed statements that made some relative sense.  They spoke about the shade and architectural beauty that these massive trees provided.  One guy who couldn’t string two words together kept talking about Wind power.  His slurred words suggested he might have been experiencing a flashback.  Another member of the community reputed that these trees drew tourists to Santa Monica in the first place.  Funny, I always thought it was the beach and the promenade that attracted tourists.  Being a frequent visitor to the beach community, I don’t think of the beautiful canopies along the boulevards when I think of Santa Monica.   But at the very least, the broadcast interested me enough to check out what was going on.
While the City of Los Angeles planned on planting 1,000,000 trees, as initiated by Mayor Villaraigosa, the City of Santa Monica planned on cutting down some of its old trees.  “The Public Landscape Division of the Community Maintenance Department will be removing the following Indian Laurel Fig (Ficus microcarpa ‘Nitida’) trees …These trees will not tolerate the amount of root pruning necessary to continue performing the City wide sidewalk and curb repair program” (Issued by City of Santa Monica).
The Santa Monica city council also claimed that because some of the Ficus trees had contracted a fungus that was rotting them to the core, they needed to be removed immediately.  If not, then all sorts of public health concerns and liabilities come into play if branches start falling out of no where, killing cars and people on the way down to hit the ground. Makes sense.  Who wants to deal with that kind of bullshit?  Isn’t that why they have the phrase “nip it in the bud”? And, Coupled with the trees nature for it’s roots to split up  concrete, “according to According to the city, removing the 54 trees would make streets safer for pedestrians and reduce concrete sidewalk-repair costs and legal payouts to trip-and-fall victims.
Really? The city is more concerned with people getting a scraped knew beucase they weren’t looking where they were going and might fall! This is more important to worry about than the homeless in the city or the cleanliness of their beach water? A possible scraped knee? Then you know what they should do? Post a fucking bandaid dispenser! And a “Watch where you’re going” or “Mind the roots” sign somewhere!It would be much more cost effective then the hundreds and thousands of tax payers money they spent on destroying these trees.

I mean, those big Blue buses must kill all sorts of pedestrians every year and they’re still allowed on the streets.  It’s understandable to empathize with Hippies: all that global warming scare, epidemic fears and the fact that we need to save all the trees we can.  But why did the council wait this long, until it became a problem to do something about it?  Why didn’t the SM Park and recreation Dept. notify the city earlier?  Was there was no effort to help nurse the sick trees before giving them their death sentence.
If you had an ailing grandpa who was losing his faculties slowly, and you knew it was only going to get way worse, would you pull the plug on the guy?  So, what to do, what to do?  I know!  Let’s launch an attack against these forest haters!  Let’s form an organization and call it “Treesavers,” have a blog, rally the community, let our voices be heard, hold tree vigils, stage/threaten hunger strikes, chain ourselves to the trunks of these trees.  Let’s try to pass them off as historical landmarks or something (LAist.com). Let’s cause a scene!
“The city wants to remove over 50 of the beautiful, large-canopy Ficus trees and replaced with small Ginkgos that though beautiful, actually cast very little shade (most of it after 20 years’ growth). Why? The city claims some of them are too damaged to be saved. But the majority of these trees are being removed to make those streets more attractive to the shopping public. This weird logic flies in the face of research, surveys and studies showing that dense, large-canopy trees attract shoppers. They make the place nicer, better and healthier for everyone.” – Treesavers.blogspot.com
It turns out actually, as reported by the LA Weekly earlier this year, the real reason to remove the ficus trees was apart of a $8 million project that will revitalize 2nd and 4th street storefront curb appeal. In fact the a business owners association claims that the reason why retail stores on Third Street are doing so well, despite this economy, is beucase “the Promenade is planted with a more flowery tree species.”
Ummm…I don’t think it’s the trees that are the problem as much as it is the crappy stores that just happen to be there…What do Ficus trees have to so with that?
For a while, the Treesavers were out there fighting the good fight for the trees and going forward with their crusade to preserve nature in Santa Monica. They even had some of the store owners support the cause by having posters in their display cases. One storeowner says Ken Salek, who co-owns Nobel Gems Inc. with his brother said, “I’ve been here for 25 years. We chose this street because of the look that these trees created. Fourth Street is known for these trees.”
But unfortunately, it became a showdown. The battle between green and evil came to a halt when the Treesavers were blind sighted by 23 trees being felled overnight, taking the members by complete surprise.  The city officials cut down the trees in the early morning.
So what’s become of them?  Where have these mighty tree defenders gone?  After basically being bitch slapped by the city, you’d think there would be some sort of public outrage.  Or that they had some guerilla-esque tactics up their sleeves.  A Plan-B!
But no, they’re as quiet as a tree.  Maybe, they’re laying on the down low, gathering resources and planning a massive citywide attack.  Perhaps, congregating some street teams and plotting against certain people in positions of power, so when the time comes they’ll at last take their vengeance.
As of now, their blog is still up, trees are still coming down, and no new strikes are in the works.  Except for a daily vigil.  Or is that just a ruse to the unsuspecting?