But wait, there’s more. Shepard Fairey was approached by Death Cab for Cutie bassist Nick Harmer to reinvent the band’s upcoming single, “Home is a Fire” as a video with lyrics appearing as street art across the Echo Park cityscape:

Fairey posted a thoughtful essay on the experience at his Obey blog, excerpted here:

One’s relationship with home might be complicated, but ultimately it can be a two-way dialogue, of which we can at least affect one-way. The city can be an impersonal place, imposing, simultaneously anonymous and claustrophobic. However, there are opportunities for us to affect the city(and life) experience rather than accepting things as passive voyeurs.

“Home is a Fire” appears on Death Cab’s Codes and Keys album, out May 31 on Atlantic.

Originally posted at LAist on May 18, 2011.

I immediately fell in love with Avon Street when I first ventured to check out the house that I would eventually move into four years ago. The gradual ascent up Echo Park Avenue excited me — I knew I was heading deeper into an urban canyon, 3 miles from downtown, but surrounded by wildlife and Elysian Park. But once I took the right turn onto Ewing and inevitably downshifted to make it around the broken-up corner to Avon, where it keeps going up on a steep angle before arriving at my house, I knew I had found my shangri-la. You know, for a broke grad school student this was clearly paradise.

The surroundings reminded me of lush hillside villages I had visited in the foothills of the Andes Mountains of Peru and Ecuador. Houses and guesthouses were impossibly built into hillsides that — without a car, or at least a horse — seem more or less uninhabitable for any non-self-sustaining non-hermit.

Even the streets — not only are they broken up here, but these are exactly the kind of two-way roads you see in the third world. These are arguably two-lane roads WITHOUT one side being filled with parked cars, which it always is. And you just have to assume that everyone follows the unwritten rule of travelling South to North on the 2000 block of Avon because come hill or corkscrew turn at Baxter, you’re not going to see an oncoming car until it’s in your lap.

So is this hillside coming down? Compare the photo above to this one taken the morning after some rocks came down. Small trees are sticking out into the road mid-tumble. To compare, check out the Google Streetview image of this spot:

View Larger Map

Will the city need to shut down this block of Avon completely in order to do any construction or repairs should things get worse? And what of these rumors of a new landowner of the impossible strip of property on the steep hill wanting to build directly on top of this unstable mess? And a pool too?!?

Always keeping it interesting up here…

First sunny day after a week of rain. And snow in the mountains. It doesn’t get any clearer than this in Los Angeles.

Posted via email from Andy Sternberg’s posterous

Road still navigable… For now.

Please click here for updated photos and more on the failing hillside around the bend…

So I felt like a 15-year-old last Monday night when I got to see Jane’s Addiction with a few hundred others at the Echoplex, down the street from where I live. And I’m still buzzing about the show nearly a week later.

Feel what I’m feeling by rockin’ to these great multi-camera video clips with soundboard audio that the band posted to Pitchfork.tv this weekend.

Stop!

Whores:

Ain’t No Right:

Had a Dad:

Mountain Song

Ocean Size: