Former Latino gay bar sites in Los Angeles tagged with guerilla landmark designations

The Pocho Research Society has designated the following four Echo Park, Silver Lake and downton Los Angeles sites - all former Latino gay bars - as landmarks:

• Le Barcito, currently the Cha Cha 2375 Glendale Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90039
• Klub Fantasy / Club Fire at the Nayarit aka The Echo 1822 W Sunset Blvd Los Angeles, CA 90026
• The Score 107 W. 4th St, Downtown Los Angeles, currently Bar 107

But if you want to see the memorial plaques placed on each site you better run because they might be gone by the time you read this.

On Thursday, KPCC radio (89.3) tagged along with "semi-anonymous" performance artist Sandra as she pasted the plaques outside each bar as part of the ongoing Operation Invisible Monument, which seeks to "commemorate moments in Los Angeles history that have not been officially recognized" and, in this instance, highlight the effect of gentrification in some areas of the city.

For more on all this check out the above hyper links, the project's main website or Sandra's blog.

Quinceañera opens tomorrow in NYC and Los Angeles

The reviews are in for Quinceañera and they are overwhelmingly positive:

Stephen Holden at The New York Times: "As smart and warmhearted an exploration of an upwardly mobile immigrant culture as American independent cinema has produced"

John Anderson's 3 1/2 starred review at Newsday: "An ostensibly innocent act, with vibrations that travel around forever" (the lead actors are also interviewed here)

Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times: "Endearing and perceptive"

Ella Taylor of the LA Weekly: A "saucy, rowdy, heartfelt and terribly sweet movie" and ads "Quinceañera neither skirts nor condescends to the difficulties faced by poor urban communities assailed by rapid change. Like Mi Vida Loca, Allison Anders’ 1993 Echo Park girl-gangbanger melodrama, it’s an act of solidarity with a threatened minority, but one that never falls into Anders’ exuberant embrace of ethnic stereotype"

Gary M. Kramer in Gay City News: "Profoundly moving"

Dissenting voices come from indieWIRE and the conservative-leaning New York Sun (who pass similar judgements as I perhaps did in my previous post, though I am willing to reconsider in light of some of the reviews and this interview from Jennifer Merin in the New York Press).

(Above photo of Quinceañera directors, writers and lovers Wash Westmoreland and Richard Glatzer at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival taken by Brian Brooks for indiWIRE)

My Super Sweet Fifteen

Ok, so I'll confess that the only reason I wanna see Quinceañera (which opens on Friday in New York and Los Angeles after getting some good and some not so good reviews in the festival circuit) is Jesse Garcia (pictured) playing what he calls a "gay cholo" (though we much prefer the term vato).

Call me a softie (or superficial), but I always fall for those cholo thug to vato thug love stories, as stereotypical as they may be (considering that the gringo producers wanted to make a movie of what they saw outside their comfy apartment windows near Echo Park in Los Angeles).

Now Michael Musto of the Village Voice reveals in tomorrow's issue that the movie was actually made with gay bareback porn money (the scandal!) and captures the film stars' horrified reaction.

Sure enough, you Google the facts and get the porn to Oscar-glory-bound story (pending Oscar glory). Any thoughts?