In Los Angeles, you can't travel far without seeing a gigantic billboard advertising something. Do you love your neighborhood billboards or despise them?
Send us a photo of your favorite or most hated billboard and tell us why you're so passionate about it. Submit your photo to our Flickr pool, or email them to us.
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The lighted billboard on the #405 at Inglewood Ave. [in Gardena, probably] is a terrible blight! It's bright and distracting to drivers. It should be removed!
KSWD-FM 'THE SOUND' RADIO BILLBOARD IN LAWNDALE. My favorite billboard, because it is my favorite radio station. Where else can you see something like this along with the song title and artist being played. Amazing stuff. Check out the pixs I left on flickr. Peace - Joe Goria, Redondo Beach.
As a 2.5 term member of the West LA Neighborhood Council and now member of City of LA Councilmember Bill Rosendahl's (District 11) Environmental Committee, I continue to be appalled at "the state of billboards in LA" - but NEVER surprised.
One thing needs to be made ultra clear as a fundamental: billboards are SPAM. Nothing less.
If you understand that then you'll place billboards within the same context as telemarketers and junk mail.
They are also yet another way that big capital interests continue to dominate our lives and intrude. After all, it is not the local restaurant or mom and pop store or bakery on these billboards, but large corporate interests who have the goal of extracting capital OUT of local communities and concentrating it in a very small percentage of hands. Into the corporate elites who are the political donor class, or, as George Carlin so rightly asserts, the OWNERS of this country.
These corporate interests - the owners - don't care about your local community, and they certainly don't care about YOU.
They don't care about you
They don't care about you
They don't care about you
Hopefully 3 times will get through.
Further, it's always been interesting to me how graffiti is a blight, but these monstrosities that dominate the landscape are somehow missed in that take.
Last. with the conversion to electronic billboards, the media companies (Clear Channel, CBS, etc.) have upped the ante. Like a landlord who increases rent, with ad rotation the media oligarchs have maximized their square footage.
But consider, where's the power for that billboard, running 24/7, coming from?
Yup: mostly coal. Thus, these billboards are now not only polluting aesthetically and morally, but environmentally.
Abuse and misuse of energy by money-grubbing businessmen is no longer just ugly and dangerous for drivers, it's killing our planet. We need to come down hard on those who make profit from wasting energy. They do not have the right to despoil our environment.
Only recently have I noticed commentary on one of the two most important aspects of the current instance of Los Angeles's and America's perennial problem of massive outdoor advertising (almost unique among the developed nations, btw):
THE ABSOLUTELY NEEDLESS USE OF COAL-FIRED ELECTRICITY THESE UGLY OBJECTS CONSUME -- AND THE RESULTING TOTALLY UNNECESSARY CARBON EMISSIONS.
Los Angeles a year ago observed the one-hour "Lights Out Los Angeles" on October 20, 2007 (and mysteriously failed to follow through on a stated intent to join cities across the nation in the World Wildlife Fund's similar "Earth Hour" on March 29, 2008). The same city government that supports the good (for public education and persuasion) Lights Out events has no business approving the expansion of 24/7 electricity-sucking electronic billboards, or the old-fashioned night-illuminated paper-and-vinyl billboards -- especially in the service of a nasty corporation like Clear Channel.
If our government -- municipal, state, and national -- can't move quickly to end the expansion of this lowest-hanging-fruit of energy conservation represented by offsite advertising (i.e., billboards and their electronic ilk) and then start dismantling the ones that already uglify our cityscapes and landscapes, WE'LL NEVER SUCCESSFULLY REDUCE OUR CARBON EMISSIONS IN THE MASSIVE, FAST WAY THAT IS DESPERATELY NEEDED TO HEAD OFF THE WORST VERSION OF THE CLIMATE-CHANGED WORLD NOW HEADED OUR WAY.
If "all politics is local," much of the task of saving the global climate from our own L.A., California, and American greenhouse-gas emissions will need to be local too. California is doing better than most of the U.S. (although that's not actually saying too much, given the U.S.'s huge carbon footprint); let's not backslide on our regional successes just to benefit the banal and corrupt outdoor advertising industry.
We need nightly Light Curfews on the billboards! They should be required to go dark at, say, 10 p.m. (except in just A FEW special sign districts, such as the Sunset Strip). The November 2008 National Geographic's cover story, The End of Night: Why We Need Darkness, describes the wide ecological devastation of our all-night light pollution, and its bad effects on humans.
No one benefits from America's glut of outdoor advertising and overall massive outdoor commercial signage and structures other than their owners and lobbyists. Only the wealthy corporate owners of this stuff gain while our city and nation become steadily uglier for the rest of us. European cities and countrysides are more beautiful and graceful places to live and work not just because of their multi-century heritage of fine architecture and public spaces, but because the governmental bodies of those countries have the guts to stand up to their corporate sectors and prohibit with local and national policies outrageous anti-environment abuses -- such as billboards and large commercial signage!
Check out a pair of local (Sherman Oaks) picture-pairs:
'BILLBOARDS: NOW YOU SEE THEM, NOW YOU DON'T'
on the From Sherman Oaks Blog:
http://sherman-oaks.blogspot.com/2007_10_01_archive.html and
http://sherman-oaks.blogspot.com/2006_12_01_archive.html)
Students and activists across L.A. and America should go to work creating visions of their surroundings with AND WITHOUT the plug-ugly outdoor advertising spectacles blighting the lives and spaces of almost all urban and exurban Americans.
And perhaps picturing what some of the massive billboard structures would look like if they were converted to, say, solar-electric generating structures, and foliage-wrapped aerial urban habitats for our shrinking populations of songbirds and pollinators like bees and bats?
Gregory Wright, Sherman Oaks
greg[at]newciv.org