1. On the street level New Image Art Gallery found its new home on the ground level, and just around the corner from its old pad. As hard as it is to get a people traffic in LA on any given day, the door is wide open to any of those curious minds. 2. UP OUR SLEEVE and across the Pacific Innovative online radio/DJ collective dublab.com made its first community driven artistic appearances in Rocket, Tokyo and Conquest, Kyoto with their baby project UP OUR SLEEVE. Bundled up with instore events, guest DJing with Pepecalifornia and radio show recordings just to name a few, their visit with 250+ one-of-a-kind artist designed 12" sleeves was a happy incident for Japan's artistic & musical community. UP OUR SLEEVE's endeavor will continue on to EU cities in early 2004. 3. Creative unit from near the date farm Did you know that date nuts ripe on a palm tree? I have just been learning about all the different kinds of palm trees I see around in SoCal, and recently learned about this kind that harvests. Carlos Ramirez & Armando Lerma sets their creative studio with confidence under the shades of date palm trees near Indio, where it's known the best for the annual music extravaganza Coachella. And of course, the unit (who lets New Image Art Director Marsea Goldberg call them "The Date Farmers"...which in fact, Lerma's father owns a date farm) has been participating with their art, which consists of realities of social minorities as a motif. Working together for 6 years now, both study deep into the religious influences and art as medium to deliver one's thoughts. As long as one has a place to think, and means to deliver out thoughts, being tucked away from the big city could only be an advantage. Ramirez & Lerma's art can be seen at New Image Art and other quality outlets. 4. Director's Label launches with 3 DVDs. This is epic! 3 directors that lead the generation with ground breaking ideas in their free of form filmmaking have self curated their own retrospective DVDs. Upon a call from Spike Jonze, fellow directors Michel Gondry and Chris Cunningham responded to the project with double nods. With backings of Palm Pictures, who has been hosting annual digital film festival Resfest, the year and a half worth of work was put into these extra fat DVD cases. The booklets are transformed into directors creative sketchbook, each representing three different characters. The Director's Label launch party that took place in LA the day before DVD US release date was blessed with Bjork (who collaborated with all three directors) as a DJ giving some music spin from Apple power book, not the turn table! Seriously, these DVDs are worth a peek or two. 5. Red tide for real Kids! Time to get out of the classroom and head out to the nature...which happens to be right there if you pay attention. Red tide to me until this fall was a fact in the geography text book. This year, the California coast were seeing longer than usual red tide greetings. The water rolling over your surf board is brown! The sea odor is full on! That was the moment I felt the nature right there. I can only assume there are people inhabitants that bother nature dynamics to a certain level, but this experience in the water was so real. But let's look at the bright side of this nature phenomena. At night time, all those planktons sparkle with glowing blue every time the wave crashes. An other worldly spectacle plays out before your eyes, if you know what I mean.

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