The Echo Park Time Bank in the L.A. Times

Time bank takes root in Echo Park

Echo Park Time Bank is a new online community that trades time, services and expertise, like dog walking, housesitting or advice on how to start a small business.

By Emili Vesilind
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

July 27 2008

ANE CRABTREE, a costume designer and stylist, was on location in Bulgaria when a professional chef e-mailed to say she'd be happy to give Crabtree free private cooking lessons when she returned. Then a neighbor in Angelino Heights e-mailed and offered to water her plants -- gratis -- the next time she goes out of town.

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Talk about a revolution

Fantastic Nobodies went to the Obama speech in Berlin. The police made us trun the boom box off right in the middle of We Are The World. I've been stopped by the cops a few times but never for something as innocent as that!
FN at Obama Berlin

Hands Free

30 Cents, Two Transfers, Love

Thinking hard about you
I got on the bus
and paid 30 cents car fare
and asked the driver for two transfers
before discovering
that I was
alone.

Richard Brautigan

-2

Everybody wants to go to bed
with everybody else, they're
lined up for blocks, so I'll
go to bed with you. They won't
miss us.

Richard Brautigan

Walter Benjamin Angel of History

Angelus Novus, by Paul Klee (1920). Benjamin saw in it the "Angel of History"



A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
Walter Benjamin