AdSense Update (11/26/08)

Stuck in the office today while everyone else remembered to schedule the day off, leaving you to man the fort? Why not click though a couple thousand ads on the Santiago Street Loft blog and help raise money for my furry friends down at Pet Pro Life.

As some of you may know, all funds collected from ads on this website go directly to this wonderful non-profit organization–the very same where the wife and I adopted our furry bundle of joy.

So if you have nothing to do on this day before we give thanks by stuffing our guts until we succumb to food coma, please click away!

Art Walk and soundDowntown–This Weekend in Santa Ana

Once again, our little community will be putting on our monthly Art Walk this Saturday, drawing in people from all over to witness for themselves some of the wonderful things coming to Santa Ana, not to mention some pretty sweet local art.

One of the exhibits that I'm excited to check out is The Art of City Building II: Mixed-Income Housing & Transit Oriented Development, presented by Galeria Tufiño.

This exhibit takes a closer look at Santa Ana's current state of housing, and the enormous potential that can come to our city with responsible and creative development.

For more information regarding this exhibit, please check out this page on the Galeria Tufiño website.

More information about the Santiago Art District Art Walk is available here.



Another event that's catching a lot of buzz and will hopefully draw people into Santa Ana is soundDowntown (yes, that's how they chose to spell it).

Details from the website:
soundDowntown 2008 is a one-day music festival on Saturday, November 15, featuring a lineup of over 50 locally and nationally recognized bands, DJ's and performing artists at various venues throughout the Artist's Village of downtown Santa Ana.

soundDowntown runs from Saturday, November 15th starting at 2PM and wraps up Sunday the 16th at 2AM.

More information available here.

Patchwork Sunday (11/09)

Today from 11AM-5PM, The Road Less Traveled Store is hosting Patchwork–a semiannual indie arts and crafts festival that showcases emerging crafters, delicious food (including one of my personal favorites Memphis), and local music.

From The Road Less Traveled website:
Come celebrate the best in locally produced, hand-made & creative goods at our bi-annual fair. Local foods, music, art and goods from over 60 vendors. DIY stations from Harveys & American Apparel. Join the hand-made movement!

You can read more about the Patchwork movement here.

Liberty For All

Santiago Street Loft resident and galley owner Liberty Dickinson will be exhibiting this excellent rendering of our local gem restaurant La Chiquita at The Lucky Own Gallery located in the City Place Lofts tonight.

This piece is part of a collection by various artists called Santa Ana: The Urban Landscape.

Aside from the gallery opening, City Place is also hosting their First Friday tonight (my lovely, but often nerdy wife points out: tonight is one of those rare nights where a first Friday falls just before the second Saturday [Pub Crawl]).

Lucky Owl is located at 103 E. City Place Drive, Santa Ana, CA (across from Main Place shopping center).

First Friday and the gallery exhibit both start tonight at 7PM, and run until 10PM.

Vote for Lando Calrissian

It always seems to come down to either a giant douche or a turd sandwich, doesn't it? Don't forget to vote today!

"For A Better Santa Ana"

Six months ago I began a little pet project known as the Santa Ana Pub Crawl–A little sociological experiment designed to change the perception of Santa Ana in the eyes of those who have never stepped foot in our town, while at the same time, boosting restaurant sales from the hours of 5PM through 8PM. In essence, a self-funded public relations campaign for the city of Santa Ana and free advertising for the downtown restaurants.

And what better way to lure people into Santa Ana than to offer food and drinks at great prices on a Saturday? When I approached each of the participating businesses with idea of a Pub Crawl, I only asked three things of them:

1. Offer drink/food specials one Saturday a month

2. Distribute, stamp and collect the Pub Crawl Cards

3. Contribute a prize to make the event more exciting

Over the next several Pub Crawls, someone in our "Crawl Group" would run into someone who has never set foot in Santa Ana's downtown. After saying how much fun they are having, they usually follow up with something to the likes of "Wow, I never knew Santa Ana was this cool" or "This is nothing like what I thought Santa Ana was like".

Mission accomplished. Well, kinda. No matter how many good things people like myself try to do for this city, the OC Register still sits in our backyard spewing fuel for brown hatred and ignorant stereotypes, but I digress.

Last week, I decided to extend the experiment and tie it into The Broken Window Theory. In the spirit of the election season, I created a handful of signs reading "Ben Dayhoe: For A Better Santa" with the Pub Crawl URL listed below the tagline. Under the cover of darkness, we set out to stake them around town (example below).

With the help of two awesome neighbors, we successfully "politically vandalized" the city of Santa Ana in an effort to promote the Pub Crawl to residents of Santa Ana, and maybe get a laugh or two (bonus points for offending).
What I found to be interesting was that the signs that I placed adjacent to official candidate and proposition signs remained untouched (with the exception of the sign we placed on the SW corner of Sycamore and Main that was mysteriously removed and replaced with yet another "Michele Martinez for Mayor"), and the signs that were placed on Broadway and E. Seventeenth Street where no other campaign signs resided were quickly removed.

Does the removal of my signs prove the Broken Window Theory? Not at all (but it does make me wonder how much "political graffiti" will remain post-November 4th). But I did notice that once political signs were removed, they were very slow to come back in that very same location.

David Hastie, the General Manager down at Memphis thinks that someone may have actually stolen my some of my signs. He told me in an email last week that people were actually running out into the center median and to take pictures with my signs. How rad is that?

Stolen or not, I'm very flattered. In my six+ years as a professional designer, NO ONE has ever taken a picture with anything I've created, let alone stolen my work. I say awesome–awesome to the max!

This Wednesday, I'm hoping to meet with the Downtown Business Council in hopes to receive funding to further promote the Pub Crawls. It's been a fun and humbling experience for me and I hope that the Pub Crawl continues to grow, chipping away at the stigma that's associated with our great city of Santa Ana.

The next Pub Crawl is this Saturday, November 8th. I hope you'll join me for a drink.

One last note, I'd like to thank my neighbors Dallas, Chris and Krissy for letting me "politicize" your front yards, as well as "Lando" and "El Diablo Blanco" for helping plant the signs.

www.santaanapubcrawl.com