MOCA's Art in the Streets | 17th April 2011 | 00:03 PDT

What a great day! Met up with a new friend here in LA, found on rent a friend off Twitter (friend of a friend) who also helped me find some accommodation over here.

We went to an Organic Café in Venice called Urth Café (which I guess is a really pretentious way of saying Earth) huge queue, huge menu and ended up being served by someone talking at a thousand words a second, or so it seemed.

Earth Café, though in LA it's spelled U R T H

After that bombardment of the senses my confidence levels were running low of what I actually ordered, until the food arrived and I'm pretty sure it was what I ordered but I wasn't expecting the Olympic pool sized cup of coffee.

A few hours of shooting the breeze with a blend of immature jokes, we said our goodbyes and I went on a hunt to find some juggling balls and no where stocks them, the amount of times I had to demonstrate what I was after with my hands, I could've re-learnt how to juggle 3 times over. The only person I didn't have to do that to and understood what I was after was a deaf guy running a market stall on Venice Beach, though I think it helped that the yellow shirt I was wearing was so loud.

It's not until you wear something so bright you realise that many people here wear black, white or brown.

After unsuccessfully finding my balls on the streets, I decided to eat my feelings with the best cupcake I've ever had, from a place in Santa Monica called Yummy Cupcake on Wilshire Boulevard – simply amazing!

Later on, I was working, sort of and I received a text from my friend from earlier inviting me to Downtown, LA for an art party.

These buildings are taller than most. Taxi is the size of a car.

Driving from the coast to in and around LA and towards the skyscrapers was pretty ace, I'm a big fan of high-rises their architecture and basically everything it encompasses, it took about 30 minutes to get there and about 20 minutes to find the place and about an hour to find a car park that wasn't full, this place seemed popular...

Entrance to Art in the Streets at MOCA

And with really good reason, it was the “Art in the Streets” being held at MOCA | The Museum of Contemporary Art and it was essentially about graffiti, its meaning, its history and modern artists displaying their works with a good blend of live art, DJing, dancing and drinking outside. This was an amazing exhibition and it was huge, massive, gigantic, huge... again!

DJ spinning the wax to the invisible dancers, they were so good!

After the hassles of parking we only really had an hour to enjoy it, but it was a visual feast, creative obesity, photos, information, sprays, images, interactive, videos, signs, cut and paste, stencils, everything.

Kook as a massive cut n paste piece

Think we'll definitely be going again if we can, you'll need at least a few hours to a day to see and appreciate all its offerings, it was busy as well which was a shame, as tonight was the Saturday of opening weekend and was filled to the brim with hipsters being “experts” on street art (though they never cared for it until, it was taken off the streets put under a roof and get charged to see it in all it's synthetic glory) and every hipster trying to spot Banksy, ROA, Saber, Mr. Cartoon, Jaime Reid, Phase 2, Kaws or the other 50 contributing artists... More often or not you don't know what they look like.

I may go back with a “I'm Banksy” t-shirt on and see how many gullible people I can fool.

Small sample out of a huge collection of sprayed subway cars

Sprayed bus by the entrance

Composed: Back at the house, Santa Monica