www.laweekly.com/ink/05/35/a-lewis.php
For middle-class blacks, Inglewood is more than a city its a place wh ere the dream of a better future is being put to the test. ERIN AUBRY KA PLAN, however, finds that loving the idea of Inglewood is easier than lo ving Inglewood itself.
cars that come in nice colors: mustard, seaweed, light teal. The kind of cars that some people might adorn with faux fur and fuzzy dice. But she also loves, as she puts it, this beautiful blue ball were so privile ged to live on, and her car fetish wasnt exactly squaring with her envir onmental creds. More than just personal philosophy, eco-consciousness has been inexorably woven into the identity of her 18-year-old advertising and marketing co mpany, Big Imagination Group, which she runs out of a smartly decorated, Culver City warehouse. Three years ago, Brooks bought her staff a fleet of Toyota Prius hybrids, which landed her in the pages of People; in 20 03, she got 10 celebrities to drive the cars to the Oscars. It is a mark eting ploy for which she makes no apologies. We live in a society where if celebrities are doing something it stops being nerdy and starts being hip, she says. After she bought the com pany cars, she noticed her employees changing their ways. They started t hinking about conservation they turned off lights when they werent using them, they started recycling. It got Brooks thinking: How could I do something for the greater good ins tead of just pushing meaningless products? None of that, however, solved the problem of Brooks muscle-car jones, whi ch still dogged her like a drug habit. My sense of aesthetics still crav ed these late-70s to early-80s pimp cars, she says. One day last winter, Brooks stumbled upon a 1979 Cadillac El Dorado Biarr itz for sale on a downtown LA street. The car also had a diesel engine, and Brooks had just met Joshua Ti ckell, the author of From the Fryer to the Fuel Tank, who had crossed th e country in his veggie van powered by vegetable oil. I suddenly saw that I could have a no fossil-fuel, tricked-out car, she s ays, her voice rising with wonder. Its rubber fuel lines quickly disso lved in the solvent properties of traditional biodiesel fuel; the hoses would need to be replaced with something synthetic. She spent $15,000, but by the standards of ne w cars these days, thats not so bad. I spent $17,000, and I have this ro ckin almost-new car. Brooks now owns 10 biodiesel vehicles in various states of blingage, incl uding an 83 Cadillac Seville and a 96 Mercedes E-Class sedan. Biodiesel is not just for crunchy, granola-eating hippies anymore which, by the wa y, I am, she says. This is about making renewability sexy, about not sac rificing. I met Brooks in her office with Roxanne Metrano, a Pilates teacher and da ncer and the very first client of Brooks latest marketing adventure, a c ompany called BioBling a service that connects conscious people with bio -ready cars and fuel to run them. Brooks is tiny and compact with a burs t of dark red curls; Small dogs run free throughout the office, and food proliferates; when I casually mentioned that my blood sugar was low, she ran to the refrigerator and fed me string cheese and vegetarian sushi. BioBling was born two days before Earth Day, when Brooks friend Joe Gersh en of Green Depot offered her a booth on the Santa Monica Promenade if s he could pull something together fast. Thats where she met Metrano, who had been wanting a environmentally sound car, but didnt have a lot to sp end. I was looking at hybrids, Metrano says, but they were $25,000 and youre s till burning fossil fuels. Brooks husband, Eric Cadora, tracked down a 93 Mercedes on eBay for $7,20 0 plus shipping, charged Metrano a 10 percent service fee for negotiatin g the deal and $15 for swapping out the fuel lines. He also helped Metra no procure a 55-gallon drum of biodiesel at just under $4 a gallon. There was just one snag: Metrano had a landlord whose insurance company t old him a 55-gallon drum of fuel on the premises would negate his homeow ners policy. At the same time, she doesnt blame him: Its the insurance companies that have it wrong. Brooks own insurance company advised her not to keep the drum at her hous e, so she now stores in her loading dock three bright blue drums of B-99 99 percent bio, 1 percent regular diesel, because there are weird tax b reaks if you use an existing fuel, says Brian Dolen, a Big art director. Now Colette gets to see me all the time, says Metrano, who comes by every other week or so and hand-cranks fuel into her tank from a Fill-Rite ro tary pump. Colette cant do this for everybody, Dolen admits as he helps Metrano cran k Weve got to find another solution. To that end, Brooks has been holding biodiesel salons for like-minded peo ple who want to figure out how to establish public pumps. The first salo n, held earlier this month, filled the parking lot with very large cars from brand-new Dodge pickups to a vintage Mercedes to an 81 Toyota Land Cruiser all bearing bumperstickers: No War Required. At the end of the evening, the group, which included the former mayor of Culver City and two young men from American Apparel, seemed to have narr owed down several speculative options for pump locations, among them, Am erican Apparels headquarters, a former gas station near downtown LA, a nd Big Imaginations parking lot. Personally, I dont want a chemistry set in my house, and I dont want to a lter my behavior as a human being, as a marketer, I understand that biod iesel will not get critical mass acceptance if you have to modify your b ehavior too much, Brooks says. We have to make it easy to find, and we h ave to make it hip. That said, she doesnt expect absolute purity out of anyone least of all h erself. I have dirty secrets in my garage, she confided, a big badass 66 Toronado in pristine museum condition and a 61 Ford Econoline Pickup. I take them out once a month, she says, and its unbelievable. As euphoric as I feel behind the wheel of a biodiesel Cadillac, a 440-horsepower te stosterone engine well, thats just orgastic.
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