People and Events

It’s not that a 22-year-old Westwood artist who calls himself Arte (Ar-tay) pokes around in any old trash container. He prefers the ones outside those flossy Beverly Hills boutiques where he can find what he calls “designer garbage.”

Arte generally wears a suit and tie (but no gloves) as he probes receptacles for throwaway stuff from Chanel, Cartier, Gucci and the like--all of which he uses to assemble his “Trash-Art” sculptures.

“I was reading a lot about the trash crisis we’re having in America,” says Arte, a recent arrival from the University of Pennsylvania. When he saw that former Beverly Hills Mayor Benjamin Stansbury called waste disposal a bigger problem for cities than crime, he was inspired “to make trash more appealing to look at than a landfill.”

He began encasing it in plastic containers and putting it all together somehow.

One of his assemblages, “Meridian,” was composed of trash he scavenged from the middle of a freeway. “Shoreline,” as one may perceive, is junk picked up at the scumline of a beach.

“It’s all for a good cause,” insists Arte, “to beautify the planet.”

The trash artist will have some of his work on display for a week at the Daisy on Rodeo Drive beginning late today.

He seems confident that the work will retain its aesthetic appeal that long.

Pop singer Jonathan (Chico) DeBarge isn’t going to take part in the sheriff’s anti-drug telethon after all.

“He has been removed for obvious reasons,” said Sgt. Lynda Edmonds.

DeBarge, as it turns out, is tied up in Grand Rapids, Mich., where he and his brother, Robert, 32, have been indicted for conspiring to transport 2.2 pounds of cocaine from Los Angeles.

Jonathan DeBarge, 22, is free on bail but may not leave the Grand Rapids area without permission from federal authorities.

The sheriff’s telethon, which begins on KHJ-TV at 5 p.m. today, is to raise money for the department’s Substance Abuse and Narcotics Education program.

Two West Los Angeles cops said they thought the man driving a van westbound on the Santa Monica Freeway had abducted the woman who appeared to be struggling with him. So they pulled him over.

Before they could get to the bottom of it, they said, the woman took over the van’s steering wheel and dug out, leaving the freeway at Lincoln Boulevard.

She got as far as the 700 block of Olympic Boulevard in Santa Monica, where she reportedly rear-ended a patrol car driven by Santa Monica Police Sgt. Michael Cortrite.

As luck would have it, Cortrite had heard a radio call and was looking for the van at the time. There it was. He was slightly injured. The patrol car sustained major damage.

Officers said the woman, Molinda Casiano, 29, tried to run but was caught. She and the man, identified as Carl Eugene Davis, 61, were arrested as drunk driving suspects. She was also booked for investigation of hit-and-run driving.

Eight black cowboys and cowgirls visited children at three South-Central Los Angeles facilities Friday to persuade them that they were for real.

Spokeswoman Sylvia Cordy said that each time they asked whether anyone had seen black cowboys before, either on the hoof or on television, “Almost to a child, they said no.”

The cowpersons were some of the 100 or so taking part in this weekend’s Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo at the Los Angeles Equestrian Center in Burbank. The rodeo types staged mock bullfights and otherwise entertained the kids at the Tillmon Child Care Center, at the Watts-Willowbrook Boys and Girls Club and at the Helping Hand Home for Boys.

With Domino’s still looking for the 20-foot blow-up “Noid” that someone stole from the roof of its new pizzeria in Woodland Hills, one is inclined to take note that there is a Cessna 150 angling out of the top of the new Pioneer Hyundai building in North Hollywood.

It looks enough like a crash, say the agency folks, that a lot of Ventura Freeway motorists have called, prompting the CHP and the Police and Fire departments to make polite inquiries.

It’s there, said Bill Felts, the car agency owner, to replace a six-foot, stuffed toy gorilla.

Somebody took it.