Photo by Mark Mauer/L.A. Weekly.

Lots of people knew what he looked like before -- the artist Cache, who has painted the most recent generation of mural chickens not just in Echo Park but in Silver Lake and South Los Angeles and other regions of the county, I am sure. He is known for diligently maintaining -- and revising -- his character-chicken murals. But I never caught a glimpse of their creator, who is a bike messenger in his off-hours. Now we see Cache's real face on the May cover of the "eastside" monthly New Angeles, which dropped into my real mailbox yesterday, though I glimpsed copies of the magazine at Chango coffeehouse the day before. The story subhead: "Local muralist Cache spearheads a chicken-led rebellion."

If you haven't seen his work (e.g., on Sunset Boulevard near Benton or Glendale Blvd. across from Echo Park Lake), Cache makes playful, mostly un-corny pop mural images without seeming to over-reference Japanese pop styles (thank you!) -- not that there's anything wrong with anime etc., just that it's such a pleasure to see something so fresh.

From the article by Joshua Lurie:

CHICKENS BECOME POLITICAL: Cache painted his first chicken in 2003, near downtown. "The chicken thing started as a joke," he says, "but once I started reading and exploring the socioeconomic spiral, I figured there's a way to open people's minds. Carlos Castaneda wrote about humaneros--human chicken coops. I realized we're no different than chickens. ... The more I paint, the more political I get."

Oh, Chicken Corner wishes that last line had been "The more I paint CHICKENS the more political I get." But, apparently, that's not what he said.