[youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oVUwG0qC9c]

L.A. RECORD would like to thank everyone who entered yesterday’s DESTROY L.A. contest. We got tons of hilarious and frequently disturbing entries—it’s almost as if this is something people think about a lot… We have decided to post the two winners to showcase their imagination, dedication and total insanity. Congratulations to Alex and David for soaring past all reasonable expectations, and see you tomorrow at DESTROY L.A.!

“GET A LITTLE BRAIN VIRUS” by David A.

If you want to destroy L.A. – arguably the hippest city in a state that’s already too cool – you want to do it with style. Anything that looks like less than a Michael Bay 240 million dollar special effects by Industrial Light and Magic explosion would be a disservice to this city.

So what’s hot in destruction? I heard someone shout, “Nukes! Nukes are hot!” Let me answer that with a resounding YAWN. These days, even North Korea and Iran are getting into the whole atomic bomb thing, and neither of them even knows what Cobrasnake is. Those countries are boring and bombs are boring. I guess you could have an earthquake shake the whole city and swallow it up, but how cool would it be to say you lost a whole city because the ground shook too hard? About as cool as Beau Bridges, who starred in the NBC earthquake disaster mini-series 10.5, and no one watched that.

Bombs and natural disasters have been done. What you want is something new, something fresh, something with a twist. And the best way to serve destruction with a twist is to make it SELF-destruction.

Here’s what to do: Come up with a delightful and enticing fusion food concept that appeals to hipster vegans – a fusion that evokes earthiness while remaining exciting. Ethiopian tacos, anyone?

Next, load all those Ethiopian tacos into a bright little food truck with a catchy, eco-conscious name like EARTH EARTH REVOLUTION on the side. Tweet the hell out of yourself, and give shout-outs to other food trucks like Kogi and the Green Truck. Now when you’re really big and you’ve got Jonathan Gold raving about you in L.A. WEEKLY, hold the first (and only) Food Truck Fest, in which you and all the other food trucks in L.A. gather downtown for a night of art, music, and extreme food-ery. The important part here is you have to make sure to get a little brain virus in everyone’s food and drink supply, and then make sure you get the hell out of there because things are about to get ZOMBIE.

As hipsters happily eat your food, your special virus will be eating away at their frontal lobes. Within a few hours, after riding their fixies back home, they’ll develop a cough that keeps the virus airborne. Those in the area who didn’t eat but still like to breathe will be infected. By the next morning everyone that just wanted to sample food truck foods would have lost their higher brain functioning and become bona fide zombies. From downtown LA the virus will have spread to Venice, Eagle Rock and beyond. Within days, all of Los Angeles will be overrun with shambling, mindless zombies who probably want more Ethiopian tacos but can settle for human brain instead.

When people in Washington D.C. monitoring what they’ll call the Angeleno Virus epidemic resort to coloring the whole damn map of Los Angeles in Infected Red, they’ll build an enormous fence around the perimeter. Of course, it looks like the fence won’t hold, and after Orange County complains that the fence is an eyesore, the federal government will send out jets and tanks and anything else with big missiles attached, because why the hell not. They’ll bomb Los Angeles, cutting away at it like how they’d saw a hole from beneath the floorboards of cartoon characters until the whole county’s become a bay.

Zombie problem solved, right? Wrong. Before the bombing some lucky zombies will have managed to shuffle their way into one of our neighboring cities, bearing a delightful gift basket of citrus-scented Angeleno Virus in their decaying arms. There’s just no stopping L.A.

JUDGES’ NOTES: We were impressed with how topical and detailed this entry was—nice work with the Jonathan Gold review of twittering food trucks as vector for fatal brain infection—as well as with the exciting combination of all-encompassing hostility (toward everything from Michael Bay to fixie riders) with fierce hometown pride. And we must also salute Mr. A for the twist ending in which L.A. is not—and cannot—be destroyed, no matter how much the rest of the world hates it. We have always been attracted to art with a good message. Congratulations!

“THE ABYSS OF PURE ABERRATION” by Alex B.

I will destroy L.A. by writing a recursive double-byte overflow virus. I will wait for GLK to begin his set at Low End Theory next week and then transmit the virus via a miniature bluetooth-enabled Arduino board (snuck into the Airliner in my sneakers). The trasmission frequency will be set to the exact BPM of GLK’s current mix, allowing it synchronize with the clock cycle speed of his integrated cranial cybercomponents. The virus will activate when it detects GLK’s air horn sample and begin exponentially increasing the speed of his motor functions. Already treading the micron-thin line between sanity and utter madness, an overload will occur and GLK will finally slip into the abyss of pure aberration. Raping his equipment in his demonic, inhuman frenzy, GLK will begin to spin closer and closer to Beelzebub’s Beat – the mystical, otherwordly track described by millenia-old pictographic scrolls uncovered by Antarctica scientists in the early 1960′s. The Beat is rumored by far-right religious fundamentalists to hold the key to the gate of Tartarus, and ultimately, the Rapture of Earth.

Every window and human head in Lincoln Heights will begin to explode. Daedelus, startled but decisive and resistant to GLK’s growing frequency, will set his Monome down on the bench in the Airliner’s upstairs patio. Checking his strange instruments and furiously pressing buttons, he will devise a sonic neural shunt to cut through GLK’s frequency and access his malfunctioning cranial cybercomponents. GLK’s radius of sonic insanity will continue to grow, now popping heads from Venice to Claremont. The ocean will begin to ripple and boil.

Barely enduring the sonic compression and splatter of Low Ender viscera, Daedelus will fight his way through GLK’s frequency. Laying track upon track, synthesizing, mixing, cooking the perfect auditory potion, he’ll at long last find the The Long Lost Beat, the sonic antidote. The two sounds will mix, stopping the expansion of GLK’s cataclysmic melody, and suspending his cybercomponents. Daedelus will collapse in exhaustion. The Rapture prevented, the world at large will be saved, but LA destroyed.

JUDGES’ NOTES: This entry is a triumph of inspired specificity, from the personal appearances by Low End/DESTROY L.A. beatmakers to the vivid technical detail. But it’s not just nuts-and-bolts. It has the narrative arc of an ancient world epic, in which a tragically corrupted hero is defeated by his brother only at great cost. With the inclusion of Lovecraft-style occult lore and fearlessly gory visuals—and the excellent use of phrases like “Low Ender viscera” and “abyss of pure aberration”—we find ourselves with an undeniably strong entry into the mythos of Los Angeles music. Thanks for a story that will stick with us—no matter how much we try and scrub it off.