The (free)way and the light

Sure, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles faces millions of dollars in bills from recent court case settlements.

But are finances so tight that it has decided to sell advertising space on its grandest church steeple?

That's the way it looked to startled motorists in downtown Los Angeles when they glimpsed a giant sign on the side of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

"Your Ad HERE," proclaimed the huge letters across the cathedral's landmark bell tower.

A telephone number was printed at the top and bottom of the 50-foot-wide illuminated sign, visible to thousands of commuters stuck in slow-moving rush-hour traffic Wednesday evening on the northbound Hollywood Freeway.

The sign was gone the next day, but questions lingered for church officials.

The advertising offer wasn't theirs, said Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Los Angeles archdiocese.

"A church tower is different from a billboard. If it wasn't, we would have been selling ad space 2,000 years ago," he said. "There are plenty of ways to communicate without making ad space out of your sanctuaries. I think most people would react negatively to that."

A call to the phone number included on the tower sign brought a different response from James Cui. He's a 28-year-old Highland Park graphic artist.

"I'm flattered you noticed," Cui said. "I hoped I was hitting a lot of people with it. That's the trick in L.A. The only way to hit a lot of people is on the freeway."

When he's not working at his day job with a Pasadena engineering corporation, Cui moonlights as a party "VJ."

"I mix videos for raves and parties and project them on walls. It's a niche market. It's very subcultural," he explained. "But it can be restricting. The audience is there to party and doesn't recognize what we're doing. There's a certain disconnect -- a VJ is very much wallpaper."

So Cui has begun looking for walls with high public visibility to display his artwork. With a laptop computer, a video projector and a gasoline-powered portable electric generator, he cruises the city, looking for clean walls in dark places.

"Downtown has a lot of bare walls, but nobody's downtown after dark. It's all about the audience," said Cui, who calls himself "VJ Fader."

On Wednesday, he noticed the cathedral bell tower. It is next to the busy freeway and its bottom portion is free of ambient light from street lamps and the cathedral's decorative spotlights. At 6 p.m., Cui set up his equipment on the Grand Avenue freeway bridge and fired up the 2,000-lumen projector.