April 2009 Archives

L.A. is the excuse. Mean and violent, it abets the unexpected blow to the face. The foot swung against the side the head in a perfect footballer’s arc. The woman in the passenger seat screaming hysterically while the car is driven over the chest, the ribs buckling, the liver squeezed unnaturally, rupturing. L.A. is the reason for the meanness of that. That moment in a carjack video game, that moment in some movie, the few seconds it takes to grind a body into the red asphalt.

L.A. is the scene of the crime and the perpetrator of the crime. We’re just along the ride, even when we’re behind the wheel.

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Tom Brokaw, commenting in the New York Times, is skeptical of being local – specifically of the American habit of multiplying units of local government.

I’ve shared his skepticism. In 2000 in an op-ed for the Los Angeles Times, I imagined California as a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle with more than 5,000 government pieces. “They include the familiar outlines of cities (482), counties (58) and school districts (more than 1,000), and a bewildering variety of special districts (3,800).”

My target in 2000 was “phantom government” – the thousands of single-purpose districts so specialized that the voters who elect their boards barely know of the board’s existence. Brokaw aimed much more widely in his criticism, suggesting that county governments in lightly settled states should consolidate, that systems of higher education could be amalgamated across state lines, and that, as a general rule, the merely local ought to give way before the efficiency of the regional.

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Greg Hise, a professor of history at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and author or co-author of several books on Los Angeles, was thinking of what we don’t know about the city. He laid out a prospectus of what we’re missing in a talk he gave late last year as part of the Aloud series at the downtown Los Angeles Public Library. He titled his lecture “Ground Truth – How We Talk about Los Angeles and Why That Matters.”

We don’t know the archeology of the city, Hise pointed out. Digging down through the layers of the past has illuminated urban history is plenty of cities in North America, but not very much of Los Angeles has been unearthed.

We don’t know the mechanics of investment in the rapidly urbanizing city of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There are institutional histories, of course, but they tend to be paid-for biographies of “great men” who financed the making of Los Angeles. They’re not very useful in finding out where the money went (or where it came from).

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As David Zahniser noted at L.A. Now, a recent court ruling has monkey wrenched at least part of City Hall’s rush to density. “Superior Court Judge Thomas I. McKnew,” Zahniser wrote, “invalidated the city’s approval of any real estate project that received concessions from Los Angeles that went beyond those that could be offered under a similar state law.”

Struck down were concessions – approved by the City Council last year with little review and no independent analysis – that granted developers extraordinary rights: to build bigger, build taller, and build denser if they set aside even a tiny fraction of new units for affordable housing.

It’s not known how many developments won approval from the city’s Planning Department with these concessions or if any developments have been built. “But political types,” Zahniser pointed out, “had another urgent question about the decision: Is it the revenge of Jane Usher?”

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Mayor Villaraigosa breezed past transit issues in his State of the City speech.

He noted in a single hopeful sentence that voters had passed Measure R, which included some bond funding for some transit projects. Those were county voters. Presumably, they expected that highway and public transit improvements would benefit the entire county. But the city will benefit, too.

The mayor also noted fleetingly that a promised Clean Tech Corridor (to be developed adjacent to downtown) would be built near public transit lines. The mayor described that project as “A model for future communities where residents walk more, drive less and have access to quality jobs and affordable housing.”

“Near” is an amusing term in the practice of public transit. A dimensionless aspiration, not a metric of utility.

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I saw this morning a sparrow hawk, minutes after it took a mourning dove on the lawn of city hall as I walked to Easter Sunday mass. The gutted dove: Some few gray feathers, a flash of rose-red meat on the bright green grass. On seeing me the little predator lifted away, prey clutched in talons, and brought it to the top of a nearly leafless sycamore. Springtime, but not yet in full. From a bare limb, the Falco sparverius looked down. I hurried a little. Mass was about to begin. I had another ten minutes to walk.

Fr. Hopkins, what would you have made it?

Later, the old Easter sequence about the empty tomb. Dic nobis Maria, Quid vidisti in via? Tell us Mary, what did you see on your way? Mors et vita duello conflixere mirando. Death and life hand to hand in strange combat.

The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Mark Couvillion. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

You might say that I have this thing about wheels. How they evoke oppressor/oppressed, master/servant, subject/object relationships. Wheels in motion are privileged. The unwheeled are not.

I walk for nearly all of the ordinary business of life . . . to my office at Lakewood City Hall, to the adjacent market, dry cleaners, Target, mall, restaurants, bank, bar, bookstore, church, city park, ophthalmologist, movies. I live in the most usefully walkable part of a thoroughly walkable town. And it has buses (with their attendant indignities) for the necessary reach to scarcer resources – HMO, museums, bigger bookstores, better bars, the big city (Long Beach).

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Encountered in passing in the New York Times Book Review . . .

The review takes pains to note that Simon Critchley wrote the Book of Dead Philosophers on a hill overlooking Los Angeles. And, Critchley says, because of “its peculiar terror of annihilation,” Los Angeles is “surely a candidate city for the world capital of death.”

Critchley’s comment on the place in which he wrote a collection of essays on dead philosophers (and on their dying) comes at the very end of his book, which offers a slightly snarky take on the consolations of philosophy (and being philosophical about the inevitable).

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This is another in an occasional series about places in L.A. This place is La Placita on Main Street.

Nuestra Senora de los Angeles. The phrase lingers in the city like a postcard from a long-ago summer vacation. Our Lady of the Angels, running together glimpses of the Virgin of Guadalupe on the side of carnicerias and bottled water shops.

Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Angeles

The old church across from the plaza close to where Los Angeles began in 1781 isn’t a place of sacred stillness. The church is open throughout the day for all kinds of visitors, and the little nave will often fill unexpectedly with the faithful in their devotions. On Saturdays and Sundays particularly – when crowds attending baptisms and weddings spill into the courtyard outside the north entrance – the Church of Our Lady of the Angels* is a place of holy noise.

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