Where We Are

86. August, Cal State Long Beach

2009-11-19T15:04:53Z

August Coppola has died. His obituaries began, brutally, by listing his relations: Carmine Coppola (father, composer of The Godfather score), Francis Ford Coppola (director, arts entrepreneur). Talia Shire (sister, actor), Nicholas Cage (son, actor), Christopher Coppola (son, director, producer), Roman Coppola (nephew, director), and Sofia Coppola (nice, director, actor, writer). In his obituaries, August recedes in this crowd of celebrities and the nearly famous. The implication is that he never was as notable as they are,

]]> August Coppola was my teacher for most of three years. Although “teacher” is not exactly the right word.

Coppola taught Comparative Literature and headed the General Honors Program at Cal State Long Beach in the late 1960s. Long Beach was an educational factory, exactly the kind of industrialized producer of degrees that California’s master plan for higher education intended for state colleges. It took the sons and daughters of aerospace and refinery workers and made them the first in their family to earn a college diploma, the first in their family to become reliably middle-class. They became school teachers, engineers, middle managers, dentists, lawyers, entrepreneurs, and government bureaucrats. I’m one.

Coppola was something else. He was a member of the intelligentsia, one of the avant garde at a time when both of those cultural tribes were beginning to be suspect. He was experimental in the way Dada and Surrealism had once been experimental, in the way Calder was and Pollock and the Beats had recently been, and at a time when authority in all its forms was imploding like a slow-motion film of an abandoned building being demolished. His effrontery would seem old-fashion now.

Other students could tell you better stories of August Coppola. I wasn’t a very good student of his. I didn’t have the fleetness of his thought.

By some measures, Coppola wasn’t a successful academic. He spent his career at state schools; Long Beach was particularly a backwater then. He didn’t write his era’s defining work of literary criticism or set a new course for the discipline of Comparative Literature. His students, as far as I know, aren’t passing on his intellectual heritage to a new generation of students.

Coppola did a great many interesting things in a great many different ways, in ways that were fairly radical once, although they did not result in an edifice of scholarship or a body of memorable art works. His purpose, it seems to me, was to do something else.

Coppola was an instigator, a flagrant intellectual. He was a popularizer of the visionaries, cranks, and poets of the previous generation who were just then passing into history. History, it turned out, did not treat all of them well. Some of the cranks were crazy. Some of the visionaries had nothing new to say. Some of the poets were bad.

Which is not to say that encountering them at working-class Long Beach State in the late 1960s was a mistake or that Coppola’s “everything connects” style was mere exuberance. Coppola wasn’t making a canon. He wasn’t making disciples. He was making minds. In large measure, he made mine.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user Alejandro Cortes. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

85. I’m walking

2009-11-14T00:28:22Z

I didn’t walk or take a bus to the 18th Street Arts Center on Wednesday evening to participate with other carless Angeleños in presentations connected to Diane Meyer’s photo exhibit: Without a Car in the World: 100 Car-less Angelinos Tell Stories of Living in Los Angeles.

I didn’t have to. Diane Meyer had arranged my ride to Santa Monica. She brought me back to Lakewood.

It would have been possible to walk-bus-train- bus to the art gallery, but the 34-mile trip from my office would have taken me almost two-and-a-half hours. There isn’t any easy way back at the hour the panel discussion ended.

]]> I could have – as some of the carless in Diane’s exhibition do – spent the night in Santa Monica and returned in the morning. I could have spent $40 or $50 for a cab ride to the Blue Line station downtown. I could have asked a former L.A. Times transportation reporter, who was there, to take me to a bus stop in Belmont Heights in Long Beach, where he lives. He might even have been given me a lift all the way home to Lakewood. It’s sort of on the way. If I could see well enough at night, if I were fearless, if I were properly equipped, I might have ridden a bike back home.

Some of the carless in Diane’s show do just that, and they explain how and why in brief quotes that accompany their photograph. The attitudes of the carless range from earnest to desperate: Not driving is liberating. Not driving is a curse. I’m saving the world. I’m lost in L.A. I’m better than all of you who drive. I don’t belong here because I won’t ever be like you, who drives.

The carless are great improvisers, even of their reasons to remain carless. They are a spectacle of contradiction in Los Angeles, but no one notices. They alone hear the sound of their footsteps on our empty sidewalks.

My bit came at the end, after a panel on not owning a car (More bikes! More Zipcars!) and after presentations that covered the iconography of walking in L.A., the history of sidewalks, and the accounts of two academic pedestrians who have crossed L.A. on foot like a modern Lewis and Clark.

I just said that you should learn to wander. I said become an expert flâneur and acquire pedestrianism as a vice. I said acquire the desire to walk into your neighborhood with the purpose of expecting something – Wonderful! Offensive! – to occur to you as wandered into an undiscovered place.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user cobalt123. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

Domesticated Weirdness

2009-11-08T22:38:31Z

Those madcap jokesters – Anthony R. Lovett and Matt Maranian – have updated their bestselling L.A. Bizzaro for the new millennium. It’s the “All-New Insider's Guide to the Obscure, the Absurd, and the Perverse in Los Angeles,” and it’s now in color.

The 1997 edition delivered all the L.A. weirdness the lurid green cover promised. In a review in the Times, I said that “L.A. Bizzaro continues the tradition of seeing Los Angeles as a toxic playground, best observed slightly unconscious. The book is largely about body parts, cracks (wise and otherwise) and drinks. L.A. Bizzaro! approves of consuming them all.”

]]> Censorious and prurient, like a Calvinist at the Pussycat Theater, the L.A. Bizzaro of more than a decade ago was appealingly plastered for a post-earthquake, post-Rodney King city. Just below the cheerful pornography, however, was a cranky satire of hipsters in search of authenticity.

Back then, before the Bobos were lured downtown by the “noir adjacent” vibe, the bars on the fringe of skid row weren’t sanitized for your protection the way motel toilets are. “Cole's has always reminded me of a filthy stinking Parisian public urinal trough, the kind you can't flush,” Maranian noted of one past and present landmark. “If you like the acrid aroma of a real honest-to-goodness dive, you’ll absolutely adore Coles.”

Time and domestication have changed Cole’s and the authors. The new edition of L.A. Bizzaro isn’t as shrill as it was. And there’s real regret in it too, as if a melancholy Ralph Story (“Things That Aren’t Here Anymore”) had teamed up with the authors to mourn vanished alligator farms, shuttered burlesque museums, and other lost roadside attractions.

‘The quintessential 'Bizarro' place, Maranian told a Times reporter recently, "is really hard to get to, slightly disappointing upon arrival and pretty much unlike anything you're likely to stumble upon anywhere else.” Which is pretty much all of L.A., lost seekers of the real city would agree.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user jericl cat. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

Somewhere, west of Doheny

2009-11-01T19:39:05Z

The Ferrari California convertible test driven by Jerry Garrett of the New York Times was red – Corsa red, the red of a bad girl’s lipstick or a bankrupt’s bottom line. Based priced at less than $200,000, this Ferrari is the least expensive model from a very expensive maker. Even with extras – including handstiched leather rear seating and a computer-controlled suspension – the California is almost an economy car.

That makes the California a dilemma for Ferrari, the same dilemma every luxury brand faces: either democratize to improve profitability and dilute the brand’s exclusivity or ratchet up the mystique of the brand and achieve near unobtainability. Either can turn out to be a trap. Open any edition of Vogue and you can see luxury brands lurching to one pole or the other and without any guarantee of making the right choice in today’s woozy economy.

]]> Brand anxiety isn’t what I find interesting about this Ferrari. Its name is. The California restores a designation that was applied to Ferrari 250 GT export models beginning in 1957, a time when the California brand promised youth and freedom and desires fulfilled – a sort of vast, half-adult Disneyland, Autopia without limits.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art once sought to sum up the extravagance of the brand – why Ferrari borrowed California to sell a car – in an art exhibition: Made in California: Art, Image and Identity, 1900-2000. Robert Hughes in a Time Magazine review of the exhibition pointed up the obvious problem with the California brand. The image of California by 2000, he said, was “luscious and poisonous at the same time,” an emblem of “a flawed and contradictory ex-paradise.”

If that’s California, why name today’s Ferrari after a failed state of mind?

Purists have complained that the California isn’t enough of a Ferrari. It has fake tailpipes, a front-mounted V-8, and an automatic transmission. That it’s a car – not an obsession. Perhaps that’s why the management chose the name – the California is a Ferrari for the disenchanted.

California isn’t the brand it once was, but the California Ferrari is selling. The company wants to assemble about 3,000 cars a year – more than a 50 percent increase in the company’s overall production. There’s even a waiting list for the California. It’s 18 months.

The image that accompanies this entry is from an ad for the Jordan Playboy. The company assembled adequate vehicles in the 1920s, but it wrote wondrous advertisements:

SOMEWHERE west of Laramie there's a bronco-busting, steer roping girl who knows what I’m talking about. She can tell what a sassy pony, that’s a cross between greased lighting and the place where it hits, can do with eleven hundred pounds of steel and action when he's going high, wide and handsome. The truth is - the Playboy was built for her. Built for the lass whose, face is brown with the sun when the day is done of revel and romp and race. She loves the cross of the wild and the tame. There's a savor of links about that car - of laughter and lilt and light - a hint of old loves - and saddle and quirt. It’s a brawny thing - yet a graceful thing for the sweep o' the Avenue. Step into the Playboy when the hour grows dull with things gone dead and stale. Then start for the land of real living with the spirit of the lass who rides, lean and rangy, into the red horizon of a Wyoming twilight.

82. Hockney and L.A.

2009-10-23T22:34:37Z

I once went to All Saints church in Pasadena to hear Lawrence Weschler give a talk. We are acquaintances, and we like each other’s work. (He is a man of many enthusiasms.) Weschler had recently written about David Hockney and in particular Hockney’s blue/gray/green Yorkshire landscapes. Hockney and his partner, John Fitzherbert, came to hear Weschler speak.

I had gotten to the church on Colorado Boulevard by foot, bus, train, and subway (in various combinations). The walk from the Gold Line station wasn’t far, but it still would be daunting at the hour when the lecture would be over. I hoped that Weschler might give me a lift back to the station, or that he or someone with enough time to kill might even take me back to Lakewood (about 45 minutes away).

It turned out that John Fitzherbert and David Hockney gave me that ride – to the Del Mar station of the Gold Line. Weschler had asked Hockney on my behalf.

]]> It was a little odd to take the ten minute ride to the station with the officially declared “greatest living painter” in England. Our conversation was brief, commonplace – the unexpected fact that I’m unable to drive and that driving is a defining characteristic of Angeleños (and could I be one, if I don’t drive).

A mild, older man, hard of hearing but less so then, reminding me of my uncles. A man with an accented voice, but nothing more than in the treatment of a vowel or the duration of a consonant. Actually, a pleasant voice. We said our goodbyes when they dropped me at the head of the stairs down to the train platform, well lighted but empty at that hour. (Later, another passenger or two joined me, reassuringly.)

Hockney is in England now, in Yorkshire, perhaps for good, apparently because his partner is barred from traveling here. But Hockney’s delight in the light there and the seasons (and family connections) hold him to Yorkshire, too.

Hockney is considered a painter of surfaces . . . of the presumed superficiality of Los Angeles. And he is of Los Angeles, and not because of superficiality. He says that California taught him space, that new ways of looking at the space that expands west and east of Los Angeles – the Pacific and the Mojave – played a part in breaking down the former constraints of perspective for him. That and Polaroid snapshots and Photoshop. Which seems, to me at least, to have something to do with southern California and within the capacities of this place to make itself anew.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user nutted/nick. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

81. The constant fan

2009-10-14T23:58:46Z

Blue is the color of true love, to twist a lyric sung by Donovan and Joan Baez. Dodger blue, in this particular instance. And no, I’m a not a fan. But I'm a friend of fans. And they know another fan of heroic proportions. He’s a fan of the Dodgers – a big fan – from Belfast, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, etc., etc.

I’ve been to Belfast, been to neatly gridded neighborhoods of semi-detached villas where Dodger fans today are as rare and unlikely as Catholic householders once were in those neighborhoods, Belfast being Belfast. And Irish hearts there beat fast for Manchester United football and the red and the black. Dodger blue doesn’t figure in at all.

But Conor Caldwell of Belfast bleeds the truest blue of City Terrance, Boyle Heights, East L.A., El Monte, Maywood, Bell, Rosemead, and everywhere that the voice of Vin Scully reaches the mind’s ear and conjures some essential part of what means to be of our wonderful and terrible place. Vin via the Internet and cable TV wings over the world to cool and rainy Belfast even.

]]> Conor Caldwell is a musician, a traditional fiddle player, a teacher of the art, and pending an advanced degree in music. He’s also a first rate Gaelic football player – a game that combines the physicality of soccer, rugby, and (I’m told) basketball. Conor’s team is St. Agnes.

But this week, his team – his home team – is the Dodgers. Still jet-lagged from his discount flight, he’ll join my friends on Thursday and Friday at the opening games of the Dodgers/Phillies playoff series. He’ll have come 5,100 miles to see a baseball game that he could watch, I suppose, at some unholy hour of the morning in the comforts of Belfast. But it wouldn’t be the same for a true Dodger fan.

Welcome, Conor Caldwell of Belfast, to Dodgertown. Paint it blue.

The photo on this page is courtesy of Conor Caldwell.

80. Constant complaint

2009-10-10T00:50:15Z

We who are of this place are continually approached by provincials who complain that Los Angeles isn’t like ________ (insert the name of someplace with blizzards). Departing L.A. Chief of Police Bratton is the latest exile who says he is returning east, in part, because the climate here is “too constant.”

That indictment is one of the oldest on record. Richard Henry Dana, working aboard a merchant ship from Boston, arrived in southern California in 1834 and stayed nearly a year tanning hides. He hated the climate and condemned the Californios because of it. The memoir of his voyage – Two Years Before the Mast – became an American bestseller in 1840.

]]> Dana’s distain for southern California entrenched the view that indolent, sun-addled Angeleños were spoiled by the climate, which contained none of the moral rigor found in Boston’s foul weather. Bostonians (Chief Bratton is another one) have been telling this climatological fable for 170 years.

A century before Dana, Bostonians suffered the contempt of their British cousins, who bitterly complained that the highly variable weather of New England was a brutal parody of the gentle rains, breezy summers, and generally mild winters they were used to in the English Midlands. Boston’s answer was to redefine terrible weather as Providence, which provided Puritan backsliders with a daily reminder that they were sinners in the hands of an angry God. England had constancy in its climate; New England had weather that revealed divine attention.

Chief Bratton can button up his overcoat in the sure and certain knowledge that lousy weather brings him closer either to God or pneumonia.

And in my indolence, I’ll feel – as an electric current – the change from season to season in Los Angeles in the subtle shifts in the quality of light, the ebb of on-shore and off-shore winds, the cyclical replacement of birdsongs, and the scents (still there!) of the chaparral fading or blooming.

The image on this page of the Huntington Gardens was made by Flickr user P M M. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

79. Forget it, Jake, It’s LA

2009-10-03T00:15:08Z

I rode up to USC on Friday by bus and train to hear Bill Boyarsky. He is a 30-year veteran of the Los Angeles Times, a member of multiple Pulitzer Prize-winning teams of reporters, the writer of several books about California politics, and a columnist now for TruthDig.

Bill was to talk about his new book and take questions from what is always an idiosyncratic audience – the members of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. (I am a member of the LAIH, and both Bill and I are published by Angel City Press in Santa Monica.)

Bill’s book is Inventing LA: The Chandlers and their Times, a companion – but not exactly – to the new PBS documentary by Peter Jones. Inventing LA: The Chandlers and their Times documentary will be broadcast on KCET on Monday, October 5 at 9:00 p.m.

]]> Bill sketched in his talk the outline of the entangled Times and Chandler family stories: from General Harrison Gray Otis, to his son-in-law Harry Chandler, to his son Norman Chandler, to his son Otis Chandler, and then to Otis Chandler’s successor, Tom Johnson.

Bill was blunt about the general and his son-in-law, and truly there’s nothing appealing in their part of the story except the exhilaration they both shared in selling Los Angeles into existence between 1880 and 1920. Bill didn’t dwell in his talk on handsome, polished, Pasadena-rich Norman Chandler, who oversaw a family business in which the Los Angeles Times was run as just another subsidiary.

Bill lingered on Otis, the last Chandler. Bill knew him as his boss but not particularly well. Otis Chandler was big, athletic, in love with speed, and – Bill wryly noted – almost a monster of self-regard. His decision to turn to the paper over to a publisher from outside the family, in part out of self-indulgence – was as close to classical tragedy as an American story can get.

Otis Chandler made the Los Angeles Times almost great through the 1960s and 1970s, and every fall from that achievement can be threaded back to Otis’ decision.

Bill was guarded about the future that the story of the Times and the Chandlers led to. I found the Peter Jones documentary, with its somber music, to be wrenchingly melancholy. But one luncheon guest complained to Bill that this is only the Times, only the Chandlers, only a marginal story far from the places of real significance.

Like clueless Jake Gittes at the end of Chinatown, we’re always being ordered to ignore what we need to know best.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user Pieter Edelman. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

78. Apologia

2009-09-19T01:19:17Z

The hullaballoo of my retirement has ended, the Long Beach Press-Telegram has had its say, and if I may, I’d like to add a few more words about Lakewood and the purpose of my work there.

Successful communities aren’t handed their residents ready-made. Success requires patience and the constant mending of relationships, including relationships between community members and their city government.

Over more than three decades, I’ve focused my work on making and sustaining a sense of shared responsibility for the city in which I live. I’m proudest of my part in working with city council members, the city manager who has served Lakewood through my 32 years, and city staff members. We have sought to bring community members and their city together.

In our fallible way, we have made and mended relationships.

]]> Trust between institutions and those they serve isn’t easy, particularly in a time of deep distrust of all governments. But it is imperative that cities reach out to their residents and give them reasons to be loyal to the place they call home.

It has been my privilege to explain why loyalty to Lakewood is deserved. I’ve had help from city officials and staff who hold Lakewood in the same high regard and whose work is far more significant than my own. They have done the hard part. I’ve done what I love to do. I have been a storyteller.

And as a storyteller, I’ve found the words that articulated values and hopes, that framed the issues of the day for citizens to appreciate, and that may even have led voters to make good choices for Lakewood’s future.

I’ve mourned Lakewood’s losses and I’ve celebrated its milestones. I did good work.

I share a tradition of faith that emphasizes the acceptance of a vocation. The work that was given to me has been my vocation. What I have done is my witness to my beliefs.

All cities are like Troy in their potential to mingle tragedy and the commonplace, Homer knew. Even a nondescript suburb may claim someone’s allegiance, answer his longing, and persist in his memory. And Homer knew such places are as sacred as they are vulnerable.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user lavocado. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

77. “Who wouldn’t want to own the Los Angeles Times?”

2009-09-14T00:05:04Z

On the blustery spring day in 2000 when the Los Angeles Times was sold to the Tribune Company under the guise of a merger, Kathryn Downing – picked to be the publisher of the Times by its hapless CEO Mark Willes – answered a question which she thought had an obvious answer. A Times staff member, standing in a packed Chandler Auditorium to hear news of the sale, asked why anyone would want to buy the Times

“We are a crown jewel,” Downing answered. “Who wouldn’t want to own the Los Angeles Times?”

“Inventing LA: The Chandlers and Their Times,” (a documentary airing on Monday, October 5 at 9:00 p.m. on KCET), answers that question in bleak detail and long after the paper and the Tribune Company passed into the hands of the even more hapless Sam Zell and into bankruptcy.

]]> Most of the 170 members of the extended Chandler family would have a smiled sardonically if any of them had read Downing’s answer in the LA Weekly a few days later. Who wouldn’t want to own the Los Angeles Times? The Chandlers wouldn’t, although three generations of Chandlers had run it.

By then, some Chandlers had done everything they could to profit by ridding themselves of the newspaper. They no longer wanted this most visible symbol of their place in a city they no longer needed. Embittered by Norman Chandler’s decision in 1960 to turn over the paper and leadership of the family trust to his son Otis Chandler, two generations of family members had spent more than thirty years maneuvering for that day in late March 2000.

They had hired Mark Willes five years before to spruce up a troubled asset, not to publish a newspaper. Willes’ job was to boost the value of the shares in the Chandler trust, ironically designed by family patriarch Harry Chandler sixty years earlier to prevent the sale of the paper. When Willes’ work was done, and the Chandlers completed the torturous stock deal needed to transfer ownership, the Tribune Company possessed a nearly great newspaper about which Tribune managers knew next to nothing in a town they strove to dislike almost as much as a majority of the Chandlers already did.

Characteristically, the deal was poisonous for everyone involved except the Chandlers and their financial advisors. And now you can add Sam Zell to those who wouldn’t want to own the Times; he now calls his takeover of the Tribune Company a disaster.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user Kansas Sebastian. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

76. Muttering retreats

2009-09-06T21:24:36Z

I met Robin Kramer only once, more than a year ago. When she resigned as Chief of Staff to Mayor Villaraigosa in August, Ms. Kramer was memorably called the city's chief grown up and the levelest head in Los Angeles politics in the Los Angeles Times. Before she left the mayor’s office, she had a distinguished career serving men with demanding personalities – Councilmember Richard Alatorre, Mayor Riordan, Eli Broad, and Mayor Villaraigosa.

She had called and invited me to City Hall, I suppose because I had written occasionally about Mayor Villaraigosa, sometimes hopefully and sometimes skeptically. I had hoped that the city’s first Latino mayor since the 1870s would be a sign of something. I had feared that Villaraigosa’s short tenure in the state Legislature was exactly the wrong experience to lead Los Angeles.

]]> Still, I’m pretty naïve. I took a bus, a train, and the subway to City Hall because I was flattered to be asked by Ms. Kramer. If she had an agenda, I was oblivious to it. It turned out that she wanted to show me the mayor’s office.

The rooms the mayor has are grand and a little worn, like a great hotel that has had negligent owners. The conference room where the media gather for press meetings is large but crowded. The oversize furniture didn’t seem to fit. The mayor’s ceremonial office has a brave and optimistic mural on the far wall, but it’s dully colored, indistinct. I could see why Mayor Villaraigosa rarely uses this high, ornate room. It’s imposing but pointless – designed to impress the little men who were elected to serve in it and his visitors from the sticks.

Kramer showed me the room where Tom Bradley kept his exercise equipment. I thought of the two-bit chiselers who had sat there in the 1930s and 1940s – political hacks who had run the mayor’s extortion and bribery operations from that little room where Bradley’s stationary bike rested.

Ms. Kramer wished me well after our brief tour. She went to a meeting. I went down through City Hall’s cool marble loggias, triumphantly in the style of 1920s democratic totalitarianism.

I wondered then – have always wondered – how place matters in the shaping of a mind. I should have asked if the muttering of the building – its dozens of incised mottoes – had suggested anything of interest to the mayors Ms. Kramer served. If the white, middle-class, Protestant, and Republican future imagined in the fabric of City Hall in 1928 still touched anyone in passing.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user calwest. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

75. Perfectly ordinary

2009-09-03T00:23:35Z

Los Angeles lacks the kind of official warning we’d see on any other consumer product. Perhaps those illuminated Caltrans signs along the freeway can be reprogrammed to read “Get out now! While you still can!”

Today’s news is wildfires. Tornadoes, flood, and earthquake can’t be far behind.

Los Angeles is a dangerous city. As Mike Davis took pains to point out in Ecology of Fear, where we live is hardly fit for habitation. Any reasonable assessment of risk would limit development here to a single story of wood frame construction – and only in the few areas above a 100-year flood and below the quick burning chaparral. None of it would be safe from earthquakes, but a small house is least likely to kill you when it twists off its foundation. Then there’s earthquake liquefaction, when the ground beneath your feet turns into cream of wheat. And drought. And mountain lions. And plague, which swept in during a warm October in 1924.

]]> If Los Angeles were built to fit its hazards, the city would be village about the size it was in 1850 when it became an outpost on the margin of Manifest Destiny (and seen as monstrous, even then). It was a lethal little town. With a population of less 4,500 by 1860, Los Angeles suffered a murder a day.

The lethality of our home has always been high. But not uniquely so. America is a hard country and abounds with places to be wretchedly dismembered, dispossessed, knocked off, or driven to extremes by solitude.

Of all of hazardous America, Los Angeles is singled out. As Susan Orlean notes in her New Yorker blog entry on the August burning, “It underscored the essential absurdity of Los Angeles – a city of far too many people, perched on wobbly geology, without water, and perfectly flammable.”

That “perfectly” is perfect. As if Los Angeles only becomes itself in its capacity to be obliterated. And this awful perfection is “essential.” It cannot be abated. Those scary movies about relentless monsters and ever returning terminators are really about Los Angeles.

The city’s shortcomings in both of its aspects – as heaven and as hell – explain why we imagine it coming to an end, over and over. It’s the story of our disappointment in a city that never delivers ultimately on the extravagance of its dreams or its nightmares.

I think our home is perfect. Perfectly ordinary in its mix of joy and tragedy.

The image of the Station Fire on this page was made by Flickr user Kansas Sebastian. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

74. Newspapers and fried eggs

2009-08-30T00:46:26Z

I ate breakfast every morning in the mid-1950s before going to school. My mother fried four eggs (over easy) and four strips of bacon. My brother and I got two of each. She poured a glass of orange juice for my brother and another for me. He had toast. I rarely did. He didn’t read the Los Angeles Times, I always did. Or rather, I assembled my own newspaper from the kit of parts the Times presented daily. My father, who walked to the bus stop to get to his job at the gas company, left the paper behind on his chair at the kitchen table.

I read the non-political columnists. Jack Smith, of course, whose five-a-week slices of suburban life began in 1958. Matt Weinstock, with more of an edge from his own days at the Daily News. Jim Murray, the sports columnist. Although I wasn’t much interested in sports, I was interested words. And voices.

]]> I read the movie reviews, largely because mine wasn’t much of a movie going family. I read the comics. Dick Tracy. L’il Abner. Orphan Annie. Gasoline Alley. I read the city news – just the headlines and the story ledes; rarely to the end. I didn’t read even that much of the national and world news, except to glance at the front page last. Or almost last, I looked at the editorial page for the editorial cartoon. Not for the paper’s cranky Republicanism, in its editorials and selection of right-wing columnists, famous but unreadable.

My famioy subscribed to the Times and the Long Beach Press-Telegram, then an afternoon paper. My father would sometimes bring home a copy of the Herald Examiner he picked up on the bus on the way home from work. Two papers every day – sometime three.

And the experience, in retrospect, wasn’t much different from the experience of “new media” . . . finding the stuff you wanted to read every day in the welter of stuff you didn’t care about. Finding the voices that came alive in your mind’s ear. Making my own “newspaper” of many newspapers, even from the Times, which was widely considered one of the worst newspapers of that era. It was easy. A part of the morning that delivered the satisfaction of the two fried eggs and bacon made by my loving mother.

Maybe all that the old media needs is more breakfasts and more mothers.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user Martin Cathrae. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

73. The abandoned city

2009-08-27T01:14:50Z

Robin Rauzi in an essay in today’s Los Angeles Times finds her way finally to the Watts Towers. Perennially facing one catastrophe or another, the towers might be the perfect metaphor of Los Angeles – a place that many see as a bright but broken assemblage of disordered bits ready always to fall into ruin. The towers are labeled “baffling” in the headline to Rauzi’s piece, which is true enough about the city for some Angeleños as well.

Add that Sabato (Sam or Simon) Rodia arrived, built the towers, handed them over to a neighbor when he was finished, and then left Los Angeles forever. If you imagine that Los Angeles is always reached from the east, Rodia’s story might serve as another metaphor for the city – a place where you arrive after arduous travel, find insubstantial pleasures, ultimately find the city wanting, and finally abandon.

But if Los Angeles isn’t the terminal city of the East, but the leading edge of everything south of us, then the metaphor doesn’t work.

]]> The towers are in trouble again. As Rauzi notes:

If Watts Towers, like Lady Liberty at the mouth of the Hudson River, was positioned in a prominent locale (say next to the intersection of the 10 and the 405), more Angeleños might demand it get sufficient attention and care from the tangle of government agencies it's been entrusted to. The skinny pie-slice of a lot and adjacent park are owned by the California State Parks but administered by Los Angeles' Department of Cultural Affairs, under a lease that lasts another 20 years. Since 1990, the site also has been on the National Register of Historic Landmarks, but that means it's worthy of protection, not that there's cash set aside to do it.

Just last month, two city commissions – Cultural Affairs and Cultural Heritage – met at City Hall to face dogged complaints of inadequate maintenance and poor conservation at the towers. There's talk of asking for help from the Getty Conservation Institute or from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and of soliciting private donations. It'll take an estimated $5 million to get them back in prime condition.

No truer metaphor than that – the towers and the city both governed piecemeal and badly maintained, but beloved intermittently . . .

. . . a place that was arrived at after an arduous journey from the westside, was briefly enjoyed, found wanting, and then abandoned again.

The image on this page was made by Flickr user The Photographer. It was used under a Creative Commons license.

72. The unbuilt subway

2009-08-24T00:31:07Z

Symptom: the unbuilt subway that would take riders from the core of downtown west, past an invisible separating line.

That line isn’t diagnostic of our unease. Every city is a puzzle of lines through personal geographies. On my own block, I almost never walk on the west side of the street, even if westward is my destination. I’ll cross at the end of the block. Why? I don’t know. Habit or distrust of the unordinary. Forty feet away for 60 years, and there’s the other side of the street, which I know by sight as well as any 1000 feet of suburban street might be known. But I rarely go there.

Not the dividing line – which could be drawn anywhere, which has been redrawn repeatedly in the city’s history – but the unbuilt subway. The missing subway is symptomatic. It stands for what Los Angeles has not wanted, and it has little to do with public transit. What we do not want is a mingling and hybridization of our geographies. A miscegenation of space.

]]> The image on this page was made by Flickr user Victoria Bernal. It was used under a Creative Commons license.