December 2008 Archives

This past week made me realize that, besides being a perennial shopping derby, Christmas is a mad rush for place. Being home on the 25th is all-important, and getting home is a process that I never fully appreciated because I live in the place where I was born and grew up; for me, going home never meant anything more than a 30-minute drive across town. No freeways necessary.

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Christmas giveth and Christmas taketh away. Depending on how you look at it, former L.A. schools chief David Brewer got a lump of coal in his stocking this year, or he got the best present he could have asked for--or secretly wished for but couldn't ask for, until circumstances a couple of weeks ago forced the issue. After two years on the job, Brewer walked away from his brief tenure as superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District with a contract buyout of more than a half million dollars; though he initially declared he would fight to stay put, he didn't. You have to have other people fighting to help you stay put, and in the end--actually, in the beginning--Brewer simply didn't have those people.

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Last Sunday night, just before the first storm of the season hit, I went to a play reading at the Matrix Theatre on Melrose that launched a new effort to basically change the racial climate of theater. The effort was conceived of well before Barack Obama declared his candidacy for president, but the timing couldn't help but look impeccable. Matrix owner Joe Stern wants to turn his space into a kind of petri dish for plays that explore race and multiculturalism on a regular basis, and in more detail and nuance than they're generally explored. He wants to make the ramifications of color a core theme in American theater as opposed to an exceptional one, because, well, it's time. Long past time. So after three years of talking about it, Stern got his project under way last week with "Stick Fly," Lydia Diamond's play about the modern pressures within and without an upper-middle class black family who meet up at their posh house on Martha's Vineyard for a break of sorts. It's more like a breakdown: the boys have brought their girlfriends home to meet the parents, and the usual tensions--complicated by various racial twists--ensue. Shirley Jo Finney, who directed the acclaimed "Yellowman" a few years back, directed this one.

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Last Saturday was my street's annual block club Christmas party, an event I'd been forward to about as much as annual eye exam. That is, I had no problems going, but I would have just as soon postponed it or put it off altogether. The benefit and the bane of something like a block club is intimacy. You get to know people over time, and suddenly--usually by December, party season--you realize you don't want any more time to know them. You don't want a party. In those monthly meetings you've scoped out everybody's charm, and the less charming stuff that lies behind it you'd rather not scope at all. Our block club also has an annual street picnic in August, but that's different. It's out in the open; you can come outside of your house or not, participate or not. It's permeable. The Christmas party is like watching a play at a small theater--you're a totally confined audience. There is no intermission and no escape.

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I listen best at night. No surprise there--things are quieter and the world is eminently more listenable. Or more audible. It's like the daytime wall of sound comes down--cars, kids, electronics--and you can hear what's really going on behind it. That doesn't mean what you hear is all lovely, but it is revealing. However inelegant, it is the truth.

For the last ten years or so I've been on a listening mission, straining to connect with my fellow Americans. I've been doing it in an odd way. Every night at about 10:30, I turn on KFI-AM and the overnight "Coast to Coast" show. As fans know, it's a strange-phenomena program that discusses--with a very straight face--everything from alien invasions to pet psychics to government conspiracies and cover-ups. As the hour grows later, things get more bizarre (I've tried to stay awake to see what's in rotation at 4 a.m., but I haven't made it yet). It's the only time I willingly listen to an AM station like KFI, which is brazenly right-wing and has been since Tom Bradley left office, or maybe that's when I first noticed.

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