Who knew that Inglewood has a burgeoning arts scene in the northeast corner of the city?

Of course I did, but I have to admit, I didn't give it much thought. Not nearly as much thought as I've given lately to police misconduct, development, homelessness, tagging wars or even the incidence of stray dogs that directly correlate to the rising number of foreclosures and otherwise empty houses popping up in my picturesque neighborhood like dandelions. Nearly every day, I check the curbside lawn outside my local 99-cent Store to see if people will forego throwing trash on it for once; if it's relatively free of plastic bags at the end of the day, I notch a victory. Silly stuff, overly NIMBY stuff, but in my ongoing psychological battle to keep Inglewood normal (for utter lack of a better word), these are the aesthetics I obsess about. My concern with visuals has been limited to clean lawns, paved streets and graffiti-free walls--concern with what isn't there versus what is. I feel I have no choice. Real art is lovely and welcome, but I didn't see it as a solution to anything. It could wait

As impressive as the mix and breadth of art is the mix of the artists themselves: young Otis grads and more grizzled vets who've been laboring obscurely in Inglewood twenty years or more. Black and white artists who seem genuinely united in their efforts to jump-start a scene they see as they belonging to them all. At the Saturday reception at the 703 gallery on Hyde Park Boulevard, I certainly felt like I belonged, as did my non-Inglewood resident friends and everyone else in the room who stood sipping wine and happily noshing on catfish and Jamaican fritters. Normal? This felt way better than that. Empowering, even. Better than I've ever felt looking at even a spotless lawn in front of the 99-cent store. Art, indeed.

This image was taken by flickr user Roadsidepictures. It was used under the Creative Commons License.

At first glance, nothing. Last week marked the gentlest transition of LAPD police chiefs in my lifetime--Bill Bratton to Charlie Beck. That was partly because tensions between the cops and the black and brown neighborhoods they police (and sometimes terrorized) have eased notably during Bratton's tenure, partly because crime has dropped by many percentage points across the city.

I won't argue with improvement. But improvement is not the same thing as success or full justice. The game is not over. Bratton promised more transparency, especially in the case of controversial police shootings; let's just say he has both given and taketh away. A master of PR, Bratton got ahead of public anger after police cut down 13-year-old Devin Brown in 2005, but he ultimately found that shooting in policy. And while crime may be down, racial profiling continues to be a huge problem in the city; of the hundreds of complaints filed against the LAPD in the last several years, none have been sustained by the department. Post-racial? Depends on what side of the blue line you're on.

But what disturbs me most is how the black establishment, notably the black press, has succumbed whole hog to the Bratton charm offensive. A recent exit interview with Bratton in the L.A. Sentinel could find no fault nor mount any challenge to the chief or his history here. Over at the Wave, a weekly columnist/watchdog who has been a fierce critic of the LAPD since the '65 Watts Riots dropped that stance completely after Bratton asked for a public audience with her. When I asked her about the change of heart, she groused that my problem was that I needed to be more optimistic--this from a woman whose professional demeanor could never be described as optimistic.

But is keeping public servants accountable to their constituents incompatible with optimism? To the contrary; one can't exist without the other. All I'm saying is that we need to keep up the scrutiny even as we applaud. Civil rights attorney Connie Rice, a Bratton advocate, issued a post-Rampart report on the department in 2006 that warned of an occupying-army, us-against-the-streets mindset that still persists in the rank and file. That was three years ago. Just because we've stopped looking for that mindset doesn't mean that it's gone away.

This image was taken from flickr user kevindean. It was used under the Creative Commons license.

I don't know the man's name, like I don't know the name of so many other people at the El Segundo dog park. My icebreaker question a month ago was what was the name and breed of his dogs; I didn't get around to asking his (name, not breed). That isn't considered rude in the tiny social bubble of the dog park, where canines are the real news and objects of interest and humans aren't that important. Still, this man stood out for me. I'd know his mussed white hair, ruddy face and hearty, gravelly voice anywhere. I figure he's Irish; he lit up when I told him my first name, calling it a fit one for an Irish girl.,

Yes, I told him. My mother had a thing for Irish names. Lucky me.

I'll just call him George. Last Sunday I saw him, per usual. After an upbeat chat about college football and the progress of my rescue pup, Honey, he paused, like he wasn't quite sure how to say what he was going to say next. "I'm trying to figure out your shirt," he said.

My shirt? I glanced down. I was wearing a t-shirt with a logo that read, "Black Girl, 'Nuf Said." One of a hundred t-shirts I wear to the dog park on Sundays. It's self-explanatory to me, if maybe a little cheeky, like most logos and bumper stickers. What was he asking? I felt an instant tension, a familiar racial wariness and human distance that I did not want to feel. Not at the dog park. Although now that I thought about it--now that I had to think about it--this was El Segundo, famously white and cloistered, population sixteen thousand, nice little burg by the ocean that people like me couldn't venture into after dark for decades, let alone live in, or even walk a dog through..... "Figure out what?" I said, cheerfully.

George kept smiling and went on to say that perhaps my shirt was saying that being black was all there was, and I was excluding other things about me that were also important? I fought more tightening and wariness. No, I said evenly, not at all. But being black was certainly as important as anything else. He nodded, satisfied, or done with his questions for now. We drifted apart to search for our animals, came back together, talked a bit more about Honey and her terrible allergies and what to do about them.

I warned him about a volatile dog owner who had lost his temper a few days before and roughed up my golden/shepard mix, Toby. Picked him up by the collar and threw him in the dirt.

George looked shocked. "That's terrible!" he said. "Who was this guy? What'd he look like?"

I almost said, he was white. I wound up saying, young and blondish. Seemed okay on the surface, smart and all, but he wasn't. Dangerous. You know the type.

George nodded. More than 'nuf said.

It was all too predictable. After months of local speculation about why the city of Inglewood wasn't releasing a report on the practices of its police department, a department that became infamous last year for fatally shooting four black and Latino men in four months, the city announced last week that we're all going to have to wait some more. A city spokesperson said that the report, which Inglewood hired an outside body to do well over a year ago, could violate attorney-client privilege and therefore had to stay under wraps for the time being. What sort of attorney-client privilege? No details. When would the report be released? "Eventually," said the city spokesperson.

]]> Excuse me? Such vagueness reeks not just of incompetence, but arrogance. The whole point of the report was for Inglewood officials to demonstrate transparency, accountability and expediency in the wake of a string of highly controversial shootings by its police force last year--among its victims were a 20-year-old man sitting in a car at a drive-thru, a homeless man with a toy gun and a postal worker roused in the middle of the night by cops who had a wrong address (also a dog, Topaz, that happened to be in the line of fire of the 48 shots unloaded on the homeless guy--but at least the dog survived). Last year's constellation of shootings wasn't the first time Inglewood made national news for questionable police conduct, but it was certainly the most sensational, and with good reason. Faced with so much negative attention and palpable public anxiety about the next shooting, Inglewood city officials had little choice but to act; the council hired the county's Office of Independent Review to assess what exactly was going wrong and how to fix it.

That was just about a year ago. Rumor has it that the report was completed in the spring and the city council had been sitting on it ever since. Inglewood Police Chief Jacqueline Seabrooks told me last month that that's an exaggeration, but she didn't say what was holding things up. She did say that there's nothing in the OIR report that she doesn't know and no problem cited that she isn't currently working to correct.

Great--so why not let taxpayers in on what they're entitled to know, on what they need to know, on what they've paid to know? I suspect that the report, despite Seabrooks' confidence in the progress of the department, is still damning enough to have Inglewood civic leaders in a panic about lawsuits emanating from the families of the shooting victims, and any other victims of police misconduct in Inglewood over the last, oh, 20 years. Hence the vague but telling concern about breaching "attorney-client" privilege.

Not even the city Police Oversight Commission, a citizen watchdog group that the council put together in the wake of the shootings, has seen the report. Nor does the commission have the power to demand it--actually, it doesn't have the power to do a lot of things that it should be doing. Which makes me and a lot of other people in town wonder if the whole police reform push in Inglewood is mostly a charade.

But let's not forget that the IPD is also being investigated by the Justice Department, another development last year after the fourth-in-four-months shooting made Inglewood a national model for what police ought not to be doing, especially in neighborhoods of color. Whatever the misgivings of our city fathers, make no mistake that the truth will out--eventually.

This image was taken from flickr user kevindean. It was used under the Creative Commons license.

With all the political tumult of the recently completed summer, I'd almost forgotten about a loss in the middle of the season that hit me as hard and unexpectedly as the loss of a relative who hadn't been sick. Tired, maybe, but not sick. Not to my eyes.

I remembered the loss yesterday, driving through town, though I actually remember it every week, sometimes more; the regret comes in spasms that I expect will decrease over time. Although since I'm almost sure nothing will replace what was lost, that expectation might be wishful thinking. I might hurt a while.

I lost a garage. It was a general automotive repair place called Manchester Brake & Auto, an unassuming, almost old-fashioned looking place on Manchester and 3rd avenue on the east side of Inglewood. Every car I ever drove or owned, starting with a '73 Dodge Dart Swinger that I inherited from my grandfather and used through college, spent some time at Manchester Brake. The place opened in 1965. I went there because my parents took their cars there, but I quickly came to appreciate the family who ran the business, a father and two sons who were all mechanics. One brother was short, cheerful and outgoing, the other one was tall and taciturn, and the father kind of split the difference on all counts. But they were all famous for their honesty. If they couldn't fix your car or if it didn't need fixing, they'd tell you right away. They'd send you to somebody who could do the job that they couldn't, and do it well. There was never any tension or haggling at Manchester Brake; a garage isn't a place where customers hang out, but it often felt like they did as they lounged on wooden school chairs set on the driveway outside the hydraulic lifts (Manchester didn't have an office or lobby) waiting for a diagnosis or to pick up a car.

What fascinated me most about the place, as time went on and my social awareness took shape, was its perfect ordinariness and reliability in a neighborhood that had undergone huge transformations since 1965. The Manchester guys were white; '65 was not exactly an auspicious year to open. After the Watts Riots, South Central and nearby places like Inglewood emptied out of white folks almost overnight. White-owned small businesses went with them. Manchester Brake not only stayed, it settled. It was definitively Inglewood in a town that was rapidly losing its touchstones and searching for new ones. Through uneasy times in Inglewood up to and including this year, Manchester was one tiny measure of reassurance that we all were living a life good enough to have within reach a place we could drop off a beloved car at a moment's notice and know it would be taken care of. It countered the occasional but jarring threat of urban chaos with middle-class predictability.

And then, unpredictably, it wasn't there. One day in July, I drove to Manchester in the morning to have the guys (two of them--the father died many years ago) check out my tires, which they had done two weeks earlier. This was just a follow-up. I hadn't called beforehand; I'd never needed to. What I pulled up to was a shuttered garage door and a hand-lettered sign that said Manchester had closed for good due to retirement. The departure looked hasty, or maybe just humble. The sign thanked all the customers for their business the last 44 years.

I sat idling in my Chrysler for many minutes, unbelieving. I had no idea where to take my car next. And for a very brief moment, I didn't know where I lived.

This image was taken by flickr user phxpma. It was used under the Creative Commons license.

Call me un-American, but I've feared the word 'choice' for a long time. It's the preferred euphemism for not addressing inequality or monopolies or greed or social reform, or general indifference to all of the above. What better word to make it sound as though you're putting everyone on a level playing field, or more precisely, a level harvesting field where all anybody has to do is reach up and pick fruit that's roughly the same distance above their head as anybody else's?

There's a lot of hollowness in the so-called School Choice Plan recently passed by the L.A. Unified School District. What's being touted as 'choice' and a plum opportunity for community empowerment (another favorite euphemism for a power grab) is really something opposite. The district sees potentially giving away 50 new campuses to the most qualified operators--more than likely charter-school operators--rather than keeping them in-house as the kind of big change local education needs. But there's no guarantee that new casts of characters produce new results; less oversight is not such a good thing if people, even well meaning people, don't know what they're doing.

'Choice' is actually the problem I have with charters, even the successful ones. Charters can select kids, and then use their own criteria to keep selecting them; public schools have to take everybody. Call me a socialist--please--but there's something noble in the obligation to serve everyone. Lest anybody forget, schools are more obligated than most public entities to do that because schools are the oldest purveyors of inequality in our history. How many studies of modern-day segregation do we have to read to realize that? How many crappy, all-colored schools do we have to write about before we decide to do serious intervention?

The district plan might go down better with me if it included some provisions to serve the most underperforming group of students in the district, black students. But it doesn't. The plan does mention English Language Learners, as it should, but no one else as a group. Why not? I know that African Americans are barely ten percent of the student population, but they are the most imperiled. They always have been. The district that serves them owes them a plan, and a course of action, that takes that into account once and for all.

This image was taken by flickr user Pip R. Lagenta. It was used under the Creative Commons license.

The post-vacation bubble didn't last long. L.A. and Maui are separated by five hours in a plane, two hours of time zone, ocean dynamics (trade winds versus coastal fog), and so much, much more than that.

It's a strange feeling, the waiting around until the ban is lifted from your own street. You think about the things you have to do around the house when you get back, like wash dishes and pay bills, and not about the fact that your house is a potential crime scene. I resent that potential. I resent it because it mocks my stubborn but very necessary and mostly valid idea that I live in a normal house on a normal block. On the other hand, how else am I supposed to live? How are any of us?

My neighbors don't fume about this intrusion into their sense of normalcy: It happens frequently enough in this stretch of Inglewood to be considered normal in its own right. When the police sound the all-clear, they go back home and resume what they were doing, shake the dust off their shoes and forget about it until the next time. This particular corner of the earth opens up and swallows what just happened, erases the last several hours of history. My neighbors might tut-tut or even laugh about it, like a SWAT lockdown was a funny thing that happened after church on a Sunday. I don't like this kind of minimizing or denial, though I understand it. I've been guilty of it more than once.

This time, it isn't our block that's roped off, but the one just around the corner. I'm instantly relieved about that, in a selfish way- I'm free, those folks aren't. Cheered by my liberation and intact sense of normalcy, I take my usual dog walk and head down the inconvenienced block, which is part of my usual route. I'm in full, civic-minded denial: I'll be damned if another Inglewood crime-scene sweep will keep me from my daily claim on the neighborhood. If the pleasures of Maui were mine to take home, surely home is a good place to take them. A safe place for dreams, wish-you-were-here photographs, good feeling. It has to be.

The police tape is gone, though people are still milling about in the street, talking. Turns out this was no search, but something far worse -somebody was killed. The victim was a pleasant man of about 30 that I knew from my dog-walking. Shot five times in the heart, a guy tells me soberly, by somebody who was more than likely in a gang. Died on his way to a trauma center that used to be closer, but isn't anymore. I'm stunned. Was Otis in a gang? I ask. The neighbor looks at me, but past me. "Not to my knowledge," he says.

I walk on with my dogs, chastened, outwitted again by some force I can't describe or make go away. The neighbors on the unfortunate block eventually disperse and go back inside. The peacefulness of this street that normally reigns returns. The earth closes up. Knowledge? Normalcy? How little we know, or care to know. Maybe that's best. Maybe that's a kind of death. I need another vacation already.

My 30-year reunion wasn't what I expected. In some ways it was entirely opposite of the high school experience I had gone to the Long Beach Hilton to celebrate, which in my particular case was satisfying, encouraging and about as optimistic a time in my life as I've ever had.

]]> I realize that in itself is entirely opposite to the typical high school experience of many of my peers and for pretty much anybody who was oriented by the 60s and then lived its consequences through the 70s (I can't speak for the 80s and later, when the acquisitive, America-first Reagan era set in and high school dissolved completely as a touchstone for me). But I believed without a shred of irony that being a 17-year-old senior was the pinnacle of sophistication, that 1979 was what I'd been preparing for since kindergarten, and that my moment had come. Yes, the system was corrupt, society was unequal and the government was untrustworthy. But I was going to ride roughshod over all that--literally forge a new path-- with the talent and passion I had been cultivating in public schools for the last dozen years. The time was nigh. The world was my glittering disco ball, and it would know me. Things would change.

Et cetera, et cetera. One of the first things I realized at the reunion was how alone I was in my grandiose thinking (which, mercifully, I always kept to myself). The bash at the Long Beach Hilton saw plenty of conversation, but almost none of it was about taking the world by storm or falling short of dreams or assessing where people are now versus where they envisioned being 30 years ago. Instead, this lot of earlyish middle-aged people looked around eagerly for who was there and whether they recognized them. Who was alive? was the most pressing question of the evening, and the departed were represented by a single candle that burned on a small table on the dance floor throughout the night. We were instructed to bow our heads in a moment of remembrance for the Mohicans who had gone on to God (I cheated on that head bow, just like I'd cheated mostly every time we were called to do the pledge of allegiance during high school assemblies and the like. Who were we remembering, exactly? Allegiance to what?)

But back to the party--because that's what the reunion was. Not an adult party where people chat over wine and exchange business cards and war stories related to their line of work. That's not what the Stars of '79 (our class name) came to do. No, we came to illuminate the past for a night, to break away from all the war stories that accumulated too quickly after high school (jobs, marriage, kids, illness, divorce) and sink back into the blissful feeling of what it was like to only have to worry about cleaning out a locker or getting to practice on time. Or, in our most reckless moments, taking the world by storm.

People remembered me, which was surprising. Though Gardena was a happy experience, I was by no means popular or well-known or especially well-dressed. In a graduating class of 900, I lived in that big, comfortable netherworld between prom queen and outcast. I had odd but acceptable interests, like drama club. I sat in the back of many a room and doodled cartoons and logos on xerox paper. Yet people saw my face and lit up, becoming young and hopeful again as they remembered.

"Erin Aubry!" they cried. "You look the same! You haven't changed a bit!"

I smiled back with all the brilliance I could muster, and returned the hug of somebody I didn't know especially well in school, maybe not at all. That I meant something to that somebody now, maybe even then without ever knowing it, was a discovery worth making 30 years down the road.

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For most people, murder is a plotline or a movie genre, at most a chilling but compelling headline that glows, sometimes against its will, among other gray headlines in the sea of daily news. This changes when murder happens to you, or to somebody you know. Then the abstract crashes to earth and becomes purely awful. And unlike a plot or a movie, the awfulness doesn't resolve. It keeps opening up into more dimensions of agony and what-ifs for the family and friends of the murder victim--days pass, the death recedes but more dimensions open. Love is eternal, but so, I think, is despair.

]]> I knew Lily Burk, the 17-year-old girl murdered last week in a bustling part of the Wilshire corridor. I worked for many years with her father, Greg Burk, at the LA Weekly, when we were both staff writers. True to her name, Lily was bright and blooming, and had been that way since I met her as a child. She was sweet but complicated, reserved in a singularly teenage way, but very open. I didn't see her often, only when I visited Greg and his wife Deb, but I looked forward to the times that I did--what would Lily look like now? What would she be like? Who would she resemble more? Whenever I saw her--always taller, more articulate and more assured than when I'd seen her last--she made me reflect fondly on growing up. Watching her go happily through what was long past for me made me feel good about the future. As journalists, Greg and I talked constantly about the crap and misery going on in the world, starting with our own workplace; Lily was hardly shielded from that stuff, but she was having fun in the world anyway. She was a good sign. I took it.

Greg has always been a good sign. Bad things happen to good people all the time, but that doesn't make the bad thing any easier to countenance. Greg is smart but self-effacing, a poetic writer, an astute observer of music and other big things, a man of great heart and conscience that are matched by a great sense of humor. Lily was coming into all of that. I don't mean to eulogize her father by speaking well of him, but I can't help but feel that the Greg I knew before last weekend is gone. He has changed. That can't be helped. Greg will be Greg, but different. He will still be a good sign for me, always a good sign, but different.

The last time I saw Greg, he told me an odd but funny story over breakfast. Somebody came knocking on his door about 2 or 3 in the morning; when he opened it, an oddly dressed woman gave him some convoluted account about how her boyfriend or husband had left her after a fight, how she needed to get somewhere to get money or a ride or a connection, and could Greg drive her somewhere? I think that somewhere was a parking lot. "Of course you didn't do it," I said. Greg shrugged: he had. She needed help, he gave it to her. It was his way of refuting that crappy, miserable, closed-up world we talked so much about. It was a risk to engage that world at its word, but Greg did.

Lily was poised to do it, too. Though she's gone--too fast, too violently, much too unfairly--I believe the future that I glimpsed through her is still out there.

This image was taken by flickr user hamedmasoumi. It was used under the Creative Commons license. ]]>

11:30, Monday: It figures. The Senate's intro to Sonia Sotomayor's testimony is a frank face-off over the issue that's rarely spoken about but has cast a giant shadow over the judicial system, and the Supreme Court in particular, for decades. That issue is race and identity and how it dictates judge's views on legal and social matters.

Talk about talking out of two sides of your mouth (or ten sides of your neck, as a friend of mine says.) This false hurdle of racial bias is just what Obama had to overcome too; he basically had to assure white voters that he meant them no harm because he is black. Sotomayor has to do the same thing because she's Puerto Rican (which very often is black as well, but that's another blog--let's just say Puerto Rican is one of the more suspect Latino groups for that reason). She has to bear the burden of proof of fairness and impartiality.

Of course that's something every Supreme Court nominee must and should bear during confirmation hearings. But with white nominees the burden has been mostly rhetorical; in this case, it's front and center. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham has already denied that Sotomayor has not demonstrated she is "racist," which of course means he thinks she is. It'll be interesting to hear what Sotomayor, inscrutable up to this point, has to say for herself, and perhaps for the rest of us who are nonwhite and and who have borne that burden of proof for a long time.

7:30 Tuesday: Sympathies, opinions and prejudices, oh my! Sen. Jeff Sessions is going at Sotomayor, guns blazing, over her lack of impartiality he thinks is evident in her past remarks about the myth of impartiality, especially as it relates to color and personal background. Sotomayor is the picture of measuredness as she tries to explain to a very huffy Sessions that what she means it's that it's best to acknowledge one's "prejudices" and take them into account as one judges, and not to let them dictate inappropriately. And she states that sometimes those "prejudices" are good things, that they can lead to sound judicial outcomes. Sessions is having none of it. Of course he holds up Sotomayor's appellate ruling on the the New Haven firefighter reverse-discrimination case as proof of her SOP's. Does he hold up anything else, cite any pattern or practice of gross bias over 18 years of her career? Of course not. That would be, well, discriminating.

8:15 Sotomayor has a sense of humor--she laughs heartily in response to a question about the issue of cameras in the courtroom. It's kind of startling, but a big relief. A sense of humor (or of the absurd), especially in the middle of a grilling like this, is a sure sign of sophistication. Or maybe she knows better than us that this is all theatrics--for all the hand-wringing about bias, etc., Sotomayor's judicial record is as middle-of-the-road as it gets. It's not even possible to argue that point. But of course with a nonwhite nominee (or job candidate), critics will zero in on the one event or remark that "outs" the bias we all know is lurking there somewhere, waiting to be deployed...

9:30 Sen. Orrin Hatch, though somewhat less belligerent than Jeff Sessions, also gives Sotomayor the third degree about the New Haven case. At least he brings up other issues, like gun ownership rights (though that's an intricate part of the whole guns-and-God worldview of heartland--read 'white'--America). Sotomayor says later that no one group of people has a monopoly on making good decisions, or bad ones. True. But since the court has been stacked with white males for the vast majority of its history, isn't it time for some other group to test the limits of its mediocrity, or its brilliance?

Can somebody please out the elephant in the room? As John Kyl takes his turn castigating Sotomayor about her lack of impartiality and questioning her about the improper use of her background, I want a heckler to stand up and scream: "People! White judges side with white people ALL THE TIME!" Improper use of one's background? Bias? Yes, sometimes. It's what locked us into terrible rulings like Plessy vs. Ferguson and Dred Scott, rulings that became hallowed "settled law" that was awfully tough to uproot. Background, my eye. We all need to free ourselves and admit that when it comes to law and established order in America, white is definitely a primary color. Brown and black don't even come close.

The image associated with this post was taken by Flickr user bootbearwdc. It was used under Creative Commons license. ]]> tag:www.kcet.org,2009:/local/blogs/cakewalk//13.1549 2009-07-08T20:06:52Z 2009-07-10T19:07:41Z

"Renaissance man" is one of the most shopworn phrases around, to say nothing of the most overworked notion in American culture. Ditto for "new beginning," "starting over," and "reinvention." But when the cliché truly fits, you might as well wear it--and top it off with a newsboy cap.

Roberto Arturo Fucci did exactly that on Sunday night at the reception of his first solo art show at The Talking Stick coffeehouse/café on Lincoln Boulevard in Venice. He was nattily dressed in blue and gray for the occasion, a switch from his usual artist-y duds of jeans or khakis and sneakers. On stage, he surveyed with clear satisfaction the café walls that were lined with more than thirty of his abstract paintings, intensely detailed, lively works that recall Kandinsky and Klee--"colorist," in art lingo-- but that project Fucci's own restless energy. "You like my hat?" he said in his gravelly voice, removing the cap and waving it at the appreciative crowd. "Not bad, eh?"

]]> Roberto--Robert Fusey to his friends--is 85. Sunday night's opening was the culmination of a remarkable run of creativity that started five years ago, when Robert transplanted to L.A. at the tender age of 80. It was the first time he had ever put paint to canvas, very nearly the first time he'd done any art at all. Oh, he sketched some, mostly cartoon figures, but that was years ago. And there were some pictures he did in kindergarten that his mother raved about but that he, all of 5 years old, dismissed as rank amateurism. That was pretty much it. In his professional life he was an educator, a high school principal in Brownsville, a famously tough section of the Bronx in his native New York; later he worked for the IRS. Eventually he retired to Florida with his second wife, a woman he lovingly described as his soul mate. End of story, for the moment.

But things happen. The wife succumbed to cancer. Roberto moved again, this time to Venice, to be close to his daughter, singer/guitarist Stefani Valadez. It was in Venice, as Stefani's husband David said in his stirring intro to the evening, where the magic began. Or found a way out. Far from being a hobby he was hoping for, Roberto's first encounter with paint and canvas was a flash point that fired an artistic imagination that's been firing ever since. The display at the Talking Stick is only a fraction of the 300 paintings, nearly all abstracts, that Roberto's produced in the last five years. The passion frequently kept him up nights; sometimes he painted two canvases in 24 hours.

For a lounge lizard like me who's fretted forever about a lack of ambition, the math alone is mind-boggling. Where'd all this productivity come from? Is it talent that Roberto consciously thwarted all his life that's finally demanding an appearance? A well-timed statement from a higher power? An expression of the humble art of determination that's inherent in pure hard work?

A self-described "spiritual agnostic", Roberto is less interested in the esoteric idea of where it all came from than in the more pragmatic idea of where it's going: forward. He's an artist now. And he says we can all go there, whether it's painting, writing or some other creative endeavor. "Anybody can do this," he told the crowd confidently. "Just do it! Let it go. Let it come out." He talked a bit about one his favorite musicals, "Zorba the Greek," which features a song with a line that goes, "Life is what you do while you're waiting to die."

"And I realized, that's not true," he said. "Art is what happens while you're waiting to die."

Right. So what are we all waiting for?

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