Where We Are

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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