Where We Are

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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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.

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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.

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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.

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