Grandmother's Hands

 

Street Performer

 

Pesky Palm Trees

 

Ghosts Among Us

 

With Eyes That See The World And Can't Forget

 

So-Cal Winter

 

Getty Blue 3

 

The Fire and Rain Have Left Town

Only in Los Angeles can one go from summer on Monday to winter on Wednesday.  In November.

The fires have died for the most part, as we all must someday, but we are still displaced from our offices until, tentatively, mid-January due to the Getty Fire.  At least we still have our home.  That is the disaster mentality of L.A.:  “only a few out buildings burned, but people and animals are safe and the house still stands.”  A few news outlets confused “out buildings” with “outhouses,” which, of course, means something completely different to those of us who remember the implication.

We learned several weeks ago that the fire was caused by a tree branch falling on power lines along Sepulveda Boulevard in the pass just north of the Getty Center.  This according to the LAFD Arson-Counterterrorism Section.  Our office and buildings withstood the fire thanks to the hard working fire fighters, but the place needs some clean-up to remove ash, debris and burned foliage.  The air quality also needs to improve because it still smells like an ash tray outside.

And now we have the rain which rolled in with tremendous, thunderous aplomb yesterday.  Rains after fires can create some additional problems with mudslides, but rain also freshens the air, and the cool breezes were a welcomed relief from the stagnant 90 degree temps of Monday.

The traffic to and from work was a slog before the fire.  Now that we are commuting to our temporary work space downtown, each day we realize how lucky we were before the fires.  Vermont Avenue, one of the main north-south thoroughfares around the clogged 101/110/10 freeway interchange, is slow but colorful:  sit in comatose traffic while inching along through Little Bangladesh; Wilshire Center and the Metro Station; Koreatown; Pico-Union; West Adams; University Park.  Vermont offers a measure of real down-to-earth life we do not see in Brentwood on our former commute every morning and evening.  Sprinkled along the Vermont sidewalks are stands with street food and fruit and homeless denizens wandering up and down seemingly stunned and confused or just plain angry.  One person in a stuffed black bra and underwear screamed “Give me my money!” at the passing traffic.  A nearby restaurant shouted in neon “Pick your chicken, we kill it, cook it and serve it hot to your table!” Through it all, USC students bike to class with laptop bags slung over their shoulders.

Los Angeles:  where every commute is an adventure through several countries and social strata.

For now, no fires; no floods; and a city very much alive.

Vermont Avenue in the old days: still too much traffic

Charles Bukowski: Los Angeles Poet

My first encounter with Charles Bukowski was in the late 1980s at Dutton’s Books in North Hollywood.  Davis Dutton had a rack of Black Sparrow Press editions next to the door of the shop, and it was there I picked up the poet’s work and was instantly hooked.  His words were profane and often misogynistic, but also bloody and heartfelt.  I scanned through several poems that lit up my nervous system like 50,000 volts off a live wire.  I tried to read everything I could find by him and about him.  For sheer testosterone, he outdid Hemingway by a long shot.  Somewhere in his more than 60 books, I remember a scene in a stairwell in an old Skid Row hotel.  The character is trying to make it to the hospital when he realizes it is too late.  Blood vomits from his mouth and down his shirt as he collapses, suffering from a ruptured stomach due to an untreated ulcer.  Alcohol and hard living finished him and left him to rot in that tenement hotel.  It was powerful stuff.  That was Bukowski, brutal and bloody, but clinging to life.

He was born 94 years ago this month in Germany, but his family relocated to Los Angeles in the 1930s where he grew up and lived most of his life.  He is truly a Los Angeles poet, having lived in Hollywood, Downtown, East L.A., and San Pedro, often in cheap boarding houses, rundown apartments, and seedy motels.  He wasn’t a pretender; he lived life as he wrote it.

As a child, his father beat him and abused him physically and verbally.  His mother was powerless to stop the violence, but Bukowski often said the beatings helped his writing later in life because it forced him to understand the suffering of others.  He also was inflicted with a severe case of cystic acne that left him with deep pock marks and a craggy face that looked boiled and angry for his entire life.  Every sin the man committed was plain in his scarred complexion.  A handsome gent, he was not.

Alcohol played a major role in his art and life.  His alcoholism mirrored that of his characters in his writing.  The drinking started in high school and continued throughout his life.  In 1955, he nearly died from a bleeding ulcer, most likely similar to the one he assigned to a character in the work I read so long ago.  He worked for the United States Post Office until the age of 49 when he quit to devote himself to writing full time.  The books—novels, poems, plays nonfiction, chapbooks—rolled out of his typewriter at a blistering pace.  His was scorched earth writing; he took no prisoners while pointing his pen at Hollywood, drinking, whores, pimps, losers, transients, and other down-on-their-luck denizens of the streets of L.A.  All of it in writing that was on fire with nerve and emotion:  brazen, angry literature.

The first book I plucked off the shelves at Dutton’s was The Days Run Away Like Wild Horses Over the Hills (Ecco, 2002; originally published 1969).  It sits on my shelf to this day, as well as several other works collected over the years. What I love to do when procrastinating from some writing project or a set of papers needing comments is to browse one of the online databases of quotes from him.  I have many, many favorites.  Here are a few:

“For those who believe in God, most of the big questions are answered.  But for those of us who can't readily accept the God formula, the big answers don't remain stone-written.  We adjust to new conditions and discoveries.  We are pliable.  Love need not be a command nor faith a dictum.  I am my own god.  We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system.  We are here to drink beer.  We are here to kill war.  We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.”

“What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”

“You have to die a few times before you can really live.”

“An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way.  An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.”

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

“Find what you love and let it kill you.”

My final thought about Charles Bukowski concerns his gravestone.  The poet is buried in Rancho Palos Verdes down near Long Beach and the harbor of Los Angeles.  On his stone one will find the words, “Don’t try.”  It was the poet’s own philosophy of life, a way of accepting the fact that we have little control in this world.  There is fate and the choices we make, but in the end, life takes us where it will, and we can either be dragged, kicking and screaming, or we can do our best where we are with what we have.  Bukowski had his bottle, his pen and typewriter, and his life experiences to steel him against the vagaries and disappointments, the sheer violence of being alive.  And in that dark existence, he found true beauty in the profane, the decayed, the broken down.  We are lucky that he shared his vision with the world.  We have his poetry to get us through the rain and for that, I am grateful.

Crossing the Line

“Donald Sterling accused of racist, sexist remarks in new lawsuit.”

                                                                                                           Los Angeles Times  6/2/14

I stood just inside the doorway of the mall security office watching the teenage suspect, a black kid about sixteen years old.  He sat in a chair at a scarred, wooden table while across from him, a tough, no nonsense, off duty cop named Robert filled out the arrest report.  Between them on the table was a line of six Swatch watches, all the rage in the 1980s.  I thought the watches were ugly, but then what did I know, a college student trying to finance his education by working as a uniformed security guard at a mall.

Robert, a tall, African-American with twenty years on the force, was one of my favorite cops to work with because he took the job seriously.  That set him apart from the other jokesters who moonlighted at the shopping center.  Those cops could always be found sleeping in their unmarked mall rental cars or flirting with the teenage girls who worked the shops along the plaza.  Robert could be found reading the newspaper at the food court, and if you needed him on a call, he always responded.  He never condescended to the security staff or belittled us.  In a way, I admired him because he seemed more enlightened than the other off duty cops.

The kid had the misfortune of trying to shoplift the watches right in front of Robert as he walked through the department store looking for his wife’s anniversary gift.  He saw him sweep the watches from a display into an empty store shopping bag and make for the exit.  Robert followed him out into the mall and arrested him.  The kid never had the chance to run, although he immediately insisted that he paid for the watches but dropped the receipt somewhere.

“Man, this sucks,” he whined.  “I bought them watches.  Paid for ‘em with cash, too.”  Robert ignored him and kept writing out his report.  “Man, can’t a brother give another brother a break?”

Robert stopped writing and stared at the kid.  He glanced in my direction and motioned for me to close the door.  In a single fluid movement he grabbed a handful of the kid’s shirt from across the table and pulled him out of his seat.  “I’m black,” he hissed into the kid’s face, “but you’re a nigger!  I am not your brother!”

There was something about the brutal way he used the racial slur that made my stomach turn, as if he had physically slugged the kid in the face.  The room itself seemed to go dark, and I wanted to run outside for air.  Robert pushed the startled kid back into his chair.

In my job at the mall, we were given sensitivity training before we put on the polyester uniform and the plastic badge.  We were told that if we used racial language or acted in a discriminatory fashion, we would be fired immediately and escorted off the property.  The off duty cops we worked with didn’t follow those rules.  Racist and sexist language was a part of their culture, and they used those words for emphasis and punctuation.  What I found strange was how being a police officer separated them from civilians so completely that cops like Robert stopped being black, or Hispanic, or Asian, and seemed to exist without racial identification.  They were police and everyone else was just everyone else, or simply the enemy.  I witnessed firsthand the “us against them” mentality that would eventually culminate in a black man “proned” out on the payment and beaten by four officers on that fateful night in 1991 when Rodney King went down.

Words today have the same power for me now as they did in that tiny security office thirty years ago.  Words betray the thoughts of the author, and they must always be used cautiously.  They reveal character as well as wisdom and ignorance in equal measures.  Because words are my tools, I am always cognizant of this, and when I see someone’s words detonate in the air around him, I am reminded again how dangerous words can be.

After the uniformed cops showed up to take the kid and the evidence away, I ask Robert about his words.  “Why should you have a problem with one black man calling another one out?” he said.

His glare intimidated me.  “I was just uncomfortable,” I replied, feeling ashamed for questioning him, even though I feel now that I was right to do so.

“Get over it.”

Here in Los Angeles, thirty years later, I don’t think I ever will.

Breaking News!! Donald Sterling Is A Racist!

I’m puzzled by all of this furor that exploded this weekend involving Los Angeles Clippers’ owner, Donald Sterling.  Yes, his taped comments are reprehensible and dastardly.  (I like that word when dealing with classic silent movie bad guys, which in all the pictures of Sterling, he appears to fit the bill although he lacks the requisite handle-bar mustache)  But as we have heard ad nauseum, Sterling is not a born again racist.  This wasn’t an overnight conversion.  As the media has trumpeted, Sterling has a long history of racial discrimination.  There are lawsuits, one of them filed by the federal government, detailing Sterling’s discriminatory practices in real estate and business.  Former employees like Elgin Baylor have tried to sue him for, wait for it, racial discrimination!  This guy didn’t need a hood, nor did he need to sneak into a particular neighborhood under the cover of darkness to burn a cross on someone’s lawn.

This racist hid in plain sight in front of 18,000 people at an NBA basketball game!

And apparently, it was a not-so-well-kept secret among many people here in Los Angeles.

So if everyone knew Donald Sterling was a racist, why is this story breaking now?  And a follow up question, who stands to gain from the whole kerfuffle?  I mean, even the girlfriend with the tape recorder says she didn’t leak the recording, and in fact, she has said Sterling allegedly knew his comments were being recorded.  So what gives?

And to add a touch of irony to the proceedings, the NAACP announced today in a tweet that it will not be awarding Sterling any lifetime achievement awards next month.  Phew!  I’m glad they caught that in time before the plaque was engraved.  As Kevin Roderick said on NPR today, these awards are never given out based on merit.  It is all about the money.  Sterling writes a lot of checks to charity, probably to give himself some income tax relief, and until this firestorm erupted, every one of them was cashed, I’m sure.  When things go public, everyone grows a conscience.

This guy should get the boot from the NBA just on principle:  most of his employees are black and he obviously hates people of color, or at least doesn’t want them in the crowd at games or living in his real estate holdings or posing in pictures with his girlfriend (although he did approve sleeping with them if she should choose to do so, which to me is a bit confusing coming from a racist).

But there is a bigger question that must be answered:  if everyone knew this guy was a raving bigot, why didn’t someone take decisive action before now?  Money.  If you have money, you can pay for your ignorant views, your impolite beliefs, your moral failures by slipping a little cash under the doors of some charity or political campaign.  It is amazing the silence that can be bought for some moola.

It is also interesting to note that no one had a problem with Sterling until the Clippers were in serious playoff contention.  Over the last few seasons, the franchise has undoubtedly become quite a wealthy organization.  So no one cared when they were the laughingstock of the league, but now that they are contenders and bringing in the big bucks, Sterling is a racist and must be run out of the NBA?  Something does not add up here.

A year ago, I wrote about the Clippers and how I was rooting for them.  I like the underdog, and I was rooting for them this year, too.  I could not understand why no one gave them any respect, even with the way they have been playing.  In this town, everything is Lakers, Lakers, Lakers.  The Clippers have shown far more gumption and less dysfunction on the court than their hoity-toity co-tenants at the Staples Center.  The Lakers are the golden boys while the Clippers are the ugly stepbrothers.  Just once, I wanted the other L.A. team to at least get into the finals.  Now, with all of this distraction, I think it’s already over.  And I don’t know if I want them to win or even show up for the next game, because every ticket sold, every beer, every jersey, and of course, every victory puts money in Sterling’s pocket.  But this is not a problem that will be solved easily.  Sterling will not go quietly.  Ignoramuses rarely know when to take their lumps and slink off into the sunset.  We know this here in Los Angeles after the Frank McCourt debacle.

It is too easy to simply come out against Sterling and condemn racism.  It is too easy to commandeer the podium at the news conference and express outrage.  All the politicians from mayors to presidents have made it clear this weekend that racism must be stopped.  Tell us something we don’t know.  But there is more to this story, you can bet on it.  Yes, Sterling should be forced out as a team owner; yes, he should be penalized financially; yes, the fans are owed something for supporting the team and unknowingly lining the pockets of a bigot.  But what about all the people who knew what Sterling was like, the views he espoused, and continued to look the other way for the almighty dollar?  Given the often morally questionable behavior that is rampant in professional sports, those who have stayed quiet over the years are just as culpable.  The whole thing is a cesspool, and the city and Clippers fans must put up with the stench.