Much to Say…

…but I probably won’t say much of it here on this blog. To quote Daily Breeze reporter Denise Nix’s quote from legal pundit Laurie Levenson:

people involved in legal matters must be very careful about what they say in blogs, shorthand for Web logs, because it “can come back to bite them.”

Levenson said blogging defendants generally make their attorneys very nervous.

“It’s not like other writing — it just sort of vomits out on the page and it’s hard to take back or try to put back in context,” Levenson said. “It’s wrought with dangers.”

I don’t want to make my attorney nervous. Ever. He’s been very indulgent of my blogging venture, and I repay his faith by pretty much avoiding the topic of my trial. Not only could anything I say be “used against me,” as the Miranda warning has it, but striking the right tone is difficult. This hasn’t been easy, but I’m not looking for sympathy, so I don’t want to say anything that might cause people to feel sorry for me. Conversely, many things have happened to make me laugh out loud, but by sharing the laughs with you, I fear it would seem I was making light of the situation, and I don’t want to do that either.

Beth Barrett of the Daily News asked me to comment after the verdict yesterday, and I declined to talk about anything legal, verdict included. I did say one thing to her (which she didn’t use): I told her this experience has been emotionally overwhelming because of the many expressions of heartfelt sentiment about me from family, friends, former co-workers and clients, friends I haven’t heard from in 25 years, and even people I only know online. I am so grateful for that, inexpressibly grateful.

But I’m just an ordinary person who has led, generally speaking, a fairly ordinary life. I am sure that many people just like me have the love and respect of others, but don’t get to hear it very often. I was lucky, in a way. A bad thing happened to me, and so people came out of the woodwork and out of their shells to tell me how they felt, and to offer help. Their help–your help– made a difference in many ways, especially in my outlook on the whole ordeal.

My hope for all of you is that it doesn’t take a disaster for the people in your life to let you know how they feel about you.

One funny thing happened today. I went across the street from where I live to buy coffee for my wife and me. I had forgotten that this coffee shop stacks copies of the Daily Breeze for sale by the register. Because I’m an “area man,” the Daily Breeze played the story of the verdict sentence above the fold — with this horrible picture of me I put on my blog last summer. It was one of those ‘hold the digital camera three feet away from your face while you’re wearing a stupid hat’ pictures — now reproduced above the fold in a newspaper available everywhere in the South Bay.

Tomorrow can’t come soon enough!

Fortunately, even though I’m a regular at this coffee shop, no one behind the counter seemed to make the connection. Or, if they did, they were still willing to sell me coffee.

Seeing my face in that paper reminded me I owe an apology to David Zahniser, the excellent LA Weekly reporter who was at the Breeze when I was indicted. As he followed the early weeks of my story, he kept identifying me, mistakenly, as a resident of Rolling Hills Estates. This is probably because the LA County registrar of voters keeps getting an important part of my address wrong, no matter how many times I try to fix it.

At one point David left me a voice mail asking me to clarify where I lived — he obviously knew his information was iffy. Now, I always had good dealings with David, always liked and respected him, and never intended him harm. But I wasn’t in the mood to correct the error at the time. I also didn’t think I should be talking to any reporters. So, for months, until he left the Breeze, I was always identified as a Rolling Hills Estates resident.

There were times when seeing that mistake repeated once again was the highlight of my day.

David, I’m sorry. Your reportorial instincts were right as usual. I don’t live in Rolling Hills Estates. I hope you will forgive me.

Stuck on 400

Hello, friends…

When I started this blog, I had no idea what I’d do with it. At various times, it has been like a friend, my own media channel, a shingle, a distraction, a guilty pleasure and, above all, a place to give my writing and photography skills a chance to develop.

The post before this one is the 400th I’ve completed since I started up on December 14, 2005. If anyone had told me I would write 400 posts on this thing in a little over a year, I would have said:

a) that was a madly ambitious goal;

b) gee, how many books and screenplays could I have written if I’d put all that writing energy into those things?

Four-hundred posts! And I tend to write long for a blogger. No terse Instapundit-style allusions for me. I quote at length, and then write at more length. Figure my average post is about 500 words, excluding what I copy-paste from others; I’ve scribbled some 200,000 words here in the past 13 1/2 months! That’s a long novel.

I always wanted to write a novel. Hmm.

Part of my new job is to coach other bloggers. My first rule is: Don’t look at mine as a good example! This is where I get to make mistakes so you won’t make them.

Anyway, since writing my 400th post a week ago, I have felt a little writers’ block. Some of the reasons are obvious if you’re following my legal travails. But that’s not all of it. In April and May 2006, I managed to write 36 posts during an immediately after my trial. This post will only be my 11th of January ’07.

It’s not like I don’t enjoy this anymore: I do! I’m quite proud of the work I’ve done this month. Especially this, this, this and this. So maybe I’m settling into a different rhythm now. I don’t have to write a post every time something pops into my head. I’ll let them cook for a few days, even a week.

Just so you know I haven’t been utterly neglecting this blog, here are some of the things I’ve considered posting about in the past week:

• The music and legacy of Phil Spector
• The State of the Union address, James Webb’s response, and the politics of the “surge”
• “Hurray, We’re Capitulating!” — an excerpt from a book about European appeasement of Muslim extremism
• Hillary, Obama, Vilsack and Brownbeck — heirs to CSNY?
• Ahmet Ertegun, R.I.P.
• More pictures from my trip to New Orleans
• The fact that every team I was rooting for in the NFL playoffs lost, but I’m still happy because the New England Patriots didn’t make the Super Bowl
• Why I liked “Dreamgirls” even though most of the song are bad
• The woman who died after drinking too much water on a morning whacko radio show
• The woman who died when her jealous friend sabotaged her parachute

…and that’s just for starters. I might do some, none or all of these, eventually. I’m also reading four books now. If I ever finish one of them, I’ll probably post about it. The top candidate? Suite Francaise, by Irene Nemirovsky — the first two parts of a five-novel cycle the writer planned to write about the German occupation of Paris, until her plans were interrupted by her arrest by the Nazis and death in a concentration camp. That’s a poignant story in itself, but the book itself is also breathtakingly great, a novel for all time.

For now, all I want to do is thank everyone who reads this blog for reading it, apologize if my productivity has flagged this month, and promise more exciting reading ahead!

(There…with post #401 behind me, maybe I can relax…)

Alice Coltrane, R.I.P.*

It doesn’t feel good to realize that the last time I paid much attention to the great musician and bandleader Alice Coltrane, I was in high school.  Of all the bop figures of the 1960s, Alice Coltrane did the most to unite the freedom, spontaneity and individualism of jazz with the timeless, egoless sounds and feelings of Indian meditation– a combination that ties together two ends of a long string.

The album I remember listening to over and over was Journey in Satchidananda, on which she plays harp and Pharoah Sanders is prominent on sax.  A number of jazz heroes of the 70s — “Mahavishnu” John McLaughlin, Keith Jarrett, Chick Corea — were also known for prayerful, other-wordly improvisations that seemed as if the music was being dictated from somewhere beyond, but my impression that this territory was first explored by Alice.   It was not too far from that style to New Age music, at first mostly performed by jazz-trained players, seemingly designed to accompany meditation.

But in Alice Coltrane’s gifted hands, the blend of Hindu mysticism and hard bop gave birth to music that wasn’t meant to accompany a spiritual or inward journey — it was the journey, and she was quite serious about it.   She established a commune in Agoura Hills for the study of Vedanta, a Hindu school of philosophy, and taught there after retiring from music in the late 1970s.

Alice Coltrane was, of course, the widow of jazz immortal John Coltrane, who died in 1967.  She was also the pianist in his band for the last two years of his musical career, which ended with his death from liver cancer at age 40.  Now, she has joined him. She died at West Hills Hospital a week ago of respiratory failure.

I heard about her passing this evening as I drove away from LAX after my flight home from New Orleans.  I stumbled across Tavis Smiley’s radio program, where he replayed a priceless interview with Coltrane taped when she was promoting a comeback album in 2004, Translinear Light.  She was unexpectedly funny, especially about her early years in Detroit, growing up in a highly religious family.  I don’t know if Smiley streams his show on the Internet; I’m too tired to investigate now, but I’ll update this post if I can find it. (See below.)

Meantime, I’m going to start looking for a copy of Journey in Satchidananda, and see whether it moves me now the way it did when I was 16.

*Update:  A stream of Tavis Smiley’s interview with Alice Coltrane is here, for the next week at least.  Really, even if jazz doesn’t interest you, listen to it.  She’s so utterly charming.  The aforementioned album and much else of her work is available here on Rhapsody.  (The link is to the music service’s Internet site, but to play it you have to download the player. I’m a fan of Rhapsody, so if this gets you to join the service, all to the good.)  You can hear samples on Impulse! site, and on that thing Apple runs, oh yeah, iTunes.

Writer Deanne Stillman has a lovely brief tribute to Alice Coltrane here on Huffington Post, and so does RJ Eskow, here, in a combined tribute to Coltrane and saxophonist Michael Brecker, who also passed away last week.

New Orleans from a Cab

As I write, a local news anchor has just reported that it is 64 hours until kickoff for the New Orleans Saints’ game in Chicago against the Bears. If the Saints win, they go to the Super Bowl, a goal the team has never achieved, or even come close to.  The idea that it would be now, a year and a half after “the storm” that changed everything in the Crescent City, is just too much. 

I got an earful of what’s right with the Saints from a cab driver tonight: The coach, Sean Payton, the long-time star Deuce McAllister, the maturing rookie Reggie Bush, and especially the fans who, according to the cabbie (who had the classic N’awlins accent) willed the Saints to victory against the Eagles after Bush’s late fumble revived nightmare visions of past Saints fiascos.

“We was just screamin’! I never heard anythin’ so loud. We were just all sayin’, ‘No way! Not this time!’”

My morning ride’s driver seemed oblivious to it all.  He was a Bosnian, only in New Orleans for six months after ten years in Pittsburgh, PA.  He was looking for work.  I had my camera and took a few pictures from the window. It was a dreary day and these pix aren’t my best, but they couldn’t be of anyplace but New Orleans:

Now it’s 63 1/2 hours…

Gimme Sacrifice

Think Progress objects to President Bush’s statement on PBS last night in answer to a question from Jim Lehrer about whether he has demanded enough “sacrifice” from the American people:

Lehrer: Let me ask you a bottom-line question, Mr. President. If it is as important as you’ve just said–and you’ve said it many times–as all of this is, particularly the struggle in Iraq, if it’s that important to all of us and to the future of our country, if not the world, why have you not, as president of the United States, asked more Americans and more American interests to sacrifice something? The people who are now sacrificing are, you know, the volunteer military–the Army and the U.S. Marines and their families. They’re the only people who are actually sacrificing anything at this point.

Bush: Well, you know, I think a lot of people are in this fight. I mean, they sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night. I mean, we’ve got a fantastic economy here in the United States, but yet, when you think about the psychology of the country, it is somewhat down because of this war.

Now, here in Washington when I say, “What do you mean by that?,” they say, “Well, why don’t you raise their taxes; that’ll cause there to be a sacrifice.” I strongly oppose that. If that’s the kind of sacrifice people are talking about, I’m not for it because raising taxes will hurt this growing economy. And one thing we want during this war on terror is for people to feel like their life’s moving on, that they’re able to make a living and send their kids to college and put more money on the table. And you know, I am interested and open-minded to the suggestion, but this is going to be–

Lehrer: Well–

Bush:—this is like saying why don’t you make sacrifices in the Cold War? I mean, Iraq is only a part of a larger ideological struggle. But it’s a totally different kind of war, than ones we’re used to.

Think Progress’ take on this answer is that Bush ignores the cost of the Iraq war — $700 billion through 2008 — which the blog writer implies ought to result in higher taxes on the wealthy.  One of TP’s commenters, ”upside 100,” elaborates on this point:

WTF!!!!!

Peace of mind?? WOW, what a great sacrifice, and we sure wouldn’t want those Corporate Scumbags supporting this Cabal to suffer any more.

Let’s just have the troops carry all the death and injury and missed time with families. Wouldn’t want any “real” people to feel it.

What a bunch of elitist crap from Dubya and his whole merry band of NeoCon assholes!

WAKE UP AMERICA!!!

Of course the idea that watching disturbing TV equates to the kind of rationing regime this country experienced in World War II is ridiculous.  (Millions voluntarily watched a nuclear bomb explode near Los Angeles on 24 Monday night.) Although many American soldiers enlisted for WWII, many more were draftees, and this pattern continued through Korea and Vietnam.  I remember my high school economics teacher predicting that Lyndon Johnson’s refusal to raise taxes to pay for the Vietnam War would lead to inflation, and I think it’s common wisdom now that LBJ’s decision was a contributor to the high inflation of the 1970s.  

But there is an inconsistency in the views of Bush’s opponents.  They’re talking about taxes on “the wealthy.”  Does terrorism only affect “the wealthy?”  Do the remaining achievable war aims in Iraq only benefit “the wealthy?”  What if, as many assert, the wealthy already provide a disproportionate share of the government’s tax revenues?  There’s a lot of empirical evidence to this point.  Does that mean the wealthy have paid enough?  And if so, who do we tax next? 

Regardless of the need for them, or the equity of them, taxes are a drag on the part of the economy that is taxed.  There is no argument on this point — it’s classical economics.  You can tax the wealthy, but the wealthy simply will refuse to suffer very much.  They will, instead, reduce or relocate their economic activity, which means someone further down the economic ladder suffers. 

It would be optimal if we could raise taxes on the wealthy, and force them to earn the same amount as they did before the higher taxes, and to buy just as many luxury items as before, so we could be assured that the government’s revenue take would increase, and the economic harm would be forestalled.  But you can’t force a wealthy person to buy another yacht or to add a new manufacturing plant, or come up with another high-tech scheme.  They will react to the potential ROI, the bastards, and because higher taxes raise costs and depress the benefits of investments, they are less likely to do make them.

Another issue re: sacrifice.  What about civil liberties?  The Patriot Act is a direct result of 9/11.  Its critics say we are less free from government intrusion, and its supporters don’t disagree, but say the intrusions are necessary to thwart terrorism.   Increased security thus comes at a significant cost that permeates society — a sacrifice in my book.

Beyond that?  The sacrifice promoters need to make the case for specific sacrifices.  I’m certainly ready to make them.  But first tell me, what do you need? 

During WWII, we needed to ration fuel and meat in order to keep our troops supplied.  Do we need to do anything like that now?  We needed dramatically higher taxes in part because our defense systems were lacking at the outset of the war; we built a modern air force and navy almost from scratch, and we didn’t have a global military infrastructure. None of that pertains now.  Today’s American economy is a powerhouse; while $700 billion is a lot of money, we are apparently absorbing it. The deficit as a percentage of GDP is not especially high, and it’s shrinking.

It’s true; members of our military are paying the heaviest price.  Recruitment goals are being met, but in the future, we might need more than what voluntary enlistment gives us.  When the battles are over, if our country doesn’t do right by these heroes, that would be outrageous.  But my guess is, the leadership of this country in the 2020s and 2030s will heavily come from those who served and from their families. The sacrifice of our soldiers during this era won’t be forgotten.

Don’t just say “sacrifice” as if it’s self-evident.  Do your homework.  We need to sacrifice X for the cause of Y.  Then we’ll have something to debate. 

Big and Quiet

A container ship slips quietly through the San Francisco Bay…

The sun streams onto a patio at Nepenthe in Big Sur…

…and the wind swirls around Coit Tower.

Running Silent, Deep

When I start up blogging again, tomorrow or in a few days, it’ll be on my usual assortment of topics, and not on today’s court developments.  As regular readers know, I seldom address it, and will adhere to that policy tonight.  Thanks for understanding. 

Given the horrible fire tonight in Malibu, I doubt there will be much coverage anyway. 

P.S.  I’ve been more than a bit distracted.  Did football experts see Florida’s annihilation of Ohio State coming?  And why isn’t Boise State at least #2 now?   

Belated New Year’s Gift

If you have a blog that takes comments, you find out a lot about the inner workings of spam.  WordPress equips you with a spam filter, but it doesn’t catch all the spam.  Some spammers are better at disguising their links in seemingly benign comments like “Nice site,” or “I was looking for information on this subject, this was helpful,” and those comments sometimes slip onto your site.  

One giveaway is when you click on the website or name link and it takes you to a site selling…whatever.  Insurance is the most common.  Another giveaway is when the comment is made to an old post that no one has commented on before. The game for these spammers is to trick the Google algorhythm into ranking them higher, so they will get more hits and, they hope, more sales. 

So, when I saw this comment — “Lovely Blog!” — on a boring year-old post about urban sprawl, it had all the earmarks of spam.   But then I looked at the website associated with the post: http://sureshg.wordpress.com/.    Hmm, a WordPress blog.  I hadn’t been aware of any spam being hosted by WordPress.  So I clicked.  And here is a screenshot of what I saw:

This is an absolutely gorgeous site! How its owner could find mine “lovely” by comparison is astonishing.   Every photo on the site — by Suresh Gundappa — is as penetratingly beautiful as this one.  Each one is accompanied by a “meditation,” a beautiful, Zen-like prose poem about applying the wisdom of nature to our strange human anxieties.  Today’s top post starts off like this:

It seems tension has nothing to do with anything outside you, it has something to do within you. Outside you always find an excuse only because it looks so idiotic to be tense without any reason. Just to rationalize, you find some reason outside yourself to explain why you are tense.

But tension is not outside you, it is in your wrong style of life. You are living in competition — that will create tension. You are living in continuous comparison — that will create tension. You are always thinking either of the past or of the future, and missing the present which is the only reality — that will create tension.

IT IS A QUESTION of simple understanding; there is no need of any competition with anybody. You are yourself, and as you are, you are perfectly good.
Accept yourself.

This is the way existence wants you to be. Some trees are taller; some trees are smaller. But the smaller trees are not tense — neither are the taller trees full of ego. Existence needs variety. Somebody is stronger than you; somebody is more intelligent than you — but in something, you also must be more talented than anybody else.

Just find your own talent. Nature never sends any single individual without some unique gift. Just a little search… perhaps you can play on the flute better than the president of the country can be a president — you are a better flautist than he is a president.

There is no question of any comparison. Comparison leads people astray. Competition keeps them continuously tense, and because their life is empty, they never live in the moment. All they do is to think of the past, which is no more, or project in the future, which is not yet.

Reading this, and looking at the incredible mountain landscape… it relaxed me!  I’ve got a lot going on, as you might know.  This has the potential to be a very restless weekend.  But somehow, reading this put me at ease.  

Mr. Gundappa is, from what I can tell, an investment banker and photographer in India.  On a Blogger page he lists his age as 250.  What, if any, religious tradition these thoughts come from is not identified, at least from what I can find.  It was an unlikely path that brought me to his wisdom, but, ya know, that’s how life works sometimes.

Kudos to a Young Hermosa Beach Writer

I just saw the Daily Breeze’s coverage of aspiring screenwriter Scott Simonsen’s selection by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. As Scott is a Hermosa Beach resident, and this is to some degree a South Bay blog, I wanted to congratulate him and wish him well on what will hopefully be a satisfying career.

The award was actually announced in November, so the Breeze is a little late.  (They’ve been distracted.) According to the story:

Simonsen’s “Tides of Summer” tells the story of a student who gets accepted at Yale, then visits his grandfather, an ill, grouchy old man who lives on a sailboat. The teen becomes more accepting of the area his grandfather lives in and starts to change his perspective on life.

The story was inspired by Simonsen’s work tutoring high-school students at the Blue Train Tutoring Company in Hermosa Beach.

“In this company, I found, I spend so much time with these kids (who are) trying to get into college. I kind of had to call (expletive) on them a little bit and say, ‘There’s more to life than getting into college,’ ” he said.

Simonsen said that though he, of course, would like to sell his script, the market for dramas is small.

“Everyone wants thrillers or broad comedies like ‘The Wedding Crashers,’ ” Simonsen said. “So small dramas aren’t selling anymore — so whether it sells or not, it’s a huge deal to have gotten where I have gotten.”

As part of being in the fellowship program, Simonsen has to complete another script by November. He’s already begun work on the project, and although he would not share details about the story line, he did say it involves teenagers and the high-school world.

Actually, if you look at the top grossing movies of last week, it’s obvious there is both an audience for drama and a market for it.  “The Pursuit of Happyness,” “The Good Shepard,” “Rocky Balboa,” and ”We Are Marshall” are all dramas, and “Dreamgirls” and “The Holiday” have dramatic elements, although they would be categorized as a musical and a romantic comedy respectively.  Admittedly, the sample is skewed:  This is Oscar-bait season.  Admittedly, three of the four dramas are based on non-fiction sources, and the fourth is a sequel to several sequels.  But I think those caveats aren’t meaningful. You can’t argue that the public went to these movies just to learn a bunch of facts. They wanted to be touched in a way only a dramatic tale can affect you.

Don’t forget what screenwriter William Goldman said: “Nobody knows anything.”  The thing you really want to write?  That might be the hit.  

All Grim Fascination, All the Time

In my days as a commuter, particularly the last few years, I usually spent most of my trips up and down the Harbor Freeway on dreadful phone calls that were about as much fun as passing a kidney stone.  But there were days when I didn’t need to do that, and I could listen to the radio, or to one of the six CDs loaded in the player in my trunk. 

If anyone wanted to find out how I was really feeling, deep down inside, they could have asked me, “What did you listen to?”  If I said music, that was a sign I was in good spirits.  If I said “talk radio,” that probably meant I was in the throes of depression.

I was reminded of those grim days by LA Observed’s report that “Jamie, Jack and Stench,” a morning show on Star 98.7, is cancelled.  I occasionally listened to Jamie White, “Stench” (worst nickname ever), and former child actor Danny Bonaduce when that was the lineup.  With various co-hosts, Jamie White has been on Star 98′s morning drive shift for nine years, according to the LA Times. 

If I was listening to a political talk host like Laura Ingraham, Al Franken or Hugh Hewitt, that was an indication of a mild, manageable melancholia. Howard Stern?  Creeping despair and angst.  But if I was listening to Jamie White and co. or Tom Leykis, that was a sign I’d gone clinical and should be on suicide watch.  

Why did they bother me so much?  If you don’t know the programs, they’re both phone-in talk shows in which the hosts and their callers tell us as much as they can get away with about their sex lives.  Not just intercourse, but the whole process of meeting people of the opposite sex, dating, sleeping together, becoming dissatisfied with the sex, cheating on them and rationalizing it, finding out they’re cheating on you and not putting up with their rationalizations, breaking up with them, posting embarassing information about them along with nude pictures on the Internet, getting a restraining order… you know, modern romance. 

Of all the words used on these shows, the most common was probably “bitch.” The sex they talked about is anything but ecstatic. It’s more of an exchange of value, in which both sides are looking for the edge. The highest praise is bestowed upon men who cadge sex out of a woman without spending any money courting her; and on women who manage to do the reverse–find a man with a lot of money and make him burn through a lot of it before yielding to his sexual demands. 

In the world of Leykis and White, the opposite sex is always the adversary, never to be trusted.  Falling in love is equated to being a complete idiot, especially if one falls in love with a partner who is of the wrong economic status, or who is less attractive than one’s personal attributes are worth on the open market. But that’s another part of the contest.  Boys, you’re supposed to make attractive women think you’ve got more money than you do.  Girls, if nature didn’t give you the physical features required to catch a wealthy man, then it’s off to the plastic surgeon for a makeover.

Both shows thought they were funny.  There was a lot of guffawing when a caller would talk about a succesful con job they’d pulled off, or a nasty breakup that left the ex-partner completely humiliated.  But all I could pick up from these programs was a lot of anger.  Here we are, the most fortunate people on the planet, living in the free-est and wealthiest country, many of us in the beautiful Mediterranean climate of Southern California, and all anyone thinks about is how dissatisfied they are with their sexual status.  These people don’t even sound horny to me.  They only want the kind of sex that validates their self-image–with people that make others envious.

The callers to these shows are all 20- and 30-somethings, and at the time I was a mid- to late-40-something, happily married and with lots of fond memories of my wilder years. I can’t recall ever evaluating a woman the way they do on such shows, nor can I recall being evaluated that way.  Anyone I connected with romantically or sexually, it had to do with something undefinable, not a checklist.  The whole point was to feel good. It was private. And while break-ups are inevitable when you’re young, they were rarely something to celebrate. 

The popularity of shows like Leykis’ and Jamie White’s suggested that, somehow, without me noticing, the world had turned a lot harsher, and happiness became more elusive for the generations coming up after mine.  I listened to those shows when I was trapped in a different misery of my own, so I guess I was looking for something that reflected it — even though it made me more depressed and worried for the children in my life.

Star-98 says White was dropped because “management decided that the show is not a long-term fit with the music-intensive, artist-driven direction that began last April….”  Those words sound reassuring to me.  I’m not familiar with too many of the ”artists” the station’s website talks about, but the change might mean they found out their listeners wanted to be inspired by something special in the mornings, rather than be dragged down into the muck of dysfunction, resentment and envy that Leykis and White celebrate. 

Wal-Mart’s Compact-Flourescent Push

This story, and the new Wal-Mart policy concerning energy conservation it describes, undoubtedly has heads exploding all over Washington, D.C.  On the one hand, good for Wal-Mart to set an ambitous goal to overcome public resistance to a proven technology that will cut energy used for lighting by 75 percent.  On the other hand, this is Wal-Mart, and they do good things the same way they do bad things — like a two-ton gorilla:

In September 2005, (CEO H. Lee Scott Jr.) and Andy Ruben, Wal-Mart’s vice president for strategy and sustainability, drove 6,000 feet to the Mount Washington Observatory in New Hampshire with Steve Hamburg, an environmental studies professor at Brown University, and Fred Krupp, the president of the advocacy group Environmental Defense.

At the summit, where scientists measure climate change 24 hours a day, the men discussed global warming, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer and what Wal-Mart could do about them.

“You need to look at what is being sold on the shelf,” Mr. Hamburg recalled telling Mr. Scott over a dinner of turkey and mashed potatoes. He began talking excitedly about compact fluorescent bulbs. “Very few products,” he said, “are such a clear winner” for consumers and the environment.

Soon after returning from the trip, Wal-Mart publicly embraced the bulbs with the zealotry of a convert. In meetings with suppliers, buyers for the chain laid out their plans: lower prices, expanding the shelf space dedicated to them and heavily promoting the technology.

Light-bulb manufacturers, who sell millions of incandescent lights at Wal-Mart, immediately expressed reservations. In a December 2005 meeting with executives from General Electric, Wal-Mart’s largest bulb supplier, “the message from G.E. was, ‘Don’t go too fast. We have all these plants that produce traditional bulbs,’ ” said one person involved with the issue, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of an agreement not to speak publicly about the negotiations.

The response from the Wal-Mart buyer was blunt, this person said. “We are going there,” the buyer said. “You decide if you are coming with us.”

In the end, as Wal-Mart suppliers generally do, the bulb makers decided to come with the company.

Philips, despite protests from packaging designers, agreed to change the name of its compact fluorescent bulbs from “Marathon” to “energy saver.” To keep up with swelling orders from the chain, Osram Sylvania took to flying entire planeloads of compact fluorescent bulbs from Asia to the United States.

“When Wal-Mart sets its mind to something with a narrow objective like that, they are going to make it happen,” said Jim Jubb, vice president for consumer product sales at Sylvania.

Last February, I wrote this post about “Ban the Bulb,” founded by Dr. Matt Prescott, who asked, sensibly:

If we cannot deny ourselves incandescent light bulbs, which would require minimal sacrifice, how are we ever going to do the really difficult things such as cutting our reliance on fossil fuels, buying smaller cars or reducing our use of finite natural resources?

“Ban the Bulb” seems to approve of Wal-Mart’s policies, but bemoans the fact that the giant discounter dismissed the idea of supporting a ban on energy-wasting incandescent bulbs as “too radical.”

Even if Wal Mart doesn’t want to be too radical, perhaps it could consider the implementation of programme which would allow it to phase out the sale of incandescents over the next 10 years…

This would clearly be a lot easier than tackling the carbon emissions associated with its supply chains, stores, shoppers and distribution network, and would allow the barriers to beneficial change to be seriously tackled.

Cycling in the Shallows

John Balzar is leaving the LA Times soon to go to work for the Humane Society in a PR position.  Balzar’s departure is sad on many levels; he was one of the Times’ best and most passionate writers, a last link to the Otis Chandler years.  His story today on Monica Howe, outreach coordinator for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, could well be the last byline he has in the newspaper.

So I was frustrated after reading it to see that Balzar, of all people, wrote it.  I wanted to rip it to shreds as yet another example of the Times’ shallow reporting, and of the missed opportunity to expose its readers to the many fascinating and disruptive dimensions of the urban bicycling movement.   But, as is my usual habit, I read the byline last. 

“Aw nuts,” I said to myself.  “I really respect Balzar.”  I started making excuses for him.  Maybe it’s his editors’ fault.  Maybe the problem is the unimaginative approach of the Times’ website overseers.  And hey, it’s not the like story is bad, exactly.  It’s well-written and…  uh…

Okay, read Balzar’s story.  Do you see the words “Critical Mass” in there anywhere?  No?  In 1992, there was a massive traffic disruption in San Francisco, in which bicyclists dramatized their demands by clogging automotive traffic at rush hour.  It was called Critical Mass–a “visionary traffic jam.”  Critical Mass is now the name given to a monthly mass bike ride in major cities, in which bicycle and other self-propelled commuters take part.  According to the Critical Mass site dedicated to listing such events, Los Angeles, Long Beach and Newport Beach are among the cities that participate regularly.  It says here that the Los Angeles Critical Mass ride used to start at Sunset and Silver Lake, but recently moved to Wilshire and Western. It’s a local phenomenon as well as a global one. 

If you’re interested in what Critical Mass is all about, you can start with Wikipedia’s entry on the topic — a great read.  Critical Mass is many things: An environmental protest, a demand that cities do a better job of accomodating cyclists and ensuring their safety on public roadways, a celebration, an “organized coincidence” that demonstrates the viability of xerocracy – a benign form of anarchy, in which no one is in charge, but a mass event happens anyway.  Did you know that the Critical Mass phenomenon has led to a Rand Institute study of netwars? 

It’s possible, of course, that Monica Howe knows nothing about Critical Mass — unlikely, but possible.  But she certainly knows her own organization, and the specific public policy demands it has made.  Balzar describes Howe’s political positions this way:

She has thrown herself into the campaign to demand the stenciling of “sharrows” on city streets. A sharrow is a bicycle symbol with two chevrons that is meant to remind motorists to share the road and also to promote better lane positioning for those on bikes. Howe has rallied cyclists to demand safer streets. She has led efforts to support cyclists hit by cars. She has promoted group rides that bring residents in touch with unfamiliar neighborhoods. She hammers away on the idea that bicycles are the only zero-emission transit machines.

But his focus seems to be mostly on Howe’s personality.  This is a personality profile, after all.  But how many stories does the Times run on the issues facing bicyclists in Los Angeles?  If not in this story, when is the Times going to tell its readers what the Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition is advocating?  Here is a flyer from CICLE (Cyclists Inciting Change through Live Exchange) that Howe’s coalition wants to distribute to motorists:

(I hope this is readable. It’s downloadable at the link above.) 

The most important thing to take away from this flyer is that bicycle activists believe bicyclists should be entitled to as much space on the road as a car.  They don’t use the sidewalk, and they shouldn’t be limited to the parking lane — those places are often too dangerous.  People in parked cars are wont to open their doors suddenly, placing a deadly obstacle in the path of a fast-moving bicyclist.  Also, sometimes bicyclists need to make left turns.  They are not breaking the law if they cut in front of you to do this.  They have a right to do this.

The organization is also joining a postcard-writing campaign aimed at Mayor Villaraigosa:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa speaks about his efforts to make Los Angeles “the greenest and cleanest city in America”, yet his vision for a sustainable Los Angeles continues to neglect an emphasis on walking and bicycling as being part of this future.

Cities such as Portland, OR and San Francisco have quickly risen to the top of the list as the nation’s most sustainable cities. These cities have made significant efforts to encourage both bicycling and walking as clean and viable modes of transportation. C.I.C.L.E. believes that if Los Angeles is to become the “greenest and cleanest” city in the nation, then we too need to be incorporating strategies that encourage bicycling and walking as part of a sustainable solution for our transportation needs.

That’s news, isn’t it?  Not as sexy as the mayor’s battle over LAUSD, I grant, but if the Times is going to write a story about one of the city’s most influential bicyclist advocates, shouldn’t her involvement in a political protest of the mayor’s policies rate a mention?  Doesn’t it stand to reason that there ought to be — at least — a link to some of this information on the web? 

Believe me, I’m no expert on bicycling or bicycle activists.  I found all this information in about 10 minutes.  There is undoubtedly much, much more. The Web is one place where bicycle activists talk to each other–globally.

Bicyclist activism is a rich topic with massive implications for growth, the environment, transportation in Los Angeles — way more interesting stuff than anything SCAG has to say on those topics.  It is also a harbinger of the new forms that political activism will take, as the Harold Meyerson-approved model of deep-thinking, self-congratulatory conferences gives way to a new form of networking that, as you read further into it, could alter the balance of power in a dimension that conventional politics can’t access.

As far as it goes, John Balzar gives Monica Howe a nice profile.  I can just imagine the Westsiders who form the Times’ core readership reading it and nodding their heads approvingly.  Bicycles are just…so…wonderful!  Like puppies and rainbows. That’s just great that somebody is so passionate about it.  These readers might have had a different reaction if they understood the radicalism inherent in bicycle activism.