Labor Day Weekend Total: One Lost Pair of Glasses

Very hot weekend in Southern California. The thermometers underestimated what was going on, particularly out here on the coast. It wasn’t 114 degrees, but it certainly got higher than 88.  The  stickiness factor made sleep difficult.  Accomplishing a simple chore often required a change of shirt afterward.

The people around me all seemed sleepy and uncommonly gentle, looking to avoid confrontations if possible because arguing would take too much energy. This was not weather to provoke a riot. This was the kind of weather that makes you forget things.

My brother and his family were down from the Bay Area for the weekend. We made a point of going to the beach just before sunset on both Saturday and Sunday evenings, when the crowds were smaller and the temperatures more comfortable.

Sunday we were particularly late in going. It was just my visiting brother and me. We got into the water as the sun was disappearing over the horizon, and body-surfed until the late-staying lifeguard finally whistled us out.

I was juggling car keys, a cell phone, a shirt, a towel and glasses. Somehow in the approaching dark, I lost track of my glasses, a fact I didn’t realize til we had pulled out of the parking lot. I did a U-turn. “I know exactly where they must be,” I assured my brother.

Flashlight in hand, we hiked back down to the beach — Rat Beach butts up against the cliffs of Palos Verdes, and is accessed by a steep asphalt road and then a trail. We searched. I was shocked I didn’t find the glasses right away. In a flashlight’s beam, it was not easy to get reoriented. We spent an hour systematically walking up and down the beach but they didn’t turn up.

The Pride of Torrance

Who says the South Bay isn’t a leader in defense technology any more?  What about this?

It looks like a big flashlight — but it’s really a nonlethal weapon designed to make you sick.Intelligent Optical Systems, Inc., of Torrance, Calif., has been granted a contract by the Department of Homeland Security to develop what it calls the “LED Incapacitator,” according to a DHS online newsletter.

The handheld device using light-emitting diodes to emit super-bright pulses of light at rapidly changing wavelengths, causing disorientation, nausea and even vomiting in whomever it’s pointed at.

“There’s one wavelength that gets everybody,” says IOS President Bob Lieberman. “Vlad [IOS top scientist Vladimir Rubtsov] calls it ‘the evil color.’”

(h/t Opinion Journal)

Swimming In It

There’s a beach near Portuguese Bend in Palos Verdes where you can feel like you’re swimming off Baja California’s miles and miles of unoccupied coast. If you overlook the few clifftop houses, you can feel completely alone there, especially when you’re bobbing around in the blue surf.

I hiked to this beach Sunday. It is covered with weathered stones, some as big as melons, and the rocks continue almost to the surfline, except at low tide, which exposes a stretch of coarse, brown sand. When I was thinking about my swim, I could see the sand, but by the time I got there, the tide had come up, erasing the swimmable section of the beach.

Now the surf was sucking against the rocks, meaning if I wanted to swim, I’d have to deal with the possibility of stubbing my feet against them. But the water looked so inviting! The whole weekend had been a hot and sticky one, running around on various family obligations, wiping sweat out of my eyes, toweling sweat out of my hair. To spend a few minutes in that surf would be such an antidote.

So I went in. I kept my sandals on, and went in. It was everything I wanted it to be: the water a soothing temperature; the setting sun turning the cliffs into golden monuments . I was alone, and it was quiet except for the sounds of water.

Then I thought about Jeremy Blake, the artist who apparently killed himself in despair over his longtime girlfriend Theresa Duncan’s suicide; the sad, baffling story that has generated so much writing across the blogosphere and in the mainstream press during the past week. So much writing about it, but as Bob Dylan would say, “Nothing is revealed.”

Blake killed himself, apparently, by walking into the ocean at New York’s Rockaway Beach. Just took off all his clothes and walked out into the surf, at night. To die.

How does somebody do that? How does someone swim to their own death?

Breezin’ Along with the Breeze

I have been trying to keep in mind Tony Soprano’s sixth-season admonition, “‘Remember When’ is the lowest form of conversation.”

I’m in my fifties now, I’ve seen a lot of things here in my little world, and I find history both pleasurable and important. But I also think change is good, new things excite me and as a father of an incoming high-school senior, the future is far more important to me now than the past. For me, too. It has to be. What I once thought of as my life has ended abruptly, twice, with no turning back. This is a condition of everyone’s existence. Sometimes this truth is hidden, but it’s there.

I remember floating on a water taxi in Venice early one foggy morning, seeing these ornate palaces emerge from the opaque dampness, one-by-one like a procession of ghosts. Whoever built these gilded homes never imagined that mighty Venice would ever lose its grip on the world of commerce. But it did. When the end came — in the form of Napoleon’s armies — Venice didn’t even put up a fight. They wanted to save the palaces to remind them and future generations of how rich and powerful and glorious they were, once. So, in exchange for no bombardment, Venetians handed over the keys to the invader. And now the whole place is sinking.

Someday they’ll say of Venice: “Remember when?”

Curiously, I thought of all that when I came across LA Observed’s link to a post on Life on the Edge, a San Pedro blog. The post is about the Daily Breeze, the supposed newspaper of record for my part of Los Angeles, the South Bay and Harbor areas. When longtime owner Copley News sold it to Dean Singleton’s Los Angeles Newspaper Group a year or two ago, it was inevitable that we would read about the Breeze’s descent into the lower depths of journalism. LANG’s a cheapo-cheopo organization, proudly so. They buy up newspapers in a region, they consolidate as much of the operation as they can, and then they cut cut cut.

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.  

It Won’t Be Jane Harman? (Updated)*

Until the post-2000 redistricting, Jane Harman was my congresswoman, and I was always pleased to vote for her. My part of the South Bay used to be one of the few real, bona-fide “swing” districts for both congressional and state legislative races, thus the political debate was sharper and the candidates, on both sides, more solid. The ideal candidate for this district was a pro-environment, pro-strong defense, pro-choice, fiscally responsible Democrat and that’s what Jane Harman is.

However, she now serves a district where anybody with a -D. after their name would win — where she faced a primary challenge from the left — and I’m now in a “safe” Republican district, represented by my fellow former Palos Verdes High School graduate Dana Rohrabacher, who was once a self-described “anarcho-capitalist,” and still pretty much votes like one. When I was working with the Port of LA, I heard him propose that the answer to increased post-9/11 port security was for the ports to charge shippers more, with each port free to make its own decision on whether to do this and by how much. He seemed completely unaware that the west coast ports all compete for business; that there was already a long-standing “race to the bottom” on port enviromental mitigations, and the last thing we needed was a similar competition on security.

But I digress.

To reset, Jane Harman is a good congressional representative. She is smart, prepared, and has an independent mind. She has been the ranking Democratic member on the House Intelligence Committee, and in that role has gained national prominence. She has been a good face for the Democratic party when the war against the jihad is being discussed, and would be even better in the role of chair heading into the 2008 presidential campaign.

I didn’t know until today, however, that if the Democrats win a majority in the House of Representatives in next month’s election, Harman will not become the chair. From the NY Times:

Ms. Harman, a moderate from Southern California, has been one of the party’s most outspoken voices on national security matters since the Sept. 11 attacks. But she has also drawn sharp criticism from more liberal Democrats, including Ms. (Nancy) Pelosi, who have privately said that she has not sufficiently used her position to attack the Bush administration for its prewar intelligence failures on Iraq and for its use of secret programs like the domestic eavesdropping carried out without warrants by the National Security Agency.

Losing Harman’s leadership is unfortunate. But get this:

Two candidates whom Ms. Pelosi is said to be considering for Intelligence Committee chairman are Representatives Alcee L. Hastings of Florida and Silvestre Reyes of Texas, both of whom currently serve on the panel.

The selection of Mr. Hastings, who is black, would help Ms. Pelosi shore up support from the powerful Congressional Black Caucus. But he has a checkered past, having been impeached and removed from a federal judgeship in 1989 on a bribery charge. Some Democrats fear that installing him in so sensitive a position would only invite Republican charges of weak Democratic leadership on national security matters.

Umm…ya think? What kind of House Speaker would pull an experienced intelligence expert like Harman for a former judge found to have taken a $150,000 bribe in exchange for a lenient sentence? This is a position with access to highly classified information!  I’m not sure but I believe that among intelligence experts, the term for people who take bribes is “security risk.”

The Times story reports that Harman has been lobbying for the job, and the lobbying has gotten her into trouble — both alienating Pelosi and reportedly (in Time) prompting an investigation into whether Harman “had made improper promises” to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in exchange for its support of her candidacy. According to Harman’s attorney, former Bush solicitor general Theodore Olsen, Harman is not under investigation, “and the idea that she should be investigated for being a supporter of Aipac is frightening.”

The idea that a Speaker Pelosi would toss Harman aside is frightening. The idea that the Democratic Party, with a real chance to win a majority in an election two weeks from now, would publicize Pelosi’s preference for someone so compromised as Hastings to head up the Intelligence Committee is ridiculous. Karl Rove does not deserve such a gift.

*Update:  Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball have a story up today that fails to resolve whether or not Harman is being investigated for her Aipac ties, but gives a lot more detail on the overlapping agendas of Harman, Pelosi, current Republican chair Peter Hoekstra and the issue of whether the committee was vigilant enough in watching the bribe-fueled lobbying activities of disgraced Rep. Duke Cunningham.

If Harman isn’t being investigated by the FBI, someone is sure making a big effort to make it appear like she is.

“The Yuppies and the Junkies Can Have It.”

While watching the Mets beat the Dodgers’ brains in, I checked out a few of the blogs on my blogroll that I hadn’t read in awhile. On the San Pedro-based group blog “Life on the Edge,” the most recent entry is a terribly sad tale that suggests the latest efforts to revive the beautiful but unsettled village overlooking LA Harbor are falling short.

The author is an artist named Marshall Astor, whose nom du blog is “Calamari.” Astor announces that he won’t be posting much on the site for awhile, in part because “I don’t really feel like writing about Pedro at the moment.” The post explains why. To sum it up, Astor ran the Walled City Gallery in downtown San Pedro until closing it in August. (He also has a position at Angels Gate Cultural Center.) Astor had a good rent on the space, so he decided to retool it as studio space for himself and two other artists.

At about the same time we began to transition the space from a gallery to a working studio, I got some new neighbors in my building. The illegal live work, sublet that was a bit of an irritation became at first a hassle and then later, a crisis. I had been speaking with my landlord for half a year about the issue with the sublet next door, and for half a year, he claimed that he was going to evict the tenants. No eviction took place, and in August, more people started living next door, most notably a couple that engaged in on and off, 24 hour a day domestic violence. It was soon obvious that everybody next door was using methamphetamine, and by the beginning of September it had become obvious from the amount of in and out traffic at both the front door and the alley entrance that the place had become a major drug den.

By the beginning of September, it had become impossible to use the backyard, as there was either constantly a semi/non-operational vehicle parked in my half of the yard, or just piles of new and mysterious junk had been dumped on my side. The lock on the back gate was changed. Lumber and paint started disappearing when I would leave it outside. So many people were now living/crashing/hanging out/getting loaded/buying drugs at the space that I didn’t even know who to blame or talk to. When I did manage to bring it up to anyone, it was a non-productive conversation with a doped up, out of it, loser.

The landlord promised to evict the tenants, but never started the process. In the meantime, the building was sold. The new landlord told Astor he would evict the tenants and wanted him to stay — at a significant rent increase. Astor stresses that the rent hike was fair and in keeping with the market, but he wasn’t interested in paying that much. He decided to stay until December 15, and began slowly to move his belongings out. However, he didn’t move quickly enough:

Edith (one of his studio-mates) had arrived at the studio, found the back door wide open. I immediately directed her to the dusty silhouette where my laptop had been before some tweaked out, low life had made off with it. Every box, container or package in the building had been opened and searched, for what, I do not know. My talles was strewn across my desk, defiled and manhandled, and during the high holy days, no less. The remanents of my father’s coin collection was gone, one of my backpacks was gone, presumably to carry off my belongings in. Edith’s stuff was searched, but nothing taken. Someone had spent a lot of time in my place, making a mess, rifling through my personal business, and otherwise subjecting me and my mates to a disturbing and frustrating violation.

They posted a guard until they could return to the studio to move everything out, and turned in their key.

So I’m out of downtown, and due to the level of gentrification, combined with the general decline in the quality of life downtown (I’ve spoken with a lot of police in the past week, they all have heard or experienced that San Pedro has become a mecca for drug activity and more of a “dumping ground” than usual), I’m not likely to have either a studio, or a gallery there in the future. The yuppies and the junkies can have it.

I’ve lived in LA, and mostly in the South Bay/Harbor area, since the late 60s. All that time, San Pedro has been a town on the verge. Not everyone agrees with me, but I think it’s one of the most beautiful spots in the Los Angeles. Some blame the Port of LA, but I should think having such a vital economic force as a neighbor could only help. Besides, container cranes are kind of interesting to look at. They don’t blight the landscape — they’re just more colors and shapes for the morning and evening sun to illuminate.

Why can’t all the powers-that-be line up to keep this gem safe from becoming a “mecca for drug activity?” What a waste if they let San Pedro’s downtown slide into the kind of chaos from which decent, community-spirited people like Astor have to flee.

(photo credits: “Warner Grand, San Pedro,” by My Life as a Haint, “Downtown San Pedro” by Lyan Zurke)

Video Out-Takes Rides Into the Sunset

 

 

If you are a Quentin Tarantino fanatic, you might recognize the name Video Out-Takes as having a “who begat what” relationship with Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.

In 1979, Tarantino’s now-estranged writing partner Roger Avary took a job at what was then a new and innovative business, a video-rental store called Video Out-Takes in Redondo Beach. Video Out-Takes was co-owned by Lance Lawson, who then broke off and founded Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, taking Avary with him. Tarantino became a loyal patron and employee of Video Archives, and a friend of Avary’s.

When VHS and Beta movies first appeared, the studios assumed people would buy them like books and LPs. By offering what were supposed to be end-consumer products for rent, the first video stores had a kind of “is this legal?” feel about them. Stores like Video Out-Takes and Video Archives provided the first opportunity for fans to see classic movies, cult movies, foreign movies, on demand in their living rooms–or in the case of Avary and Tarantino, on the TV monitor at the store when business was slow.

I never went to Video Archives, so I missed my chance to meet Tarantino in his pre-fame geekdom. However I was a Video Out-Takes customer for 25 years. My mother is a movie-lover, so she was willing to shell out what it took to buy a VHS player when the technology was still new and too expensive for me; and Video Out-Takes was her source. I lived an hour away in Los Angeles, but would sometimes come home on weekends just to rent movies and watch them in my parents’ den.

When I moved back to the South Bay in 1992, one of my first stops was to buy a discount card at Video Out-Takes. In addition to the movies I was interested in, Video Out-Takes had a great collection of Disney cartoons and obscure movies for kids — videos that had long gone out of print and could only be found there. My son and step-son loved to browse through dusty shelves full of faded clam-shell boxes to claim movies like Old Yeller, The Three Caballeros and The Best of Beany & Cecil.

Video Out-Takes was an oasis for people who loved movies of every genre — from art-house to slasher. You could tell that before you even walked in the door, from looking at the bizarre murals on the side wall: Elvis riding a pink Cadillac with Chucky…John Wayne taking E.T. for a ride. These murals as well as a faded collection of steamy lobby cards for obscure films noirs can still be seen if you visit the storefront on PCH, but probably not for much longer.

Video Out-Takes survived competition from giant chains like Blockbuster and Hollywood Video because of the depth of its offerings (which apparently also included a large porn collection secreted behind a false wall). It made the transition to DVDs fairly seamlessly.

Perhaps Netflix delivered the coup de grace, because like Video Out-Takes, the online service provides access to a huge collection suiting many tastes. However, when I visited the store last night, I saw an announcement for a public hearing on converting the site to a “commercial condominium.” It might just be that the landlord sold the store out from under them, and the owner didn’t have the energy to relocate.

What Video Out-Takes had that Netflix does not was its collection of old VHS tapes dating back to the beginning of the technology. Hundreds of titles got issued on VHS — once. These are titles that aren’t on DVD and might never be. The images and sound were starting to fade on these tapes, but at least you could see them. I was on my way to look for an out-of-print VHS title like that when I discovered the store was closed.

That was a great cinematic library: Where is it now?

(One buried treasure I need to mention: Lou Bunin’s Alice in Wonderland, a stop-motion animation “puppetoon” combined with live action that came out in 1950, the same year as Walt Disney’s more famous version. The Disney lawyers managed to suppress Bunin’s charming rendition of Lewis Carroll’s tale, allegedly threatening film labs and theater chains so that it barely reached U.S. screens. However, at some point in the late 70s, it was issued on VHS, and Video Out-Takes had it. I stumbled across it and thought my son might like it — and boy did he! That movie became the central focus of his life for several years, inspiring hundreds of drawings. We must have rented it 25 times, until finally we made a copy of it, fearing the rental tape might get stolen…or that something like this would happen.)

Nissan: Shift…location

Thanks to the excellent South Bay blog, The Aesthetic, I have been pointed to Curbed LA's photos of the moving vans pulling up to Nissan North America's Torrance headquarters to take their stuff to Tennessee.  Click here to see them. 

In the beautiful South Bay, most of the landmarks are natural features, but the distinctive Nissan headquarters building, with its beveled glass feature, was a gateway of sorts to this part of LA County. When Nissan became a client of the PR agency I worked for in 1995 or so, I'll admit to a little thrill that I actually got to go inside this iconic (to me) structure. 

I assume, but don't know for sure, that the building stays up after its occupants leave.  Several other Japanese automakers companies still maintain big offices in the Torrance/Gardena/Carson area, which might account for the fact that so many Nissan employees declined to move with the company.  

I wonder if the greater LA area will ever add a major corporate headquarters again.  We've certainly lost quite a few, and our local and state governments seem powerless to stop the flow.   

Lomita’s Great Awakening

Lomita, the little town in between Torrance, Rancho Palos Verdes, Harbor City and Carson — the town that has a lot of signs so you don’t forget you’re in Lomita — is the home of a new coffeehouse, Awakenings.

It might seem at first that Awakenings’ owners, Julie and Joseph Olson, have come a little late to the coffeehouse trend. Starbucks’ CEO Howard Schultz has expounded for years about making his giant chain a “third place” between home and work. Internet access is pretty standard; although Awakenings’ is free while Starbucks and Coffee Bean are hot spots only for paid-up wi-fi subscribers.

Open-mike nights and Saturday night jazz, blues and rock are scarce, but not unknown in the South Bay — Sacred Grounds in San Pedro, Coffee Cartel in Redondo are two places you can expect some indie-style entertainment on a Saturday night.

Awakenings, however, does add two things to the formula: Kids and God.

Starbucks is not kid-friendly (which doesn’t prevent a lot of South Bay moms from letting their little prodigies run wild in them) because too many breakable items are within a toddler’s reach. But according to the Daily Breeze story this morning, Awakenings has “separate kiddie room where children can play with toys or doodle, so long as their latte-sipping moms and dads supervise.” As for God:

…come Sunday mornings, spirituality is brewed.

That’s right, Joseph and Julie Olson are also pastors of the multiethnic church known as Vineyard Xtreme, which holds its weekly services at Awakenings.

But the Olsons stop short of billing Awakenings as a religious coffeehouse. It’s a venue for all sorts of performances and events, they say, including the Sunday service.

Nevertheless, Julie Olson acknowledges there’s a thin line to be walked as a businesswoman and pastor.

“Sometimes religion can polarize, and it has polarized in this country,” she said. “I don’t want anyone who comes in here to feel uncomfortable or alienated.”

Even more unique than all of this is foot traffic in Lomita. City officials quoted in the story were excited that something “new age” has come to their little village. “New age” is not the phrase that generally comes to mind when envisioning Lomita.

Zahniser will be Missed in the South Bay

For the past few years, regular readers of the Daily Breeze (who are mostly residents of the South Bay and Harbor areas) have had the pleasure of reading Los Angeles City Hall coverage provided by David Zahniser, an aggressive and intelligent young reporter who was also blessed with a highly readable writing style. According to LA Observed, Zahniser has just been hired by the LA Weekly.

That’s a good hire for the Weekly, at a time when ownership changes will have readers looking carefully at whether the paper keeps its edge. David set a high standard for whoever replaces him. The Breeze is Los Angeles’ “third” newspaper, but once Zahniser came into his own, he provided the most interesting and stylish coverage of City Hall to be found in any daily.