Hooray for the sound defeat in the state Senate of the the ineffectual business-as-usual health care proposal cobbled together by Schwarzenegger and the Assembly.

While the Los Angeles Times front-page article today depicts the defeat as a blow to Californians and to reform efforts nationally, it's essential to note that the bill was rejected by Republicans, yes, as expected, but also just as resoundingly by Democrats who easily saw that the bill wouldn't even begin to solve the problems of health coverage that lower- and middle-income (and even upper-middle-class) Californians face. The Democrats included, notably, Sheila Kuehl, who sponsored the true real-life reform bill that Schwarzenegger chose to veto a year and a half ago.

Now, perhaps, this proposal can become a model nationally for how not to address the health care crisis in ways that preserve every weakness of the current system and that thereby promise to help almost no one. The defeat, we can only hope, will cease to lead to hand-wringing about the defeat of "bold" reform, and will instead encourage our political leaders toward proposals that show less concern for the welfare of insurance companies and more for Americans' health.

Are you watching, Obama and Clinton and Edwards?

Today is my birthday. No big deal, that. I’m 58 – if you must know. Strange how that number is still like a new taste in my mouth, a taste I have to acquire, like it or not. But not forever. Sadly.

Anyway, I’m not posting this to carp about aging, or re-dyeing my hair, or how I’m a tad tardy on my resolution to be buff by fifty.

It’s much weirder than that ...

My therapist tells me it’s bad luck to be superstitious, but still, I have this fascination with people who are born on my birthday. Doesn’t have to be the same year, but it doesn’t hurt. Why? Read about our appealing qualities in the next paragraph. Why wouldn't people like me/us want to hang out with ourselves?

According to the book, "The Secret Language of Birthdays," which I'm sure someone must have given to me since I wouldn't buy this hocus pocus myself, January 28 is "The Day of Outstanding Achievements." Okay. I'll take that. In fact, every time I look up the secret language of someone's birthday, in this book that I swear just appeared on my living room coffee table, their personalities seem just like what the book describes. Well, not everyone. My wife refuses over and over, categorically, absolutely, no argument about it, in the strongest possible terms, to have anything to do with a date labeled "The Day of Dogged Persistence."

January 28th people are supposed to be gutsy, strong-willed, and driven. Those are our positive qualities. We're also overexcitable, sensationalist, and impulsive. Hmm. Those sound a lot more appealing.

Anyway, when it comes to any birthday, the astrology books and “today in history” web sites list the usual suspects. Here’s what they say for January 28:

Musician-composer Acker Bilk is 79 ("Stranger on the Shore." Cool!) Actor Alan Alda is 72. Actress Susan Howard is 66. Actress Marthe Keller is 63. Actress-singer Barbi Benton is 58. Actress Harley Jane Kozak is 51. Movie director Frank Darabont is 49. Rock musician Dave Sharp is 49. Rock singer Sam Phillips is 46. Rock musician Dan Spitz (Anthrax) is 45. Country musician Greg Cook (Ricochet) is 43. Singer Sarah McLachlan is 40. Rapper Rakim is 40. DJ Muggs (Cypress Hill) is 40. Actress Kathryn Morris ("Cold Case") is 39. Rhythm-and-blues singer Anthony Hamilton is 37. Rock musician Brandon Bush (Train) is 35. Singer Joey Fatone Jr. ('N Sync) is 31. Actress Rosamund Pike is 29. Singer Nick Carter (Backstreet Boys) is 28. Actor Elijah Wood is 27.

You can add: Colette, Nicolas Sarkozy, pianist Arthur Rubinstein, Jackson Pollock, King Henry VII, Arnst Lubitsch, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Claes Oldenburg, and bunch of others who had enough impact to make the list.

That’s right. I want to make the list. That’s not asking for much, is it? Maybe one day. Soon.

In the meantime, while we're waiting, let me share this fantasy I’ve had of hanging out with a few of the people on the list, specifically: Barbi Benton, Sarah McLachlan, Sam Phillips, and Kathryn Morris. Baryishnikov would be all right, too. And, okay -- because although I am all man, I have a strong feminine side -- Alan Alda. I’m just choosing from the living, otherwise I’d include Pollock, Rubinstein and King Henry VII.

But really, it’s the gals I’m thinking of. The rest are just window dressing. I really like McLachlan’s music – call me sentimental – and it’s not only because when I was writing Tim Allen’s first book (“Don’t Stand Too Close to a Naked Man”) in 1994, mostly while sitting his trailer on the set of “The Santa Clause” in Toronto, McLachlan’s first album played about five hundred times. And Sam Phillips is an under-appreciated class act, wife of record producer T-Bone Burnett. I play her CDs more than most. No one like her out there. I’ve seen every episode of “Cold Case” with Kathryn Morris, who I first discovered playing Tom Cruise’s wife in “Minority Report.” She's unusual among female drama characters (great looking, but it's not about the looks, or being buff or buxom, or having robot parts, or speaking to ghosts, or being a non-nonsense lawyer, or streetwise hooker with a heart of gold, or a spoiled teenager. Lily Rush uses her head and heart and gets the job done), in a show that more often than not can be quite compelling. And Barbi Benton? Put aside the facts of my being a Playboy contributing editor since 1981. Now it can be told that in the late 70s I met her once at a party in her post-Hef days and, sidling up to her in a noisy and overcrowded room, I mentioned that she and I not only shared a birth DAY but a birth YEAR. (All while thinking: I'm a man; you're a woman. We're both single adults. It would be like making love to yourself, only not quite. Wouldn't that be, uh, cool .... you get it without my having to come right out and say it, right? )

Then I waited for the sparks to fly.

I’m still waiting.

One can dream can’t one?

I’ve discovered I’m enough of a narcissist to not only want to spend some quality time with these women over a quiet meal -- one on one or as a group -- but to luxuriate together in what I'm certain will also be their fascination with our natal day. I'm counting on them being as infused with the spooky spirit of finding out in which ways we’re alike, and that the differences will make it even more special. Then we can be best friends and talk on the phone all the time. Oh, the mystical web we’d weave, plumbing our creative depths and the crazy coincidence of it all. And our "outstanding achievements." (No wonder we're on a list!)

Or maybe we (okay, I) will discover that this birthday stuff is just hogwash and I should be sending solicitations to the list to do something about our national nightmare (except for Sarah, who's Canadian. We can think of something for her, too). I mean, how far can you carry this birthday and how the stars and planets align stuff anyway? For instance, one of my best friends shares a birthday (Oct 28) with Julia Roberts and Bill Gates and he doesn’t have an impossibly wide mouth or billions of dollars, isn't a former America's sweetheart or the richest dude in the country -- and it doesn't look like either are likely in the future.

How about if I just settle for having written about my crazy little fantasy here – a birthday indulgence?

But hey, if Sarah, Sam, Kathryn or Barbi read this, I’m always up for dinner and cake, on me. I'm sure we'll have lots to talk about.

I wrote about the strange collision of Robert Blake and Bonny Bakley for Rolling Stone in 2002. During the course of my extensive research, I learned of her other, equally strange celebrity encounters, including the time she spent with Christian Brando, who has just passed away. Because of space considerations, this aspect of my story was cut from the piece. Some of it was told to me by Margerry Bakley, Bonny's sister, when I sat with her in a diner in Dover, New Jersey, a few days after 9/11 - an odd moment to be talking of such matters, but I had waited for months to meet with her, and had flown from LA to New York for the appointment, landing just a few hours before the towers were attacked and demons emerged from the hole in the ground, never to be hidden again. She would not be available again for some time.

So I drove across the George Washington bridge as soon as it reopened, past the newly positioned military patrols as bells were tolling at ground zero, for what was one of the most peculiar meetings I've had in my writing endeavors. I'm offering this excised part of my piece because I think it sheds some light on Christian Brando's sad life - his desperation and how he, and all of us, do what we can to connect somehow with our parents, whatever the path they have blazed. I'm also including some material about the Bakley and Brando families because it helps to explain what drove Bonny - herself a misled character - to seek out Brando, and what may have made him susceptible. For background, remember that Bonny Bakley always wanted to be famous. “To do that you have to know other famous people,” her best friend would tell me later on the phone from her home in Walls, Mississippi. “That’s how the stars do it.”

Also, bear in mind that this was written before Marlon Brando died. Herewith, part of the remaining Bakley chronicles, with some previously published material included to fill in the blanks:

Bakley would doggedly track down celebrity addresses, information about where they went and what time, and even what property they owned and how much it was worth. But there was madness in her method; she was the ultimate fan, a weird citizen imprinted from her very birth to need fame, to seek the famous, to win love and approval only by association with the famous. Her life would be complete if only she could stand in fame’s glare, or even its shadow – the wattage did not matter as much as proximity, closeness that would take away her pain and make her immortal. Bakley’s grandmother – who raised her from the age of eight through high school – would chow down on celebrity news long before People Magazine tied off the national arm and jammed us all with a needle full of poison.

“Granny was obsessed with tough guys,” Margerry recalled when asked about Bonny’s attraction to men who, some said, were prone to violence, such as Christian Brando and Jerry Lee Lewis. “She loved Bogart and Cagney. My mother liked all them guys too. She was into Elvis, not Bonny. She was the one who liked Gary Busey, not Bonny. And it was my grandmother who liked Robert Blake. Bonny never stalked him. When she met him, she didn’t even know who he was. She never watched ‘Baretta.’ Granny used to watch him when he was on Johnny Carson and tell Bonny how cute he was.”

Bakley’s mother was poor, physically abused as a child, and also starstruck. In her extreme desperation for motherlove, Bakley was more broken than most, willing to lie, cheat, and steal in the grubbiest of ways to get what she felt the world owed her. Like a lot of people without a moral compass, she had her own at times touching code. Nor was she selfish: much of the money that came her way she lavished on friends and family, some of whom were one step away from the gutter. But by the time she crossed the velvet rope that divides the populace from its immortals, entering a time warp that was supposed to confer special qualities, her life’s string had run out...When someone initiates an encounter with a policeman and gets killed in the process, law enforcement calls it “suicide by cop.” Bonny Bakley’s tangle with the famous was most assuredly a case of “suicide by backstage pass.”

Bonny Bakley was born on June 7, 1956 in Morristown, New Jersey to tree surgeon Edward and Marjorie Lois Hall Bakley. Margerry came along five years later. “My mother chose to marry a bum,” Margerry said, referring to her father. “I’m trying to get myself out of all this stuff but it’s hard.” She described her own history of two suicide attempts, a nervous breakdown, a marriage to a violent Colombian drug dealer, a bad check bust, a long bout with alcoholism, the difficulty of protecting her young son from child molesters, and salvation in the Catholic church – a wide-ranging, insightful, and well-spoken confession severely informed by a culture steeped in the broth of Oprah and punctuated by tears, cigarettes, and laughter. “My father drank all the time. My parents told us we were ugly. They made fun of us when we got out of the shower. They were always fighting. It used to make Bonny hyperventilate and she would pass out..."

By the time Bonny reached junior high, her father had been beaten to death by cops while living in a homeless shelter. She often fell asleep in class, or fantasized about becoming a movie star to get back at students who laughed at her for being poor. She dropped out of school and studied modeling at the Barbizon School in New Jersey and acting at the Actors Studio in New York in the early 70s. Bonny’s foray into that world was short-lived. According to Margerry, she was not very talented. The movie star thing might not work out. But the star thing could; at that time, for women like Bonny with vague desires and no social standing, there arrived on the scene a strange gift from the depths of Ohio – “Hustler.”

The signature piece of o.g. white trash Mac Daddy Larry Flynt, the magazine was Yukon Jack to Playboy’s Chivas Regal, featuring photo spreads of down-and-dirty women who would never get invited to Hef’s mansion. Bakley went gyno in the June, 1977 issue which published her picture in the oddly groundbreaking department called “Beaver Hunt.” Her debut on the newsstands came as a total surprise to her family. “My neighbors knocked on my door and asked if I was in ‘Hustler,’” her mother recalled. “Bonny and I look alike.”

After the “Hustler” picture was published, Bakley seemed to diversify, cranking the gig to another level. As a teen-ager, her mailing list was limited to a couple of regional sex rags; now she advertised nationally in men’s and swinger’s magazines under a variation of her own name as well as many various aliases, using a variety of pitches – “Hi, I’m Claire. I’m a nursing student. Can you help me get through school?”; “Hi, I’m Laura. I can make you feel good. If you send me a bus ticket, I’ll come right over”; “Are you a tit man?” and so on. She patterned herself after Donald Trump, not because he built his fortune on bad taste but simply because he worked hard and made buckets of dough, was living proof of the era’s predominant, not-so-secret password: “Greed is good.”

Soon, Bonny faced a problem: How could a single working girl manage such a burgeoning business alone? It was time to find a husband. She married her first cousin, a choice that no one – not even her family members – can fully explain. “I think my mother said he looked like a movie star but I’m not sure which one,” Margerry said. Her husband helped her with all the mail, picking it up at drops in various places and performing clerical tasks. By the time she was killed, the business had entered the cyber age; leaving out no chat room, she trolled the ranks of those with fibromyalgia and fans of German shepherds, and she maintained elaborate computer files on customers, including stats on how much they were worth and their preferred sexual tastes. Like a lot of computer workers, Bakley had carpal tunnel syndrome; towards the end of her life, she went to a mass for The Anointing of the Sick.

Behind all the trips to the post office, all the visits to justices of the peace, Bakley was laying a foundation in California. She bought a house in suburban Thousand Oaks and rented it, intending to move her and her family into it when she could support them all. “The plan was, some day we would all live together in California,” Margerry said. “Say what you will about how she made her money, but she really liked the guys who were paying her way. You were never allowed to make fun of them, they were her guys. One day, they would help us all get to the West coast.”

Of course, can the true fan come West, to Hollywood, without paying homage to The Godfather? As in Marlon Brando? Oddly, for all the public barriers, the penetration of his family was easy, it would seem. Strip away the grand stature of Marlon and the Brando family was not that far removed from Bakley's, with a history right out of a slouching double-wide at the Whispering Sands Trailer Park. After an explosive and highly publicized divorce between Marlon and actress Anna Kashfi, their son Christian had been shuttled back and forth between his parents for years, once allegedly kidnapped by Kashfi and hidden by thugs in a Mexican jungle to keep him away from his emotionally abusive father. As a grown-up, Christian labored under his father’s shadow, trying half-heartedly to succeed in Hollywood, as a producer and actor, but according to an US Magazine reporter falling in with a group of Laurel Canyon drifters known as the “down boys.” They crashed and partied with him at his big pad in the hills. He gave them food and money. Then one day he killed his sister Cheyenne’s fiancé when she told Christian he had been hitting her. (Later she killed herself and somewhere along the way, he said that perhaps his sister had exaggerated her claims).

When news of Christian’s murder trial swept the planet, Bakley took note. “We thought he was cute,” Margerry recalled. Bonny felt there was a connection. “With Christian,” Margerry said, “it was that his family was messed up and no one understood him.” Bonny sent him letters while he was behind bars. Having learned that he was into pornography, she made sure to include pictures. He read the letters and replied, unlike Robert Downey, Jr, whom Bakley was also approaching via the mail while he was in prison. When Brando got out of jail, he hooked up with Bakley. Inside Brando Land, and even amid the outer regions, hardly anyone would talk about the relationship. Those who did insisted on e-mail contact only and some preferred anonymity. That Bakley and Brando knew each other was confirmed twice. “Yes, they were together for a while,” said Christian’s ex-girlfriend, actress Laurene Landon, in an e-mail interview. “That’s all I can say.” A second source explained the sad hook-up this way: “Bakley gave Christian money for drugs.” In 1999, Bakley came to visit him in the played-out logging and fishing town of Kalama, Washington where he lived between bouts in rehab since his release from prison. “They spent a weekend in a motel,” the source said, “and she bought him new welding tools.”

In becoming involved with Bakley, Christian appeared to have taken his very cue from the old man – and then one-upped him, only to watch in horror as the whole thing collapsed in a strange echo of the murder he had committed, and wind up in rehab once again. In Marlon’s book, “Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me,” he recounted an episode in which he agreed to have sex with an obsessed fan – as an experiment. It all started when she offered to wash Brando’s feet. "The penis has its own agenda," Brando wrote. Afterwards, he felt remorse, realizing that he “had just seduced a girl who thought I was Jesus.” So too had Christian accepted the advances of an adoring stranger; so too had Bakley paid homage to an icon - and not just any god, but the living son of The Godfather. But while Marlon seemed to have controlled his bizarre experiment, Christian did not. In fall of 1999, Bakley learned that she was pregnant. She told Christian the baby was his. “He was very happy,” both Margerry and another source said. “I think it gave him something to live for,” the source elaborated. “He liked the idea of becoming a father.”

When the baby was born on June 2, 2000, Bonny named her Christian Shannon Brando. “Christian picked out the name,” the source said, although undoubtedly Bakley approved - it proclaimed her celebrity nearness, as did the name of her third child, Jeri Lee. But the baby didn't belong to Christian; her real father was Robert Blake.

Every actor of Robert Blake’s generation stands in the shadow of Marlon Brando. “My dream part is Sky Masterson,” Robert Blake once told an interviewer. He was referring to the singing gangster that Brando played in the classic “Guys and Dolls,” the kind of grand role that Blake – even at his peak – was never offered. It’s not that he couldn’t have done it. He was as good an actor as his major contemporaries –Hoffman, Pacino, Newman, and in some ways even Brando. Alas, the closest he would ever get to Marlon and the innermost chamber of the Hollywood heart – publicly at least - was his association with Bonny Bakley.

Four pounds of hothouse tomatoes (pictured).

Local mom-and-pop market cost @ 69¢ per pound: $2.76

Local chain supermarket cost @ $3 per pound: $12

Dollar difference: $9.24

Percentage increase from corner market to chain store: 334 percent

If only elected officials shopped for their own groceries …

Leaky roof? Favorite movie star dead? Wrong candidate leading in the polls? Writer's strike got you broke and hungry? In these uncertain times you can always find solace in the hot, open-faced turkey sandwich at Pepy's Galley. Pepy's is the coffee shop attached to the Mar Vista Bowl. I've been going there for nigh on seventeen years. Here's why: home-roasted turkey breast nestled on top of a chewy slice of white bread with a pale spooge of jizz-like gravy shot across it's open, schoolgirl face. Nestled beside it is a Matterhorn of mashers and a bright, jiggly mound of cranberries with the can striations still visible.... I tell you, this is quintessential diner food at its best. It's a comestible eider down--warm, pillowy, super-snuggly. You can tuck in and relax. You won't be challenged by any unfamiliar spices. No pan-asian twists, nothing post-modern, its not a hipster version of a sandwich. None of that ceci n'est pas une hot turkey sandwich crap. It simply is. Oh, and no scary, fresh vegetables to negotiate either. Everything straight from the can, just like the lunch ladies used to serve in the school cafeteria, back in those simpler times, when ketchup was a vegetable and schools had cafeterias.

Foodies will sneer. Wear a fedora and dark glasses when you go. But know that it's there for you whenever you need it. I ate one the afternoon following the Northridge quake, tucking into its gluteny-goodness as the plate glass windows looking out onto Venice Bl. rattled with aftershocks. When pregnant with my first child, only the turkey sam would quell the churning of my stomach. Now that baby is negotiating puberty and I find my world turned upside-down once again. So I fled to Pepy's the other day and had taken my first brain-stem-stimulating bite when I put down my fork and shot this snap. LA Observed readers should know about this, I thought. Yes, we're worldly and sophisticated, and our fair city offers many culinary thrills. But some days it's nice to lower the bar and just eat something that Homer Simpson would enjoy. For added pleasure points you can exit through the attached lounge/bar, grab a Rolling Rock, and go bowl a few frames next door. Mmmmm...

© 2007 American Honda Motor Co., Inc.

It looks to me like my Los Angeles, but with some serious alterations. Honda's mystery city has some of the same buildings, but not all of them. And, perhaps I haven't been paying close enough attention, but that yellow air looks more like a good day in Shanghai than any recent one in Los Angeles. Our air is often horrible, unhealthy and dirty. No question about it. But I've never seen it look like that.

The ad talks of Honda's dream of a cleaner environment, but I'm left to wonder exactly what environment. What city is portrayed in that image? It's definitely not my LA.

Now that’s an exceptionally tough choice (see information below for how to sign up for both tours). The 51-mile L.A. River, or the 20 miles of Malibu public beaches that are lined with private development?

They’re both huge, essential, richly iconic L.A. outdoor public spaces that have long been famously difficult to find and enjoy. They’re like the yin and yang (the beauty and the beast?) in L.A.’s dysfunctional history of public space.

And their fates are tightly intertwined--of course. The beaches are populated by affluent folks, and a lot of celebs, whose tireless (I mean this) campaigns to clean up L.A.’s glorious ocean are doomed hopelessly to failure if we don’t clean up L.A.’s Grand Sewer—which will also bring desperately needed public park space to communities without a lot of celebs. See how it's all connected?

Here are the announcements for the tours: (disclosure: I am deeply involved in both):

THE RIVER:

Tour the Mighty Los Angeles River!

Everyone in L.A. has seen the L.A. River, and has heard that it's being revitalized. But who knows where it is, exactly--and what exactly is happening on its banks?

The Friends of the L.A. River tours take you to current and planned restoration sites. Come walk, drive, and lunch along the L.A. River, as we talk about its central role in the city's past and the necessity of its comeback to LA's future.

Jan 27--car tour, 10-4 (sign up soon)
Feb 24--car tour, 10-4
Mar 2--bus tour, 10-4
Apr 6--car tour, half-day

Tours convene at the River Center (near the 5/110), and stop at the Sepulveda Basin in the Valley, the Glendale Narrows across from Griffith Park, the historic Arroyo Seco confluence, the Los Angeles State Historic Park (aka the Cornfield), and the
heart of downtown.

Car-caravan tours (form carpools at start)--$20 members/$25 non; Bus tours--$45/$55. Nonprofits and students-- contact mail@folar.org or jennyp@laobserved.com for member rate. Lunch included on bus tours; we stop at a riverside cafe on car tours, or bring your own.

Kids (thru 18) are free--and dogs are welcome (and free).

Spaces limited, and advance sign-up required-- mail@folar.org or 323-223-0585. For more information-- http://www.folar.org/rivertours_2006.html.

MALIBU BEACHES:

In conjunction with KCET's recently released Web Stories, "Sustaining L.A.," the Los Angeles Urban Rangers announce:

"MALIBU PUBLIC BEACHES" SAFARI
Sunday, Feb. 3, 1-4:30pm

Tired of Zuma and Surfrider? Want to find the twenty miles of public beaches that are lined with private development?

The "Malibu Public Beaches" safaris show you how to find, park, walk, picnic, and sunbathe on these Malibu beaches legally and safely. The safari visits two different beaches. Skills-enhancing activities include a public-private boundary hike, sign watching, a no-kill hunt for accessways, and a public easement potluck.

Safaris are free. Spaces are limited. To sign up, e-mail info@laurbanrangers.org w/name and # of people. For further information on the safaris and the Los Angeles Urban Rangers, please visit http://www.laurbanrangers.org/.

A downloadable "Malibu Public Beaches" guide is available on our website.

The Rangers are happy to offer this safari in conjunction with KCET's new online feature, "Sustaining L.A.," about four public-art groups—Fallen Fruit, Farmlab, Edible Estates, and the Rangers—who explore the L.A. landscape. Check http://kcet.org/explore-ca/web-stories/sustaining/ for upcoming events and for abundant info on all these groups.

Until I read Steve Martin's enjoyable new memoir, "Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life," I never would have connected him with Diane Arbus. He's funny and somewhat dark, but always struck me as fairly straight. She, on the other hand, photographed extreme subject matter that made people turn away in discomfort. Circus freaks, transvestites and those on the fringe of society were her thing. She killed herself at the age of 48 by slashing her wrists.

Martin, besides being a comedian, actor, and writer, is also a prominent art collector. He's a LACMA trustee, and in 2005 pledged $1 million over five years for the Huntington Library museum's American art collection. His own purchases have shown an eclectic taste, including Georgia O'Keefe, Willem de Kooning and David Hockney. In the book, Martin reveals a very personal connection to a certain Arbus photograph.

In this passage, he has graduated from high school in Orange County and secured a job as an entertainer at Knott's Berry Farm. It's his last day as an employee of Disneyland, where he began working the summer he turned ten — in 1955, the park's first year.

My final day at the magic shop, I stood behind the counter where I had pitched Svengali decks and the Incredible Shrinking Die, and I felt an emotional contradiction: nostalgia for the present. Somehow, even though I had stopped working only minutes earlier, my future fondness for the store was clear, and I experienced a sadness like that of looking at a photo of an old, favorite pooch. It was dusk by the time I left the shop, and I was redirected by a security guard who explained that a photographer was taking a picture and would I please use the side exit. I did, and saw a small, thin woman with hacked brown hair aim her large-format camera directly at the dramatically lit castle, where white swans floated in the moat underneath the functioning drawbridge. Almost forty years later, when I was in my early fifties, I purchased that photo as a collectible, and it still hangs in my house. The photographer, it turned out, was Diane Arbus. I try to square the photo's breathtaking romantic image with the rest of her extreme subject matter, and I assume she saw this facsimile of a castle as though it were a kitsch roadside statue of Paul Bunyan. Or perhaps she saw it as I did: beautiful.

Another Arbus print of "A Castle in Disneyland, Cal. 1962," sold at public auction in 2003 for $95,600. A Los Angeles gallery owner told me such a print might command more than $200,000 if offered for sale today. It's one of her better known images and appears in "Looking at Los Angeles," the 2005 book edited by Marla Hamburg Kennedy and Ben Stiller.

Earlier today my friend Lisa and I were enjoying a nice lunch at Susina on Beverly. We scored a quiet, lovely booth in the corner. My tomato, avocado and white cheddar sandwich tasted especially yummy. Suddenly, the room darkened. Something — clouds? King Kong? — obscured the sun. Flashes exploded in the window.

Paparazzi.

More than I'd ever seen in one place, and I've been a news photographer. I leaned forward and saw a seething mass of dark determination filling the sidewalk. All of the swarm's energy was focused inside our cute little cafe/bakery. What the?

I looked around. Sure enough, standing at the counter were a polished blond in jeans and cream-colored flats and a tall, boyishly handsome man. Katherine Heigl and her new husband, Josh Kelley. They had apparently just entered and were placing their order. They hugged and seemed oblivious to the frenzy on the sidewalk. Not so the rest of us. We were...uncomfortable.

I know Heigl doesn't exactly hide from the tabloids, post-Knocked Up. But seeing the TMZ-era paparazzi phenomenon from this side — trapped in the fishbowl — was kind of disturbing. I got up to take a closer look, curious how big the hive had grown. There must have been 20 to 30 guys out there, most of them a sleazy-looking type I would definitely avoid at a party. The one girl I saw reminded me a little of Avril Lavigne.

They were annoyed that I blocked their view. I wanted to scream at them to leave her alone — leave us alone. Instead, I reported back to Lisa.

Lunch was spoiled. When Heigl and Kelly walked in our direction, looking for a place to settle in, I made eye contact. Ours was the most private nook in the room. There was only one right thing to do. "Why don't you guys take our table," I offered. They accepted, gratefully and with smiles. They didn't even mind our dirty plates and my leftover cup of cold coffee.

By the time we got outside, the swarm had dispersed. Some of the vultures lingered, but most had begun drifting away. Off to look for Britney maybe?

I wish the new compromise health care proposal were getting more bad press. At least, notably, when the Los Angeles Times endorsed the plan, the Letters to the Editor were uniformly negative and tore it apart in all the right ways.

I'm heartened that Californians are not fooled by the Governor and state Assembly's “historic” and “courageous” plan. Well, I guess if I had to choose between “historic” and “courageous,” then I would have to side with “historic.”

Anyway, here's a bit more bad press from me, that deals with the plan's courage-free specifics more than the previous bad press I've posted here.

Here's what the plan proposes. It maintains the basic structure of the current system--if Americans’ reliance on employers and insurance companies to pay for health care can possibly be called a system--and adds a series of much-trumpeted reforms. It requires people to buy coverage and insurance companies to take all comers. It requires employers to spend a set percentage of their payroll on health care. And it subsidizes California’s poorer residents.

How much, exactly, is that going to change, since the plan offers no subsidies to the middle class or even upper-middle class, all of whom can currently be saddled with unaffordable premiums, high deductibles, and uncovered health expenses. Overall, the plan mandates universal coverage, but fails to enact reforms that will make coverage adequate, reliable, and affordable.

It fails, first, to closely regulate the cost of premiums or the extent of coverage. Rather, it continues to leave major decisions about the cost and provision of health care in the non-medical hands of insurance companies, which have a logical mandate to maximize profits—not health—and which profit only in proportion to the degree that they do not provide health care. The plan does specify that insurers have to spend 85% of premium income on health care—which sounds, at the least, like an incentive for insurers to continue to raise their premiums. And it exempts families from the mandate to buy insurance if the cost of coverage would exceed 5% of their income.

Now that’s groundbreaking health-care reform, which we should all get excited about. Here's a plan that assures Americans that they don’t have to have health insurance if they can’t afford the insurance companies’ premiums.

And subsidies to the poor? Well, that’s the plan’s sole feature that just might make a difference, by making health coverage accessible to the state’s lowest-income residents (and to middle-class Californians who become poorer trying to pay for health care). It should be noted, however, that these payouts will heavily subsidize not just poor Californians but also the not-at-all-poor insurance companies, to continue to charge the premiums that the plan assures many Americans they won’t be able to afford to buy.

No, with this plan, Californians will continue to enjoy precisely the same two routes to affordable coverage as before (aside from being poor). We can be young and healthy—which even for us Californians, alas, turns out to be impossible in the long term. Or we can find jobs in which the employers themselves provide large subsidies for health coverage. And by now requiring all businesses to pay for or contribute to employee health care, the plan legislates and perpetuates the link between employment and health coverage—an artifact of a long-ago post-World-War-II economy—that has generated so much of the anxiety in the current health care crisis.

The plan will continue to constrain smaller employers, especially. It will continue to restrict our choices—often severely—about what work we can do and where we can do it. (As a freelance writer, for example, I can no longer write full-time, for the sole reason that I couldn’t afford the $12,000-plus unsubsidized annual premium for insurance—and how would Governor Schwarzenegger respond if he could no longer work as governor for the sole reason that he couldn’t afford the premiums for health insurance?) This plan continues to tie job security to health coverage—if you get fired or want to quit, you soon lose your subsidized coverage—and to deprive people of their heavily subsidized health plans soon after they become too sick to work.

By failing to regulate the insurance companies effectively (or God forbid do away with their role), and by reinforcing the disastrous link between employment and health coverage, this historic, courageous plan will keep Californians in a mass state of anxiety and insecurity about how to get and maintain and pay for health coverage.

Though perhaps it does take some courage, at least, to call the proposal courageous.

A version of this piece was cross-posted on the Huffington Post Blog.

For a couple of years, I’ve logged on just about every day to Writer Action, a message board where Writers Guild of America members discuss politics, philosophy, plumbing, movies they’ve seen or written, pets, pet projects, string theory, string cheese and everything in between.

There’s a lot of collected wisdom at WA, with hundreds of writers sharing stories of fascinating lives inside and outside the business. One regular contributor, until his untimely passing last fall, was a former CIA spook who sometimes dropped dark hints about U.S. foreign policy that he helped (or in the case of the Bay of Pigs invasion, refused to help) carry out. Another has written about his struggles growing up with autism. Other members possess brilliantly warped comic minds that engage in unexpected ways—like the entire thread written in haiku, the strike-oriented Christmas carol parodies, or the conversation limited to nominations for the worst imaginable two-item omelet (ingredients tended toward the profane and the bizarrely metaphysical), which improbably became the longest running thread in Writer Action history.

Lately, the fun and frivolity have taken a backseat to talk of the writers’ strike. While Writer Action members as a whole solidly support the guild’s labor action, it’s a trying time for everyone, and emotions can run high. If you’ve ever visited a chat-board or read the unmoderated public comments on a popular blog, you know how quickly things can turn nasty. It’s no different on a writers’ site, except that the insults, when they happen, tend to be more pointed and better written.

To combat this, the administrators, who include several of the writers who launched the site as a free service to WGA members around 2001, decided before the strike to draft several volunteers to moderate the board. Because of my exceptional diplomatic skills, sparkling personality and the fact that few others could be persuaded to take the job, I was one of the group they appointed.

Ever since then I’ve spent more time than ever on WA, sometimes hours a day parsing messages for personal attacks both subtle and overt. It’s easy to recognize some violations. Call someone a fucking idiot, and you get warned or suspended. But these guys are highly paid professional craftsmen, and some of their most sophisticated work involves delivering ad hominem attacks without saying the kind of words that raise red flags. So we get sarcasm, mockery and a kind of deliberate, passive-aggressive obtuseness that hints at contempt without clearly stating it. I have little time to enjoy the thoughtful debate, tales from the picket lines, helpful advice, lively banter and links to interesting articles and videos that permeate WA, because lately I’m focused on playing kindergarten cop to a dozen problem children who never learned to be civil in cyberspace.

I volunteered to help moderate because I wanted to give something back to the board that I’ve enjoyed so much and because I feel the service is an important one to Writers Guild members, especially at this time. There’s no official guild electronic bulletin board, partly because the one that existed succumbed years ago to problems much like the ones we face every day at Writer Action. This is a way for me to serve the guild during our strike without driving 25 miles each way from my home four days a week to the nearest picket line. (As a Ventura County resident, I’m not technically required by the guild to picket.)

Last week, with the strike having dragged through the holidays and the conglomerates still refusing to come back to the bargaining table they abandoned, tempers flared on the board over a false rumor planted on two Hollywood-oriented websites. The rumor involved a Writer Action poster, who was now understandably furious, and its dissemination included parts of messages lifted from our private board, a practice expressly forbidden. The uproar on WA continued well after the six consecutive hours I put in trying to quell it.

The next day I messaged the other moderators and administrators that I would no longer be able to put that kind of time into my WA duties. I had been neglecting the new spec I’m working on, not to mention my family and personal life. I needed some moderation of my own.

Everyone completely understood, and we’ve begun taking steps to spread the work more evenly and streamline our process. I’ve already cut down my hours, but even so, it’s still hard for me to read the board without thinking like a hall monitor. I hope to regain that ability by the time my voluntary six-month tour of duty ends.

It would be nice if the strike is over by then too.

All us LAO-ers peeled our heiners off our desk chairs this morning and headed to Tarzana for our Second Annual LAObserved Brunch at stately Rensin Manor. As you can see, we are a handsome group, and we know how to eat. The board was groaning and excitement was in the air as we anticipated the year ahead. Veronique starts her new gig as news blogger for the LA Times tomorrow. We got to fondle the hefty galley for David Rensin's Miki Dora book "All For a Few Perfect Waves," coming in April, and Deanne Stillman showed us the stunning cover for her new book "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West" due in June. Kevin announced some exciting changes in for LAO, so stay tuned folks! All of us at Native Intelligence left replete with lox and fully resolved to post more. I personally plan to strive harder to clutter this blog with the kind of piffling puffery that is my hallmark. So 2008 is going to be a fantastic year at LAO! Thanks to David and Susie for the hospitality, apologies to those who left before I got my camera out. Thanks most of all to Kevin, our fearless leader, for creating and helming such a spankin' website and for giving us all the opportunity to contribute.

Photo left to right:
Erika Schickel, Cari Beauchamp, David Rensin, Denise Hamilton, Jenny Burman (with daughter Madeline), Veronique de Turenne, Judy Graeme, Eric Estrin, Deanne Stillman, TJ Sullivan and Kevin Roderick.

Some of the most heartfelt, gut-wrenching — and sometimes simply beautiful — street photography in Los Angeles is being created by low-income teenagers who meet once a week after school at the St. Francis Center on Hope Street in Downtown. The kids live near the center and are guided by their teacher, photographer Joanne Kim, and five volunteer artist-mentors.

The class is offered by Venice Arts, a non-profit program that recently joined with the USC Annenberg School for Communications to form the Institute for Photographic Empowerment. The students, for the most part new to photography, explored and documented their Downtown environment over ten weeks. Their subject matter included the streets and alleys around the Center, Disney Hall, and the students' own homes and families.

Their photographs are an example of "participant-produced" imagery, a way for kids who live in marginalized communities to have a voice and tell the stories of their lives. Venice Arts creative director Jim Hubbard, a veteran photojournalist, believes this kind of visual storytelling leads to individual empowerment and awareness for the students, and ultimately to social change.

For Kim and the mentors, the most important achievement so far has been to get the students to engage with and trust their instructors. On the Wednesdays of class, students are loaned a digital camera and escorted onto the streets in groups. After taking their pictures, they edit on computers at the center.

In mid-December, the year-long class took a break with a pizza party and slide show of everyone's best photos. Joanna Hernandez, who is 13, used her hand to frame a compelling image of Grand Avenue on Bunker Hill. Geovanni Montes, 15, caught a woman on a train that brought to mind the style of Bruce Davidson's series on New York subways.

Kim hopes the coming weeks will provide opportunities for the kids to learn more about photographic technique and about well-known photographers who might provide inspiration. Mostly, she wants them to continue using their cameras to examine and reveal the world they inhabit.

It's not only for their own sense of identity and self-worth, but as a tool to inform the larger community how youngsters Downtown live and the realities they face.

Photos from the class: (click to view each photo larger)

This is the third post in an occasional series about Los Angeles photographers whose subject is the city. Previous entries featured Julius Shulman and Iris Schneider.