Native Intelligence

I had just accepted a job offer from the Los Angeles Herald Examiner to become an editorial writer and op-ed columnist when I realized I might be making a terrible mistake.

It was late in the day on January 22, 1987 when I left the office after a promising first interview. On my way to my car, I spotted a Herald newsrack featuring the paper's "afternoon wrap," which was the morning edition with an added four-page wraparound section for late-breaking news. On the front page above the fold was a story about R. Budd Dwyer, the Pennsylvania state treasurer. That morning, a day before he was scheduled to be sentenced to prison on bribery related convictions, Dwyer held a press conference to proclaim his innocence--and then pulled out a Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum and blew his brains out in front of the stunned reporters. The Herald fronted a pair of photos: the first showed Dwyer brandishing the weapon; the second, with the gun in his mouth pulling the trigger.

This was not what I thought I was signing up for.

My previous job had been writing editorials and producing documentaries for a radio station whose owners considered public service programming not just a ruse to keep their license, but a solemn obligation. Its sleek and modern Hollywood offices looked more like an insurance firm than a typical radio station.

The Herald, by contrast, was located at the bottom of downtown, in more ways than one. Its once-splendid 1913 Julia Morgan-designed Mission Revival building had gone to seed, the ground-floor arched windows long-since covered over as a result of vandalism during the punishing 1967-1977 strike. Its beautiful lobby and graceful staircase to the second-floor newsroom were virtually all that was left of the original interior; the rest looked like a cheap 1950s-era retrofit.

Still, after a second interview with the editor-in-chief, I took the job. It would be the first and last newspaper I would ever work for. The Herald was already ailing when I joined, and for the nearly three years I was there, it was on life support. The final six months were like a prolonged death rattle, and after a few feeble attempts to rally, on November 2, 1989, it gave a last gasp and expired.

Thirty years ago this week, at the age of 86, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner died. It wasn't easy, but those Herald days were some of the most fun and rewarding experiences in my career.

Let me tell you why.

I was hired by an editorial page editor five years my junior--lucky for me, because a more senior editor never would have taken a chance on a radio guy with no print experience. Was it innovative out-of-the-box thinking, or sheer desperation? Either way, it was my lucky break. As a distant second to the Times in circulation and advertising, the Herald had nothing to lose, and could afford to gamble. Long shots, after all, were all it had left.

Every morning our editorial page staff would meet, and as our editor barked out "OK, what have you got?" we frantically riffed on our underdeveloped ideas. I'd offer, "I think we need to do something about the Israeli settlements," and the editor would fire back,"OK, what are we going to say? Land for peace?" I'd be thinking, "Middle East peace plan? Yeah, 600 words ought to do it."

We each churned out 4-6 editorials a week, with a punishing deadline of 2 p.m. The writing process itself only added to the pressure. Where my radio station had spoiled me with my own IBM PC, our overworked Coyote network at the Herald often crashed--invariably around deadline--and you could hear the cursing and shouts of desperation wafting up from the newsroom one floor below us.

Now and then, I had an eerie reminder of what it meant to be part of "legacy" news organization. There was mysterious pile of several hundred dust-covered Underwood manual typewriters in an otherwise empty office nearby. Once I found a ruler in my desk with the name "Ribicoff" inked on it, and realized with a start it had once belonged to Sarai Ribicoff, an editorial writer who had preceded me. A Phi Beta Kappa Yale graduate and niece of Connecticut Sen. Abraham Ribicoff, Sarai had been shot and killed in a street robbery near her Venice apartment seven years earlier; she was just 23.

I also learned about "the power of the press," and the reality checks about that power. In 1988, County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, first elected to the Board of Supervisors when Harry S Truman was still president, ran for reelection to a 10th term, despite a debilitating stroke that had severely limited his effectiveness. His district was roughly 70% people of color, and we thought it was time for a younger, healthier candidate, so we endorsed his long-shot challenger, the mayor of Carson and an African-American. A furious Hahn told the Times in an interview that he wasn't about to let the Herald run him out of office--and he didn't, an ailing white man in a heavily minority district still winning reelection with 85% of the vote.

We also notched a few David-and-Goliath wins that year. We were one of the only outlets to endorse Prop. 103, sponsored by a protégé of Ralph Nader and considered the most radical of five competing insurance-related measures on the ballot, three of them sponsored by the insurance industry. Voters approved 103 and rejected the others; last year, a study by the Consumer Federation of America found that California drivers have saved themselves $154 billion in premiums over the past 30 years.

That same election, we also stood nearly alone in opposing Armand Hammer's Occidental Petroleum scheme to operate slant-drilling coastal oil platforms at the base of the Pacific Palisades cliffs. Mayor Tom Bradley, the LA Times, most of the heavy-hitting consultants and lobbyists, and nearly the whole political establishment lined up with Oxy to push the drilling plan. Mayor Tom sent in Mickey Kantor and his delegation to lobby for our editorial endorsement. Kantor, a longtime Westsider himself, railed against supposedly greedy Westside homeowners who were depriving the city's communities of color of public services funded by oil revenues, just to protect their wealthy enclaves.

They failed. We wrote a full column Sunday editorial against the plan, endorsing instead Councilmembers Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude's initiative to protect the coast. Hammer pulled his ads from the paper and personally called the Hearst CEO in New York to clip our wings. But even though the Herald was losing millions every month, the CEO told him to take hike. The public stood with us and defeated the drilling plan, Zev personally called to thank us and to say how much the Herald's editorial support had meant to their underdog campaign.

But by the spring of 1989, the string was running out. When our union contract came up, Hearst gave us a first and last best offer, telling us that if we didn't accept it they'd shut the paper. Our negotiating committee wanted to accept it, but many of the reporters wanted to stand and fight. After an incredibly bitter all-day union meeting at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, we voted to authorize another strike.

Things were by then so stressful that I was almost continuously playing my cassette of Pete Seeger and Utah Phillips labor songs just to lift my sagging spirits. But before anything else happened, our negotiators caved and accepted the Hearst offer. Then we learned that Hearst had been lying to us across the bargaining table the whole time and was secretly negotiating to sell the paper. In response, our union filed an unfair labor charge with the National Labor Relations Board--but then quietly withdrew it without explanation. The reporters were so upset with the union that our shop steward quit--so one night after work over drinks at Corky's, the dive bar across the street, I found myself drafted to become the new shop steward.

For the next six months, I advocated for my members and represented them at grievance hearings. I think I may have saved one or two jobs. But the union and its contract were ultimately of no use. Rumors of a possible sale--or imminent closure--hung in the air like circling vultures; we were practically delirious with anxiety and exhaustion. Then, on Halloween, I got a call from a friend at the LA Times. Had I heard that the Hearst brass were in town, huddling in a downtown hotel? Something about a big announcement. On behalf of my members, I asked our local management about it. They claimed to know nothing.

The next day, November 1, the Herald's editor sent word that there was to be an all-hands-on-deck meeting in the newsroom that afternoon. We knew this was it. As we all gathered anxiously, Hearst newspaper division chief Robert Danzig, in a scene straight out of a movie, stood on a desk and grimly announced that they were closing the paper and that the next day's edition would be the Herald's last edition. Tears of sorrow, tears of relief--and then we trooped back to our computer terminals to write our final copy. We spent the next day cleaning out our desks, fielding condolence calls, and raiding the morgue for the clips we hoped would see us into our next journalism job. KTLA interviewed me as I was boxing up all my stuff. "What are your plans?" the reporter asked. I answered, "I don't have any idea."

As it turned out, I was one of the lucky ones. I was recruited again, this time to join a political staff as a press deputy. And that's where I stayed for the next 26 years, as the journalism world as I had known it collapsed entirely.

There have been many times when I mourned the loss of my journalism career, but very few times when I regretted my decision to leave it behind. The Times circulation peaked the year after the Herald closed, and it's been an accelerating slide ever since.

Yet I would not have traded my Herald days for anything. My tenure there was relatively brief, but it completely changed my life. I made some lifelong friends, I did work that I'm proud of, and occasionally, somebody even still remembers me.

For all of its final decade, the Herald was fighting a losing war--with changing public taste, with technology, with the economy, with time itself. On November 2, we survivors will gather for an informal 30th anniversary reunion, and I'm reminded of the famous lines from Shakespeare's "Henry V," as the king exhorts his men into the final momentous, glorious battle of Agincourt:

"From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here..."

Posted by Joel Bellman at 2:22 PM | Permalink

By Jon Regardie

Thursday, Aug. 29, was my last day at Los Angeles Downtown News. My departure was neither my decision nor my desire. The paper has a new owner. My 15-year-run -- one heck of a run -- has come to an end.

I know what you're thinking. I'm thinking the same thing: How can I be out of a job when José Huizar, 10 months after an FBI raid of his City Council office, still has his? I mean, there was a battalion of agents in the building!

I'll miss writing about Huizar and the rest of the City Hall crew for L.A. Downtown News. In fact, I'll miss writing about virtually everyaspect of the wonderful, diverse, dynamic, evolving, occasionally frustrating community. There have been so many great stories to track and so many extraordinary and sometimes unpredictable people to cover. It's a cliché to say that it has been an honor and a privilege to serve as Editor of Downtown News, but it's a cliché that is also true. The neighborhood was never dull, and the people who work and came to live here care deeply about their community. While I watched the skyline take shape and saw billion-dollar projects advance, as a journalist I could never predict, on a granular level, what would happen the next month, the next week, even the next day.

The best thing you can hope to find in a job is a place where you want to be each morning, working alongside smart and kind people whose talent in turn makes you better. That was always the situation with this gig. I'll miss it mightily.

Front-Row Seat

I did my first stint at Downtown News in the mid-1990s, left, and returned at the end of 2004, at the invitation of the wonderful Sue Laris, who founded and ran this gem of a publication for more than four decades. The job gave me a front-row seat to an unprecedented city revival. I've been fortunate to watch as a moribund community has been reclaimed, as a neighborhood that two decades ago died each night at 5 p.m. has blossomed into a vibrant, 24-7 city replete with an engaged residential population and some of the best restaurants and cultural spots in the state.

I still remember the day in 1998 when a brash young developer named Tom Gilmore called and told me to meet him at Fourth and Main streets. I did, and he pointed to three buildings at the then-hardscrabble intersection. He said he had bought them and was going to turn them into market-rate apartments. I thought he was nuts.

"People say the neighborhood is lousy," he told me. "I just bought the neighborhood."

I wrote about Gilmore many times in ensuing years, but he and his Old Bank District -- which proved to be the beachhead for the residential revival -- was just one of a gajillion captivating and catalytic projects that powered the growth of the community. The landmarks multiplied -- Staples Center, Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, Grand Park, the Ace Hotel, The Broad, the Wilshire Grand. To get a sense of how far Downtown has come, just remember when everyone went bananas in 2007 when Downtown welcomed... wait for it... a Ralphs supermarket.

I've witnessed a stunning array of power brokers and big plays. Fortunes were made and lost. Nothing I saw in Downtown rivaled the dominance and in-the-moment myth-making of AEG's Tim Leiweke as he rode herd on the creation of L.A. Live and nearly got a $1 billion football stadium erected in South Park. On the opposite end of the spectrum, I saw jaws drop as San Zell filleted the L.A. Times. That was eclipsed only by Frank McCourt treating the Dodgers as a personal cash machine. Okay, it
was also eclipsed by Clippers owner Donald Sterling verbally immolating himself, as we learned the depths of his creepiness.

I'll always be thankful for the coterie of politicians and other public figures who seemed to make it a personal mission to keep giving the media something to write about -- they were the gift that keeps on giving. In addition to Huizar there was Antonio Villaraigosa, a mayor felled by personal ambition, Jim Hahn, a mayor felled by seemingly not wanting to be mayor, and Eric Garcetti, a mayor whose legacy still hangs in the balance. There was Carmen Trutanich, a hurricane as city attorney, and
City Council President Herb Wesson. Oy, Herb Wesson. The list goes on and on and on.

Next

I'm incredibly proud of the work Downtown News did over the last 15 years. It was always rewarding. It was always hard. There hasn't been a lot of time off.

So now I'm taking that time, regrouping, breathing, reassessing. I'll spend as much time as possible with my wife and kids. I'll exercise more. Tomorrow I'll wake up early -- it's my turn for carpool.

What's next? I don't know. The lack of an answer is scary. It's also exciting.

I remain fascinated by this city, by its power games and myriad challenges, by its leaders, by its triumphs, by its failure and by its attempt to wrestle with challenges including the soul-crushing crisis of homelessness. I hope to continue to write about Los Angeles for a long, long time.

Thank you to everyone who has read and reached out over the years. And please continue to do so. I'm at jregardie@gmail.com. I'll see you at the next stop,

Jon Regardie

Posted by Visiting Blogger at 11:25 AM | Permalink

It was nice today in downtown Los Angeles, the kind of day you might walk around and smell the flowers or the bus exhaust, or sit on a park bench and watch, as former L.A. Times sports columnist T.J. Simers used to write, "these people [who] live among you."

Today in downtown L.A., Simers walked around, near the courthouse, for more than an hour. He was watching people, but ask him now what he saw and he probably won't remember. At 10:45, his phone rang. Today was verdict day in the re-trial of Simers' 2013 lawsuit against his erstwhile employer for wrongful termination.

He took a seat on a park bench nearby.

After six years, two trials and an appeals court ruling, Simers sat, waiting for the phone to ring again. The first call, from his lawyer, announced that the jury was back. Another call would announce the verdict. Simers benched himself, too nervous to go inside the courtroom to hear it in person. What if the call didn't go his way?

Simers v Tribune Co., et. al. first went to trial in September 2015, and lasted six weeks. I was in the courtroom one day then, for opening statements and a tiny slice of witness testimony.

Simers claimed that the Times essentially forced him to resign because he was too old and had inconvenient health issues. Discrimination on the basis of age or disability is illegal, but proving such claims is very difficult, and a tie in these situations generally does not go to the runner, especially when he resigns, then runs all the way to the Orange County Register, as Simers did.

The Times claimed that any stress Simers incurred from events that occurred in the spring and summer of 2013 was his own fault; that he had failed to disclose outside business relationships, and pursued conflicting interests.

The Times should have settled the case then. That jury found Simers credible and sympathetic, a descriptor never before applied to the abrasive reporter. The verdict was that Simers' grief was righteous, and worth $7.1 million to be paid by the troglodytic Tribune company that ran the paper then.

It was never entered into evidence, so Simers' charm probably wasn't what won the jurors' hearts. It probably had to do with what looked like bullying. People who wrote in Simers' performance review in February 2013 that he was one of the paper's "must read" writers, by June had relieved him of his column. Being snarky and sometimes mean isn't illegal, and in the hands of a decent reporter and a gifted writer such stories draw eyes to the page and screen. So why didn't the paper settle this mess?

The Times planned to appeal the first verdict, but a month later, the trial judge, William MacLaughlin, voided the award. He deemed Simers unentitled to economic damages, but said that the case for discrimination and emotional distress could be retried. Both sides whined (aka "appealed"), and in January 2018, a state Court of Appeals agreed with MacLaughlin's ruling to dump the award, and re-try the matter. If the result was the same, they would re-do the math.

Eighteen months later, the opponents were still circling each other, looking for a settlement opening that didn't present. As Simers said today, "We never got a legitimate settlement offer, and we tried. ... My original intent [in suing] was noble -- it was stupid, but noble. I was trying to make a point for older journalists. After six years it wasn't so noble. They spent a good deal of time ripping me the way they used to like me [ripping people] on Page 2."

The second trial began Aug. 5. Simers' team called a few witnesses, including current sports columnist Dylan Hernandez and former Sports Editor/columnist Bill Dwyre. The defense called one witness, a physical therapist who had treated Simers for a shoulder problem that had nothing to do with anything.

This morning, on the park bench, between phone calls, Simers sat and waited. Fifteen minutes passed. The phone rang.

The verdict was another shocker: The jury still liked Simers, they really liked him. The value of its affection was $15,450,000 -- more than twice the first award. And the paper is also on the hook for legal fees, interest and other court costs. Nick Rowley, one of Simers' attorneys, said in a news release that the newspaper might have to fork over $22 million. Efforts to reach The Times' defense counsel and an editor at the paper were unsuccessful.

Simers, however, was happy to talk. But, wholly out of his columnist character, he said he didn't want to gloat. In fact, after six years, he does seem like a changed man. "It sounds crazy," he said, "but the money didn't matter. ... It's a good day for journalism. There are a lot of journalists out there with no chance to do this. I hope this verdict gives them confidence to fight."

Previously on LA Observed:

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 7:27 PM | Permalink

Annie Leibovitz at the Hauser & Wirth gallery in DTLA. Photos by Iris Schneider.

The first thing Annie Leibovitz did before she went on a walk-through of her career-capping exhibition at Hauser & Wirth, Annie Leibovitz: The Early Years, 1970-1983 Archive Project No. 1, was issue a verbal apology and a warning about the enormity of what lay ahead. You're not meant to look at every one of the 4,000 images pinned unpretentiously but carefully to the walls, without frames and laid out over several rooms in sequence and stacks, she warned. Just go through and find the images that have meaning for you, she advised. That is how it's meant to be viewed.

Flowing down that river and finding meaningful images is a task much easier fulfilled than you might think. So many of the images themselves are memorable, and so many evoke a flood of feelings about the period in our history and the specific events they document.

Even though she admits that in her younger days she wanted to be Henri Cartier-Bresson, "the decisive moment never came for me exactly." Looking back, Leibovitz says that instead, "It became a river of work." I admit when I first heard that the show consisted of 4000 images, I thought, she needs an editor. And of course, not every image sings. But so many stand alone. And seeing the breadth of her work, the visual timeline that represents not only her life, but ours, is actually quite stunning. It's a visual history of the 70's and of many of its seminal characters.

I disagree that the decisive moment never came but I think that Leibovitz found so many of the moments surrounding it just as compelling. I get it. I spent a career as a photojournalist being a fly on the wall, watching for the things that others might have missed, documenting the unfolding of major events and not just the pinnacle moment. I appreciate this river of images because it fleshes out those iconic moments and gives them context. And it does take some confidence to put your outtakes on the wall.

Hearing her talk about the early years was revealing of who she was at the time, a young art student with a camera, basically putting one step, photographically, in front of another, and following where her curiosity and her photographic idols led her. In her talk, she was honest and self-effacing. She admits that when she signed on to follow the Rolling Stones on their 1975 tour she would much rather have been traveling with Bob Dylan. But that was not her destiny and not her journey.

Instead, she hitched her wagon to the stars of pop culture, politics and rock 'n roll, chronicling it all for 13 years for Rolling Stone in its nascent days. And they are all here: Jagger and Richards, Stevie Nicks, Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe, George Wallace, Dan Rather, Keith Haring, Jackson Browne, Linda Ronstadt and Jerry Brown ("Why don't you photograph her reading a book?" he had asked her indignantly), George McGovern, Hunter Thompson, and Richard Nixon among so many others.

The groundbreaking photo spread on the day of Nixon's resignation that appeared in Rolling Stone, including the memorable image of the red carpet being rolled up as the helicopter bearing Nixon after his v-for-victory farewell was barely lifting off the ground, basically happened because Hunter Thompson who, Leibovitz recalled, had worked so hard and wished so fervently for this day to come, had writer's block and could not write about Nixon's final departure. The ten blank pages that were awaiting his prose instead were filled with the images that a young Leibovitz had taken that day, the first time the magazine let images tell the story.

The iconic portrait she made of a naked John Lennon curled around a clothed Yoko Ono, was shot on the day Lennon was murdered. It appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone because Leibovitz told Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone's editor, that Lennon wanted to be with Yoko. Wenner replaced the single portrait of Lennon they were going to run with the one we all remember. It became something so much more meaningful given the events of that day. Instead of reviewing the images with John and Yoko that evening, she had waited at Roosevelt Hospital that night to hear the final outcome. "I think I was in shock for months," she said. Yoko had encouraged her to sell the image so she could buy herself a loft but she said that she never did. "Maybe it would have been better if more people had seen that image," she reflected, "but I was idealistic at that time" and it never felt right to sell it.

Sprinkled throughout the rooms are photos that Leibovitz has taken over the years of her family: her parents, her partner Susan Sontag, her siblings, her children. She talked about photographing her mother, who was a dancer. As a budding photographer, Leibovitz had asked if she could photograph her mother dancing. The sequence of photos brings tears to her eyes because, she says, at that moment they were not mother and daughter but rather dancer and photographer. They had assumed the roles that would define who they were, or who they were becoming.

For Leibovitz, the process of mounting this show provided her an opportunity to look back and see the evolution of her work. Perhaps that is why she thanked the curators at Hauser & Wirth for putting up with her, and allowing her to include so many images -- seminal and ordinary -- that marked her journey. I'm not sure their decision came from respect or indulgence, but I took the advice she gave and searched for those images that resonated for me.

Those who might not connect so personally with her work might find this sea of images — and the dearth of captions and difficulty in identifying who we are looking at — kind of frustrating and bewildering. There is a written roadmap of the show, but not everyone who visits knows to ask for it. It should be more readily available as it definitely enhances the experience.

Leibovitz talked affectionately about the series she did for Rolling Stone in 1976 in which she documented the living photojournalists who inspired and informed her growth as a photographer in her own right: Cartier-Bresson, Jacques Lartigue, Ansel Adams, Richard Avedon, among others. The breadth of her interests and curiosity are the mark of every great photographer. And in this show there is value in even the imperfect moments captured, sprinkled in between those images that we will never forget. It's fascinating to see Ansel Adams standing on the stoop of his house, his station wagon in the driveway, a casual moment that humanizes the master.

When asked if she felt disadvantaged starting out as a rare female photographer in a mostly male world, she said that in a way being a woman made it easier. "No one paid any attention to you because they didn't think you could do anything important," she said. Looking at her river of images, I'd say she proved them wrong.

Her more recent work also makes an appearance on the walls, highly conceptual and well-lit portraits for Vanity Fair that, while clever, are not nearly as revealing or intimate as her early documentary work. No longer operating as an under-the-radar fly on the wall in her work, she still documents her family and her life, and can't really imagine ever putting down her camera and retiring, she says. "I'm going out with a camera in my hand."

Posted by Iris Schneider at 11:23 PM | Permalink

Part of the front page of the Los Angeles Star published on Oct. 9, 1858.

By Susan LaTempa

It feels to a lot of readers--and journalists--that we've lived through unusually turbulent times at Los Angeles newspapers in recent years, with the shape-shifting but ever-beset L.A. Times typically at the center of the story.

But if you step back for an historic perspective, you'll find that 'twas ever thus for L.A. journalism--and then some.

From their start in the early 1850s, local newspapers--and/or their owners, publishers, and editors--came and went as frequently as other get-ahead schemes. Newspapers were aligned with political parties. Editors ran for office, castigated their competitors in print, and sought printing business from government agencies.

As editor for "Paperback L.A.," the "casual anthology" series from Prospect Park Books, I've been poking around the increasingly accessible archives of early Los Angeles newspapers, including The Star/La Estrella and The Los Angeles Daily Herald, from which I drew excerpts for the books. I'm not a historian, but I've been a newspaper and magazine staff writer and editor, so I read those old columns of newsprint with sympathy and, it turns out, some envy.

If you ask me, L.A.'s first fifty years of newspapering, before yellow journalism was even invented, were way more colorful than its last fifty years.

Editors Put the Passion in Passionate

For example, I've seen nothing in modern times like the exchange of invective in print that led to a gun battle in the streets, which happened in 1879 between Joseph Lynch, editor of the Herald, and William Spaulding, acting editor of the Evening Express. The issue was the influence of the Southern Pacific Railroad Company on politics; Lynch had described Spaulding as a "pismire," or ant, "of a dog-like and snarling temper." Spaulding later wrote that both of them missed all their shots. "As I continued to fire, I advanced, and when the fracas was over, I was standing in the middle of the street, and he was in the barber shop." The feud didn't go on forever: Their newspapers were merged by Hearst in 1931.

You Think You Have a Communications Problem?

The 1850s and '60s were get-a-foothold time for journalists in our small town surrounded by cattle ranches and vineyards, isolated, until 1860, by the lack of telegraph communications. There was little local news except for crime and vigilante reports. Newsgathering tactics included getting your buddies to write letters from their camping trips and scissoring news out of other papers. San Francisco and East Coast publications were happy to exchange issues for reciprocal re-use, but, according to an early Star editor, news took "from two to six weeks and in one instance fifty-two days" to arrive.

Tech Revolution

Things had improved with the arrival of the telegraph, but what's that notice on Page 2 of the first issue of the new Daily Herald? (Page 2 carried the breaking news, with the pride of place on Page 1 going to poetry and advertisements.) It seems that editor/publisher Charles A. Storke wasn't having a good day: The (actual) wires were down, and there was no news.

Poetry Was Actually Popular

Poetry and politics were the pillars of editorial content in L.A.'s early newspapers. Various papers actively advocated for Whigs, Democrats (and their subgroups, including Copperheads and Chivalry Democrats), even those pesky pro-abolition Republicans--but poetry was something everyone could appreciate. It held sway until the strategy of covering agriculture news became a turn-of-the century winner for the Los Angeles Weekly Herald. Poetry's local queen, Josephine Smith, signed herself "Ina" and was later (by then named Ina Donna Coolbrith) designated poet laureate by the state legislature.

Multiculturalism: the Old Normal

The Star/La Estrella, a weekly, was L.A.'s first newspaper, begun by and for newly dominant Americans in 1851, and it was bilingual from the start. La Crónica, a Spanish-language paper from 1872-92, started as a weekly and became a semi-weekly. By the late 1870s, there were also German- and French-language newspapers; by 1910, Japanese, Swedish, and Slavic. The California Owl, targeting African American readers, was founded in 1897 (later becoming The Eagle); the Bnai Brith Messenger began the same year (named Emanu-El at first) for the large Jewish community. William Spaulding recalled that weekly City Council meetings, with all discussion translated into the three languages (Spanish, English, French) spoken by the various councilmen, were so long and repetitive he could have his copy "ready to turn in to the printer, subheds and all, as soon as I reached the office."

Arch Rivals

We should know a lot more than we do about Francisco Ramírez, a trilingual (English, Spanish, French) fourteen-year-old Californio who worked for a year as compositor and translator when The Star/La Estrella began, then returned to L.A. after schooling to found the Spanish-language El Clamor Público at age seventeen. El Clamor incorporated occasional English sections and, for a while, a regular French page. Ramirez was an ardent Republican who railed against the (widely prevalent) lynching of Mexicans. He ran for state senator in 1863, losing to Star editor Henry Hamilton. Hamilton, an Irish immigrant, was known for colorful partisan editorials that bitterly opposed Lincoln. Under him, the Star was excluded from the U.S. mails for a year in 1862 because it had been used "for the purpose of overthrowing the government of the U.S." A few months later, he was arrested, held for ten days, and released after taking a loyalty oath. He continued his anti-administration editorials and took his views to the state legislature.

Big Personalities on the Left

E.W. Scripps, the founder of the Los Angeles Record, the evening penny paper aimed at working-class readers, was a self-described "Damned Old Crank" who portrayed himself as an accidental capitalist but attracted a talented and energetic band of idealist-journalists, including Rueben W. Borough. As Borough remembered about his years there before WWI, "We were for civil liberties and we fought tooth and nail against every effort to prevent equal justice to racial and political minorities. We defended the Wobblies. A Wobbly was pretty hard to defend in a legal action, but he was entitled to defense and he got it." Even further to the left was Ricardo Flores Magón, a Mexican revolutionary born in Oaxaca who, beginning in 1910, published his banned anti-Diaz newspaper, Regeneración, from L.A. for several years in between stints in U.S. jails for advocating the abolishment of private property, along with other offenses.

A Real Newspaper Town

By the beginning of the 20th century, L.A. was a real newspaper town, with another four papers--The Times, The Evening Express, The Evening Herald, and The Examiner--joining the larger-circulation survivors from the first fifty years. The fraught commercial strategy of selling papers through sensationalized politics was updated to include some Hollywood spice.

And now here we are--online, evolved far beyond divisive debates because we have so many choices. Ignoring innuendo and and demagogic leaders because we are so well informed. Right? Right?

Susan LaTempa is the editor of the newly released Paperback L.A. Book 2: Studios, Salesmen, Shrines, Surfspots, and its predecessor, Paperback L.A. Book 1: Clothes, Coffee, Crushes, Crimes. The series features works by a broadly diverse roster that includes Eve Babitz, Chester Himes, Vin Scully, Lisa See, Jonathan Gold, Susan Sontag, Harry Shearer, Ray Bradbury, Naomi Hirahara, Hector Tobar, and many more.

Posted by Visiting Blogger at 11:22 PM | Permalink

I don't share the view that the recent media blowup over the Covington Catholic kids and the tribal drummer at the Lincoln Memorial was much ado about nothing. It may have been too much ado, but it was about something.

It was about the use and abuse of social media to drive an ideological agenda (quite possibly from a fake Twitter account), the carelessness and gullibility of the news media (exemplified by the initial BuzzFeed News account, only a day after their discredited Michael Cohen "scoop"), and the toxic tribalism of the Trump era.

But it was also about other things: a Rorschach test of the national psyche, which suggests a kind of borderline personality disorder on both sides. You watched the numerous videos, from a misleading snippet to a stupefying two-hour real time recording, and saw what you wanted to see: Either these schoolboys were entitled white junior patriarchal oppressors and racist monsters, whose "red MAGA hats are the new white hoods," or they were innocent "targets of the media-led outrage mob."

Then there was the Rashomon effect, the plot hinge in the classic 1950 Kurosawa film in which multiple eyewitnesses and participants give divergent and even contradictory accounts of the same incident. Nick Sandmann, the Covington 16-year-old at the center of the media firestorm, released a statement of his account, crafted with the help of a crisis PR firm; Nathan Phillips, the Native American drummer, offered shifting accounts of his own in various interviews; a lengthy video posted by a half-dozen Black Hebrew Israelites, who helped escalate the confrontation, told yet a different story; and virtually every partisan who saw a video or read an account declares with certitude that they know exactly what happened and whose fault it was.

No reporters personally witnessed the events, not that it would necessarily have cleared anything up even if they had.

Too much of the analysis, I think, has missed the point, dwelling on superficialities. Why were the boys standing where they were, instead of further away from the demonstration? Where were the chaperones? Did the Native American drummer falsely claim to be a Vietnam veteran? Was the crisis PR firm connected to Sen. Mitch McConnell? Were the Black Hebrew Israelites only proselytes, or provocateurs?

It's all a willful distraction from the deeper problem, and it long predates Donald Trump and his presidency: and that is a fundamental ignorance of, indifference toward, and contempt for First Amendment guarantees of free speech and freedom of assembly. Too many people today, across the ideological spectrum, not only disdain respect for differing or opposing viewpoints--they seem to reject even the abstract principle of tolerating dissent at all.

It's a profoundly unhealthy development, and we've seen it cut both ways in similar situations. After the Parkland, Florida high school shooting last Valentine's Day, student David Hogg and some of his fellow survivors emerged as outspoken supporters of gun control. They were lionized by the Left and showcased on national media. But almost immediately, the gun lobby and its right-wing allies launched a campaign of personal attacks and character assassination to ridicule, discredit, and intimidate Hogg into silence. Progressives howled in outrage, and the effort to silence Hogg failed--but it largely succeeded in squelching the gun-control debate and blocking any meaningful national legislation.

Fast-forward to today: Nick Sandmann, a 16-year-old schoolboy only a year younger than Hogg was at the time of the Parkland shooting, similarly did not seek out the limelight, but found himself thrust into it by circumstances. But he was no articulate, media-genic public-school shooting victim; he was a parochial school kid (one strike) in DC for an anti-abortion rally (two strikes) wearing a red MAGA hat (three strikes) appearing to treat disrespectfully an elderly Native American. And so the positions were reversed: now it's activists and self-righteous commentators on the Left who are attacking, doxxing, and even threatening his family and the school, which has taken down most of its online media presence.

It's not even the first time a kid simply wearing a MAGA hat triggered an aggressive response; last August, a 17-year-old student was charged with battery against a classmate (she later called her act "a political statement.") Imagine a boy attacking a female student for wearing a pussy hat, and trotting out such an excuse!

After all the threats, bullying, incitement and confrontations that characterized the Trump presidential campaign, it's no wonder the political debate is so fraught today. But it's still no excuse to abandon basic principles of tolerance and civility, no matter the issue and no matter the opponent. Who could forget that uplifting moment when Michelle Obama declared at the 2016 Democratic Convention that, "When they go low, we go high."

That November, of course, we saw how well that seemed to work out. So it was bracing to hear former Attorney General Eric Holder tell a campaign gathering in the heat of the mid-term elections last fall, "No, no. When they go low, we kick them."

But when Michelle was later asked to respond, she answered in words that Dr. King and the great civil rights leaders of the past would have embraced: "Fear is never a proper motivator," she said. "Hope always wins out." And she added, "We think of the values we try to promote to our children. Which model do you want them to live by?"

As a parent, as a citizen, I know that she's right. In the news coverage, and the social-media reaction, we adults should have shown more respect, restraint and common decency. It was a teachable moment, and being better role models would have been the most powerful positive lesson for those kids. That's my takeaway from the Covington kerfuffle.

Posted by Joel Bellman at 10:59 PM | Permalink

In 1979, I was assigned to write an article for an intimate apparel trade magazine. "Seductive Selling LA Style" was the first story I got paid for as a freelance writer. It was about a retail store on La Cienega called Trashy Lingerie. It's still there.

So are low rates like the one I got for that gig -- $150. Unless independent writers regularly contribute to print versions of The New Yorker, Vanity Fair or The Atlantic, we make more money working as a McDonald's shift manager.

Until the dawn of the digital era, freelance writers who actually made a living routinely resold their stories, or versions of them. They might have resold to a foreign newspaper, or licensed reprint rights to a PR company for press-kit photocopies of stories in which their clients were mentioned. Unless they expressly sold rights beyond one-time print use, writers' exclusive ownership of their copyright could enable them to market their intellectual property more widely. And because story fees were lousy, they had to.

Most writing assignments still pay crap. But because the online marketplace has so radically changed the media universe, many publishers insist on buying all or most rights for most work produced by freelancers. A publisher buys all rights because it can't or doesn't want to account for all of a work's uses. "All" doesn't mean "exclusive," it means that the publisher gets to share the rights to re-license the work with its creator. Although the writer retains the copyright, he or she must compete in the resell market with a much more powerful seller.

A couple of weeks ago, I received a thin envelope in snail mail from Dublin, Ohio. The sender was Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation, a wonky, vaguely familiar name. I figured it was a story pitch or fund appeal from one of the many media information purveyors that usually find me via email.

But the Ohioans weren't looking for money, they were offering it. The envelope contained a check for a substantial amount. No letter. Just a check whose stub bore a claim number and the message:

Dear Class Member:
Full payment of your claim in In Re Literary Works in Electronic Databases Copyright Litigation. Void after 90 days.
Sincerely,
GCG, Claims Administrator

I've signed petitions. I've joined advocacy groups. But I've never sued anyone. Have I?

Well, yeah. Thirteen years ago, about 3,000 other freelance journalists and I sued some publishers for reselling our work when they didn't have the right.

I stared at the check, and remembered filling out reams of paperwork, determined, but cynical. There was no way I or anyone else would see anything remotely equivalent to the value of what had been stolen from us. I had plumbed years of story files more as a gesture of support for independent writers than for any real expectation of remuneration. It was a pain in the ass, but it was important to go on record that publishers don't get to repurpose our work without permission.

That's theft, and it violates the U.S. Constitution, which affords authors exclusive rights "to their respective Writings, ..."

In 2001, in a case known as New York Times v. Tasini, the U.S. Supreme Court found that five publishers had infringed on the copyright of six writers. The defendants had republished freelance writers' work in various electronic media when the creators had agreed to write stories only for one-time use in print.

The publishers removed much of the content from online databases, but shortly after Tasini, a related suit was filed that prompted years' worth of settlement negotiations. It was a larger, more complicated case in which writers were supported by the National Writers Union, the Authors Guild and the American Society of Journalists and Authors.

As a member of ASJA, I had learned that I could submit claims for stories I wrote that might have been reprinted for the benefit of the original publishers but not for me. In 2005, defendants agreed to pay $18 million to settle all claims in a byzantine formula involving four class actions and two categories of written material.

The wheels of justice indeed grind slowly, but in this case they were greased with righteous perseverance. Yes, lawyers made millions ($4 million, if I'm interpreting the online documents correctly), but writers had claimed nearly 300,000 works for consideration, and 26,583 listed publications had objected to 42,000 of them, which had to be reviewed.

I had filed 235 individual story claims, of which 122 were declared in ineligible. The settlement documents do not parse individual claims, so I don't know which of my 113 eligible stories were compensated and for how much in my share of the total $9 million split among 2,500 writers (502 of them had opted out of the class settlement).

My hundreds of claimed stories were published between 1980 and 2004 for article fees ranging from $100 to $2,200. They ran in publications no longer in business (including, it appears, the naughty knickers magazine), and those published by major players including the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, the Orange County Register, Modern Maturity (now AARP Magazine) and Travel & Leisure.

Did I receive what I was due? Nah. But more important than my check for $2,555.77 was confirmation that my work has value that our justice system respects. That organizations such as ASJA served a vital role in my nascent career, educating me about writers' rights and my responsibility in advocating for them. Loudly, if necessary.

Photo: Ellen Alperstein

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 3:50 PM | Permalink

Kirk Gibson bobblehead.

They're bringing Kirk Gibson back to Dodger Stadium Thursday to throw out the first ball on opening day, and like most of us who were there the night Gibson became a part of World Series history Joe Amalfitano has a story to tell.

Amalfitano's half-century career as player, coach, manager and scout — "I'm a lifer," he says — began when he was a rookie sitting on the New York Giants bench as Willie Mays made his famous catch in the 1954 World Series. Thirty-four years later, when Amalfitano was coaching third base for the Dodgers, he became the first man to shake Gibson's hand as he limped around the bases after his historic game-winning home run.

So to this day, whenever they show the the most memorable highlights of past World Series, Amalfitano relives two of his most memorable days at the ballpark. Once in a while, he even gets to see himself.

"Sometimes, they'll cut away when Gibson gets between first and second base and he's pumping his fist and limping like Chester in 'Gunsmoke,'" Amalfitano says. "But sometimes, they'll show the whole thing and I'll yell to my wife, 'Hey, get out here. Look at me.'"

My own memory of Gibson's home run elicits a different emotion: Terror.

I was writing a sports column for the LA Daily News then — talk about memories, it was one of the fastest growing papers in the country in the late 80s and now it's laying people off in droves and laboring to keep the doors open — and the game was shaping up as one of those easy ones sportswriters long for. The Oakland Athletics were winning easily and Dennis Eckersley, the best relief pitcher in baseball, was working the bottom of the ninth.

All we needed was a final score and we were good to go. And then it turned into our worst nightmare.

The people in the ballpark were screaming with joy after Gibson hit his home run, of course, but we were running for our lives. Through the mob of fans, down the elevator, crammed into a small interview room off the Dodgers' locker room where, wonder of wonders, there was Gibson waiting for us.

I don't think I'm giving away any secrets when I say Gibson was not always the easiest guy to deal with. You might catch him on a good day and he'd be curtly civil or you might get that out-of- my-face look that would make you decide to go talk to Orel Hershiser instead.

But just as Gibson had known what to do against Eckersley, he knew what his responsibility was now. For five minutes, the only voice in the room was his and, he took us through it all. Where he had been. What he had thought. What he had been told. What he had said. What he had seen. What he had done. What he had felt. Everything that had happened before, during and after his epic at-bat.

As we raced upstairs to write our stories without the luxury of thought we realized no one had to ask a single question. As far as we were concerned, Gibson had performed two heroic acts that night.

Gibson is struggling with Parkinson's disease now--some of the proceeds from Opening Day will go fund his foundation that promotes its awareness--and everybody who remembers his most famous night at the ballpark can only wish him well.

Joe Amalfitano, I'm sure, would like to shake his hand.

Me, too.

Posted by Ron Rapoport at 12:25 PM | Permalink

Photo: Joel Bellman

In one of his last interviews this past summer, the late radio dramatist Joe Frank confessed that he couldn't "remember a thing" from the six years he spent living in Washington, D.C. before moving to Los Angeles to join KCRW.

Selfishly, I was relieved. That meant he'd also forgotten about the time I dumped his drink in his lap when we first met at a Georgetown bar.

The year was 1982. A year or so earlier, I had just started my first professional radio news job in Los Angeles, and a close friend who shared my passion for radio casually asked if I'd heard of this guy Joe Frank--"you might find him interesting." A handful of Joe's early shows had aired nationally on NPR, but back in those pre-digital days, "downloads" were marketed in the form of audio cassettes, each in its own clamshell case. In for a penny, in for a pound, I ordered the whole batch.

My literary taste has always leaned toward the dark and weird, having been raised on horror and science fiction in movies, short stories, comic books--as well as the medium of radio drama, which had captivated me ever since I'd first heard rebroadcasts of "The Shadow" back in the mid-1960s. As an English professor, my dad had exposed me from an early age to Poe, Kafka, H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, and all the great British ghost story authors, many of whom had been effectively adapted for radio during its pre-television "Golden Age."

But when my NPR cassettes finally arrived, nothing had prepared me for the hallucinatory world of Joe Frank. It was as if he'd absorbed all the classic literary influences I loved, applied the most sophisticated and imaginative radio production techniques I admired, and conjured up a shadowy realm of free-associative aural nightmares.

As musical trance-loops droned in the background, Joe's narrator, speaking in an even, sonorous monotone, would begin his tales conventionally enough. But before long, his voice might take on a new urgency, even a barely controlled hysteria, as he recounted increasingly absurd, bizarre, and frightening scenes with clinical precision. As things increasingly spun of control, listeners would quickly find themselves plunged into a world of incipient madness, careening from deadpan humor and twisted erotica to desperate confessionals and despairing existential debates.

I knew I had to meet this guy, and it wasn't long before I found my opportunity. I was scheduled to travel to D.C. for a conference, and knowing that Joe was living there, got his number, called to introduce myself, and we agreed to meet. The bar was a dark and crowded yuppie hang-out; I spotted Joe off in a corner, his drink set on a small three-legged table. After navigating through the crowd, I leaned in to shake hands--and immediately upset the table, spilling the drink all over him. Not five minutes in, and I was already beginning to feel like a character in one of his radio plays.

Despite my disastrous first impression, Joe kept in touch. A couple of years later, a package arrived in the mail; I opened it to find a signed copy of a new prose anthology, which included the transcript of Joe's 1983 radio play, "The Decline of Spengler." But I found the most exciting news in the index card he'd tucked into the flyleaf: "Dear Joel," it read, "I'll be coming out west in February for a series of 12 one-hour live programs on KCRW, with original music by a band I'm working with here in D.C." It was to become the most celebrated and productive phase of his long radio career.

Shortly after Joe's move to Los Angeles, we got together again for dinner. At some point in the conversation, I mentioned Martin Scorsese's then-current film, "After Hours," a black comedy that I imagined Joe could easily have written. Well, he said--he sort of had. A friend of his had seen it, and reported back to him, "Did you know they stole your work and turned it into a movie?" When Joe went to see for himself, he was shocked to discover that fledgling screenwriter Joseph Minion had lifted the first 20 minutes or so of his script for "Lies" (a 1982 Frank radio play) almost verbatim. "And the crazy thing is, the guy was a big fan of mine," Joe told me. "I have letters from him telling me how much he loved my work." Warner Bros. hastily settled Joe's inevitable lawsuit, which kept him solvent for the next few years, and whose non-disclosure agreement kept the whole matter safely under wraps.

In 1988, I found an excuse to interview Joe for a local public-affairs program I was hosting on KPFK. The topic was talk radio, a populist phenomenon whose dark side had recently been explored in a controversial Oliver Stone film. I asked him the reason for its exploding appeal.

"Because of the anonymity, because visually you can't be seen, you're not known, it gives you a certain kind of freedom that you wouldn't have otherwise, and so that you can say things, and reveal yourself in ways that you wouldn't perhaps be otherwise willing to reveal yourself," Joe explained. "And of course there's also the element of voyeurism, people who listen and enjoy a certain kind of voyeuristic pleasure, particularly if you're listening to a program of a psychological nature, where people are talking about their marital problems, or problems in their love relationships, or whatever."

And beside the prurient hosts, there were the others, the outrageous and abusive: "I think that's appealing because the listener can vicariously enjoy it," he told me. "We all feel anger, we all feel rage, and we all want to be outrageous, and we all want to be lawbreakers, and we all want to be reckless criminals. We want to do things we can't possibly do. The hosts of these programs, in a sense, they're the lawbreakers, and they do things we can sort of vicariously appreciate and enjoy because we're not doing them. If you live in a world in which frustration is a good part of your life, and you have to repress or suppress a lot of your own emotions, then it's liberating on some level, again vicariously, to be able to see somebody else do it."

Despite forays into stage performance, a printed short story collection, and periodic attempts to adapt his work for film and television, Joe's medium would always be radio. It was there he returned again and again, struggling mightily in recent years against mounting health problems. In the theatre of the mind, after all, the only artistic constraint is the writer's imagination, and Joe's was thoroughly unbridled, running wild and free throughout several hundred programs across nearly 40 years. He was, as many have written, "an acquired taste," but for listeners with an adventurous palate, he created a singular body of recorded work that will stand with the finest radio dramas--indeed, the finest literature--our world has produced.

Sample or subscribe to Joe's work at: https://www.joefrank.com.

Previously on LA Observed:
Joe Frank, RIP

Posted by Joel Bellman at 7:55 PM | Permalink

The print edition of my LA Times has an interesting front page today. The ad folks are either big on irony or lack adult supervision.

Photo: Ellen Alperstein

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 9:56 AM | Permalink

Alex Alpharoah in "WET: A DACAmented Journey." Photo by Youthana Yuos.

Oops. The first show that was discussed in "The 99-Seat Beat" - a new, weekly LA Times theater column -- was "Silent Sky," at Long Beach's International City Theatre. ICT is not a 99-seat theater. It offers 249 seats at each performance. The column didn't mention the actual seating capacity.

Three days later, the Times ran a correction: "An article in the Sept. 1 Calendar section with recommendations for small-theater productions implied International City Theatre is a 99-seat theater. It is not." The accurate seating capacity remained unknown to Times readers.

A week later, the final part of the second installment of "The 99-Seat Beat" was a brief discussion of "Incognito," at Ventura's Rubicon Theatre, which has 185 seats. Again, the larger capacity wasn't brought up - so again, as with International City Theatre, it would be easy to assume that the Rubicon has only 99 seats. So far, no correction has appeared.

In defining its turf, the first "99-Seat Beat" had initially mentioned "Hamilton," at the 2,703-seat Pantages -- but did so only to vow that this new column would be devoted to "the other side of the SoCal scene, the so-called 99-seat intimate theaters," as if "the SoCal scene" consists only of the Pantages and the 99-seaters.

The corrected online version of the first column, as well as the second column, tried to be a little more precise, using the phrase "99-seat theaters and other smaller venues" to describe the column's bailiwick. But "other smaller venues" remains ambiguous. Does it mean "smaller than the Pantages" or "smaller than the Mark Taper Forum" or the Geffen or what? It could even be interpreted to mean "smaller than 99 seats." Some of the venues mentioned in the column so far, apart from International City Theatre and the Rubicon, have capacities that are indeed smaller than 99 seats.

The confusion in the LA Times column isn't reflective only of its shrinking, multi-tasking staff. It's also reflective of the changing landscape of theater in Los Angeles County.

Until this year, the 99-seat mark in LA professional theater meant more than it means now. For decades, productions that occurred in venues with fewer than 100 seats were free of the obligation to use Actors' Equity contracts when their casts included Equity members. Instead, they operated under much less demanding agreements with the union, which didn't require any payment at all during the Equity-Waiver years (1972-1988) and required only token per-performance fees during the 99-Seat Plan years (1988-2016).

Now, after a recent change in Equity rules, many companies that operate with fewer than 100 seats are required to use Equity contracts that pay at least the minimum wage, for rehearsals as well as performances. But others, known as "membership companies" because they're supposedly self-produced by Equity members, don't have to pay anything at all.

One thing that hasn't changed, however, is that LA still has a level of "midsize" theaters that use Equity contracts in spaces with more than 99 but fewer than, say, 500 seats (although the contracts themselves have changed somewhat).

International City Theatre is one of the midsize companies that began at the 99-seat level but raised enough money and community support to advance to Equity contracts, in a midsize venue. Others in this group include A Noise Within, East West Players, and Los Angeles Theatre Center (formerly Los Angeles Actors' Theatre in its 99-seat days). Independent Shakespeare Company started in 99-seat theaters, long before it began offering free Shakespeare in Griffith Park to thousands.

These companies were justifiably proud of their ability to make that difficult ascent from the 99-seat world to bigger audiences and budgets, more professional standards and supposedly higher profiles. It's depressing that Craig Nakano, the current arts editor at the LA Times and the writer of the first "99-Seat Beat," doesn't seem to notice that these companies moved beyond the 99-seat realm years ago.

On the other hand, the 185-seat Rubicon never was a 99-seat company. It's in Ventura, and Equity didn't allow its 99-Seat Plan to spread beyond LA County. But there are also midsize companies in Los Angeles County that have almost always used Equity contracts - for example, Theatricum Botanicum, Garry Marshall Theatre (formerly the Falcon), the Shakespeare Center.

And of course there are other companies that never used the 99-seat plan but operate on Equity contracts in larger or upper-midsize venues, such as those run by Center Theatre Group (CTG), the Pasadena Playhouse, Geffen Playhouse, La Mirada Playhouse, Musical Theatre West, Ebony Repertory Theatre, Native Voices, the Getty Villa, and the relatively new Wallis Annenberg Center.

In other words, it was never accurate to boil down the non-Pantages or even the non-CTG LA theatrical community to "the 99-seat scene." But it's an especially inappropriate time to do it now, when new differences in the Equity requirements within the sub-100-seat arena have made that previously pivotal number "99" lose much of its point.

The LA Times should find a new name for its new column.

It appears on Fridays, and I'm glad that the Times has returned to its long tradition of including theater in its coverage every Friday, when many readers are making theater-going decisions for the weekend. But the new column would also benefit from a clarification of how it operates.

In the first installment, any hints about which shows Nakano had actually seen (if any) remained hidden. For example, how should a reader react to this unattributed yet oddly specific sentence about "Silent Sky": "Last weekend, the audience seemed particularly pleased by a supporting cast that includes Jennifer Parsons, an ICT and South Coast Rep veteran, and Leslie Stevens, who originated the role of Anne in 'La Cage aux Folles' on Broadway"? Who exactly was this "audience" who "seemed" to be "pleased" by two particular supporting actors? Nakano? A critic? Someone on Facebook?

Nakano twice cited Times reviews of earlier productions of two of the plays that were featured in his column - but he misquoted the 2010 Times review of "La Razón Blindada."

The second column, by regular Times free-lance reviewer Philip Brandes, did a much better job of using language that indicated whether the columnist had seen the production. Apparently the authorship of this column will rotate among regular Times free-lance reviewers. I can't yet decipher whether a mention in it will enhance or will eliminate a show's eligibility to receive a separate Times review.

By the way, the first-mentioned show in Brandes' column, "WET: A DACA-mented Journey," is one that should not be missed. Although Sunday had been its apparent closing date, it's now scheduled to return, on a different schedule, starting October 9. LA-based Alex Alpharaoh tells his own gripping story of being a "Dreamer" in the Obama era and now the Trump era, and he tells it very well, as staged by Kevin Comartin for Ensemble Studio Theatre, in Atwater. This production can only increase in topicality as he and we await the next turn in the DACA saga. I'm hoping to have an opportunity to see an updated version.

Finally, a nod to the above-mentioned Native Voices. The Autry Museum-based company, devoted to Native American talent and topics, has achieved a significant boost in its national reputation with the current production of its artistic director Randy Reinholz's "Off the Rails" at Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It's the first play by a Native writer that OSF has produced. And it's staged by OSF's artistic director, Bill Rauch, an LA favorite from his years as a co-founder and artistic director of Cornerstone Theater (another company, by the way, that often has used some Equity contracts in spaces that seat more than 99).

Native Voices first produced "Off the Rails" at the Autry in 2015. I liked it then, and I like the new version even more, at the OSF campus in Ashland, Oregon.

It remains an adaptation of Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure" that's set in 1880s Nebraska, against the background of one of the infamous de-Indianizing boarding schools. It has a bitter side, considering its historical context, but it also features a rowdy set of scenes at the local saloon/whorehouse where the locals are planning their auditions for Buffalo Bill. It's almost a musical; for this production, Ed Littlefield, a Tlingit from Alaska, wrote original music and sound and Nick Spear added original music and lyrics, making up a rich sonic blend from various cultures. The design elements, especially Tom Ontiveros' projections of eloquent period photos, are memorably poignant.

I'd like to write more about "Off the Rails" when it returns to LA, as it certainly should. The Wallis would be a likely contender to present it, because the Wallis has imported previous OSF productions. But perhaps those who run other big LA theaters should go to Ashland and consider the possibilities. The final performance is on October 28.

"Off the Rails" ensemble in Oregon. Photo by Jenny Graham.

Posted by Don Shirley at 10:37 PM | Permalink

Yesterday's 62% eclipse of the Southern California sun was accompanied by an eclipse of journalists at the L.A. Times that left only 66% of the news side editors shining brightly from the masthead.

As a longtime former employee of the LAT and a 30-year subscriber who is sad and frustrated over the paper's decline, I am not optimistic that the new regime installed by the Deep Thinkers at Tronc will effect any profound, positive change -- the explanatory flackery issued yesterday by Tronc executives reads like that of the previous deck-chair rearrangers.

But if Messrs. Dearborn and Levinsohn are truly sincere in their expressed desire to "invest more heavily in news in Washington, improve its culture report and its coverage of sports," this reader would like them to:

• Compete harder in national political coverage; actually break stories instead of making their chased versions of other papers' coverage pretty on the front page, then crowing about the design. Content matters.
• Question the wisdom of devoting the whole Calendar section to a single event ("Hamilton") that, as marvelous a production as it might be, is still a 2-year-old show that opened in New York and since has been covered since six ways from Sunday (see chasing above). Is this good judgment in the entertainment capital of the world?
• Return the sports section to journalistic credibility instead of fanboy pandering. The section sends a staffer to cover the Little League World Series but resorts to wire coverage for the Angels, who are still in contention for a playoff spot? The fourth-largest newsroom in the U.S. has only a single sports columnist, who's short on curiosity but long on soulless opinion? Install another strong voice into the sports columnist ranks, one with interests beyond the predictable, and the energy to pursue them.
• And, as some former LAT journalists chattering among themselves have suggested, Levinsohn and Dearborn should talk to former staffers who recently left the paper. Those wise resources are being wasted.

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 10:51 AM | Permalink

Free Zuma beach on a winter day. LA Observed photo.

Attn: Malibu Times

In your publisher's "Straight Outta Kafka" 12/15 column, he slams the California Coastal Commission for levying a $4.185 million fine against a Las Flores Beach couple for public access violations. He denounces the fine as hugely excessive. As tyranny! As depriving citizens of due process!

"We now know," he laments, how arbitrarily the CCC will use their new power to levy fines.

Um, really??--as here are the facts as the Malibu Times, which has a reliable news page, has reported them. There has been a public easement to create an accessway on this property since 1979. The current owners bought the property in 2002 with full knowledge of the easement. Since 2007, the Coastal Commission has asked them again and again to remove the private development in the public easement--and has sent dozens of letters in the course of negotiations with the owners and their lawyers.

That's 9 years of due process under the current public access laws.

Not only have the owners refused to clear the accessway, but they have been renting out the house, at a purported profit of $1000/night--and have advertised the rental as a house on a Private Beach.

[Note to all Malibu beachfront homeowners: There's no such thing as an all-private beach in California.]

And after 9 years, when the CCC finally decided they had no choice but to levy a fine, the owners said, "oh my gosh, but why not just work with us, we're not trying to block public access."

The CCC has in fact used its power to levy fines (of up to $11,250/day) extraordinarily conservatively--as this is the first time the agency has used it since they acquired it 2 1/2 years ago. And far from operating outside the law, the agency now simply and finally has the same standard enforcement tool--a little more effective than saying please--that state and federal regulatory agencies generally have.

The CCC levied the first two fines this month--the $4.185 million on the Las Flores homeowners, which they viewed as an especially egregious case, and $975,000 on the Malibu Beach Inn for failing to build two access stairways that prior owners agreed to in 1988. The Inn's current owners, by contrast, did not respond by pretending to be the victim. They said, yes, we're in fact aware of this access requirement and we'll be delighted to comply with it.

The public has property rights, too. Take 2: the public has property rights, too. And for decades, we haven't been able to enjoy our more than mile of public sands on Las Flores Beach, which so far has no official public access.

We're tired of it...No, we're disgusted, really, that we're forced to use our state taxes to enforce access laws that are entirely clear, and that we have to fight decades-long battles for public access that has been long established.

The travesty here isn't the fine on these homeowners. The travesty is that everyone else has had to wait year after year after year while they have knowingly refused to obey the law.

That these homeowners are demanding more than 9 years to negotiate the clearing of a public easement that has been established for 37 years and that they have now had 14 years to take care of...

Well, now that's Kafkaesque.

(An earlier version of this post was published in the Letters section of the Malibu Times.)

Posted by Jenny Price at 6:15 AM | Permalink

Photographic evidence of the LA Times sniff test in the 1990s. LA Observed photo.

In my 40 years at the L.A. Times, I inevitably heard numerous urban folk tales about the newspaper. The thing that I loved about such gossip was that, as long as you didn't do any more than pass along some yarn at the water cooler — didn't publish it, in other words — you wouldn't have to write a correction if you were wrong. All you had to say in your own defense was: "Well, it was a good story."

Still, I find myself wondering whether some tales I heard were true.

For instance:

Uh, I guess I know that one's true. I was that columnist.

Oh well. Here are some other Times tales I've been able to confirm.

When things started to go south for the newspaper in the 1990s, did a consultant visit a meeting of Times senior executives and set out canisters of shredded newspapers for the execs to sniff? Oh yeah. The consultant claimed the Times smelled worse than either the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times and the consultant "offered to remedy this by making the paper smell like coffee and donuts," recalled former executive editor Leo Wolinsky, who attended. (The incident is also mentioned in former Times Editor James O'Shea's book, "The Deal from Hell.") Looking back the other day, Wolinsky quipped: "If we had taken his (the consultant's) advice, I think we would have overcome the forces of the Internet."

On his last day in the Times building, did fired CEO Mark Willes take home the Diet Cokes that were in his office mini fridge? Yes, says Wolinsky, who was there. That, of course, wasn't all that Willies took. He also received a settlement rumored to be more than $50 million.

Contributor Steve Harvey is on Twitter.

Posted by Steve Harvey at 11:57 PM | Permalink

There were well over a hundred of us crowded into the backyard of a home in Mandeville Canyon over the weekend to celebrate the life of Joe Jares, and while a few of us who had been asked to share some memories of Joe were speaking I couldn't help thinking what a shame it was that he wasn't there to enjoy it.

Joe and I were sports columnists for the Daily News back in the late '80s and early '90s and I always thought the joy he took in every aspect of his life is the one thing that set him apart from the rest of us.

I don't think I'm giving away any trade secrets when I say that sports writers as a group can be a pretty cranky bunch. We're always complaining about something--the editors, the deadlines, the travel, the athletes and coaches whose attitude toward us tends to range from compulsory nuisance to dirt beneath their feet.

But Joe never bought into any of that. He was always so happy with the work he was doing, just as he was happy with his family, his love of USC sports, the books he was reading, the books he was writing, the movies and TV shows he was watching and so much more.

But his own enjoyment wasn't good enough for Joe. He was constantly sharing his love for all those things with the rest of us and his joy and enthusiasm couldn't help but make even the crabbiest writers among us come away smiling in spite of ourselves.

It was a gift Joe gave us and I'll miss that.

As writers doing the same job for the same paper at the same time, Joe and I had an unusual relationship. Sports columnists don't have assignments for the most part or much direction either. Steve Clow, our young sports editor who has gone on to become a top editor at the Los Angeles Times, may have thought he had some influence over what we were doing, but he really didn't.

Joe, who had taught Steve sportswriting at USC, and I would listen politely and then, for the most part, go our own way. I always thought of us as lone gunslingers walking down dusty streets poking around for our next idea.

The fact that Joe and I were walking down the same dusty streets most of the time could have been a recipe for trouble, I suppose, It could have easily devolved into "I want to write that." "No, I want write that." But Joe seemed to have a sixth sense, a built-in radar, about not only what he would write on a given day, but what I would write, too. So not only did we never have a shoot-out at the OK Corral, we never even had an earnest discussion that I can remember. Except once.

We were covering a World Series game at Dodger Stadium--for anyone too young to remember, or who wasn't born yet, there actually was a time when they played World Series games at Dodger Stadium--and this was going to be an easy one. Jose Canseco of the Oakland A's got things rolling early when he came up with the bases loaded and hit a ball so hard that it made a dent in the camera beyond the center field fence.

And now there were two out in the bottom of the ninth inning and the A's were leading by a run and they had the best relief pitcher in baseball closing out the game for them. So we were a happy bunch up in the press box, getting an early start on our stories and needing only a couple of post-game quotes to make an early evening of it.

But then a man walked and we looked up to see this big galoot, who we hadn't seen all night, come limping out of the dugout and take his place in the batter's box to face the best relief pitcher in baseball.

After a couple of pitches, the big galoot hit a home run and the Dodgers won the game and the whole ballpark was delirious with joy. But Joe and I, and just about everybody else in the press box, I think, were seized by another emotion: fear.

We all knew this was one of the most dramatic home runs in World Series history and that the next time somebody asked us the one question sports writers hear the most--what are the greatest events you ever covered?--this game would be high on our list. But there wasn't time for that now. There was barely time for Joe and I to have our first earnest discussion.

Here it is word for word.

"Gibson?" I said.

"Eckersley," he said.

We went to our separate locker rooms, wrote our separate columns, looked over at each other as were finishing up and shook our heads and laughed.

Now that, I think you'll agree, is teamwork. That was working with Joe.

Thinking about it all these years later, I realize now that it was just another gift he gave me.

Joe Jares died in July at age 78.

Posted by Ron Rapoport at 11:58 PM | Permalink

It's ironic that Gannett is trying to get its hands on the company formerly known as Tribune Publishing (including, of course, the Los Angeles Times.) A little more than a quarter century ago, some upset Times employees sneaked an ad into their own classified section that warned about USA Today.

Their ad said:

Lost...LA Times. Last seen in a confused state disguised as USA Today. If found, please return to Times Mirror Square.

The Oct. 29, 1989 "Lost" notice, later mentioned in a Joan Didion piece in the New Yorker, followed the Times' adoption of a redesign that included boxed summaries of the sections. The summaries were evidently for readers who were guilty they couldn't read the entire newspaper.

"The new faster-format Los Angeles Times," the newspaper called it.

"READ THIS," Times newsracks said. "QUICK."

Then-Times Editor Shelby Coffey, asked about the sarcastic ad by New York magazine in 1989, said: "It made me laugh. Change always produces anxiety and it's healthy for people to have a chance to ventilate."

Whatever, one thing seems certain now: If the Gannett folks take over the Times and Tronc, they won't bother to wear disguises.

Posted by Steve Harvey at 11:56 PM | Permalink

Take My Picture Gary Leonard runs weekly at LA Observed. Click on the pic to enlarge.

Posted by Gary Leonard at 8:56 AM | Permalink

This chart is from today's Lost Angeles Times story on A1 about Proposition 30. Apparently, 14% correct is good enough.

(Tip of the hat to Mr. White.)

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 10:45 PM | Permalink

Lynsey Addario with photographer Tom Stoddart at the Annenberg Space for Photography. Photo by Iris Schneider.

I couldn't help thinking of Lynsey Addario while watching "Louder Than Bombs," a recent movie by Joachim Trier that focuses on a woman war photographer. There are undeniably fewer women photographers on the front lines than men and even Addario, whose work has won every journalism award out there including a Pulitzer and a MacArthur genius grant, recently acknowledged that now that she has a young child she is less available or willing to run off to cover breaking news around the world. Interviewed recently at the opening of "Refugee," a photography exhibit at the Annenberg Space about the global refugee crisis that includes her work, Addario talked a bit about being a woman, wife and mother and covering hard news and conflict worldwide.

"Having a child, it's harder and harder to work on assignments like news," she told me. "I can't just get on a plane. I'm tortured. That's the reason i waited till 38 to have my son. I come from a very close family, and I knew I'd have to make those compromises. I wanted to have a family and as a woman we have a finite amount of time."

Addario came of age as a photographer after 9/11, and has worked in conflict zones worldwide, mainly for the New York Times, since 2000. The youngest of four sisters brought up in Connecticut by Italian American hairdressers, she began shooting in Argentina where she went to live and learn Spanish after graduating from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1995. She became interested in photographs she saw in the local newspapers and thought that photography might be a career that would allow her to combine her interest in international relations with the art of storytelling. She begged the local newspaper for a job and after much persistence, they gave her one. Later, she moved to New York to learn the skills she needed and found a mentor in Bebeto Matthews. She began freelancing for Associated Press. She lived in India, then Afghanistan. In one interview she talked about her parents, who were not news junkies like her, but rather clueless about the dangerous world she was beginning to explore. She remembers telling them she was going off to Afghanistan. "Have fun!" they told her as she headed out.

Her career has taken off, mainly due to her great eye, compassion and commitment to telling the stories of those under the radar, particularly of women. In Afghanistan she focussed on the lives of women under Taliban rule. She has worked hard, putting in 18 hour days when she is immersed in a story. She has worked in Afghanistan, Iraq, Republic of the Congo, and the Middle East. But coming from a large family, she always knew she "wanted to start a family of my own someday. In 2005 I met my husband, Paul de Bendern. He was the Reuters bureau chief in Turkey and I was living in Istanbul. We are perfect for one another. He's driven, dedicated to his own work. He understands."

She continued to do the work that mattered to her, often putting herself at risk. But her "someday" finally arrived after a harrowing experience in Libya when she was kidnapped along with three other journalists in 2011. Their driver was killed before they were taken hostage and held for a week. It was not the first time she was held hostage while on assignment or thought her life was in danger.

"After being held hostage in Libya, I came out and thought there were three times in my life that I thought 'I"m dead.' Then Tim (Hetherington) and Chris (Hondros) were killed. That sent me over the edge," she said. "I thought it was time to step back. It was a moment of saying, I've given my life to this work, and still do, but I have to have something else that grounds me. I don't want to end up this wayward, empty soul just traumatized by everything I've seen. Having a child and loving husband gives me this grounding and provides me with a huge amount of love...I'm not working as much on the front line. I can't cover as much breaking news...I don't have the flexibility anymore. Is it okay? It has to be okay.

"Do I wish I could have been in Lesbos? Of course, but I couldn't do it. You can kind of have it all, but you really can't. There is a sacrifice...It's like I never feel like I'm doing enough. I always feel I'm failing either as a mother or as a photojournalist." That speaks volumes about her commitment to her craft and the responsibility she feels to her subjects, and the pull at the same time of her family ties. These are the personal costs of being a woman immersed in the world of conflict photography, some of which Joachim Trier attempts to address in "Louder Than Bombs."

Posted by Iris Schneider at 1:13 AM | Permalink

Los Angeles Times readers have been sadly noting the gaping holes left in local coverage by the massive loss of talent that resulted from the buyouts of last November. But today marks the final Classic Hollywood column by Susan King, the LA Times reporter who for the last 26 years has provided insightful interviews, reviews and profiles in the world of movies. (She stayed on to help with the award season.)

In addition to her regular reporting, Susan's weekly Classic Hollywood column put the spotlight on films, people and books that otherwise would go unnoticed and unheralded. She called attention to DVD releases of classic films as well as screenings around town of silent films and special programs worthy of finding an audience. In a city that is so spread out and so diverse, it is a challenge to get the word out and Susan could always be counted on. Whether it was a new series of UCLA restorations at the Hammer, special screenings of preserved films at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences or the American Cinematheque's Aero or Egyptian theaters, or film festivals such as Cinecon or the TCM Classic Film Festival, Susan was there to spread the news.

"Susan's experience and infinite knowledge of the film industry's heritage will be sorely missed," says the American Cinematheque's Margot Gerber. "Her interviews always nailed the significance of an actor, writer, producer or director's contribution."

She gave us in-depth interviews with preservationists, actors and those working behind the scenes that did not appear anywhere else. Susan was much more than a fan; she understood the history of Hollywood and its impact on our culture and our economy. There are far too few people left who can connect the dots the way Susan did.

Randy Haberkamp, managing director of Preservation and Foundation Programs at the Academy, adds, "Susan was at the center of classic Hollywood. Every time she interviewed me, I noticed she had done her homework and her questions made me dig deeper. I looked forward to talking to her because I always learned things — what new books were out or what films were about to be released on DVD."

And that's exactly what her readers will be missing. The LA Times says that the column will continue, and hopefully it will appreciate Hollywood as Susan did, as a continuum with a history and culture that deserves to be celebrated. But Susan King's wealth of knowledge, her appreciation of filmmaking over the decades and sly humor will be sorely missed.

King's final Classic Hollywood newsletter

Posted by Cari Beauchamp at 11:15 PM | Permalink

I was a little disappointed to see the report of Eddie Einhorn's death reduced to two meager sentences in the Los Angeles Times on Friday, if only because the mark he left on UCLA basketball was almost as great as his influence on the game itself. He was, in a word, a visionary and while he would smile at the lack of attention his passing drew out here, he should not be allowed to depart without a recitation of some of his greatest hits.

Eddie first became interested in college basketball at a time when almost nobody else was, except perhaps for the students at the schools where the games were being played. There was no network television, very little radio and no understanding at all of the national phenomenon the game would soon become. When Cincinnati played Ohio State for the NCAA title in 1962, for instance, the only place you could see the game live was in the state of Ohio. Everybody else had to wait for "Wide World of Sports" the following day.

By then, Eddie was four years removed from putting together a radio network that broadcast the 1958 tournament on the radio. His office was his dorm room at Northwestern University's Law School, his office phone was at the end of the hall and his mailbox was at the post office.

"I was always afraid the universities and radio stations I was dealing with would get wise to me," Eddie told me. "Somehow, they never did."

That set the pattern for the rest of Eddie's career. He came up with the then-radical idea of broadcasting games from Madison Square Garden to the home towns of the competing teams. It wasn't until game time that a Garden executive pointed out that they owned the television rights.

"Well, nobody told me," said Eddie, who paid a hastily negotiated rights fee and pocketed $200.'

Shortly thereafter, he created his own network, TVS, and hit the road where station by station, conference by conference, independent team by independent team, he began broadcasting road games back home. His phone was no longer in his dorm room, but rather on the wall in the lobby of a building on Fifth Avenue that had a common answering service where he could pick up his messages.

In 1965, Eddie set his sights a little higher. He began broadcasting games not just to the various colleges' home towns, but on regional networks with a larger reach. And even when the broadcasts began to prove popular and he had more than 200 local stations in his fold, the three major networks remained unmoved.

"I started booking games on the local stations the networks owned in some of the largest cities in the country," he said. "Pre-empting their own shows, in other words. But they were slow to react."

There were some college basketball people who could see the future, however, and one of them was J.D. Morgan. The UCLA athletic director was overseeing the greatest college basketball dynasty the game would ever know and he was intent on spreading the brand to the nation at large. Soon Eddie was broadcasting UCLA in intersectional games, which culminated in its fabulously successful home-and-home series with Notre Dame. (John Wooden was not a fan of these games--he preferred non-conference games against teams he knew he could beat--but Morgan saw that national interest was dependent on competitive games and ignored his complaints.)

Eddie's greatest triumph came in 1968 when he matched UCLA against Houston in the Astrodome. This was the first game ever played in a large arena so the venue itself was a big talking point. And on that one night, all the stars were aligned. The two top teams in the country--both of them unbeaten--with No. 1 UCLA riding a 47-game win streak. The two top players in the country--Lew Alcindor (as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was known then) for UCLA and Elvin Hayes for Houston. Two of the top coaches in the country--Wooden, who would win 10 NCAA titles, and Houston's Guy Lewis, who went to the Final Four five times.

By the day of the game, the national frenzy had peaked and it seemed as if every advertising agency in the country wanted in.

"Here's the thing I'll never forget," Dick Enberg, who broadcast the game, told Eddie when they were reminiscing more than 40 years later. "By the time the second half started, the telecast had become a huge hit around the country and we were getting calls from all over from advertisers wanting to buy time. So while the game was progressing, you were passing me hand-written notes--you didn't have the best handwriting in the world--and I was trying to decipher them. I was plugging cars and shaving cream and everything else, all from the handwritten notes you were giving me."

The game itself was a thriller--Houston won, 71-69, as Alcindor was hampered by an eye injury he had suffered in a game a week earlier--and Eddie was in his glory. But he had planted the seeds of his own destruction. Now that he had proven what college basketball and national television could do for each other, the much-richer networks bid up the rights and Eddie sold TVS and moved on to other jobs in television.

The idea of becoming a TV mogul himself never seemed to have occurred to him, nor was he consumed by wanting to be a hugely wealthy man. What Eddie liked was working for himself, traveling wherever the spirit of the moment took him, going to Broadway shows when he was home in New Jersey and enjoying himself as he saw fit.

In 1981, Eddie threw in with his former law school classmate Jerry Reinsdorf to buy Chicago White Sox. His broadcasting background led to him helping negotiate baseball's first billion-dollar television contract, but he was frustrated to find owners of baseball teams no more forward thinking than the network executives to whom he had shown college basketball's future years earlier.

"ESPN was just starting out and was looking for a partner," Eddie said. "Baseball could have bought a major interest for very little money and passed. I could cry just thinking about it."

A dozen or so years ago, Eddie hit the road in earnest one last time. He'd had some health setbacks, including a kidney transplant, but he was feeling better now and had an idea. He would travel the country and look up many of the great coaches whose games he had once broadcast--Bobby Knight, Dean Smith, Joe B. Hall, Denny Crum, John Thompson, Jerry Tarkanian and so many more. And some of the great players--Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Elvin Hayes, Lynn Shackelford and others. And the great announcers who had worked for him--Enberg, Al Michaels, Dick Vitale, Billy Packer, Jim Nantz and more. And the pioneering television executives, conference commissioners and television ad salesman, too, all of whom had wonderful stories to tell.

As he traveled, Eddie kept telling me how thrilled he was to be able to see his old friends again and swap stories, but as I read over the transcripts of their conversations I realized it worked both ways. They were delighted to see him, too.

"One of the first calls I made was to John Wooden," Eddie said, "and I was a little nervous, wondering if he'd remember me and feeling a little sheepish for not having been in touch for so many years."

I am now imagining the smile on his face as I recall the first thing Wooden said when he picked up the phone:

"Eddie! Where have you been!"

Ron Rapoport is co-author, with Eddie Einhorn, of "How March Became Madness: How the NCAA Tournament Became the Greatest Sporting Event in America."

Posted by Ron Rapoport at 11:04 PM | Permalink

It was a late spring afternoon during my first visit to Florence back in 2013, and technical problems with our plane had delayed our flight home until the next morning. The airline had installed us in a travel hotel on the outskirts of town, but after an exhausting day of dragging our luggage around and wrangling with officials, it was too late for any more sightseeing.

We decided instead to try and salvage the remains of the day as dusk was falling, and take the hotel shuttle back into downtown to stroll a bit through the shopping district before we surrendered entirely and turned in for the evening.

In the heart of Florence a few steps from the bustling Mercato Centrale stands the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, an imposing 15th century Renaissance palace that was once home to the legendary banking family. But for all the Palazzo's monumental size and reputed splendor, you could be forgiven for missing it, because at street level most of its exterior walls are deliberately understated to the point of being nondescript.

And so it was that I found myself unknowingly wandering past the rear of the Palazzo on the back street of Via Ginori, when my attention was unexpectedly drawn to a simple plaque mounted next to an otherwise unmarked pair of wooden doors.

It read:

Provincia Di Firenze
Sala Stampa
"Oriana Fallaci"
Giornalista

Now this was an extraordinary thing! As a former journalist, I was of course familiar with Oriana Fallaci's work; in her prime, from the early 1960s through the mid-1980s, she had been one of the most famous and recognizable reporters in the world. She had graduated from features and celebrity profiles for the Italian weekly newsmagazine L'Europeo to globe-trotting war reportage in hot spots from Vietnam to the Middle East (she took several bullets and nearly died while covering the 1968 student uprising in Mexico). She had conducted a legendary series of interviews, collected in the volume "Interviews With History and Conversations With Power," where she aggressively confronted the likes of Henry Kissinger, the Shah of Iran, Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar el-Qaddafi, Ariel Sharon,Yasir Arafat, and others. She wrung a concession from Kissinger that Vietnam had been a "useless war," tore off her chador in the presence of the Ayatollah and called it a "stupid, medieval rag," and elicited an admission from the Shah that, were she an Iranian woman writing as she did, he would "probably" throw her in jail and put her on trial.

By the 1980s, she largely withdrew from journalism to concentrate instead on novels. And in the early '90s, she was diagnosed with cancer--a disease that earlier claimed the life of her sister Neera, who had also been a writer--and retreated to her townhouse in Manhattan's Upper East Side where she quietly battled her illness as a virtual recluse. But in 2001, her outrage and revulsion at the 9/11 attacks on her adopted country, even her adopted city, drew her out of seclusion. In a feverish burst of activity, she wrote two lengthy polemics (each of which became a best-seller) denouncing the Islamization of the West in terms so harsh and uncompromising that attempts were made to ban the books, and she was even criminally charged in an Italian court with defaming Islam. In response, she doubled down on her increasingly intemperate rhetoric, relishing the notoriety.

By the fall of 2006, after a painful and debilitating struggle, she had returned to her beloved birthplace of Florence; there she died.

And now this. Translated, the plaque on the wall outside what I later learned was the official local government media center read:

Province of Florence
Press Room
Oriana Fallaci
Journalist

The woman who began her life as a teenage volunteer with the Italian anti-fascist resistance movement, who fell in love with a Greek resistance fighter imprisoned for the attempted assassination of the head of the Greek military junta, who covered the news and made the news, who fearlessly confronted the most powerful despots in the world-- she was now obscurely memorialized in the seat of local government where, it would not be unfair to say, it is perhaps the very last place you would go to speak truth to power, or to cover any real news beyond self-aggrandizing handouts, talking points and photo ops.

This melancholy reflection was prompted by the recent news that our City Fathers (there is after all, only one elected woman currently serving in city government) have similarly seen fit to "honor" one of our own widely liked and respected local journalists, renaming the room behind the City Council Chamber as the Rick Orlov Memorial Media Center, where his plaque commends Rick's "professionalism and commitment to ethical journalism."

Meaning no disrespect to Oriana and Rick, nor to their brothers, sisters, predecessors and successors in the business, this strikes me as a singularly shallow and self-serving gesture that ultimately dishonors the journalism profession while purporting to honor its practitioners.

Why? It's no accident that all this took place the same week in which the Mayor's office announced the hiring of a second press secretary--because the current press secretary, the director of communications, and various other communications assistants, coordinators and the like apparently still aren't enough to effectively communicate His Honor's "bold agenda to create a more prosperous, safe, livable, and well-run city."

Behold the result of more than two decades of the slow-motion collapse of aggressive, comprehensive, independent news coverage in Los Angeles. Government flackage at all levels has largely supplanted outside reporting, open-meeting and public- records laws are routinely violated with impunity, the once-robust local government beat has been reduced to a skeleton crew of harried, overworked reporters, and the dwindling handful of gadflies, cranks, and government groupies who attend official meetings--the feeble remnant of authentic public participation--can be openly abused when they're not ignored. Municipal voting, consequently, has plunged into single digits.

So Oriana and Rick now have their government press rooms, and as my people say, "May their memories be a blessing." But if elected officials truly want to honor their memory in a lasting and substantive way, they could begin by submitting to regular unscripted and on-the-record media availabilities, scrupulously observing (not to mention aggressively enforcing) the Ralph M. Brown Act open-meeting law and the California Public Records Act, and enacting a stringent sunshine ordinance that goes above and beyond those state laws that too often, as they say, are more honored in the breach than the observance.

Journalists themselves, for their part, might do well to honor these exemplars by cultivating a little more of the unflinching impertinence Oriana expressed in a 2006 interview for The New Yorker, one of her last, published only three months before her death.

Speaking of the "respectability" conferred by her age, the 77-year-old Fallaci said, "But you don't give a damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things that I didn't used to say before--you know, there is in each of us a form of timidity, of cautiousness--now I open my big mouth. I say, 'What are you going to do to me? You go fuck yourself--I say what I want.' "

Joel Bellman retired from the County of Los Angeles after 26 years as press deputy for three Supervisors representing the Third District. He currently serves as chair of the Nominations Committee and member of the Board of the Greater Los Angeles Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

Posted by Joel Bellman at 9:20 PM | Permalink

Take My Picture Gary Leonard runs on Thursdays at LA Observed. Click on the image to see it bigger.

Posted by Gary Leonard at 11:05 PM | Permalink

Last night, about 75 former Los Angeles Times employees attended a cocktail party at the Brentwood home of former Mayor and LA Pooh-bah Richard Riordan. According to former LAT journalists who attended, the gathering was the result of a question Riordan asked a friend and member of the '15 buyout class: Was the paper having any kind of a party for the massive numbers of people who were leaving?

"No," was the answer.

"Then I will," Riordan said, and delivered a classy, catered affair last night with valet parking and the respectful acknowledgment of what the paper had lost in institutional memory and journalistic experience. According to one attendee's calculations, more than 2,000 years of experience were represented by the 92 people who left (not all of whom were journalists).

I wasn't at the party, so this report is hearsay. But what I heard was from people known for accurate reporting even more than for the gossip in which members of our professional also love to indulge.

I'm glad that someone celebrated the people whose absence from The Times has further diminished a paper cast adrift not only because of the exigencies of the business but because of deficient leadership. I was a member of The Times layoff class of '09, when 9 of the 13 members of our department were excused from our jobs, euthanizing the Los Angeles Times-Washington Post News Service. Then-Editor Russ Stanton was gracious and present as we were losing our jobs, but we got no face time from then-Publisher Eddy Hartenstein, who chose to attend a birthday party for an editor in the Calendar section instead of delivering in person our bad news.

Leave it to an outside businessman to take care of the paper's human resources.
From all accounts, Riordan's party was fun, which is in seriously short supply these days at Tribune Mirror Square. I doubt anyone at the party will report anything negative about The Times because all buyout-takers signed a clause that they could not be critical of the paper or they could be sued and lose their windfall.

But I heard that many of the people at Riordan's house last night said they would have stayed at the paper if Editor Davan Maharaj and Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin, the widely loathed masthead toppers whose toxic presence is poisoning the premises, had gone.

Happily, however, many of the Riordan revelers have found other important, engaging positions, and, according to one, are "relieved to have escaped The Times."

Good for them. Bad for anybody who wants to read a really good paper.

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 11:36 AM | Permalink

"St. Nick at the Square," featuring night-side Metro reporter Nieson Himmel and former Times CEO Mark Willes, written by an anonymous Timesian [* see update below] and pinned to a newsroom bulletin board around 1997. In many ways, it reads as though it was written yesterday. Himmel died in 1999, the same year that the Tribune Company of Chicago bought the Times and removed Willes from the building.

'Twas the night before Christmas,
and there was a feeling of doom.
Not a reporter was smiling,
in the whole City Room.

The rumors were flying,
about the layoffs next year.
So it was hard to muster up,
much Christmas cheer.

The Times gave no presents,
they just took away.
They're charging $35 a month for parking.
That's more than a dollar a day!

Well, it was way past deadline,
on that holiday night.
And Nieson was half-dozing,
while sitting upright.

Then all of a sudden
there came such a clatter,
Nieson leaped from desk
to see what was the matter.

When what to his wondering eyes
should appear
but a miniature sleigh,
and eight tiny reindeer.

More rapid than eagles,
his coursers they came.
St. Nick whistled and shouted,
and called them by name

Nieson grabbed a notebook
and he picked up a pen.
He knew it was past deadline
'cause it was way past 10.

But this was a story,
he knew it would hold.
This was real news
that would never get old.

The fat dude, he yelled:
"Now, Dasher! Now Vixen!
On, Comet! On Cupid!
On Donner! On Blitzen!"

And then in a twinkling
Nieson heard on the roof,
the prancing and pawing
of each little hoof.

"I've got extra presents,"
St. Nick said, "but I fear ,
that the reporters I've brought them for
are no longer here"

"Why are they gone?"
St. Nick asked, shaking a mitt.
"The TImes is still making money
though the stock's fallen a bit."

Before Nieson could answer
A Times guard ran to the roof.
He approached all the reindeer,
then slipped on a hoof.

"Get off of this roof,"
the Times guard said.
"And what's with that getup?
"Why're you dressed in all red?"

This made St. Nick nervous,
And he answered real quick,
"I'm here for Christmas,
And my name is St. Nick"

The guard grabbed a phone,
and called the corporate side.
He announced, "I caught St. Nick.
He was trying to hide."

Although it was late,
and the guard had called on a whim,
Mark Willes was still here
and he yelled, "Arrest him!"

"And while you're at it,
Willes managed to say,
"His sleigh was parked on Times property,
He's got thirty-five dollars to pay!'"

* Update: The poet has been revealed as Miles Corwin, then the nightside reporter for the LA Times city desk, and now an author in Los Angeles.

Posted by Steve Harvey at 4:11 PM | Permalink

One of the exhibits at the recent "To Live and Dine in L.A." display at the Los Angeles Central Library was a menu from the old Redwood House on First Street. The menu, resembling a round slice of tree trunk, failed to mention two interesting features of the Redwood when it was next door to the Times.

The first feature was a passageway that enabled thirsty Times employees to discreetly travel between the newspaper and the bar without going outside (their bosses didn't care; many of them used it, too.)

The tunnel disappeared when the Redwood moved in 1970 -- staggered, so the joke went -- a block-and-a-half to its current location on Second Street between Hill and Broadway to make way for Times corporate offices on First Street. (A flower shop and a bank branch were also uprooted.)

The second unique feature of the Redwood was a direct telephone connection (ext. 5116) to the Times.

"The day bartender (I recall his name as Frank) knew us all so well that if the Times extension would ring he'd look around to see who was represented and either answer 'National Desk' or 'City Desk' as appropriate," recalls former deputy managing editor Dennis Britton. "He even once answered it 'Dennis Britton's Office.' It's possible I was there a bit too often."

I was summoned via the Red Line just once. Myself and a couple other chums were having a few after-work drinks when a story -- a plane crash, I think -- broke at around 10 p.m. An editor phoned the Redwood, looking for help. The three of us gallantly rushed to the City Room but the editor took one look at us, shook his head, and sent us home.

The Red Line existed until 2005 when the restaurant was remodeled.

The Redwood has been around since 1942 and long-ago acquired the unofficial title of The Times Bar, outlasting such rivals as Anthony's, a beer-and-shot emporium; Hill's Code 7, with its wall displays of cop badges; and the Epicenter, home of earthquake-themed artworks (sure, I'll have another drink, we're all doomed anyway.)

The Redwood was the subject of many legends.

There was, for example, the regular who worked above the bar and would supposedly stomp on the floor three times before leaving work. When he entered the bar a few moments later, waitress Alice Broude would have his drink ready.

Many of the Redwood's most unforgettable characters worked there, including Bill Eaton, the bar manager (pictured with Eddie Spivak during the 1970 dismantling on First Street.)
The feisty Eaton liked to tell the story of the revenge he exacted from a patron who had gotten drunk one night, made a noisy scene and refused to leave. The next morning, Eaton said, he went to the offender's nearby office, and began yelling. Then Eaton told him (and his terrified co-workers), "There. Now you see how it feels to have someone come into your place of work and start screaming?"

No-nonsense waitress Alice Broude worked at the Redwood for 51 years, including the day of her 80th birthday party in 1999. "If I wasn't working I might get stuck talking to people at one table," explained Broude, who died in 2008.

In 2005 the Redwood shut down, reopening later as the Redwood Bar & Grill under new management with punk music and pirate decor. I can just imagine one of the shaky, hung-over old reporters I knew entering the place and suddenly confronting one of its plastic skulls.

But it has a hipster clientele now, what with newspaper folks in decline.

The other evening it was almost like old times when several Timesians gathered there. However, it was actually a going-away for several employees who had been invited, or advised, to take the newspaper's latest buyout. There was no Red Line ringing for them to come back.

Posted by Steve Harvey at 10:56 PM | Permalink

Filmmaker Alexandria Bombach was working on a short documentary in 2012 when she was given some footage shot in Afghanistan. Meant as B roll, or background, the footage was shot on a camera set up on a street in Afghanistan. The photographer had turned the camera on and walked away. At first it seemed like nothing was happening. But Bombach decided to watch and as she did she was immersed in the ordinariness of everyday life and struck by what she saw. As her colleague Mo Scarpelli tells it, Bombach thought, here was a country that the US is intrinsically tied to and we have no idea what it's like to live there.

She had heard about a small group of photojournalists working in Afghanistan since the Taliban lost power in 2001 and thought their story might just be the window into Afghani life that she was looking for. She called Scarpelli, and asked her if she'd go with her. The two knew each other from previous projects they had worked on in Africa and Asia. Scarpelli agreed. So Bombach sold her car to buy the air tickets, and Skyped with a fixer they had heard of through a friend. They didn't want to do too much research in advance. "The best way, is to just go," Scarpelli said. "A lot of the information we get here is coming from a foreign, white perspective. We are more interested in telling local stories." They hoped they would be able to connect with the fledgling photojournalist community working in Kabul.

"Frame by Frame," their first feature-length documentary that will open on Friday at the Laemmle Music Hall, is what came out of that impulse. In order to make the film, Scarpelli says the two filmmakers reached out to many more experienced in feature-length storytelling. "We built a village around the film," she says. She called the process wonderful, but really hard. While they shot for only 8 weeks, it took a year and a half of post production and editing.

The film is a compelling and inspirational look at four photojournalists who are determined to document life on the streets in their country, and that job can be a risky business. We meet Najibullah Musafer, Massoud Hossaini, Farzana Wahidy and Wakil Kohsar, part of a tight-knit but growing community of working photojournalists in Afghanistan today. Despite the risks, these four are driven to document the lives and struggles of those who live the ordinary stories. It is a very affecting film. When the Taliban were defeated in 2001, these photographers were more easily able to work in the open but they still encounter fear on the streets.

Wahidy, the only female among the four, has made the plight of women in Afghanistan her focus. When she travels to Herat to visit burn victims who were abused by husbands or family members, the doctor at the special clinic set up for these women denies her entrance, fearing for his own safety should she document the truth. The hospital has gone so far as to change the name of the burn unit to defuse and confuse the public as to who is being treated there. The exchange is telling, both in the doctor's worry for his and his hospital's safety, and Wahidy's persistence in searching for the truth. Once ejected, Wahidy finds a willing victim who eventually gives a harrowing interview, telling how, after an unhappy arranged marriage, she was doused with gasoline and set ablaze by her father-in-law. Wahidy tries to keep her composure but these abuses are difficult for anyone to listen to. The photographer, who had to get her education in secret with 300 other girls when the Taliban came to power, is determined to shine a light on the abuses, both physical and emotional, that women in Afghanistan suffer today.

Massoud Hossaini, the most well-known of the photographers in the film, who happens to be married to Wahidy, won a Pulitzer for spot news in 2012 when he witnessed a bombing during a religious rite and documented the horror unfolding before him. But the acclaim does nothing to ease the pain he witnessed that day, or the memories easily conjured up when he visits the victims who survived and who still stay in touch with him. His commitment to his craft makes for a complicated dance between personal safety and public responsibility. Like each of the photographers in the film, it is that commitment to the truth but also to their fellow Afghanis that drives them on their dangerous mission. Sadly, the film cannot be shown in Afghanistan but the filmmakers are doing everything they can to make it available to the Afghani American community through free community and online screenings, and at screenings at over 30 American universities.

All of the photographers--Hossaini, Wahidy, Najibullah Musafer and Wakil Kohsar--attended classes at the AINA Photojournalism Institute, started in Afghanistan in 2002 by National Geographic photographer Reza Deghati to train native Afghanis in documenting their own country. Najibullah Musafer, the oldest photographer of the four in the film, has continued shooting, but also started Third Eye Photo Center in Kabul to train young people in photojournalism and photography. Only with constant vigilance will news of their country filter out beyond its borders. The joint effort between Bombach and Scarpelli and the four photographers in this film makes very clear the importance and commitment of those seeking truth and sending it out into the world, despite huge personal risks.

Another love letter to journalism also opens Friday, "Spotlight," the star-studded bigger budget feature about the Boston Globe's investigative series that exposed the priest pedophilia scandal and cover-up perpetrated by the Catholic Church in Boston and, ultimately, internationally. The film centers on the investigation begun at the Globe in 2001 when editor Marty Baron, formerly of the LA Times, New York Times, Miami Herald and currently the executive editor of the Washington Post, arrived at the Globe and with an outsider's perspective, was able to guide his staff through an investigation into allegations of abuse that had been ignored for years. The Globe's work won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize.

A paean to the very old-school ethic of knocking on doors, searching records for paper trails, reading microfilmed archives and old clips, this film could very well be the shot in the arm that journalism needs right now. Just as "All the President's Men" caused a jump in journalism school enrollment when it showcased the work done by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward at the Washington Post as they, along with Deep Throat, launched an investigation that ultimately brought down Nixon and 40 of his aides for the Watergate break-in and cover-up in 1972, the heroes in "Spotlight" responsible for speaking truth to power--and in Boston nothing was more powerful or entrenched than the Catholic Church--are the journalists committed to exposing the tragic truth. The film keeps you on the edge of your seat.

These two films are my kind of superhero movies.

Posted by Iris Schneider at 9:15 AM | Permalink

In happier days, the masthead atop the Los Angeles Times editorial page proudly displayed the names of the newspaper's past and present publishers — and their years in power — next to that symbol of courage and strength, the eagle.

It was a short list for a long time because just five men ruled the newspaper from 1881 to 1989: founder Harrison Gray Otis, Otis' three Chandler descendants, and their successor, Tom Johnson.

Then, in the 1990s, as the Times' financial troubles mounted, there began a sort of Publishers on Parade. Five men and one woman occupied the office in the next 17 years.
And odd things began to happen to that ever-growing, embarrassing roster of exes on the editorial page.

The newspaper began tinkering with it.

Some years, some past publishers would be omitted.

Or the names of the departed ones would be moved away from the masthead and buried at the bottom in tiny print in a one-column footnote.

An unexpected lengthening of the list occurred when the name of Mark H. Willes appeared both at the top of the list (as publisher) and at the bottom to call attention to his three other jobs (CEO, chairman, president). A 4-tool player, as they say in baseball!

In the mid-2000s, there was a reunion of sorts. The whole gang reappeared on the editorial page, though in two platoons. Publisher Jeffrey M. Johnson was at the top, alongside the trusty eagle; his 10 predecessors (including multitasking Willes) were at the bottom of the page in the footnote (under the "How to write to us" box).

But the list continued to grow.

Would it never stop? Then someone had an inspiration. Fire the list!

In 2007, during the reign of David Hiller, the Chicago Tribune Co.'s man at Times Mirror Square, the names of all past publishers were erased from the editorial page, including Otis and his relations.

Poof: 126 years of history, gone. Perhaps someone pointed out that a little SOMETHING about the Times' past should be mentioned in the masthead. So the line "Founded December 4, 1881" was added. Wow, 1881. Talk about a stable business! Meanwhile, Timothy E. Ryan, the newest Times boss, can be found in the masthead, along with his subordinates, and the eagle. But the ex-publishers are still missing.

As always, the eagle's gaze is unblinking.

Posted by Steve Harvey at 8:39 AM | Permalink

Lost in the last few weeks of turmoil over Tribune's firing of the L.A. Times' publisher is another arcing storyline from the episodic drama, "As the Newspaper Turns."

No, not today's 20% drop in Tribune stock; I'm talking about the lawsuit filed in 2013 by former sports columnist T.J. Simers against the paper for wrongful termination. It's playing out this month in Superior Court downtown.

The trial began last week, and this morning attorney Courtney Rowley's opening statement laid out Simers' case in repetitive detail. (I had assumed his advocates were working on contingency, but maybe they're getting paid by the word.) After lunch, defense attorney Emilio Gonzalez was slightly more succinct in telling the jury how his team planned to prove that The Times and its overlord Tribune did not harass, retaliate or discriminate against or otherwise breach its employment contract with the involuntarily retired sportswriter; rather, that this is a tale of lies and cover-up.

Anybody with time and inclination to sit through what's anticipated to be weeks of wrangling might have a hard time finding a side to root for. Sadly, I had only today to witness this pissing match.

Simers, a skilled writer with an equally powerful gift for bullying arrogance and smug superiority with anyone he considers a lesser light, abruptly lost his thrice weekly column for reasons he says neither his supervisors nor the paper's management made clear. He claims it was about getting rid of older workers in favor of youth, about his health and about his penchant for dissing powerful figures (Frank McCourt, Arte Moreno) whose company some Times suits enjoyed, as well as their ad revenue.

The Times has said that if Simers suffered damages from the stressful situation that unfolded over the spring and summer of 2013, it was his fault, or maybe that of a third party. That Simers failed to disclose outside business relationships, then lied about his conflicts of interest. It claimed that Simers has embarrassed the paper as a "public behavior problem," and was given every opportunity to recommit to righteousness but chose instead to quit and go work for the Orange County Register.

Times Editor Davan Maharaj and Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin initially were named in the complaint, but their names have been dropped. Although they aren't scheduled to testify any time soon, they were both in the courtroom all day today. I asked Maharaj why they're no longer individual defendants, and he said he didn't know, adding that "we're corporate representatives," and that either he or Duvoisin probably would attend each day. Except for the jurors, they were the only open-collared males officially involved with the case.

One attorney familiar with the case told me that once they were dropped from the lawsuit, Simers' counsel had sought to ban them from the courtroom until they were called to testify. So they became corporate representatives, a designation, he said, that entitles them to attend whenever they wanted.

You have to wonder why this mess has been allowed to fester for so long, why it wasn't settled and the dirty laundry cleansed out of public view. I asked Simers if a settlement offer had been made. He told me to ask his lawyers. "I'm not allowed to say anything."

"That's not like you," I said.

"I know," he answered, wide-eyed.

Carney Shegerian, one of Simers' attorneys, said, "If they had made a legitimate offer we wouldn't be here." He also said that his team never had a specific number in mind to make this all go away.

Linda Savitt, an attorney for the defense, was similarly cagey when asked about a settlement, explaining that "There was a mediation," and that anything involved in that process is privileged.

I think we can assume the Times offered a number that Simers rejected and, let's hope, just because it's T.J., that he did so loudly and with his usual bluster.

Maybe it was because he was underdressed, but Maharaj seemed uncomfortable. I asked him about certain claims in the complaint, but he said he hadn't read it, had no information about any settlement offer or discussion of one, and by the way, had I seen the big photo spread on Syria in yesterday's paper? He also wanted to know how long my commute took this morning from Santa Monica.

Simers' complaint was a detailed account of how the paper supposedly manipulated his temporary disability into an excuse for chilling his strident voice. It described how management spun his paper-approved video encounter with then-Laker Dwight Howard into an undisclosed conflict of interest involving an agent, a script and a TV program Simers denied was ever an actual business deal.

If having an agent, if pitching scripts, were a firing offense, the L.A. Times newsroom would be populated only by food writers and page designers formatting text from scribes filing phone-reported stories remotely from Iowa -- this is Hollywood, people, where the valet at The Ivy has three scripts in turnaround.

The first witness scheduled was retired Sports Editor Mike James, who arrived early wearing a suit, tie and the demeanor of a guy who'd rather be having his toenails pulled out with pliers. We nodded, and he said, "This is really how I want to spend my retirement."

By the time he was called to the stand well after lunch, James had removed the tie (must be a Times dress code thing), and fulfilled his reputation as someone who could be situationally well-spoken but generally meek, a department supervisor whom management used to twirl around like a fork in spaghetti.

The way things were going, James could be on the stand until Halloween. Other names on the witness list include Tommy Lasorda, Chris Paul, Joe Torre, Ned Colletti and a bunch of Times staffers, including Bill Dwyre, Helene Elliott and Dylan Hernandez.

I'm sorry I won't get to hear what they have to say, and I'm in no position to choose a winner here. I know little about the case other than gossip, what I read in Simers' complaint and in The Times' answer, and what I heard today. But it sure sounds to me like age, health and ethics aren't really the issue. It seems to me the issue is a double standard of employee treatment, and is that against the law?

If The Times has ethical concerns about its journalists working for other media, why are some sports columnists (currently Bill Plaschke, formerly Simers) allowed to broadcast from The Times' newsroom several times a week live on ESPN when other writers have been told they're not allowed to write for sports magazines? If The Times truly is concerned with the public conduct of its reporters, how does it justify the hypocrisy of enabling Plaschke's high profile after he embarrassed the paper with his lurid, soft-porn comments about actress Helen Hunt during a sports radio host gig in early 2013?

Will the jury vote to force the paper to write Simers a check big enough to soothe his hurt feelings? Will they find his abrasive persona, or something else, compelling evidence that he deserved what he got? Will this case settle or reach a verdict before the plunging stock value motivates Tribune to sell the paper to Eli Broad?

Stay tuned.

Editor's note: I'm told this reality show is playing in Dept. 89 on the fifth floor of the Stanley Mosk Courthouse downtown.

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 7:07 PM | Permalink

The sheet of phone extensions given to Los Angeles Times Metro desk staffers in 1982 had more than 100 entries, to give you an idea of how much more local coverage the Times used to provide. One direct number — the "red line" — connected to the nearby Redwood restaurant and bar on 2nd Street, making it easier for editors to track down wayward reporters.

Note also the extension for "Nuts"; the Times operators switched incoming calls from offbeat characters to this number, which was generally manned by copy messengers. Often the callers were then relayed to me since I was the offbeat feature writer.

I recall once being summoned to the Times lobby to talk to a man who had carved the likenesses of all the presidents on bars of soap, which he carried in a suitcase. I believe he had done 1 through 38 (Gerry Ford). I chatted with him (while a security guard watched) but did not write a story. I wonder if he has since updated his collection.

[LA Observed note: I'm on there. So are Harvey and Boyarsky. - ed.]

Posted by Steve Harvey at 12:15 AM | Permalink

File photo

Truth is the high-value currency of journalism.

So what in the world was the L.A. Times thinking last week when it tried to cover up when a reader wondered why an error hadn't been corrected?

The wraparound cover of the May 2 sports section advanced that night's Floyd Mayweather Jr.-Manny Pacquiao boxing match. It included a large illustration that was supposed to depict the two fighters. But instead of Mayweather, the graphic featured another boxer, Tim Bradley.

Incredibly, this was the second time this year that The Times has confused the two. On Saturday, Feb. 21, a sports section news story about the upcoming bout between Mayweather and Pacquiao included a photo of a boxer identified as Mayweather. But it wasn't Mayweather, it was Bradley.

Per industry standard, a correction ran the next day in the newspaper.

Last week, six days after that mistake was repeated in the cover graphic, the paper had yet to acknowledge the error. Not only had staffers brought the mistake to the attention of the suits, readers did as well. I waited until Friday before writing to Deirdre Edgar, the paper's reader representative, wondering why no correction had been made.

According to The Times, Edgar has "the privilege of hearing directly from readers about questions of accuracy and fairness in Times coverage." She is a member of the Organization of News Ombudsmen.

Its mission is to protect and enhance the quality of journalism "by encouraging respectful and truthful discourse about journalism's practices and purposes." Newspaper ombudsmen are obliged, the organization says, to promote transparency within their news organizations, and to act as an independent agent "in the best interests of news consumers."

Edgar responded to my inquiry with the explanation that the illustration correction was planned for the next day's paper. "It is being published on Saturday," Edgar emailed, "to reach the same readers who would have seen the illustration last Saturday."

When I worked at The Times, mistakes made in the Sunday paper were corrected as soon as they were discovered, and also in the following Sunday edition because some people subscribed only on that day. Maybe these days print readers also may subscribe only on Saturday. It makes sense to publish a correction for them, as well as for daily readers.

Which is what The Times generally does.

Yesterday, Saturday, The Times published an obituary of Joanne Carson with an error. Today, Sunday, it was corrected in the print edition. The paper didn't wait a week, as it did for the Mayweather correction, "to reach the same readers who would have seen [it] last Saturday"; it corrected it as soon as it was discovered.

(As of this writing, The Times' digital corrections are only current through May 8, so there is no link to corrections published yesterday or today.)

On May 3, last Sunday, an error was made in an obituary about Fanchon Blake. The next day, Monday, that correction appeared in the paper, and was repeated in today's paper for the Sunday-only readers.

So Edgar's explanation to me for the delay was implausible, and contrary to Times' policy.

As a journalist, I've made at least my share of mistakes. No one's perfect, and deadline journalism is particularly fraught; you must get it fast, and get it right. Committing an error once is a mistake; twice is jaw-dropping ineptitude. And covering it up is Nixonian. It's unprofessional and cheapens the core value gatherers and purveyors of news are supposed to revere and uphold at all costs.

I don't know if Edgar made up the Tom "I-did-not-have-sex-with-that-football" Bradyesque excuse on her own, or had help. Even though I know The Times was aware of the error long before I mentioned it, all she had to say to me was, "We screwed up. We're publishing the correction tomorrow."

Instead, she spun it, and if she and Times managers are comfortable with that, perhaps they should flack for politicians, entertainers or corporations, for whom that kind of CYA confection is standard operating procedure. It has no place in journalism.

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 2:11 PM | Permalink

As a 20-year KCRW volunteer, I happily donate my time and money during the NPR affiliate's pledge drive. But please don't expect me to listen to it.

A week's worth of oozing self-love and incessant begging is more than I can bear, and I salute the pledgers who stay tuned long enough to snag their preferred restaurant/trip/ticket donation premiums while risking brain liquefaction.

Phones ring a lot during the drive-time shifts, but yesterday, I worked later, so I brought a book to read while the station aired reruns of the day's programming in between extended announcer pleas for your pledge. The phones were largely quiet on a Friday night when most people were out weekending, or watching the Clippers clobber the Rockets.

But over 2½ hours, I managed to read only a few pages, thanks to my fellow pledge takers. We work in a very cramped space where you hope your neighbor practices good personal hygiene and where conversation is shared no matter the intent.

Nathan, 24, sat opposite me, sporting an honorary Clippers ball boy T-shirt, beach sandals and three days of beard growth. He spoke with a honeyed voice that probably has driven many young women into activities they might not have anticipated. Andy sat next to me. A handsome young fellow not much older than Nathan, he wore a hoodie, ball cap and somewhat more mature groomed beard.

It was the second pledge drive Andy had worked. He loves motor racing, and recently went to Spain for a famous grand prix I never heard of. He also loves this radio station enough to drive during the Friday afternoon rush hour from San Diego, where he lives, to man the phones in Santa Monica for a couple of hours. He drove back, he figured, "in time to do something else tonight."

I live a mile away from KCRW. I wouldn't drive from Beverly Hills to do this job.

Nathan, who grew up in Long Beach, said his parents read the Press-Telegram, and as a kid, he used to read the Wall Street Journal. When the phones went silent last night, he called his friends and family members, using that bedroom voice to cajole them into pledging money to a cause in which he had no personal stake. If every telemarketer was as seductive as Nathan, we would all be broke.

It turns out that the time I gave to KCRW last night was worth a lot more to me than to the station. It made me realize that even if their generation does not revere newspapers the way I do, does not value conversation in person more than via electronic device, does not understand that electronic dance music is nothing more than aural wallpaper to take ecstasy by and pretend it's actual music, Andy and Nathan are still wonderful representatives of their generation.

They are the kind of people who give me confidence in the future. A future of selflessness and charity. A future populated by folks with an appreciation of the world beyond their own. A future filled with people of accomplishment who will be able to fund my Social Security when I retire, move to the country and continue to listen to KCRW.

Except during the pledge drive.

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 4:55 PM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: A dramatic, wrenching, and potentially pivotal story is unfolding in the environmental movement right now. It is a test of whether the movement--and particularly its most powerful organizations--can really represent the interests and concerns of diverse Angelenos, diverse Californians, diverse Americans, and diverse citizens of the world.

The test came to a head last week after Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club, posted messages in solidarity with #blacklivesmatter--the hashtag under which protests against the deaths of Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice have gathered on social media.

Brune was shocked by the reactions to his posts, "some of which were racist, vicious, and crude," he wrote on his Sierra Club blog. The reactions fell into three categories. "There were the ones that made me recoil," Brune wrote. "There were also expressions of gratitude--a category I'm glad to say got larger over time and soon represented the vast majority of posts. And lastly, there were comments from people who simply seemed baffled. Why was the Sierra Club speaking out on this issue? What did police shootings, or questions of abuse and racism, however tragic, have to do with protecting the environment?"

Brune answered that question thoughtfully and at length in his blog post. "I'll start by acknowledging that the environmental movement has a less-than-perfect record when it comes to race," he wrote. "After more than a century of conservation work, it's only relatively recently that we have recognized the gravity of environmental injustice--that communities of color are almost always the ones most affected by pollution. That's not an inconvenience. It's a matter of life and death, from the refineries of Texas to the tar sands of Canada."

He added: "At the same time, we have struggled to foster a truly inclusive movement. I think that's finally beginning to change, and I am proud of the hard work that the Sierra Club and others have done."

And he asked: "Is it too much to hope that the terrible events in Missouri, New York, and Ohio will force us as a nation to look at ourselves without flinching and to hold these injustices to the light? To the people who still don't understand what that might have to do with environmentalism, here's my answer: Fighting injustice--knowing the difference between what is right and what is wrong--must be at the heart of our work. Otherwise, what really distinguishes us from our opponents?"

Seeing the leader of a mainstream green group embracing #blacklivesmatter--and then vigorously and openly defending and explaining his stance--is one sign of important changes underway in the environmental movement. There are others.

Last week, the Sierra Club also joined five of the nation's other top environmental organizations in formally pledging to provide open data about diversity in their own ranks in their profiles on GuideStar, a site that provides financial and other accountability data on charitable organizations. The Natural Resources Defense Council, National Audubon Society, Environmental Defense Fund, Resource Media, Earthjustice, and the Sierra Club announced they would provide the data by February 2015 at a forum on "Breaking the Green Ceiling" organized by Green 2.0, an organization working to diversify the ranks of the environmental movement, and New America Media, a consortium of ethnic media nationwide.

The announcement follows the recent release of a report on "The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations & Government Agencies" commissioned by Green 2.0, which found that although people of color now account for more than a third of the U.S. population, they have generally not broken above a 16 percent "green ceiling" among employees in mainstream environmental organizations, and a 5 percent ceiling on their boards. Green 2.0 noted that the report also found "lackluster interest, among many foundations and NGOs, to institute strategies that could make cultures more welcoming in order to attract and retain a more diverse range of people. This is despite the fact that people of color support environmental protections at higher rates than whites."

For decades, environmental justice advocates have criticized the biggest mainstream environmental groups for not representing the diversity of the United States and the communities in which they work. This has hampered their ability to do important work in some of the communities that most need and want environmental protections and improvements.

Transparency has been a long time coming. Until now, the data and criticism have come from the outside. But at least six of the biggest environmental organizations are now internalizing the need to measure their success in representing the communities they serve. It's a truism that you can't manage what you can't--or don't--measure. And people in organizations tend to perform to performance measurements. That is, they produce the things that will increase their success in performance reviews.

If they do, the environmental movement could look very different in coming years. And that could be very good for the movement, as well as for people and the environment.

Photo at Hollywood and Highland in Los Angeles courtesy of The Mitzikin Revolution.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 2:32 PM | Permalink

Writer Toni Ann Johnson is very busy.The Inglewood resident's first novel Remedy for a Broken Angel debuted this summer and she recently joined Antioch University Los Angeles as a book coach and manuscript consultant for writers who need help finishing projects. A successful and accomplished actor, screenwriter and playwright, Toni Ann won the Humanitas Prize and the Christopher Award in 1998 for her teleplay of the ABC Movie 'Ruby Bridges', the true story of the young girl who integrated the New Orleans Public School system. She won a second Humanitas Prize in 2004 for her Showtime teleplay, 'Crown Heights' about the 1991 Crown Heights Riots.

Now she has turned her talents to fiction. Kirkus Review called her novel "musically and psychologically acute." The novel traces how the psychological scars of abandonment are passed between generations in a family of Bermudian-Americans. Two characters narrate the story in alternating chapters: Artie, a young woman psychologically damaged after a lover's betrayal, and Artie's mother, Serena, battling her own demons after abandoning her daughter and husband years before. Set in the world of professional jazz musicians, the novel is buoyant and therapeutic. It even includes an appearance by Charles Mingus, who comforts Serena as a scatting spirit guide.

Hearing Toni Ann read her novel aloud is a delight as she's an exceptional performer who brings her characters to life with vivid dialogue and musical phrasing.

On Saturday, November 8th at 7:30 PM, she'll be reading from her novel at the Cirque Salon Fiction Reading Series, located at 5503 North Figueroa 90042 in Los Angeles.

She also headlines a reading at Antioch University Los Angeles' free Literary Uprising reading series on Tuesday, November 11th at 6:00 PM in Culver City.

Below, LAObserved interviewed Toni Ann via email.

Jazz powers this novel. Can you elaborate on how the music influences your writing style and pacing of the novel?

I'm not conscious of how the music influences the writing, and I didn't try to use the music to set the pacing, but when I was working on this book I did listen to jazz often, if not daily. I would take walks in the morning and listen as I walked. Sometimes I'd play it while I was writing as well. I was listening to Mingus, and also to Miles Davis, Coltrane, Gato Barbieri, Carlos Santana and to a group of young musicians who used to play in LA in the 90s called BlackNote.

I suppose the back and forth in chapters between the two main characters, Artimeza and Serena could be considered a type of call and response, which is associated with jazz. And I would say that there are some "riffs" in the book within chapters that one might consider similar to an "out there" solo wherein a player goes off and does something that's part of the composition, within it, but breaks away for a few minutes into something unique to him or her. For example, there's a sequence in the book where Serena has a dream and the content is surreal and intense, and involves sex and spirits. One early reader said that the surreal tone felt different from the rest of the book and suggested that it didn't belong. Well, that's an opinion, but in a novel with jazz as an influence, a few "out-there" moments isn't incongruent, and I never considered removing that because those kinds of heightened moments--surprises are meant to be there. When you go to hear live jazz, you expect to hear surprises; you expect the musicians to delight you with something you couldn't have predicted in their solos. In composing this book, I didn't want everything to have the same tone. There's variety in style, emotion, and ideas in the story and that's intentional.

Continue reading "LA Observed interview: Toni Ann Johnson" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 9:15 AM | Permalink

The death of any newspaper is a sad occasion. But it was personal when I learned that the plug had finally been pulled on the San Francisco Bay Guardian. Midwestern-journalist-transplant Bruce Brugmann founded the paper in 1966, and for several decades the Guardian lived up to its masthead-pledge of "printing the news and raising hell." It was a progressive-leaning thorn in the side of San Francisco's establishment written by a revolving cast of scruffy and dedicated renegades with Brugmann as the master of ceremonies.

I first met Bruce when he was a teaching Journalism 101 at UC Berkeley. A girlfriend at the time urged me to make journalism my second major. "It's easy and it'll look good on your resume," she assured me.

Nothing about my introduction to journalism was propitious. Fifteen students - god knows what happened to them! - met in Bruce's early morning class on the top floor of Sproul Hall, the administration building. The room was equipped with a dozen or so desks with battered manual typewriters. I remember struggling with stuck keys, haywire space bars and unpredictable carriage returns. An in-class typed paper often looked like a Morse code signal sent from outer-space.

Bruce's instruction in the basic mechanics of journalism was eccentric, off-the-cuff, informal. Today it would not make it past any rigid syllabus-test and class outline requirement.

Mostly what I got out of the class was Bruce's life-story. After a stint as a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal, Bruce came to the Bay Area to rattle the cages of the mighty with his infant Bay Guardian. Class instruction often consisted of Bruce's rants about the monopolistic power of the SF Chronicle and SF Examiner and their joint operating agreement that allowed the two papers to circumvent anti-trust laws and share production room facilities and costs.

I don't remember my grade but I do remember being scolded by Bruce for my overly florid-style of writing. At the time, I also had a magnificent obsession - with words. And the more colorful and arcane the word, the more likely I was to introduce it in the infrequent news-writing exercises Bruce assigned.

It was few years later that I showed up looking for a job at Bruce's ratty Bay Guardian office located south of Market Street. Derelicts and warehouses were the paper's neighbors. Bruce's desk reminded me of a scene from the movie Man on a Flying Trapeze where W.C. Fields, a disorganized klutz, improbably finds a critical note buried under a pyramid of cluttered papers on his desk. I had plenty of evidence during my job-interview that Bruce could not have accomplished that same feat at his own desk.

But Bruce did put me to work doing freelance stories.

My "magnum opus" for the Bay Guardian was a story about the workings of the Central Intelligence Agency in San Francisco. It was largely an account of my efforts to locate the CIA's secret office and obtain an interview with its "agents" about why the CIA even had an office in San Francisco. This was the kind of derring-do journalism that - I later learned with some degree of pride, mixed later with embarrassment - was typical of the juvenile investigative reporting of the 1890's when newshounds like Stephen Crane and Richard Harding Davis engaged in various subterfuges and disguises to get scoops.

I haven't read the story in years. It's in a box in the garage probably overrun by silverfish. But I do recall how it featured the CIA's assistant station chief handing me a CIA job application during one of our encounters in a coffee shop in San Francisco's financial district and providing me with a personal introduction to CIA boss Richard Colby before Colby gave speech to the local Council of Foreign Relations chapter at the Sheraton Palace Hotel.

It was all in the story, and Bruce ate it up.

Shortly afterwards Bruce hired me to help set up his newly-formed East Bay Bureau, in another dingy office overlooking Telegraph Avenue, near the Oakland border. The Guardian's expansion was financed with Bruce's winnings from a lawsuit he had filed against his antagonists at the Chronicle and Examiner. Within three months, Bruce's experiment with me and with an outlying bureau - which he never got the hang of managing - was exhausted. My future wife and I were also exhausted with the Bay Area about the same time and moved to Los Angeles. So much for Bruce and me. Or so I thought.

Several months later Bruce phoned to tell me the CIA story had won the San Francisco Press Club's first-place prize for investigative reporting. That was my first journalism award, and somewhere in my garage is the award certificate, also probably now providing a nest for silverfish.

I flew to San Francisco, at Bruce's bidding, to accept the award. I don't even remember where the ceremony was held. Bruce was in high spirits and greeted me like a long lost son. It turned out my award was another vindication for the Guardian's editor-publisher. For years he had been railing against the SF Press Club, claiming it was controlled by the Chronicle and Examiner and had blackballed him and his reporters when it handed out its annual awards. Now that ceiling was broken.

I don't remember much about the ceremony and accompanying dinner except that Bruce treated me to a drink and a big cigar. He was puffing on one himself. It was a big deal for him and for me. It was my first journalism award, and it came with a check for $400.
That was the last I saw of Bruce. But in later years, whenever I was in San Francisco, I would pick up a copy of the Bay Guardian. In recent times the paper slipped from its pedestal of being a champion of the underdog and became largely a life-style paper, with extensive listings of what-do-in in the Bay Area.

But even in its decline, the Guardian still retained its masthead pledge of "printing the news and raising hell." I'll never forget that pledge, the Guardian or Bruce. Tonight, my pledge is to go home and dig out my old Guardian mementos from a box in the garage and raise hell with the slumbering silverfish.

John Schwada is a former reporter for Fox 11 in Los Angeles, the LA Times and the late Herald Examiner.

Posted by John Schwada at 8:55 AM | Permalink

Jon Christensen writes: Parks Forward--a blue-ribbon commission studying the troubled California State Parks system--is proposing a surprisingly bold vision for the future of parks in California. But it has been met with a surprising silence. While the crisis in California State Parks generated headlines statewide, the commission's recommendations, which were released in late April, have been mentioned in just two newspaper articles so far. Chris Megerian wrote one of them for the LA Times. His story ran online, but never in the paper, as far as I can tell. I wrote the other--an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Why this strange silence? It's hard to understand, really. Sure, journalists like a crisis. And they were all over California State Parks in its time of need. But where are they when solutions are being proposed? Solutions that deserve and need to be broadly debated. The narrative is moving forward here, friends in the media. I hope the silence is just because you're busy working on stories that will help Californians understand what's at stake and what's afoot for their parks. It's big news.

After reading Megerian's piece, I sat down to read the Parks Forward Commission's recommendations frankly expecting to be bored by another litany of the problems facing our state parks system and another set of bureaucratic proposals destined to make eyes glaze over before finding a permanent resting place on some dusty shelf in Sacramento. Boy, was I surprised. The Parks Forward Commission is recommending fundamental reforms to the state Department of Parks and Recreation. But it is going well beyond that to suggest that what is needed is a brand new privately and publicly funded organization to do what the state parks agency cannot do.

The Parks Forward commission evidently recognizes that the parks agency will have its hands full with the daunting internal reforms necessary to get its own house in order for years to come. And it will never have the capacity to take on the innovations necessary to bring California parks into the 21st century technologically, connect with a rapidly changing younger and demographically diverse urban constituency, and embrace new business and funding models. The solution: create a new, more nimble, nonprofit parks support organization to work with the state parks agency, other local and regional parks agencies, nonprofits, businesses, and community groups to do what needs to be done.

It's a simple, elegant, and seemingly obvious solution that will, no doubt, require lengthy discussion and negotiation if Parks Forward is to succeed in defining an essential new niche in a crowded field and then build an effective organization to fill it. But the commission is in a good position to do that, packed as it is with influential and intellectual firepower, appointed by the state secretary of natural resources, John Laird, and backed by some of the most powerful philanthropies in California.

The commission is refreshingly frank in its assessment of the challenges ahead. Two key findings guide its recommendations: "First, California's parks system is debilitated by an outdated organizational structure, underinvestment in technology and business tools, and a culture that has not rewarded excellence, innovation, and leadership. Second, only broad-based, fundamental change will transform the system into one that will transform parks and the parks experience to once again lead the nation and the world in meeting the needs of citizens and visitors for decades to come."

The commission's recommendations for internal reforms in the Department of Parks and Recreation include upgrading the department's information and technology infrastructure, budgeting, planning, and accounting systems, and fee collections. Right now, as state parks director Anthony Jackson, a retired Marine major general, has said, the agency is stuck two-thirds of the way through the 20th century technologically. Bringing it into the 21st century is going to be a huge undertaking. The commission also recommends a big change in state parks leadership. Right now, to rise in the agency's ranks to district superintendent and above, employees must be peace officers. As a result, the commission says, leaders tend to focus on law enforcement. The commission recommends abolishing the requirement and opening up leadership to more diverse candidates with other skills and interests.

As for the new support organization, the commission proposes an ambitious agenda that includes: providing funding, design, and support for deploying state-of-the-art fee collection machines in parks, and finding new business development opportunities, such as special events and partnerships for parks; fundraising and other financing for parks; developing digital tools for communications, marketing, and on-the-ground guides to parks in English and Spanish; strategic planning, coordination, and collaboration with other organizations especially focused on providing parks in underserved urban communities; and land acquisition to expand the parks network in California to meet the needs of urban and other underserved communities and create a network of conserved lands that enable the state's flora and fauna to adapt to climate change.

From the beginning of its efforts, the commission says it has been "mindful" of California's rapidly changing demographics. The state's Latino population is projected to grow from 38 percent in 2010 to 52 percent in 2040. Millennials--people born between 1980 and 2000--now make up 29 percent of the state, constitute "the single largest generation in human history," and nationally "will decide the next six presidential elections." And while 61 percent of Californians were clustered in three urban areas in 2010, that number will rise to 76 percent by 2050.

All of this gives a decidedly urban, millennial, technologically savvy flavor to the Parks Forward recommendations. In 1928, when the famous landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. offered his recommendations to a state park commission, he noted the "magnitude and importance, socially and economically, in California, of the values arising directly and indirectly from the enjoyment of scenery and from related pleasures of non-urban outdoor life." Today, the future of California's 280 state parks, covering 1.6 million acres, and providing access to 340 miles of coast (more than a third of the state's coastline), hinges not on escaping the city, but on reconnecting to urban life.

The draft recommendations are available on the Parks Forward web site. Additional public meetings will be held this summer to gather feedback. The commission's final recommendations are due in the fall. Let the debate begin.

This piece is adapted from my op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle. I also discussed the Parks Forward Commission's recommendations on KPCC's "Take Two" program. Photo of Dockweiler State Beach, one of my favorite state parks, by Tamara Evans. Want to see more of the social life of California parks? Visit our project visualizing social media in California parks at parks.stamen.com.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 4:40 PM | Permalink

Mark Gold writes: The LA Times Sunday edition featured a nice story on an important environmental restoration project at Machado Lake in Ken Malloy Harbor Regional Park in Wilmington. The 231-acre park is a badly neglected piece of Los Angeles wedged in between Harbor College, a golf course, and a refinery.

What the Times failed to mention, though, is the real catalyst for the $140 million project to clean up both the highly degraded Machado Lake and the Wilmington Drain, which carries runoff to the lake and ultimately to the LA Harbor. These water bodies are so polluted that they are listed as impaired under the Clean Water Act for eutrophication (algae caused by nutrient overloads in the water), toxic metals, and DDT and PCBs, banned organochlorines that still linger in this environment. The city of LA is required to clean up these polluted water bodies because of state and federal water quality requirements. And the project will the largest by far undertaken under Proposition O--the $500 million city water quality bond that passed with more than 76 percent of the vote in 2004.

The reason it has taken this long for restoration efforts to get underway is that the city Department of Public Works has been working very closely with local residents and environmental groups in LA. The LA Regional Water Quality Control Board has also been heavily engaged in project discussions and technical review of the cleanup and restoration plan. One environmental biologist and educator who deserves an enormous amount of credit for community efforts is Martin Byhower, a longtime teacher at the Chadwick School who is active in Audubon and other environmental groups. Another reason for the slow pace is that the city is trying to solve a very difficult environmental problem. Creating a healthy lake and creek system from water bodies with highly polluted water and sediments is extremely difficult.

Among the questions the Department of Public Works has struggled with here are: What do you do with all of the toxic sediments? How do you clean up the lake and drain as quickly as possible? What will be the source of water for the lake during droughts like the one we're experiencing now? And what treatment devices will be constructed to ensure that the lake and drain won't get polluted again?

After a great deal of design and community engagement work, the city came up with a good design for the project. And despite the fact that the local ports refused to take the sediments for pier expansion projects because of the poor structural integrity of the sediments, the city came up with a plan to enhance the lake, dispose of contaminated sediments in a hazardous waste landfill, and not go way over budget.

This may be the most difficult polluted runoff and lake restoration effort that anyone has ever undertaken in California. A lot is at stake. The city needs to deliver a healthy lake and drain and a park in Wilmington that all the local residents can be proud of. And the water must comply with regulatory requirements to protect aquatic life.

As a founding member of the Prop O citizen oversight advisory committee, I can attest to the level of effort and creativity that has gone into the Bureau of Sanitation and Engineering plan. As an example, the Machado team is planning to use highly treated recycled water (sewage treated by microfiltration and reverse osmosis) to fill the lake when stormwater flows aren't adequate to do so.

When the Machado Lake and Wilmington Drain project is completed it will be one of the gems in the City's Prop O efforts--right up there with the Echo Park Lake project and the year round dry weather runoff diversions that have made eight Santa Monica Bay beaches a lot safer for swimmers and surfers.

Photo: A rare green heron sighting amidst the trash at polluted Machado Lake. Courtesy of Heal the Bay.

Posted by Jon Christensen and Mark Gold at 4:01 PM | Permalink

Bill Dwyre was sports editor of the Los Angeles Times from 1981 to 2006. He is currently a sports columnist for the paper. William F. Thomas, the Times editor when Dwyre was hired, died Sunday.

It was late spring of 1981. I was a brand-spanking-new sports editor of a megatropolis newspaper named the Los Angeles Times. I was 37 years old and so far in over my head that drowning was a real possibility.

I wanted to make a gesture to the huge and talented sports staff I had inherited. I needed them to be patient with me, to have faith that I would figure it out over time. I needed to do something that would get their attention in a good way.

I checked back and saw that we hadn't covered the British Open golf tournament for several years. The jump of logic from there was easy. Jim Murray loved golf. Every reader who had ever read him loved Murray. All the other sports staff members--and there were so many in those days I still hadn't met them all and I had been on the job more than a month by then--loved Murray.

Talk about a win-win.

So I called Murray and assigned him to go cover the British Open a few months hence in Sandwich, England. He was delighted.

I was about to put the assignment on a staff list that I kept and always made public so everybody would always know what everybody else was doing. This was designed to be good journalism and good internal public relations, all in one swoop.

But then I paused for a moment to think about things.

Just a few months prior to that, I had been the sports editor of The Milwaukee Journal. It was a fine newspaper and I will always be proud of that association. But, like most newspapers, even in those days, The Journal treated every nickel like it was a gold nugget.

I broke into a cold sweat. What had I just done? Murray's trip to the British would be expensive. My Milwaukee mentality clicked in.

So, I decided to do what all great editors do. Cover my ass.

I picked up the phone and called Bill Thomas. By then, I had met him just once. That's how huge the paper was. I was told I was being named sports editor, after three months as the No. 2 guy, by the outgoing sports editor over lunch in the Picasso Room. I could only assume that Thomas and the managing editor, George Cotliar, had been in on the deal, and as I learned later, they not only had been in on it, but had orchestrated it masterfully.

So I called Thomas' office and his secretary put me through, after pausing for a moment to figure out who I was.

I told him I just wanted him to know that I was sending Jim Murray to the British Open.

Silence.

I babbled on about getting our readers more exposure to Murray's golf writing, and about how this was supposed to be a good year for the British tournament.

Silence.

Finally, Thomas says, "Do what you want. It's your sports staff, your sports budget. Cover stuff. Spend it. And don't bother me with it."

Click.

I remember rocking back in my chair and wondering if I had died and gone to heaven. I pinched myself and, sure enough, I was still alive. Not only was I alive, but the sports editor of the Los Angeles Times, working for the best, in Bill Thomas and his managing editor, Cotliar.

A few days later, Murray called and said he was just making sure it was all right to fly first class. I said of course it was, that that's how we did things at The Los Angeles Times.

I never called Thomas to confirm.

Posted by Visiting Blogger at 10:26 PM | Permalink

Linda Deutsch, the AP's special correspondent in Los Angeles, dates her journalism career to covering the 1963 civil rights march on Washington 50 years ago Wednesday. She wrote this story about that day and posted it on her Facebook page. Posted here at LA Observed with permission.

Through the years, when I tell people that I covered the 1963 civil rights march on Washington, they often ask: "Did you know?"

They mean did I know I was present at the making of history? Did I know I was hearing one of the greatest speeches of all time -- Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech?" Did I know that the nation would change because of this day?

The answer seems to be yes. Although history is perceived in retrospect after great events I was lucky enough this week to obtain a copy of my story from Aug. 29, 1963 and the fuzzy microfilm copy shows that I knew something monumental had taken place.

Reporting on a delegation of marchers from New Jersey, I wrote: "Weary and footsore, some 1,500 area residents returned last night from the Washington March for Freedom and Jobs exhilerated with the knowledge that they had participated in what one woman described as 'the most drynamic demonstration in the history of the Civil Rights struggle.'"

I know now that hot August day in Washington changed my life and that the massive demonstration by more than 200,000 people was just the beginning of a march toward equality among races that continues today.

Everyone who was there has a special memory. Mine is of a career-changing decision to talk my way into covering the march.

I was a teen-age summer intern at a New Jersey newspaper, the Perth Amboy Evening News. I had just completed my sophomore year at Monmouth College and, with mentoring from a journalism professor, had seized the chance to work a shift each night that began at 7 p.m. and ended at 3 a.m. I wasn't covering big news and never saw the editors. But I had seen reports about a huge civil rights march that was coming up in Washington, D.C.

One night, at the end of my shift, I timidly left a clipping and a note for the paper's editor, Ken Michael: "Don't you think we should cover this?"

He called the next morning. "So you want to cover this, do you?" I said yes. He paused a moment, then said, "Well, you can go but it can't cost us anything." It was my first lesson in journalism economics.

I telephoned the local NAACP chapter and asked if I could go along on their bus. They were glad to accommodate me.

There had been predictions of violence, and I didn't tell my mother I was going because I knew she would worry.

Oddly enough, I was neither worried nor nervous. I was excited to have such a great assignment and, with the confidence of youth, I knew I could handle it. But the demonstrators must have had residual fears. Washington was an armed camp that day. One young girl on our bus had been jailed for 21 days for demonstrating in Virginia.

We left before dawn in an atmosphere of excitement. There were 25 busloads from our one county and, as I would write in my story, "They were Negro and white, young and old, Jews, Catholics and Protestants, professional people as well as unemployed boarding the bus together with a single purpose, to demand the freedom and equality promised them in the constitution."

Most of the buses, I reported, were air conditioned and comfortable. But a few school buses were pressed into use and no one complained.

"There were no thoughts of resting on the way," said one woman I interviewed, "We were so excited that we talked and sang all the way."

The songs they were singing were the same same as the demonstrators chanted softly as they marched. Black passengers on our bus taught the whites the lyrics to the famous songs: "We shall Overcome" and "Oh Freedom."

Those on the bus were committed to the cause. I was the observer.

But that day, no one who was there could remain immune from the powerful emotions. I remember standing near the reflecting pool at the Washington Monument linking arms with strangers, black and white, joining in the songs, sitting on the grass and hearing hearing speeches by entertainers and civil rights leaders. (Decades later, that scene was beautifully recreated in the movie, "Forrest Gump.")

Amid the enormous crowd, I managed to find my way to the press tent where I encountered my journalism professor accompanying a group of students. He was proud to see that I was there as a working journalist.

I remember writing my story when I got back. Without computers or cell phones, I had to scurry, but I made deadline for the afternoon paper of Aug. 29.

It was my first front-page byline and my destiny in journalism was sealed. I would never turn back and would go on to cover many more historical events over the next half century.

I covered Robert F. Kennedy's assassination, the evacuation of Vietnam on Guam and dozens of huge high profile trials from Manson to Michael Jackson. The trials of black activist Angela Davis and football hero O.J.Simpson raised issues of racism which had not disappeared from our public dialogue. And my stories on the trial of Los Angeles police officers acquitted of beating black motorist Rodney King preceded one of the worst race riots in Los Angeles history.

The AP story from Aug. 28, 1963 reported at the end of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, someone in the crowd shouted a salute to "The next President of the United States."

What a dream that was then. A black President?

Flash forward to November, 2008. I am sitting in front of a TV set in Los Angeles watching the presidential election returns roll in, still uncertain if the dream is possible.

And then a commentator announces Barack Obama has won election as the first black President of the United States.

The memories of that day in Washington came flooding back . And I cried.

Posted by LA Observed at 6:31 PM | Permalink

Today is Dorothy Parker's 120th birthday. She was born on August 22, 1893, and her devotees shall observe the occasion by posting her quotations and poems on the Internets. However, a famous quip about Los Angeles may not be applicable.

As the president of the LA Chapter of the Dorothy Parker Society and tour guide, I am asked on a regular basis if Dorothy Parker actually said that Los Angeles is "72 of suburbs in search of a city." The answer is...probably not.

The quote has been attributed to Dorothy Parker but it's really a paraphrase of Aldous Huxley's bon mot found his 1925 book, Americana. He wrote that Los Angeles was "nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis" and he was probably quoting someone else who initially said Los Angeles was seven or six suburbs in search of a city. The witticism expanded from there. At times it was attributed to H.L. Menken, Robert Benchely, Alexander Woolcott and Dorothy Parker.

Most likely it was Mencken who used the phrase in an essay published in the April 1927 issue of Photoplay magazine after visiting Los Angeles for three weeks in 1926. I cannot find the actual essay so I must reserve the right to be wrong. Thanks to Kim Cooper, I have found the publication online. But I still reserve the right to be wrong.

Regardless, Mrs. Parker's hatred for our fair city inspired plenty of other waspish quips.
I can verify that she once told a reporter that she loathed palm trees, calling them "the ugliest vegetable God created." You can tweet that.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 12:38 AM | Permalink

On Saturday, August 10th, Henry Rollins inaugurated the new Meet and Greet speaker series in the Annenberg Space for Photography's newest area, Skylight Studios. A compelling speaker, he shared tales about his encounters with people all over the globe, taking their pictures, and documenting the power of kindness to combat global brutality and propagate peace. Not bad for an old hardcore punk. He's  maturing in his inimitable, self-absorbed way, but maturing nonetheless. He mentioned his LA Weekly column and a few attendees applauded. I almost believed his humblebrag that the Skylight audience's adulation was the first confirmation that he'd ever received that people actually read his column.  Hmmm.

The audience laughed along with him as he related the tale of an overemotional biker who accosted him in a Toluca Lake coffee shop because Rollins had a small part in "Jack Frost," a flick the biker had enjoyed every Christmas with his now-deceased wife.

He is very charming and left his listeners with advice on how to combat human incivility: treat each encounter as an opportunity to be kind and celebrate that person's humanity with dignity.

My friend and I caught the Rollins lecture by accident. We had just wandered over to the Skylight Studio from the Helmut Newton show now on view in the main gallery. Aside from the black and white photographs of naked women in casts, I really enjoyed people watching. Who can resist the sight of smug old men in khakis and tennis shoes, studiously ignoring giant photos of women with unshaven private parts, while arguing over the superiority of the Windows 7 operating system?

Ed Colver is the next Skylight Studio "Meet and Greet" speaker, appearing August 17 from 1-3pm.

Cropped photo of Rollins and Colver: Annenberg Space/Unique Nicole
Top Photo credit; Angie Padilla (c) 2013 used with permission. All rights reserved.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 6:52 PM | Permalink

Schwada was a reporter for Fox 11 and the Los Angeles Times (and occasional contributor to LA Observed) before he went to the campaign side and worked last year for Rep. Brad Sherman, and this year for City Attorney Carmen Trutanich and city controller candidate Dennis Zine.

I knew I was back in LA when - driving home from LAX - I heard Frank Stoltze, one of the city's journalistic treasures, making a pledge drive pitch on KPCC. I knew I was not fully back when I was welcomed home by Jeffrey Taylor, a great designer of political mail, who promptly said: "You smell like curry." Maybe not curry but Middle Eastern spices. Hard to get the stuff out of your system after eating grilled goat, ful maddamas and tempered peas for days on end.  

Halfway around the world, on the edges of the Empty Quarter, where Bedouins live and mad Englishmen (like Wilfred Patrick Thesiger) found refuge, on the shores of the Arabian Sea, sandwiched between troubled neighbors like Iran and Yemen is the quaint, forgotten country of Oman. That's where I had been. When it's 2 pm here in LA, it's 2 am in Oman. That's how far away Oman is.

Once called the most charming police state in the world, Oman is a place where politeness and civility are enforced. Lese majeste is illegal. You cannot curse your neighbor over his caterwauling cat without consequences. Like jail-time. And you certainly cannot insinuate that His Majesty Sultan Qaboos ibn Said is misgoverning the country without risking imprisonment. Bedouin hospitality is great. But the flip-side is a nation without public dissent.

Political invective and caterwauling had been at the very heart and soul of my existence for the past eight months, as the paid and earned media consulting guy for the Trutanich for City Attorney campaign. I don't think an hour went by during those months when I did not commit an offense that, in Oman, would have landed me in the local dungeon. Yet the Sultan seems to rule with a light whip-hand. Four dozen or so Omani demonstrators convicted for "illegally" protesting government policies were pardoned by HM shortly before I arrived in the country. For a "police state," Oman's police are tactfully invisible. In fact, I only once saw a policeman outside a patrol vehicle. One rumor has it that the nation's taxi drivers moonlight as spies for the regime.

Oman was a refreshing change from the daily grind of LA's political season. Pick up a paper in Oman, like the English language Muscat Daily, and you could find nary a negative thing in it about HM (His Majesty).

Trutanich and Feuer, Zine and Galperin, Cedillo and Gardea (the former in each of these pairings was a client of mine) were 12 thousand miles away, as I walked, trekked, drove my way around Oman. 1519 kilometers of driving. Maybe 50 kms of walking. The daytime temperatures - in the 100's.

In the boondocks of Oman, while getting lost in the labyrinthine alleys of an ancient village where Jesus reincarnate might have found himself at home, the struggle with the heat was tiring. But it was a good tiring. Every drop of sweat squeezed another sub-cutaneous, molecular-level drop of LA and a frustrating campaign season out of my body. The broiling heat, the bite of spices, the God-tortured mountains, the sand dune deserts the size of Connecticut, the ancient villages improbably clinging to the side of gorges or enduring alongside cooling mountain streams, the white-nosed donkeys braying under the shade of a wind-blasted tree, the exotic, nasal sound of the muzzein calling the faithful to prayer at 4 in the morning, the old men with bizarrely-coiffed beards selling live goats in Nizwa's souk or fresh-caught tuna piled up in wheelbarrows at the Muscat fish souk - all of it was cathartic. They pushed LA out of my mind.

I've been asked - why Oman? How about: It's remote, ruggedly beautiful, a haven of tranquility in a troubled neighborhood. Figuratively speaking you can count on one hand the number of Omani nationals engaged in jihadi warfare. Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is a dire force in Yemen, Oman's next door neighbor. But not in Oman.
Why Oman? Why not? Go see it for yourself. But for me, I'm ready to get back to work. In Los Angeles. Hope to see you around the city's political/media souk.

Posted by John Schwada at 12:52 AM | Permalink

This is from Harold Meyerson, the Washington Post columnist and former political editor at LA Weekly.

To the Editor of LA Observed:

Mark Lacter is absolutely right to have characterized me as a "left-winger" in his indignant response to my Washington Post column about the problems attendant to the Koch Brothers buying the L.A. Times. But he's off the mark to characterize my colleague Steve Pearlstein that way in his ad hominen bid to dismiss Steve's suggestion for how Times employees might stave off a Koch purchase. Credibility follows from the merits of an argument, not from ideology, but in case anyone was put off by Lacter's labeling Pearlstein a lefty, let me assure them that Steve is a certifiable centrist, and a professor at George Mason University, which is on nobody's list of left-wing colleges. More relevantly, Pearlstein, who's won a Pulitzer for his work, is also widely regarded as the single best business columnist in the United States.

More relevantly still, Pearlstein's outline for what Tribune employees could do to impede the Kochs (and impede Tribune's board if they wish to sell to the Kochs) isn't the left-wing fantasy that Lacter says it is. Here are the key paragraphs of Pearlstein's piece:

This is a rare moment for Tribune's beleaguered journalists. For the first time in a long time, they actually have leverage. They'd be crazy not to use it.

All it would take would be a letter to Tribune's owners and investment bankers declaring that if the newspapers were sold to an owner who would not invest in quality, politically independent journalism, they will take their talent and experience elsewhere. A one-day strike or sick-out on the day the company is put up for sale would help to reinforce the threat.

Under such circumstances, Tribune and bankers would have a legal obligation to disclose this substantial risk to any prospective buyers in its prospectus. The effect would be to lower the eventual sale price, no matter who eventually buys it. And there is a good chance it would scare off any buyers whose aim is to turn Tribune's news organizations into mouthpieces for ideological propaganda.

For any one journalist to make such a threat would be folly. For hundreds to do so collectively would be to lob a stink bomb into this carefully orchestrated sales effort.

Some might wonder what would happen if the threat fails and a hostile new owner takes over and promptly fires all the signatories. My guess is that if an owner has such little respect for value of knowledgeable and experienced journalists, then the chances are those journalists would wind up leaving or being fired for other reasons.

My guess is that readers of L.A. Observed don't share Lacter's indifference or resignation at the prospect of a Koch purchase of the Times. For them, and most especially for Times employees, Pearlstein's column can start a discussion of what, if anything, can be done about it.

Posted by Visiting Blogger at 10:07 PM | Permalink

Not that it makes it any easier to swallow, but by now most of us who care have probably heard that Al Martinez published his last column in the Daily News on Monday.

I wish it were an April Fools' joke, but it's not. Maybe it really is budget constraints, as they told him - the new redesign must've set them back something, after all. And maybe they're trying to dust off and shine up a fading brand, the better to sell ads with across their newly christened Daily News "chain" of the formerly independent little dailies scooped up and bagged by the LA News Group.

Whatever, there's no longer room at the inn for Al. After more than 50 years in the newspaper racket, they've given him a warm handshake, a pat on the back, and a push out the door.

It's easy to feel a little bitter about the whole thing, and nobody could blame Al if he did. But he'd probably be the first to say, "Cry me a river, take a number - and as long as you're up, could you fetch me another martini?" The budget axe has cut down a lot of tall trees in recent years, and he remained standing longer than most. By any measure, it has been an extraordinarily long and successful run.

Personally, I'm sad. I loved his writing. I don't mind confessing that his best pieces can still make me cry - no matter how many times I've read them. Some, in fact, have only gained in poignancy and resonance with the passage of time. And beyond their emotional import, anyone who aspires to be a columnist or, even better, an essayist, has a lot to learn just from the sheer literary craftsmanship to be found in Al's finest work.

In 1999, I was invited by UCLA Extension to develop an online course in "Opinion Writing" for their journalism sequence. Although my father was then still alive and teaching his college English classes, and my brother, too, is a tenured academic and author of several books, I was a total neophyte. Teaching was actually my fourth career after broadcast and print journalism and political staff work. And to be frank, I didn't really know what I was doing.

So I reached out to the opinion writers I admired most, and tapped them to share some of the tricks of the trade with my students. Naturally, Al was my first call. And he responded quickly with a wonderful original piece that I used in class for years.

Here is Al's previously unpublished essay from 1999, written when he was still at the Los Angeles Times, offering some characteristically wry words of wisdom to my aspiring opinion writers. I'm sure Al won't mind my sharing it with the LA Observed readership. Think of it as a writer's lagniappe, a little bonus from one of our profession's very finest.

Joel Bellman has contributed several pieces to LA Observed

Posted by Joel Bellman at 12:55 AM | Permalink

"Hello, my name is Lonnee Hamilton and I am here to solicit seed funding for My CookShelf.com, a recipe-sharing site; it's Pinterest meets Spotify for food."

It is 8 PM on a cold night in early February. I am sitting in a swank law firm's conference room in a high rise atop 7th and Figueroa, watching aspiring entrepreneurs compete for hypothetical seed funding from a panel of angel investors. Founder Institute, an international business management academy for nascent start ups, organized the event.

Knowing that I encourage writers to launch their own media enterprises, my pal, Lonnee Hamilton, SoCal food writer and Saveur magazine contributor, has invited me to join her family and cheer her on. She won the pitch that night and is ready now for Round 2.

She's looking for seed funding for real this time and has just launched a campaign to garner enough votes to qualify for participation in an upcoming pitch competition for start up cash. Or check out the My Cookshelf Tumblr for info about an upcoming Sriracha recipe contest.

Continue reading "A cash cook-off" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 5:07 PM | Permalink

The latest cartoon for LA Observed from Steve Greenberg. His archive.

Posted by Steve Greenberg at 8:48 PM | Permalink

I have just mailed in my Baseball Hall of Fame ballot and while several of the names on it required some thought--Mike Piazza (yes) and Don Mattingly (no), for instance--a few were no-brainers. I am speaking of Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro.

I voted for all of them.

Not that any of them will be elected to Cooperstown, of course. Sportswriters, and I have been one my entire working life, tend toward great moral judgments and just as they guarded the sanctity of Cooperstown against the threat posed by Pete Rose, they can be counted on to do their duty against the scourge of steroids represented by Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, McGwire and Palmeiro.

They cheated, you see. They used illegal drugs and lied about it. They gained an unfair advantage over their opponents. They threw the record book into disrepute. They sullied the game. They played fast and loose with the affections of the fans. They should be forgotten or ignored.

I have a different view.

I believe the steroid generation of players, of which these five players are among the most conspicuously accused, may well have saved baseball. I also believe these players' greatest achievements will outlast not only their careers, but their lifetimes.

Those of us who covered baseball during the strike that wiped out the 1994 playoffs and World Series well remember how bitter the players, owners and fans were then, and how dire the outlook for the game's immediate future seemed. We also remember how the home run battles between Sosa and McGwire wiped away this bitterness in an instant and brought the fans running back to the ballpark in forgiveness and delight. Bonds' assault on all-time home run records in the seasons that followed was equally transfixing as was Clemens' age-defying march to 354 victories.

The owners and fans of the teams in San Francisco and St. Louis remember this period, too, and, if caught in a moment of candor, will agree that the modern ballparks in which their teams now play might not exist but for the civic excitement, which translated into civic funding, created by Bonds and McGwire. The Giants, who at one point had agreed to move to St. Petersburg, are today baseball's reigning dynasty and play in the most beautiful ballpark in the land.

I was in Chicago at the height of Sosa-mania and can testify to the jolt it gave that star-crossed franchise. Indeed, all of baseball benefitted mightily from the accomplishments of the steroid generation: new ballparks, record attendance, soaring franchise worth, huge television contracts. If, as we are told, dirty players threaten the very fabric of the game, why is it more popular than ever?

But weren't the home run pyrotechnics of Bonds, Sosa, McGwire and Palmeiro, so much flim-flam? Shouldn't the numbers they put up be marked not with asterisks but scarlet letters? Didn't they make a mockery of the game by tilting it so far in favor of it hitters?

Well, here's a funny thing. When, after much delay, baseball finally put a steroids-testing policy into effect, the majority of the first group to be caught (my memory tells me it was 10 out of 11) were pitchers, who have occupied their fair share of the suspended list ever since. So you could argue that Bonds, Sosa, McGwire, Palmeiro and the rest were simply leveling the playing field.

Are the players who took steroids, particularly after baseball adopted rules against it, blameless? Of course not, but I wonder where in the game's lily-white, indentured-servitude, amphetamine-dispensing past, we can find total purity. Speaking just to the matter of drug-abuse for the moment, here's former major-league pitcher and USC pitching coach Tom House in ESPN The Magazine:

"Enhancements have been around forever. In the '70s, it was greenies. I took greenies. Guys were launching them with wine and alcohol. A pitcher on our team in Atlanta was called in by our manager halfway through a summer and was asked, 'Are you taking greenies?' The pitcher said, 'No, Skip, I haven't touched one for two months.' The manager said, 'You better start because you're going to get released.'"

But this is, as I say, a losing battle. Bonds, Clemens and Sosa are on the ballot for the first time this year and though they would make the Hall of Fame's Class of 2013 the most distinguished in recent memory, they will not be in it.

McGwire, who is on the ballot for the seventh time, was named on only 19.5 percent of those cast last year (75 percent is required for election the Hall), his lowest percentage yet. Palmeiro, now in his third year of eligibility, was named on just 12.6 percent of the ballots last year.

Recently, McGwire, who will be the Dodgers' hitting coach next season, said in a radio interview with Dan Patrick that he wouldn't vote for himself if he had a Hall of Fame ballot.

So I guess I'll have to do it for him--and for Bonds, Clemens, Sosa and Palmeiro, too. I will leave it to others to turn backs on an entire generation of ballplayers, one includes some of the greatest ever to play the game. They say this is necessary to protect the integrity and good name of baseball. I say it is foolish, shortsighted and ungrateful.

Now about Lance Armstrong...

Ron Rapoport covered the Dodgers and Angels for the Times in the 70s, and wrote a sports column for the Daily News in the 80s and 90s. He was also a sports columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times for 20 years.

Photo: Walter Iooss/Sports Illustrated

Posted by Ron Rapoport at 11:51 PM | Permalink

New York Magazine's fashion blog The Cut has a Thanksgiving gallery up billed as Twenty-two famous beauties stuffing their faces. Hidden in the series is this gorgeous shot of the original Tail o' the Pup at La Cienega and Beverly boulevards. Eddie Blake was forced to move in 1986 to make way for the Sofitel and landed on San Vicente, where the Pup remained until 2005. The photo is by Douglas Kirkland and Corbis. Sigourney Weaver at the time was between The Year of Living Dangerously and Ghostbusters, and a couple of years from introducing Ellen Ripley in Aliens.

The slide show also has images of a young Elizabeth Taylor eating a hamburger, Katherine Hepburn sharing chowder with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, plus Marilyn Monroe, Tina Turner, Heidi Klum, Twiggy and other faces.

Previously on LA Observed:
What about a Tail o' the Pup truck?
Art o' the Pup
The Pup is gone
Tail o' the Pup next to go

Posted by Editor at 2:15 PM | Permalink

A few years back I hunkered down in the FIDM library in downtown Los Angeles with a stack of American Vogues from the 1960's. My purpose was research for a piece I was writing on photographer Irving Penn, whose images often appeared in the magazine along with other star fashion photographers like Richard Avedon and David Bailey. I did get a good dose of Penn, but I was also struck by what a magical era that was for Vogue, whose editor at the time was Diana Vreeland. The magazine was larger in format and the photographs and layouts felt more experimental and dynamic than its current incarnation. Celebrities appeared in features and fashion layouts, but they blended with other content instead of being used as a device to promote the magazine, as they are today. There seemed to be an unlimited budget for travel when it came to fashion layouts. Models and photographers went all over the world to satisfy Mrs. Vreeland's obvious desire for fantasy and exoticism. It was also clear that she reveled in the 60's, making the most of the explosion in pop culture. She clearly admired film, music, and dance and regularly integrated them into her pages.

So of course I jumped at the chance recently to view the new documentary about Vreeland's life "Diana Vreeland: The Eye Has to Travel" at LACMA . The Museum's Costume Council held the screening as its first event of the year . The film was produced and co-directed by Lisa Immordino Vreeland, who is married to Vreeland's grandson Alexander.

Born in Paris and raised in New York, Diana Vreeland's journey from an "ugly duckling" childhood to the top of the heap of the fashion world is utterly compelling. Living in Manhattan in 1936, the wife and mother with no work experience was offered a job at Harper's Bazaar after Bazaar editor Carmel Snow spotted her in a nightclub and admired her style. She worked at Bazaar for 25 years, and after being passed over for the top editor spot, moved to Vogue as editor-in-chief in 1962. Vreeland's reign at Vogue lasted 10 years. As the 70's approached, the powers-that-be at Conde Nast became more and more disenchanted with Vreeland's editorial approach. Spending was over the top and they wanted to inject the magazine with more practicality, both in budget and editorial content. Vreeland, however, was to have a brilliant third act as special consultant to the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although she initially bumped up against some of the museum's curators because of her lack of academic credentials, it is because of her influence, originality, and bravado that the Met's costume exhibits are today some of their most popular and successful.

The documentary contains footage of Vreeland's interviews with Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley and Dick Cavett. There are on-camera interviews with photographers (Bailey, Richard Avedon), models (Penelope Tree, Marisa Berenson, Lauren Hutton, Veruschka, and China Machado), designers (Diane von Furstenberg, Calvin Klein, Oscar de la Renta) and family members. For me, the film's most important message was that Diana Vreeland invented the modern fashion editor. Before her, fashion magazines were run by and aimed at society ladies whose main concern was how to please their husbands. Vreeland introduced a global perspective; embracing the arts, individual personalities, and change. I can't deny that I was entertained by the eccentricity of Vreeland's personality and approach, but there was more than that. Immordino-Vreeland shows us that her legendary grandmother-in-law, although highly flawed , was a visionary who inspired, mentored, and influenced many -- and that is reason enough to learn more about her life by seeing this film.

"Diana Vreeland:The Eye Has To Travel" will be released in Los Angeles on Sept.21.

Posted by Judy Graeme at 9:23 PM | Permalink

Posted by Gary Leonard at 7:59 AM | Permalink

No one will ever mistake Vin Scully for a Ken doll.

I mean, can there be any greater polar opposites on the Superficiality Scale than Los Angeles' own poet laureate of the airwaves and the perpetually tawny male doll best known as Barbie's boy toy? And yet, there is one thing some Ken dolls have going for them that the Vin Scully bobbleheads - to be handed out to fans on August 30 at Dodger Stadium -- do not. That thing is a voice box.

Don't get me wrong. I can't wait to get my hands on a Vin Scully bobblehead. As most fans know, bobblehead likenesses can be hit or miss proposition. A Mike Scioscia one from earlier this year looks more like Ben Affleck than the former Dodger catcher (there could be worse things.) The Dodgers unveiled the Vin Scully Bobblehead to the public back in July, and it's a winner. The Hall of Fame broadcaster bears a striking resemblance to -- imagine! -- Vin Scully. In a nod to his penchant for preparation, he's perched behind a desk and a microphone with a binder of notes, which one could imagine containing obscure facts about visiting players you'll never hear elsewhere, like the fact that Rich Aurilia once worked for the Metropolitan Opera.

I know, calling Vin unique is like saying the sky is blue. So why not create a truly unique bobblehead - or just a Vin doll without the bobble — in which fans could push a button on his back to hear classic radio calls from his 63-year career? Today's Ken doll has a voice-activated speaker that will recite back, in Ken-speak, exactly what you instruct him to say. But before the modern era, the classic talking doll was string-activated, typically rotating between four or five different phrases. Since Vin is a classic, I nominate these five iconic phrases for his doll to utter, via button or string, with an explanation behind each one.

"Hi everybody, and a very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be."

Along with "It's time for Dodger baseball" and "Pull up a chair," this is one of the first salutations you hear when Vin goes on the air. In one simple sentence, he encapsulates the very spirit of Los Angeles - a melting pot bound by a singular love for the Blue Crew. It's as close to a signature phrase that he has, and it belongs in the talking Vin doll.

"Sandy into his windup, here's the pitch: Swung on and missed, a perfect game!"

Sandy Koufax's perfect game in 1965 is the golden-throat standard by which all Vin Scully calls are measured. Sandy was gunning for his fourth no-hitter during a late-season home game when the Cubs' Harvey Kuenn stepped into the batter's box. Vin's description of Koufax striking out Kuenn, complete with time stamps, reads like a suspense novel and still induces goosebumps 47 years later.

"She is goooone!... In a year that has been so improbable, the impossible has happened."

In Game 1 of the 1988 World Series, a gimpy-legged Kirk Gibson (who was honored with his own bobblehead this year, complete with fist-pump) hit a pinch-hit home run to win the game -- perhaps the most famous homer in postseason history. Vin's call of this magical moment was eloquently simple, but it was this follow-up statement, after he let the crowd noise soak in, that elevated this call to art.


"If you have a sombrero, throw it to the sky!"

Every artist needs a muse, and Vin found his in Mexican pitcher Fernando Valenzuela. I would argue that Vin's calls during Fernandomania in 1981 were the best of his career over the span of a season. Ironically, this particular call came during Fernando's final year with the Dodgers in 1990. It was El Toro's one and only no-hitter, and Vin's celebratory remark was a memorable one.

"Ladies and gentlemen, the Brooklyn Dodgers are the champions of the world!"

No talking Vin doll would be complete without this call from the Dodgers' days in Brooklyn. It came after "Dem Bums" won their first ever World Series in 1955. More importantly, this call reminds fans just how far back Vin's legacy with the Dodgers goes... in this case, to the Eisenhower administration.

Truth is, Vin's calls are like ice cream - they're all great, and everyone's got a favorite. So you're excused if you'd swap some of them out for "We go to Chicago!" Or "This was not the best Fernando game; it was his finest." Or even one of his various allusions to literature, like the way he calls swinging bunts "a humble thing, but thine own." Maybe those can be included in the second Talking Vin doll.

Anyone have Magic's email?

Paul Haddad has written a book on the Dodgers that features transcripts from Vin Scully radio and TV calls. It's called "High Fives, Pennant Drives, and Fernandomania: A Fan's History of the Los Angeles Dodgers' Glory Years, 1977-1981." (Santa Monica Press). He'll be signing copies of the book on August 30 at Dodger Stadium. He has audio versions of the calls at his website.

News: Vin Scully agrees to return for 64th season

Posted by Paul Haddad at 12:06 PM | Permalink

My Olympics almost ended Friday night. Cold turkey.

The cable went out at 7:50, 10 minutes before my nightly prime-time Olympics fix. "One moment please," read the message on the otherwise black screen. "This channel should be available shortly." Like the addict I am, my heart started racing, my breathing turned shallow, my skin went clammy.

There was no relief from Olympics withdrawal. Not even a digital stream--Time Warner Cable provides (or doesn't) my Internet as well as TV service.

Continue reading "The night I lost the Olympics" »

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 5:59 PM | Permalink

Black and white photos by Marissa Roth; portrait by Iris Schneider.

Common wisdom advises that life is a journey. For photojournalist Marissa Roth, life and art conspired, taking her on a worldwide odyssey that rambled over 28 years. The work she produced will be on exhibit at the Museum of Tolerance beginning August 16. "One Person Crying: Women and War" began for Roth when she was working on a book project in the Philippines. A colleague advised her that there would be a coup the next morning, just the day she was supposed to leave the country. At 3 a.m. she jumped on the back of his motorscooter and headed out, on assignment for the Los Angeles Times, to cover it. But she realized as the mayhem unfolded, "it wasn't my thing. I was more interested in the other side, what was happening in the homes while this was going on."

This became a recurring theme of interest in her work, eventually taking her to Cambodia and Vietnam, Kosovo, Bosnia Herzegovina, Pakistan, Hiroshima, Afghanistan, Northern Ireland, Novi Sad in Eastern Europe where her grandparents lost their lives in World War II, and the United States.

Women are the real collateral damage when wars are waged. Though they are not the fighters, their struggles are far more personal, as they are left behind to keep the home functioning, the children fed and clothed, the cities and villages alive. These women are the survivors who soldier on in war's aftermath. Roth traveled around the world, bearing witness as she let them tell their stories. "I can't explain it. I couldn't get away from it. It's like I was following my path and my passion. I just had to surrender to it." Her photographs, while steeped in the physical and emotional wreckage of war, show no guns, no blood, no combat.

I've known Marissa for decades. We met while I was working as a photographer at the Los Angeles Times and she was freelancing for the paper. She was always flying off somewhere to shoot something on her project and I always wondered how she was able to fund all that travel. Through a combination of some savings, some inheritance and a lot of hustling she was able to make intermittent trips. "I've probably spent close to $200,000 on the project. I could have given myself a masters and a doctorate! But I thought 'I just have to do this, no matter what it costs.' It's been a great lesson in trust, I suppose, trusting the unknown. Not letting fear be my copilot. I had to learn to just trust the process." And she never let go of her vision.

Now that the exhibit is close enough to be real, she has turned to Kickstarter to help raise $15,000 to pay for some of the costs of exhibiting the work here and elsewhere and give voice to women all over the world who have been affected by war.

Although she has published several books, Roth was unsuccessful in finding a publisher for this project. She changed her game plan and looked instead for an exhibition space. With the help of Howard Spector, a curator and mentor, she created a Powerpoint presentation for a lecture, and last October she showed it to Liebe Geft, director of the Museum of Tolerance. Geft committed to doing a show at the museum. But that commitment was for the exhibit space only.

"She basically said that a show like this would cost $50,000-60,000 to produce and an additional $40,000 for travel costs," Roth said, and those were costs which Roth would have to pay. "I wanted it to be beautiful. I knew it would be expensive but after all the work I'd done, I wasn't going to scrimp on prints, mats, frames." She forged ahead finishing the work. Her brother passed away and left her some money and that gave her the impetus and the means to make the final push.

With a recent trip to Vietnam, her travels came to a close. "I thought that once I found my grandparent's home and memorial in Novi Sad in 2009 that I was done." But she realized that she needed to go to Vietnam after talking with Spector, who was working to create a cohesive exhibit from all her years of work and images. "I was tired, but knew I needed to go."

"Vietnam was my coming of age war and I realized it was a huge influence on me. I didn't fully appreciate how it shaped me in terms of my desires as a peace activist, and to become a photojournalist. I still have vivid memories of sitting on my bed as a kid and looking at Life, Look and National Geographic. I was conscious of those pictures early on."

Often the trips would take a year of planning, so she could hit the ground running and maximize her time in the country. Once she returned from Vietnam, and with Geft's commitment to a show, she hired a designer and set about creating the exhibition. "Because I deal with so much history and address so many wars and conflicts, I felt I had to also give history lessons in the exhibit. We determined we would create freestanding text panels that give background to the wars I've covered."

Some private donors and foundations have come forward with grants. She is represented by Creative Visions Foundation, a non-profit foundation started by Kathy Eldon to fund visual projects and honor her son, photographer Dan Eldon, a Reuters photographer who was killed at 22 while on assignment in Somalia. To help pay for the remaining exhibition costs, Roth turned to Kickstarter.

Now that the traveling and photography are done, and the show is coming together, "I find myself weeping a lot," she said. "In a funny way, now I find myself feeling all the pain of these women. I don't have to keep myself cinched up in order to keep going." She has already moved on to another project, a book of images she made in Tibet. "I don't want to do too much more war stuff. I've hit my pain threshold," she says. "I'm not sure where the road will take me. I had to do this documentary project, but my roots are in art. The Tibet project is very different, almost like a photographic meditation," she said. She paused and took a breath. "I want the lights turned on in my life."

The exhibition at the Museum of Tolerance will run from August 16 to October 25. Visit Kickstarter to support this project.

Corrected post

Posted by Iris Schneider at 3:34 PM | Permalink

During the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympic Games in London on Friday night, there was a sequence called "Frankie and June Say, Thanks Tim." It was, as best I could tell, a montage of British rock and rap music combined with a look at the Digital Age. After the tribute to the Industrial Revolution, followed by a combination of Peter Pan, Voldemort, and the National Health Service, I was game for anything.

Frankie and June were fictional characters. "Tim" was Tim Berners-Lee, a fitting choice for the British to honor since Berners-Lee pretty much came up with the idea of the World Wide Web, which is making it possible for you to read my rambling thoughts right here. Berners-Lee was able to use the global connectivity of the pre-existing Internet combined with hypertext and other programming that has brought us the World Wide Web.

But to NBC's Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer, Berners-Lee could have just been as much of a fictional character as Frankie and June.

"If you haven't heard of him, we haven't either," [Vieira] said. "Google him," joked co-host Matt Lauer.

Continue reading "NBC discovers that the Web had an inventor, much to its surprise" »

Posted by Bob Timmermann at 8:35 PM | Permalink

Freelance writer Rebecca Fairley Raney worked at the San Bernardino Sun from 1990 to 1997. She later wrote an online column about the Internet for the New York Times, covered online campaigning for the paper and the website, and taught journalism at USC Annenberg.

I grew up in a place that was not safe, but it was not dangerous in the same way as San Bernardino. Where I grew up, the dangers were personal and palpable. You knew who to look out for. In San Bernardino, the dangers weren't personal, and they were all the more frightening because of it.

I worked at the Sun in downtown San Bernardino for seven years, and I'm intrigued by the news that the owners of the paper are moving the offices back to downtown.

It's hard to predict the effects of any action on a newspaper, but I can say this: When you go to work in a city that is dark and dangerous, you get a little jumpy. Reporters and editors can become increasingly vicious and crazy. Another thing: Your reporters will not be immune to the truth about the community. And you need to be prepared for the consequences.

I certainly wasn't.

I worked there during the economic crash of the 1990s. I covered the crash, with the lost jobs, the bad mortgages and the declining neighborhoods that came with it. The leaders of that city were not amused. Each year, I worked to be the first reporter to calculate just how high San Bernardino would be on the list of top 10 most dangerous cities in America.

It was worth running the numbers; we came in higher than Detroit! I covered the way the police department changed the way they counted certain crimes, and how the rankings improved.

In the 1970s, San Bernardino was named an All-America City by the National Civic League. It's a real honor, and it goes to places that are really nice. By the mid-1990s, the city had lost its big three employers: Norton Air Force Base, Kaiser Steel and the Santa Fe railroad. Nothing came to replace them.

It was horrifying, really, how quickly the city turned bad. In 10 years, San Bernardino took a dive that has taken 30 years for other cities to experience. For community boosters, it was hard to blame the executives of absentee corporations who shut down the plants. It was hard to blame the city leaders who had approved so much low-income housing in better times.

But it was very easy to blame the newspaper that brings you the endless news about children getting gunned down in the parks, country club neighborhoods losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in value, and the troubling details of the latest shady redevelopment deal.

During the housing boom of the '80s, bad mortgages were made, even in good neighborhoods. Lots of foreclosures followed. I wrote about the mortgages and the foreclosures and the code enforcement complaints, and at one point someone in the newspaper's real estate advertising department left a vaguely threatening message on my voice mail.

To me, that was a whole lot scarier than walking to my car at night.

But walking to the car was no walk in the park.

I remember the paper's security guard, white-haired and red-faced and pleasant. He was able to walk, but you could tell, on some evenings, that the walking really hurt him. Since speed was a component in safety on those streets, it seemed only fair to ask him to just stand outside the guard station and watch, rather than to pain himself by walking all that way.

Part of the problem, too, was my concern for the security guard's safety. In those days, I was 92 pounds and exhausted. (Don't hate me for it; I'm not that thin anymore.) I thought that if something bad happened, I might be able to protect him. But I wasn't sure.

The newspaper was right in the center of town, in walking distance to City Hall, the police station and the county courthouse. The sidewalks in the morning were covered with trash and puke and other stuff. It always smelled like smog and beer. In the early days, when I went out to the sidewalk to smoke, the people on the street would ask for a cigarette. As the economy got worse, they would ask for the shorts off yours.

I wasn't really scared there, but I stayed hyper-alert.

There's perhaps something inherently dangerous about thinking out loud about why you've been safe on the street. In these things, it pays to be superstitious.

The poison on the outside of the building had seeped into the inside, and the duress of being under siege at work brought out the worst in almost everyone.

Outside the building, I had a sense of certainty that no matter what was around the corner, I was probably the angriest person on the block. And if that was true, then I was probably pretty safe.

It's hard for me to assess whether the Sun changed when its new owners moved it to a business park in the foothills north of town. It's hard to make a fair evaluation of a newspaper that was once the center of my life. It's a different paper now, with different owners and different employees. I don't know if, in the new building, people jump whenever someone walks up behind them. But when we worked downtown, we certainly did.

I would venture that only the copy editors seemed to have been spared from the signs of PTSD.

By virtue of working downtown, and hearing the gunfire, and not having to go very far to collect the facts on some of the most horrible things any of us would ever see, we were fully immersed in the dark pool of a dangerous city. If your reporters have only dipped their toes into that pool, and have only gone into the neighborhoods after the police were already there, then they will change when they move downtown. They will become hyper-alert. They will have a harder time buying the idea that the crime isn't all that bad because the numbers weren't tallied right.

They might start doing work that really pisses off the authorities. The editors might have to take more of those difficult phone calls.

One of the great achievements of my career was that I left the Sun of my own volition, and the executive editor at the time was kind enough to tell me that he wanted me to stay.

But shortly before that day came, I was treated to a quintessential San Bernardino experience. Just about everyone who worked there in those days has this kind of story; this one is my favorite.

It was well after 11 o'clock, and there were only me and a couple of copy editors left in the newsroom. At the time, the police desk was in front of the one big window in the newsroom that looked out over D Street.

I was getting ready to leave. I glanced out the window and saw some guys in the parking lot with baseball bats. They were hovering over one of the cars.

"Rick?" I said to one of the copy editors. "What kind of car do you drive?"

He looked up, and he put it together. "No! Not my car!"

He jumped up and ran out the door. The other copy editor ran out too.

"Uh, you guys probably don't want to go out there," I said, as I was calling 911. "Uh, those guys have clubs. They probably have guns."

The copy editors, wan and pale as they were, ran out after the bad guys. Copy editors!

I didn't go out there. I knew the law of the jungle was not on my side.

So I watched as the two guys, just up from their paginators, chased down armed men in the parking lot.

Much to my surprise, they scared them off.

And I am pleased to report that though the car was badly damaged, the copy editors came out fine.

Posted by Rebecca Fairley Raney at 1:40 AM | Permalink

Joel Bellman, formerly an award-winning radio reporter and editorial writer for the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, is a longtime journalism instructor for UCLA Extension and the communications deputy for county Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky. He submitted this piece as an individual.

Today, along with other dads, I'm celebrating Father's Day with my two sons. We are toasting the memory of my father, Samuel, who passed away almost three years ago, and whose politics, literary passions, and unbridled enthusiasm for popular culture - high and low - helped shape me.

And falling on June 17, this Father's Day we are also toasting someone else, one of those unsung heroes whose quiet competence in a modest job happened to change the course of modern history: Frank Wills, the overnight security guard at the Watergate Hotel who 40 years ago today spotted that persistent piece of Scotch tape on an office door. That was only the first piece of tape that eventually took down the administration of President Richard M. Nixon and sent many of his top aides to federal prison.

For journalists, anniversaries are always a handy excuse to revisit the past for another lazy meander down memory lane. Yet it's virtually impossible to convey to my sons' generation how momentous the Watergate scandal really was. It has redefined American politics for more than a generation, disrupting the natural presidential succession and redirecting the course of domestic and foreign policy as profoundly as the asteroid that smashed into the Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago extinguished most life on earth. Politically speaking, Watergate was our catastrophic extinction event: it shattered trust in elected officials, destroyed confidence in government, and deeply undermined the fundamental legitimacy of a public sector empowered to levy taxes and undertake projects or activities on behalf of, or deliver vital services to, the general public.

Thanks to Richard Nixon's criminal abuse of his office and attempted usurpation of constitutional authority, Watergate spawned a corrosive and pervasive cynicism that still infects today's body politic like a lethal virus.

The tax revolt? Term limits? Citizen reapportionment commissions? The never-ending cycle of campaign and election "reform"? Government by initiative? Like them or not - and I don't - I would argue that it all started with Watergate. That scandal is surely the ultimate aversion therapy for anybody with naive and idealistic notions of politics as a noble career where principled leaders aspire to serve their country with honesty and dedication.

But even those dark and troubled times had their popular heroes, and all the self-serving myth-makers of the journalism world cannot diminish the indispensable role played by Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein and later by many others, and the superlative reporting achievements that succeeded in calling the Nixon administration to account for its misdeeds. I'm not exaggerating when I say that American democracy, the rule of law, and our constitutional freedoms hung in the balance - and were ultimately rescued by the American press and the pressure they brought to bear on other institutions such as Congress and the courts which ultimately checked the power of a runaway executive branch.

Watergate was not only one of the most dramatic, compelling and memorable political tutorials any generation could possibly experience: it was also the high-water mark for American journalism.

In many respects, it's been an accelerating downhill skid ever since. Woodward and Bernstein embarked on the Watergate saga as a pair of young and inexperienced metro reporters, and emerged two years later as bona fide superstars idolized by their colleagues and canonized - even deified - by Hollywood. If not for them, investigative journalism as we know it today would not exist.

But if it didn't, in some ways we might be a lot better informed about what's going on in our communities, and throughout the world.

Call it the Woodstein paradox. If a couple of brave reporters and their courageous news organization can uncover a monstrous criminal conspiracy in our political system and successfully drive the rascals out of the highest elective office in the land, rescuing democracy and proving The System works, then why - 40 years later - is The System more paralyzed, polarized, sclerotic and delegitimized by the electorate across the ideological spectrum?

Rather than restoring public confidence, the aftermath of the Watergate scandal has seen it demolished. After Woodstein, what fresh-faced journalistic aspirant wouldn't want to become an investigative reporter? All you needed was enough attitude, aggressiveness, and a simple credo: "follow the money."

Reality is a little more nuanced than a pop-culture cartoon. When I transitioned into politics more than 20 years ago, after nearly a decade in print and broadcast journalism, I thought I was a smart and savvy guy.

I got my comeuppance in a hurry.

Not a single issue was what it initially seemed - everything had layers of policy implications, every player part of a vast web of obscure but often defining relationships, every move had reverberating consequences, every stray remark threatened new peril should it be misquoted or misconstrued. Even truthful comments accurately reported afforded no protection: as Michael Kinsley cracked, in politics a gaffe is when somebody accidentally tells the truth.

True heroes and villains are rare, despite the play-acting and atmospherics. Motives are murky, policy outcomes unclear. Much is not what it seems, not because of deception, but because of complexity: politics is, after all, nothing more than individual human behavior, the good, the bad and the ugly, played out on a vastly larger stage with a cast of thousands.

To really understand and explain it, reporters should be embedded in their beats, where they can cultivate sources, develop relationships, learn the routines, know what to look for and who to watch out for. They need to attend all those boring meetings and see firsthand what goes on, gain the confidence of the bureaucrats who control access and information, work the political staffs.

Too often, investigative project teams are little more than a strike force, swooping in to attack a specific and isolated issue, and then, like The Lone Ranger - "Come, Tonto, our work is finished here" - gallop off into the sunset, never to be seen again. It can be exciting, glamorous, award-winning, and lucrative - and ultimately entirely pointless and inconsequential. It's been said that when you're a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. And when you're an "investigative reporter," everything looks like a criminal conspiracy.

Worst of all, as one news organization after another guts its basic reporting staff and cuts back or eliminates entirely beats and bureaus, they continue to tout their high-profile, advertiser and web-view driven "investigative" units. Even as news outlets are patronizing their audiences for being such sophisticated insiders, the poor chumps are growing more ignorant about and irrelevant to a political process that is leaving them behind.

I don't deny there are occasionally genuine conspiracies, and the press can and does play a salutary role in helping to expose them. Iran-Contra, Enron, the Madoff investment scam, the BCCI money-laundering scheme, and closer to home, the City of Bell and criminal mismanagement of the LA Memorial Coliseum. In none of these, however, did the press play the leading role - very often they were chasing work done by legislative or prosecutorial investigators, and reporting the leaked findings later.

Watergate was in many ways truly sui generis - one of a kind. Though we now know that Woodstein's Deep Throat source was the #2 guy in the FBI, pointing them in the right direction, they deserve full bragging rights for the fearless enterprise reporting they did.
But 40 years after Watergate - the epic scandal that kindled my interest in politics and fired my determination to become a journalist - I have gained much more respect for the mostly honest and dedicated people working in government, the vast majority of whom are not crooks, and increasingly soured on a sensation-seeking press corps and the shallow, inattentive readers, viewers and listeners it too often serves so badly.

What would my father say to all this? I don't know - but sometimes, Dad, I almost think that maybe it's better you're not around to see it.

Posted by Joel Bellman at 11:54 PM | Permalink

Brian Kennedy, a professor English at Pasadena City College, covers the NHL at night. We think he's the only Ph.D. in the press box at Staples Center. His latest book is "My Country is Hockey: How Hockey Explains Canadian Culture, History, Politics, Heroes, French-English Rivalry and Who We Are As Canadians."

You may not realize it, but if you go to a major hospital in the US for tests, the results of your x-ray or MRI might be read by a doctor as far away as India, who is on contract to provide a preliminary diagnosis based on the evidence sent to her or him online. If you get your taxes done by a large commercial accounting or tax prep firm, what you see in the front office is not representative, necessarily, of where the work is done.

The data could very well be crunched half a world away, and the results shown to you electronically for an e-signature and subsequent submission to the IRS. So says Thomas L. Friedman in his book, "The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century," originally published in 2005 and updated a couple of times since. Why is this condition possible? By the intersection of three things: an educated and capable foreign workforce, the "need" (questionable to some) to perform work as cheaply as possible, and the ability to move data around the world quickly and reliably via fiber optics over the Internet.

The upshot of all of this is that jobs done locally prior to the past decade or so may now be exported, with the end user of the product seeing no difference in quality or delivery time.

Friedman spends considerable time discussing how the Internet has decentralized the power of production, with one phenomenon of particular concern: the creation and distribution of news and information. Once held by a few large entities (newspapers, broadcasters), this function is now spread to the masses, with anyone who owns a relatively inexpensive computer and has access to the Internet being able to be his or her own "channel," distributing information and, as a logical outcome, creating the news.

The result is what you see around you: the financial failure of daily newspapers and the increasing reliance on the net for information, to the point where what is a "trusted source for news," to use the old tagline, has been entirely redefined.

Obviously, LA Observed is one such new-style source. But if LA Observed is news outsourced, how close to the action does the writer have to be to write the story?

To marry the terms I began with to the area that I work when you read me here (hockey coverage from the point of view of the "PhD in the Press Box,") leads to a key question:
Could someone in India with sufficient knowledge of hockey cover the Stanley Cup Final effectively? (That is, if she or he wasn't busy reading your MRI or doing your taxes.)

I ask this because at the moment, I'm in the countryside across the Swiss-French border from Geneva. I've been abroad since February, working. And while I covered the Kings for most of the season for a national online sports outlet, I didn't expect the team to get to the very brink of winning the Stanley Cup. So I was caught out when they got to the point they've arrived at, and couldn't get home. Still, my editor had arranged press credentials for me with the NHL. What to do?

One choice was just to leave readers with no coverage. Not an option, and there was nobody to fill in. So it was decided that I would cover the games from afar, without making representation that I was closer than I am. For someone used to creating stories based on firsthand knowledge of events, this felt at first like an odd arrangement. However, I soon realized that the kinds of stories I typically write could have traction from a distance.

Being an academic and having established a style which features historical and literary references and perspectives, and because my mandate is not to write "gamers" but analysis, I found that my stories felt about the same to me as they would were I in LA. In some cases, I could even imagine myself doing the very same pieces sitting in my Pasadena office or at Staples Center rather than half a world away (where the cheese is amazing!) Then, too, I had lots of firsthand information at my disposal, largely because the technology which Friedman discusses. But there were also deficits.

I had to rely on NHL transcripts for my interview material. I couldn't ask players the questions I might have had I been at the arena. And yet even this lack is tempered by what I have learned about covering a series as big as the NHL Final.

Going all the way to the Stanley Cup with the Anaheim Ducks in 2007, I know that there are so many reporters around during the Finals that it's almost impossible for one guy to grab a player and talk to him exclusively. Someone's always listening. Often, nowadays, that person is recording, making video, or tweeting. In addition, players, always careful about what they say, are even more guarded when the stakes get high. Hence, the chances of getting a scoop or an inflammatory quote at this time in a season are slim.

So what makes what the reporter does, whether in print or online, any different from what anyone with a computer and the internet could do from his or her home in Bangor, Maine or Bangalore?

The answer lies in the double bind of technology. It gives the appearance of knowing, and it undeniably spreads a kind of knowledge. Yet machines do not create narrative, people do. Further to that, however, is the sense I've gotten while writing about these games from far away: that narrative is best created on the spot.

With the proliferation of technology and the access given by pro sports teams to players, contemporary fans have essentially the same set of data available to them that reporters have to them. Postgame comments are often broadcast live or close to live via team websites or those of credentialed media members who have captured video.

Thus it may be that technology fools us into thinking that being present isn't crucial and that access to raw data in the form of video of interviews and press conferences as well as statistics about the game is enough, allowing fans to create their own stories out of the data available. It might seem that there is no longer any need for the presence of a filter in the form of a writer. But that's an illusion, because sifting data, creating stories where none exist, figuring out what things mean, is still a skill learned and practiced at cost of time and energy, and this is still best done firsthand.

If I were in LA, I'd be writing analysis pieces. My raw materials would be watching the games, listening to player interviews, coaches' press conferences, and so forth. All of that is available to me from a distance. My job, then, would be what it is now: to digest the
information and present it in a way that readers hadn't thought of themselves, and this might be the last thing left to a journalist in the internet age. This, further, is something no amount of "tweets" will do, no matter how seduced both journalists and fans are by that technology in the moment we live.

Yet as I write this week, I find that it's not enough to rely on what I can learn via the Internet, even with the inside information that having NHL Media access provides. My experiences in covering the team for most of the regular season are essential to draw upon. Things players have said to me, ways I have gotten to understand them, and insights gained from observing up close all came back to give me perspective on what they were saying now.

But I also sense that feeling the energy of a team winning or the sadness of a team losing, dealing with the emotions of the players, no matter how carefully masked, must happen face-to-face in order for the most powerful stories to be created, because sports, like business or education or any human endeavor, is about people doing what people do, and how they react afterwards.

The day the games are played by machines, machines will be able to provide total coverage of the events which transpire. But as long as players are human, prone to highs of joy and angry lows which see them smashing sticks over crossbars or kicking over garbage cans, the only way to give fans a sense of why things happened as they did is to see it for yourself.

Your McDonald's drive-through order may be as accurately taken from several states away as from several feet distant, to cite just one final example from "The World Is Flat," but that's because production of fast food is not essentially an emotional endeavor. Trying to win the greatest trophy in the history of sports is, which is why, to cite an old ad, there's no substitute for being there.

Posted by Brian Kennedy at 12:30 PM | Permalink

Although the term paparazzi was first coined in Italy, it has reached its zenith — or its nadir — on this side of the Atlantic, aided by the internet, the money to be made and the ease of picture-taking technology and dissemination. It's debatable which came first, the insatiable desire to document the famous or the need for the masses to see endless images of celebrities caught acting like normal people. Added to the mix is another layer, as celebrities themselves post their whereabouts and thoughts on their Twitter accounts, courting the popularity that we always knew they craved despite their protests.

Some of these issues of celebrity were addressed at the Getty Wednesday night at "Are We All Paparazzi Now?," a discussion in conjunction with an exhibit called "Portraits of Renown," celebrity portraits dating back to the 1800s and including Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Georgia O'Keefe, Edgar Allan Poe, Josephine Baker, Andy Warhol and Anderson Cooper as an infant, photographed by Diane Arbus. The show hangs, not accidentally, adjacent to an expansive show of the work of Herb Ritts, whose sun-drenched and beautifully composed images of people like Madonna and Richard Gere had almost as much to do with their ascension in the public eye as did their talent.

Since directing "Teenage Paparazzo," a thought-provoking 2010 documentary about a 13-year-old Los Angeles boy who threw himself into the pursuit of the celebrity image, Adrian Grenier has taken on the role of educator. The star of "Entourage," usually the object of the camera's lens himself, screens his film and speaks to teens and adults about the perils and paradoxes of celebrity in American culture. He often uses the term "hall of mirrors" to describe the state of society today. It seems apt, as I often wonder if people have forsaken actually living their lives for the shared experience of documenting their lives, pausing to photograph the meal that's just arrived at their table, the painting they are looking at in the museum or the shoes they are trying on. Now that we know celebrities are just like us, proven by the endless flow of images of them shopping, pushing strollers, sipping lattes in their sweats or heading to or from the airport, we've come to the point where we've deemed our own lives just as worthy of exposure.

The discussion, taking place at a major museum, begs the question: the portraits that grace the walls of the Getty seem several cuts above the images that we are bombarded with daily. Yes, the paparazzi quench the desire for our society's need to know everything about those we have put on the public pedestal. But is there anything about these images that can be called art? Squiers noted the difference between making pictures and taking pictures. "Great photographers make pictures," she said.

Today's paparazzi certainly give us images that provide a glimpse into our society and what it values at this moment in time. One quizzical audience member referred to them as "bullshit." Galo Ramirez, the lone paparazzo on the panel, responded, "If it's bullshit they want, it's bullshit I will give them." At the same time, he acknowledged the lucrative market for his work, refusing to put an amount on what an image could bring him but saying that whatever he is paid makes it well worth his while to wait at someone's home for hours. He is hoping to snag the hottest shot on the market in the next "news" cycle: Angelina Jolie in her wedding gown.

The panelists at the event, which was co-sponsored by Zocalo Public Square, included Grenier, Carol Squiers of the International Center for Photography, Carolyn Davis (a photo editor at Us Weekly) and Ramirez, who famously crashed his car into one driven by Lindsay Lohan as they both made U-turns several months ago. He recently got pictures of the coroner's van taking Whitney Houston's body from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Carla Hall, an editorial writer at the Los Angeles Times, moderated the panel.

Grenier has taken the issue of celebrity and run with it, having the self-awareness and smarts to see its many layers. He acknowledges that pictures tell a story and there is nothing inherently wrong with storytelling. "But we have to leave the celebrity experience and have human experiences with each other," he said. "I don't want to tell anyone how to live. I just want people to see as many perpectives as possible."

Carla Hall, Carol Squiers, Adrian Grenier, Carolyn Davis and Galo Ramirez.

Both photos: Iris Schneider

Posted by Iris Schneider at 1:50 PM | Permalink

My mother once said she thought a clear sign of intelligence was adaptability.

I must be dumber than dirt.

Even if I'm able, I'm definitely unwilling to adapt to the new English language some professional communicators now use. You know, the one in which modifiers dangle unmoored from their objects, homonyms suffice if they can't think of the words they really want and apostrophes wander around like Israelites in the desert?

Continue reading "No excuse for language abuse" »

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 5:44 PM | Permalink

Thursday, November 17, 2011

• Los Angeles Press Club honors Hugh Hefner at its Fourth Annual National Entertainment Journalism Awards dinner at the Millennium Biltmore Hotel
• Victoria Patterson speaks at Gustavo's [ Arellano] Awesome Lecture Series at Fullerton Library about her new novel, This Vacant Paradise. 6:30 PM
• Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra hosts "Austria a la Carte" at the Austrian Consul's residence in Brentwood.
• Author Richard Polsky converses with Shepard Fairey about Polsky's book, The Art Prophets: The Artists, Dealers, and Tastemakers Who Shook the Art World, at Book Soup. 7 PM

• The Spa Less Traveled: Discovering Ethnic Los Angeles, One Spa At a Time editors read their book at Vroman's. Oh, and happy 5th birthday to Prospect Park Media. 7 PM
• Pasadena Children's Guild hosts its 44th Annual Snow Ball Preview Party and Auction at the Castle Green in Pasadena. 6:00 PM. Event continues with a brunch and holiday boutique at the same location on Saturday.
• Filmmaker Wim Wenders discusses and signs Places, Strange and Quiet at Book Soup at 4 PM.
• Randall Robinson discusses his novel, Makeda, at Eso Won Books at 7 PM.
• Soil Desire People Dance performance starts at The Velaslavasay Panorama. Continues to Saturday. 8 PM

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- November 17, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 7:26 AM | Permalink

Journalists are an arrogant lot.

Not that that's a bad thing. See, sometimes people need to be told what they need to know. A fair, functioning society depends on its members having the information they need to make smart choices and hold powerbrokers accountable. A healthy culture cannot thrive on a media diet of the Kardashians, Tebowing and the McRib.

Some journalists are too arrogant, but they're not the reason newspapers are dying. The reason, at least one really big reason, is that not enough newspapers are owned by locals of the market they serve. The reason is remote corporate masters who place profits so far above public service that the people in the executive suites think good journalism is giving people what they want. What about what they need?

In light of this week's announcement, I worry about my friends who still work at my former place of employment. The editor of the Tribune-owned Los Angeles Times warned that as many as 20 more editorial staffers will be cut loose early next year from the newspaper with the fifth-largest circulation in the U.S.

I worry about readers who still depend on careful reports framed in useful context, readers who want to be informed citizens who exercise their franchise, readers who care less about "trending" than about "news."

Today, the L.A. Times published a report on the op-ed page headlined "Didn't anyone edit this?" Its point was to assure readers that although errors will always find their way into the paper -- hey it is a deadline business -- every story is edited. But I worry that a paper capable of posting big circulation numbers might forget about readers who also expect it to retain a staff big enough to be able to pay attention.

Los Angeles Times Nov. 5, 2011 page A8
Employer confirms settlement in '99 Case
... Cain spoke to a Washington convention of conservative activists, giving no indication that he was distressed by the allegations.
So far, there has been no indication the allegations have harmed his campaign, which says donations have risen this week. ...

Los Angeles Times Nov. 5, 2011, page A9
Cain links latest controversy to race
But now that his campaign is floundering due to the emergence of sexual harassment allegations made when he ran the National Restaurant Assn. in the 1990s, Cain has advanced the idea...

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 4:43 PM | Permalink

Friday, November 4, 2011

• Dick Howard and Martín Plot discuss "Democracy in America" as part of the new West Hollywood Lecture Series curated in partnership with CalArts at the West Hollywood Library, City Council Chambers, starts at 7 PM
• "Antiquity in the Twentieth Century: Modern Art and the Classical Vision" symposium starts at the Getty Villa and continues to Saturday. 10:30-5 PM
• Los Angeles Transportation Club hosts its 88th Annual Installation Dinner at the Hyatt Regency Long Beach.
• Lupus LA hosts its Ninth Annual Hollywood Bag Ladies Luncheon at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel.
• La Luz de Jesus Gallery 25th Anniversary Celebration Part 11 with Mark Mothersbaugh, Mark Ryden, and many, many others. 8 PM
• Designer Alber Elbaz visits Lavin Store in Beverly Hills tonight.
• Night & the City: LA Noir in Poetry, Fiction, & Film events at Beyond Baroque: Raymond Chandler and his Los Angeles Legacy at 7:30 PM and A Night with James Ellroy, live and in person, at 9:30 PM. Venice

• SNL's Molly Shannon signs new book, Tilly the Trickster, at Barnes & Noble at the Grove. 1 PM
• Los Angeles Police Foundation hosts its True Blue Gala at L.A. Live.
• American Indian Arts Market at Autry National Center 10 AM -5 PM.
• Friends of the Los Angeles River benefit hosted by the LA Weekly at its LA 101 Music Festival at the Gibson Ampitheatre, Universal City.
• Leslie Klinger discusses Before Dracula: History of Vampire Literature at Brentwood Branch Library. 2PM
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art honors John Baldessari and Clint Eastwood at its inaugural Art and Film Gala.
• Seth Rogen, Adam Arkin and others host Exceptional Children's Foundation's Fourth Annual Art Sale Fundraiser at Downtown Art Center Gallery. Los Angeles. 6 PM

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- November 4, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 2:31 PM | Permalink

Friday, October 28, 2011

• Young Literati 4th Annual Toastbenefit for the Los Angeles Public Library hosted by Shepard Fairey and featuring the talents of Russell Brand, Demetri Martin, Henry Rollins at Richard J. Riordan Central Library, 630 W. Fifth Street, Los Angeles, CA 90071. 8 PM
• Zombie Prom starts at 9 PM in the historic Linda Vista Hospital , formerly Sante Fe Railroad Hospital, 610 S. St Louis St, Downtown, continues Sunday.
• Peace Over Violence honors Los Angeles Police Chief at its 40th Annual Humanitarian Awards at the Beverly Hills Hotel. 6 PM.
• Urban Land Institute hosts Night at the Square on 10/27 from 6-8 PM
• Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Los Angeles throw the The Big Bash! fundraiser at the Beverly Hilton Hotel.
• Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) presents "BELGIUM à la carte" at the Hancock Park residence of the Consul General of Belgium 7PM

• ¡Vivan Los Muertos! at The Autry in Griffith Park, 4700 Western Heritage Way, Los Angeles, CA 90027-1462. 3-9 PM
• Janet Fitch reads at the Hedgebrook LA Alumn Garden Party at the historic Stendahl Galleries in Hollywood Outpost Estates, benefiting Hedgebrook Women's Writer Colony in the Puget Sound.
• First annual Automotive Authors Book Signing featuring Matt Stone, Steve Lehto, & Phil Noyes at Petersen Museum, 6060 Wilshire Blvd, Miracle Mile. 2-5 PM
• Night & the City Lit Bar Crawl with PENUSA. 7 PM h/t Rina Rubinstein's Culture Alert newsletter: CultureAlert@hotmail.com
• Cedars-Sinai Medical Center hosts the Women's Guild Annual Gala at the Kodak Theatre.
• Girl Scouts of Greater Los Angeles hosts Girltopia: The World of Girl Live at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Run for cover from the Girlzillas running amok Downtown at the sold out event.

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- October 28, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 6:37 PM | Permalink

Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB) devotes a week to the work of Joan Didion, who has just released another memoir, called Blue Nights. Meghan Daum, Susan Straight, Amy Wilentz, Richard Rayner, Amy Ephron, and today, Matthew Specktor, who grew up around the corner when Didion lived in Brentwood, contribute essays contemplating the author and her place in the L.A. literary landscape.

The upstart literary review now comes in e-book format via Kindle. And on Thursday, November 3, Live Talks Los Angeles hosts a benefit for the LARB in the form of a conversation between the New Yorker's Adam Gopnik and filmmaker Ed Zwick.

Can't get enough of La Didion? Catch "An Evening with Joan Didion" at Vibiana on Nov. 16 through the ALOUD lectures program.

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 1:19 PM | Permalink

Friday, October 14, 2011

• Congresswoman Karen Bass discusses Obama's Job Package at the Urban Issues Breakfast Forum of Greater Los Angeles in the North Campus,Crystal Ballroom of the West Angeles Church of God In Christ, 3045 Crenshaw Blvd., Los Angeles, CA. 7:30 AM
• William Shatner signs his release of his new space-themed concept album, "Seeking Major Tom." at Amoeba Music in Hollywood. 7 PM
• American Cinematheque honors Robert Downey, Jr. at its 25th Annual Awards at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Starts at 6:30 PM
• ArtNight starts in Pasadena at 6 PM

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- October 14, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 2:24 PM | Permalink

After viewing the traveling show "The Elizabeth Taylor Collection" at MOCA PDC this morning, it isn't hard to understand why Andy Warhol once said, "It would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as a great big ring on Liz Taylor's finger."

Taylor, who died last March at the age of 79, spent a lifetime amassing her legendary collection of fabulous jewels, fine art, and haute couture. The show, which represents just highlights of the collection that will be auctioned by Christie's this winter, is a window into Taylor's dazzling life. After being on display in Moscow and London, the exhibit will run in Los Angeles for four days beginning Oct 13 then move on to Dubai, Geneva, Paris, Hong Kong, and New York.

Sapphire & diamond sautoir by Bvlgari.

The jewelry is considered one of the greatest private collections ever assembled. There are stories behind numerous pieces. Many were gifts from the men in Taylor's life. Viewers can drool over gems from husband numbers 5 & 6, Richard Burton — including the 33-carat "Elizabeth Taylor Diamond" ring; "La Peregrina," a ruby and diamond necklace incorporating a 16th century pearl once owned by King Phillip 2 of Spain; and the "Taj Majal Diamond," a 40th birthday present.

From husband number 3, Mike Todd, there is the "Mike Todd Diamond Tiara;" given to Taylor in 1957 and the "Cartier Ruby Suite" which Todd gave her while she was swimming in their pool in St. Jean Cap Ferrat. One of the most unique pieces is the necklace fashioned from ivory theater tokens once owned by Hollywood costume designer Edith Head. This was Head's signature necklace and Taylor admired it throughout the years of their close friendship. Head left it to Taylor in her will.

Warhol's 1963 portrait of Taylor is there, representing just a small part of Taylor's art collection. Also on display is a Versace beaded evening jacket from the 1990s, arrayed with portraits of Taylor in her most famous roles, a Chanel ballgown, and a Tiziani black velvet evening cape from the late 1960s which Taylor wore to Princess Grace's 40th birthday ball.

It's not surprising that tickets sold out quickly. Exhibit organizers announced this morning that viewing hours will be extended to include Friday and Saturday evenings from 8 p.m. to midnight on Oct. 14 and 15. Tickets cost $50.00 and will go on sale tomorrow morning at www.christies.com/elizabethtaylor. A portion of the profits will be donated to The Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation.

Those lucky lucky enough to score tickets most likely won't be disappointed. Fans will get a close look at many of Taylor's most treasured posessions. Collectors will no doubt contemplate making arrangements to attend the auctions in New York and London. Taylor herself would be pleased. She always planned to put her jewelry up for auction with the hope that the next owners would "give them a really good home."

"The Collection of Elizabeth Taylor" @MOCA Pacific Design Center
Oct. 13-16, 2011

Photos by Sean Roderick except sautoir, which was provided by MOCA.

Posted by Judy Graeme at 5:25 PM | Permalink

For the longest time God has been the undisputed boss on Mt. Olympus. All-knowing, all-powerful, ubiquitous. But now along comes a bunch of upstarts, the Trinity of Google, Apple and Facebook, seeking to unseat the "maker of all that is, seen and unseen." The latest warning sign that God should be looking in his rear-view mirror was an article over the weekend in the LA Times. It told us - as if we had to be reminded again - that Google, Apple and Facebook have been collecting huge amounts of data on us. This god-like trio knows where we are, always; who our friends are; and, perhaps most importantly, what our buying habits are. In short, we are earthly playthings in the hands of Google et alia whose data-knowledge of us is used to place clever ads in our cyber-universe, incessantly prodding us to buy politicians, causes, gadgets, whatever.

After reading the Times article, I felt like Harry Caul, the Gene Hackman character in the 1974 psychological thriller The Conversation, who ends the movie in a losing fight against insidious forces taking control of his life. Hackman tears apart his house (while mournfully playing a saxophone) to find and destroy the electronic eavesdropping devices that are the tools of his persecutors. The equivalent now would be for me to go-off-the-grid. Renounce all dealings with the internet. Smash my computer, my cellphone. Deny Google, Apple and Facebook a portal to my brain, my pocketbook. But forget it.Too radical.

Still, I did want to test the Times' thesis that I was being inundated with subtle, manipulative ads facilitated by Google, Apple and Facebook and that these ads were compromising my very sovereignty - over myself.

It was hard to believe. I have no memory for ads. How could I be manipulated if I'm so out of it? But wait, I thought, as I reviewed my Facebook page with new suspicion and curiosity. Yes, there are ads on my page! Wow! I looked at them with child-like wonder - seeing them for the first time. Facebook- perhaps even Mark Zuckerberg himself - wants me to install solar panels on my roof. To go on a cruise. To own a BMW. Surely one of these Facebook ads had slyly imprinted its message on my brain. But no, I had no solar panels. No cruise. No BMW. Was it possible I had never clicked on one of these ads - just once? Was I some unconscious, pagan brute?

Then, I remembered something. Yes. I had clicked on a Facebook ad - once. It featured a little photo of a woman; the caption said "I am a Mormon." It also said she was a TV reporter. This woman appeared day-after-day on my FB. Finally, one day I rewarded her persistence by clicking on her ad - perhaps hoping to find out about a time-share condo deal in Provo, Utah. Whatever. I have no recollection after that - other than a vague indifference to whatever this Mormon TV reporter was up to. What I do recall is that she was part of a nationwide "I'm a Mormon" ad campaign (that is still rolling out in some venues) designed to convince us that Mormons are not wierdos. They're just like us. That is to say, they're wierdos too.

Anyway, this morning, as I was writing this blog, it dawned on me that pitching a Mormon TV reporter at me, on my FB-page, was an excellent example of how the data-miners at FB had probably teamed up with the Church of the Latter Day Saints (i.e. the Mormon church) to craft an advertising pitch custom-made just for me. After all, until a few weeks ago, I too was a TV reporter. Hmm. This data-mining thing was beginning to look real. But is it sophisticated?

I dug deeper. On the Mormon church website are hundreds, possibly thousands, of Mormons offering to befriend us non-Mormons, to be our soul-mates - and explain their religion. This pool of willing Mormons is search-able; plug in a state, a religion, a keyword (like insurance salesman, teacher or golfer) and you can find your perfectly-matched Mormon. I typed in the keyword "reporter" to see if there colleagues of mine in Mormon-land who wanted to have a heart-to-heart.

Then I had a revelation about the Big Fear - that we are the targets of diabolically crafty data-mining, mind-controllers. It is way over-blown. If, in fact, the data-miners were so smart, they should've picked Rex, another TV reporter- Mormon, to be my Facebook soul-mate. Not that immemorable other woman they kept flashing at me. I found Rex while scrolling through the dozen or so Mormons listed as TV reporter-types on the church's website. Here's what she had to say:

Okay. Not much there to tickle my fancy. But looking at Rex's photo I knew Facebook and Google and Apple and all their data-sharing companions, with all their computers, their interlocking digital observation posts, their logarithmic patterns, had missed a key clue to my persona!

It should have been child's play for these smartie-pants to put Rex and me together. We have a shared TV reporter background (that's easy), and then there's reams of data from my Ralph's and Whole Foods grocery receipts. With a little effort, the data-miners should have dug one big clue out of those receipts - bananas! I buy bananas every time I go to the grocery store. I even buy them at a 7-11. And here's a photo of Rex on the Mormon website. She's in her kitchen, smiling, and holding out - you guessed it - a big bunch of bananas, a friendship offering, to me. Elementary my dear Watson.

Obviously I could have easily sat down with Rex for hours, listening to her tell me about Mormonism, bonding with her over our common TV business experiences - and eating one banana after another. Why didn't Google, Apple and Facebook figure this out? Crafty and smart? I don't think so. They missed an opportunity for a hook-up. Now it's too late. I've moved on.

So God - you can rest a little easier knowing your rivals have a long way to go to match your unblinking, all-seeing brain.

Now I'm wondering how many days, hours, minutes, seconds, it'll be before some sly banana pitch is inserted into an ad on my FB-page or comes streaming across the top of my gmail page? My stop-watch is on. I'm waiting....

Posted by John Schwada at 10:44 AM | Permalink

When Los Angeles Magazine's Amy Wallace called and asked me to write an article for what would be the "L.A. Woman" issue, I blurted out, "Please tell me it isn't going to be all silicon and collagen." She laughed and responded, "Well, there has to be a little of that - it is L.A. - but we are really going to try to do something different." And I have to admit, several months later, they have done just that.

Their October issue focuses on women who "make a difference" and there are a lot of them. Cover girl Maria Shriver holds a regal pose and smartly turned down multiple offers for other covers where the accompanying article would have raised questions about her personal life. Instead, she is the interviewer in the anchor piece on philanthropist Wallis Annenberg.

On Tuesday, over 100 women (and a few men) gathered on the top floor of the Andaz Hotel on Sunset to celebrate the L.A. Woman issue and the fifty women named as the city's "game changers." As editor Mary Melton mused that she wished they could have lunches like this for every issue, I was struck how different this list was from the "Power" issues we are used to from magazines such as Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and the like. For one thing, you would be hard pressed to find deep pocket advertisers taking out the full page "congratulations" ads — which seem to be the major reason d'être for such issues — with honorees such as Laura Avery, veteran manager of the Santa Monica Farmers Market, or Charisse Bremond-Weaver, director of South Central's Brotherhood Crusade.

Another surprise is there was only one "movie star" on the list and that was Diane Keaton — and she was chosen because of her impact on architectural preservation. Granted, there was a handful of behind-the-camera women such as former Paramount head Sherry Lansing, lawyer Patrica Glazer, Endeavor's Nancy Josephson and screenwriter Aline Broth McKenna, but they were being credited for their civic contributions as much as their professional achievements. Most of the women were not household names nor wealthy powerhouses -- the one thing they had in common was that they each worked passionately to bring positive change to the city and people's lives.

And so since Melton, Wallace and the women of Los Angeles Magazine made the decision to dig a little deeper and examine the complexities of L.A. women instead of the stereotypes without benefit of those "Congratulations" ads, I thought the least I could do was congratulate them in LA Observed.

Posted by Cari Beauchamp at 10:39 PM | Permalink

For years Tim Rutten was one of the archbishops at the LA Times. Cerebral, magisterial, confident of his consortium with angels, Rutten's voice was heard on the Times editorial page, more recently from a pulpit on the front-page of Calendar. Who hasn't read Rutten and felt his large personality looming over their breakfast table...and wanting, at times, to yell back at him?

But Rutten has been defenestrated - fired; in the good old days, defenestration was a nasty way for a mob to dismiss its unwanted princes by literally throwing them out a window, to an uncertain fate on a cobbled street below. Rutten, we're happy to report, survived his fall, and his new job - if you could call it that - as of last Wednesday was to talk to two-dozen retired and out-of-work newsfolks. These aging, squinting, tottering greybeards belong to the quaintly-named Old Farts Society (is it refreshing to know that such entities really exist?). At this - one of the OFS's semi-regular luncheons, in Pasadena - Rutten was the dessert. A tart dessert at that.

Striking a scholarly pose with a gaggle of eye-glasses hanging from his neck, Rutten said his forced retirement left him with "a profound sense of relief" because he no longer had to "pretend to care for people (at the Times) for whom I had no respect." Harrrumph! But if Rutten were ill-humored who could blame him? He devoted his entire adult life to the Times, almost 40 years. And when the paper let him go, it was an anonymous HR employee (a "little girl" from the Chicago home office) who informed Rutten - a man who had chronicled and commented on Los Angeles' contemporary history - that he was now history himself. Defenestration. Brutal. Impersonal. And very, very corporate. (And before we forget, 30 other Times editorial workers were let go that same day, part of an incremental hollowing out of the Times that's been going on for several years).

When asked by the HR person if he needed counseling to help him adjust to unemployment, Rutten thundered - "what kind of counseling would that be - for suicide prevention?" At this, several wizened Old Farts tapped their canes on the floor in a show of empathy.

About the future of the Times? Rutten was not optimistic.

He told the OFS'ers he expects the New York Times to pick up the pieces of the LA Times' empire, one way or another.

And so it went. I had to leave early but if I had had time, I would have thanked Tim for one of his largely unsung contributions to readers.

In his own recent tribute to Rutten here in LA Observed, Bill Boyarsky recalled that Rutten was part of a team running the paper's coverage (under then-editor Michael Parks, Boyarsky was city editor) during the late 1990's. This team decided to ignore the paper's conventional way of story-telling when it came to investigative pieces. The Times' usual approach had been to tell an investigative story in one giant, mind-numbing novella that jumped from page to page. Who read those monsters and lived to tell about it? Why not, the iconoclasts argued, give the story all you can in one day, write up what you've got and put it the paper? Simple. If there's more to tell - well, there's another day to dig deeper into that same story and tell more about it again. And there's another day after that. That's how the Times city desk - of which Rutten was a big part - decided to handle the Rampart-LAPD scandal. More recently, the Bell story.

So, as Boyarsky told it, Rutten played a role in restoring this old-fashioned story-telling technique to the Times' signature big stories. This technique goes a long way toward restoring the wonder, the excitement, the suspense of picking up the paper each morning. We can all surely thank Tim for that.

PS: A shout-out to TV producer and author Pete Noyes (his book, The Real LA Confidential, now available on Kindle), a news legend in his own right, who was kind enough to invite me to the Old Farts Society event.

Posted by John Schwada at 7:22 AM | Permalink

I met two-dozen "convergent journalists" the other day at USC. They are the children of the media's current crises, and their lot, their jobs, their future, should be of concern to anyone who believes media matters.

Don't get me wrong - I only have the highest admiration for the young, convergent journalists I met from USC's specialized master's program. And, no, they are not part of a paranormal cabal that gathers at the Tommy Trojan statue and howl madly at the harvest moon. Simply put, they are madly multi-tasking reporters, weaving together all of the new, converging threads of social media and news-talk into a bigger, more luxurious, more amorphous, journalism of the future. It could be all for the good....but still I'm concerned - concerned that today's young journalists are being forced by the cruel economics of our floundering, panicky profession to do too much communicating and not enough reporting, too much selling and not enough digging.

Not only must convergent journalists do stories but also they must produce them for multiple formats: as a video (which they shoot, edit, track and perform in) that goes on YouTube or Vimeo; as a microblog on Twitter; as a screed on Facebook. They must be adept at uploads, hyperlinks, downloads - indeed, s7$!*loads of stuff (and when I half-mastered a teletype in the Imperial Valley bureau of the San Diego Union I thought I was pretty tech-savvy!). With all this, where's the time to figure out what's happening at City Hall? To poke through - and go beyond - all the flotsam and press releases to find stories that raise hell, take names and kick out the jambs? I mentioned this concern to one of the young journalists afterward, Leslie Velez. "Seems to me you're being asked to be a jack-of-all-trades," I groaned. And she brightly chimed in: "And the master of none." So they get it. they know the pitfalls. Maybe that's half the battle won already. I hope so.

And then there's the alone-ness of these new journalists. Many of the USC students I met don't see themselves working in a newsroom (a hotbed of ideas where all the cross-pollinating and jiggling around in an enclosed, tense high-caffeine environment produces jokes, mutants and miracles and reinforces journalism values) or having a regular editor (who challenge and inspire their reporters even as they fret about syntax and lawsuits). Freelancers, that's what we would've called these "convergers" in the days of journalism 1.0. USC journalism program directors Michael Parks and Sasha Anawalt (my gracious hosts) say many of their students will have to form informal journalism collectives with other solitary journalists to get feedback on their stories, to check their facts, to bounce ideas off one another. But how sustainable, how reliable will these informal networks be?

Another worrisome point: as freelancers, they must be entrepreneurial, learn how to sell their stories, and then flog the hell out them once they're published to make sure their work gets maximum exposure in the media's increasingly atomized marketplace. USC master's degree candidate Veronica Villafane, a former colleague of mine, told me her goal is to find ways to monetize the new journalism forms - like making real money shooting stories posted on YouTube. None of this was a concern to the classic journalist of yore - leave that stuff to the damned bean-counters! Show me the way to City Hall!

But just going to City Hall now and working for a newspaper, radio or TV station that pays your expenses, gives you a steady salary and benefits, provides you with an insightful editor, a computer, a printer, a newsroom full of colleagues, a giant subscription platform to air your stories - it's increasingly no longer a valid dream. Increasingly it's only a hazy memory. The new kids on the block at USC are the future. Will somebody converge me already?

Posted by John Schwada at 10:34 AM | Permalink

I awakened this morning worried about my Facebook "living room." After all I have acquired some important guests as friends on Facebook, and Facebook is everybody's new living room, right?

What triggered my doubts, my concerns was the arrival, as a Facebook friend, of quiet, serious, thoughtful Austin Beutner who's running for mayor; he's a multi-zillionaire, has been Mayor Villaraigosa's go-to-guy when the plumbing goes out in the entire city (read - ex-head of DWP). Austin asked me yesterday - out of the blue - to be his friend (I can just see him now, tapping away at his computer, probably with one finger- guys like this normally have their agreements, aides-de-memoir, litigation, typed up by secretaries who use all their fingers; maybe they've even got typing robots!) Of course, I should be flattered that Austin would want to drop by and look around my Facebook living room. He joins a growing list of slumming high-hatters who've popped their heads into chez Schwada.

But I'm a little concerned about a culture clash: How will these new "quality" guests (hmmmm?) get along with my other Facebook friends? My Facebook living room has been a pretty cozy crowd, littered mostly with newshounds (including, dare I say it out-loud, a lot of blue-collar folks in the biz and not a few folks who should really be spending time in cork-lined rooms, not with Proust, but with Bart Simpson) - all fully capable of being supremely goofy, crude or - worse - banal. It's like when you were in high school. You had different cliques. The kids who were nerds, played chess and read Crime and Punishment. And then there was the crowd whose parents lived in trailer homes and threw open their beer-filled refrigerator to underage teenagers and, for kicks, this crowd would drive around the countryside with shotguns blowing up farmer's mailboxes (I hope the statute of limitations on this is well over). You couldn't mix the two cliques. Oil and water.

And this banal Facebook conversation-stuff is not something people of quality want to deal with. It's like you have a mayoral candidate in your Facebook living room, and your drunken childhood friend starts talking about his flat-tire on the freeway and how the AAA guy ripped off his bumper trying to tow it. Then, he slams down another beer, and turns to The Magnificent One and says, apropos of nothing, "Hey dude, you got a cigarette?" I mean things like this can happen on Facebook. My friends don't know the other guy at all. They can't see each other. No visual clues. No accents. Like the one guy can't see he's talking to someone wearing a Gorgio Armani sportcoat and dancing slippers (without socks), and has Yale Phi Beta Kappa key hanging on a gold chain from his belt (does this really happen?). After all, The Magnificent One could just be another one of Schwada's goof-ball friends.

The other day I watched some of this unfold in real time and I was horrified. Indeed, embarrassed. A friend on Facebook was actually describing in intimate detail, for all the world to read, just how difficult it is to make the transition going south and then west from the Hollywood Freeway to the 134. This was so mind-bogglingly mundane and idiotic that I wanted to de-friend this woman immediately but I couldn't find the plug-in, the download, the upload, the button, the whatever to terminate her. (Note to Facebook: You need to develop a clearly identifiable bright red "KILL" button on your site). And then, other friends chimed in and commented; in no time, there was this hideously long string of my friends commenting eagerly, sympathizing, almost drooling. It was so pathetic. I thought: my God, now I know how Stalin must have felt about all those wretched, annoying kulaks in the 1930's. What's to be done with all these peasants! They're just unteachable! Their muddy feet, their coarse manners - too much!

If Stalin was on Facebook, he'd know what to do. So borrowing from the Great Dictator, I'm putting all my Facebook friends on final notice, warning them that quality folks are now populating the Schwada-Facebook living room. So it's time clean up their act, step up, dudes and dudettes! Don't chew with your mouth open; sip, don't guzzle, your beer (craft beers only please); no double-dipping with the hors d'oeuvres and when you do have something to say, preface it with words, like "indeed" or "that's so charming" or "very clever of you mon petite chou-chou."

And as for topics: let's elevate them. Obama's jobs speech, good, especially if it's curated with hyperlinks to Robert Reich's personal website or to a Ben Bernacke quote found only in the New York Review of Books. The opening Thursday at the LA Louver gallery (a room of aging art mavens, talking to each other over "real drinks" and nibblies amid a pile of muddy-looking Leon Kousoff paintings, selling for over $200,000 each) - even better. Talk about your animals? Okay, as long as they're pedigreed (no trans-ethnic dogs allowed). Verboten: describing in real-time that you are shopping, especially if you're looking for a new transmission for your 2000 Huyandai Accent. Chronicling your purchase of Gucci bags or that your hair is being done by Helen Miren's coiffeur-ista - perhaps, but only if discussed in a fresh, inviting tone, with spirited language (and if it's a Kardashian hair-dresser, you must get very snotty).

I think you get the picture. Facebook friends, thank you for your cooperation, and please stop double-dipping the celery sticks. Where the hell do you think you are? That goes for you, too, Austin. Get your Cole-Hahn tassle-loafers off my cable-table!

Posted by John Schwada at 8:04 AM | Permalink

Thursday, September 8, 2011

• Zócalo at the Hammer: Randall Kennedy ponders "Is Obama Erasing the Color Line?" at Hammer Museum at 7 PM.
• Taschen Beverly Hills hosts a tasting and book party for Jim Heimann's Menu Design in America from 7-9 PM. Reservations required. Call 310 274 4300.
• MAK Center Exhibition Opening Reception for "Final Projects" 7:00 PM
• Fashion Night Out events all over town

• Hammer Museum presents the New American Writing: Leopoldine Core & Dinah Lenney. 7 PM
• Original Long Beach Lobster Festival in Rainbow Lagoon. Long Beach.
• Quebec in Hollywood Festival opens (continues through 9/25)
• Santa Monica Museum of Art hosts its opening reception for the "Beatrice Wood: Career Woman" exhibit at 6:00 PM. Santa Monica Museum of Art.

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- September 8, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 4:35 PM | Permalink

They say famous people die in threes. I hope whomever "they" are say the same thing about famous people leaving their jobs.

May was the season of retirement for people prominent in broadcast media, and Hallmark has yet to capture the sentiment of the too-long goodbye. Last month, Katie Couric left the CBS News anchor chair, the Oprah Winfrey TV studio went dark and Liane Hansen gave up the NPR microphone on Sunday mornings. None of them simply thanked the academy and graciously exited stage right, leaving us wanting more. Couric, who's supposed to report the news, not be the news, went on a guess-my-fate talk show walkabout. But her extended exit interview was mostly a product of media obsession as they pontificated about the state of television network news--Nixon's victory pose by the helicopter didn't get as much coverage. Winfrey's 18-month farewell tour was a disharmonic convergence of audience adoration, media perseveration and all-about-me-ness--Woodstock didn't display this much communal love. Hansen's final broadcast Sunday was classy and pitch-perfect, but she announced the date of her departure a year in advance, and over that period listener adulation was a regular feature of the program, her peers repeatedly intoning that the end was nigh--Walter Cronkite is turning over in his grave that this is the way it was.

Continue reading "The too-long goodbye" »

Posted by Ellen Alperstein at 12:08 PM | Permalink

Thursday, May 5, 2011

• Geoff Dyer reads his book, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, at Skylight Books, 1818 Vermont Ave at 7:30 PM
• Slow Food L.A. presents Jam Session, a quarterly Santa Monica Farmers' Market Library Panel panel featuring preserving and canning advice from the likes of Evan Kleiman, Kevin West, Valerie Gordon (chef and co-owner of Valerie Confections) and Barbara Spencer (Windrose Farm), at the Santa Monica Public Library Auditorium, 601 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. 7-9 PM. h/t Tasting Table LA
• Simon Wiesenthal Center honors Tom Cruise at its annual National Tribute Dinner at Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons Hotel. 6:00 PM.
• Los Angeles Nomadic Division hosts its First Annual Art Auction and Benefit Party at Palihouse West Hollywood at 6:30 PM.

• MusiCares honors Dave Gahan and Kevin Lyman at its Seventh Annual MAP Fund Benefit Concert Dinner and performances by Victor Indrizzo, Jane's Addiction, Vincent Jones, Martyn LeNoble, Ozomatli, Paramore, Adam Bravin and Justin Warfield. Club Nokia.
• Resisting the Path to Genocide: The Case of States and Societies Conference starts at USC. 10 AM to 5:30 PM
• The Helping Hand's 82nd Annual Mother's Day Luncheon & Fashion Show benefit for Cedars-Sinai Medical Center at the Beverly Hills Hotel. 10:00 AM
• FIRST FRIDAYS "Nostradamus Edition: Looking into the Future of Science" @ Natural History Museum. 5 PM
• 2011 AltBuild Expo at Santa Monica Civic Auditorium starts today and continues Saturday. 10 AM to 5 PM

Continue reading "Angeleno Datebook- May 5, 2011" »

Posted by Adrienne Crew at 2:05 PM | Permalink

I remember Terry McGarry twirling his fingers over the keyboard at the sprawling new L.A. Times Chatsworth Bureau back when it overlooked strawberry fields.

"Did I tell any lies?" he asked, a wicked gleam in his eyes.

I was studying journalism at Cal State Northridge, and the Times had picked up a story I'd written for the CSUN Sundial and assigned Terry to re-write it. For some reason, they'd asked me to visit the newsroom.

"What?" I stuttered, mortified.

"Here, pull up a chair, read it. Did I get all the facts right?"

So I sat next to this jovial middle-aged man in the tie and sports jacket and read the story on his screen. Suddenly it flowed. Terry had punched up the prose, pepped up the verbs, made the transitions seamless, set up the quotes like solitaire diamonds.

"It reads great," I whispered.

"Nice job," he told me, and shook my hand.

Like we were equals or something.

I'll never forget his great kindness to me.

Later, I became an intern and got to know Terry better. He was a raconteur of the old school, a wire reporter who learned his trade in the trenches. He'd been Mexico City Bureau Chief for UPI, and the glamorous, romantic, heartbreaking stories he told left me agog. I still remember one about a poor Mexican peasant who traveled two days to bring his sick daughter to a hospital, which made me cry.

Working with Terry was like being in the movie "The Front Page." He was a link to the swashbuckling school of early journalism. I even forgave him when he asked me to fetch him coffee. I was going to the cafeteria anyway, it was no big deal. And I'm sure that impressionistic bits of him made it into my novels over the years, especially when I wrote about gruff but well-intentioned male bosses.

During those years, Terry and Marlane his wife always held a blowout St. Patrick's Day bash at their Tarzana hillside home, complete with men in kilts playing bagpipes. The invitations came on creamy embossed paper and read something like: "Tiaras and Military Dress Suggested."

The last time I saw Terry was several years ago. A Cold War buff, he took me on a tour of Valley sites where spy planes and bombers were once assembled and a secret government communications building prepared for the apocalypse along Ventura Boulevard.

Thoughtfully, he'd brought along a picnic lunch and brought a split of champagne and we picnicked up on a curve of Mullholland with the best view of the Valley, while Terry held forth about KGB defectors and the nuclear war that never came.

When we said goodbye, he pressed a KGB history in my hands and encouraged me to contact him if I ever wrote a mystery novel set in LA during the Cold War.

I drove home, thinking I should take him up on that, but then time passed, as it does. I'm sorry about that. He was full of yarns, was Terry, and a character out of a novel himself. I won't soon forget him.

McGarry died April 26 at age 73.

Posted by Denise Hamilton at 6:48 PM | Permalink

Check out the screengrabs from a trio of news sites from just a minute ago -- 1:45 p.m. -- which reveal a bit about their respective DNA:

The sober NY Times, which lets you know the crisis is still unfolding, but points out the encouraging fact that radiation levels have fallen:

The LA Times, which leads with the stricken nation's mood, and also updates you on the severity of ongoing events:

And then there's the the Huffington Post, those wily wizards of SEO, who go all out with a screaming DANGER ZONE banner hed, a "brink" and "crisis" and "catastrophe" drop hed, and a doomsday frenzy of subheds.

Talk about brinksmanship.

Posted by Veronique de Turenne at 1:56 AM | Permalink