Westside of Your Mind: Portable L.A. Headspace

Farmlands on Federal and National circa 1957

Tue, 22 May 2012 14:32:08 -0400

I’m seven years old with a 12 cent Jamocha Almond Fudge ice cream cone in one hand…wearing a pair of shorts and flip flops. We called them zories. I’m topless and pushing my baby brother up the street to watch the farmer working in the corn field. Hours go by and no one bothers us.

License Plate Lingo

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:55:54 -0500

The recent construction on the 405, Sepulveda, Beverly Glen, Coldwater Canyon, Benedict Canyon and every other access road leading to and from the valley has led to interminable amounts of time spent sitting in one place. When there’s nothing else to look at but the back of a car, the license plates get pretty interesting.

SHAME

BADMONKEE

PISSED

HONEEWIFE

GR8-1

CLASS ACT

NOLIMIT

IMFAST

DEB8 ME

YES2IT

PLEEZD

ROCKIT

SHIFT

LOOKUP

NICE1

ALL LA

A little rain…a little color.

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:34:34 -0500

A little rain…a little color.

O, City Of Angels…I Embrace Thee!

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 18:32:46 -0500

O, City Of Angels…I Embrace Thee!

LA on a clear day (taken from the Getty Center)

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 06:33:05 -0500

LA on a clear day (taken from the Getty Center)

Kiddie Land

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 10:55:06 -0500

Many years ago, when dinosaurs roamed the tar pits of La Brea, there was a small oasis on the corner of Beverly Blvd and La Cienga call Kiddie Land (Beverly Park). My grandmother would pack us into the Cadillac and take us out each Sunday to fill her Grandmotherly obligation to spend time with us. She would much rather be recovering from her night at Perinos but she did her duty. Breakfast at Schwabs was followed the short 5 minute ride to Kiddie Land, a godsend for divorced dads. A place they could take their kids every other weekend and holidays per the custody agreement. The roller coaster was small and rickety. The haunted house was put together with tissue paper and spit. The pony ride was a monotonous round over smelly hay, but to me it was heaven. Te first amusement park I ever went to. Disneyland was in a different class and i was too young to appropriately ration the different lettered tickets to maximize my enjoyment, but Kiddie Land was mine. I had it wired. I knew which rides to ride in which order. I knew the best and worst times to go. Now a giant mall sits at that corner. The Beverly Center is a large structure, but I still see the open air park of my youth.

coming from the oc

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 08:44:05 -0500

dirty depressing streets in most areas. some really fine areas but they aren’t the common mans place. no left turn lanes, what is up with that???

Kirk Gibson’s home run, 1988 — running wild downtown, so very happy.

Skateboarding downtown on the 4th of July, the streets & parking lots were all empty. We skated down the middle of the streets. It was our playground for a day. Seemed almost miraculous.

Seeing Dylan at Staples Oct 2001, one month after 9/11. Kids were young then, 8 & 7 — they rode their scooters, I skateboarded in the lot after the show while the parking lot cleared. We were in the shadow of some tall buildings that were Not coming down. Was showing them we had survived and we would still have joy in our lives, no matter what. Grandpa had died 9/18/01. Catharsis via Dylan….has happened a lot for me in L.A.

Rodney King, my lord and my god —

The Terrain As Seen by a Far Off Reference Point

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 06:33:05 -0500

I first moved to the Fairfax District. I was from Boston. LA was arid, the air and light were strong and gentle at the same time. The colors of the stucco buildings, palm trees and cement were altered by the distinct Southwestern luminosity. It seemed like a vacation colony on the edge of the known world, yet strangely domesticated and tranquil, with faux-nouveau Gothic-Tudor, Mediterranean, Craftsman, Spanish, even Colonial and the odd Victorian architecture, and even the occasional castle. I felt like I was in some Paradise on Earth one can be sent during their lifetime. But the low hum of the massively spread out city felt deceiving, as if thing must be quietly going on despite the mellowness. Driving on the 10 Freeway below Hollywood, the skyscrapers of Downtown looked like a condensed crush of sleek futuristic pods, like something out of a video game, silvery grey on certain days and framed by 10,000 mountains, snow-covered in winter. Despite social feelings and heresay to the contrary, this place was rooted in some concrete and reassuring physical reality. Other days or evenings I’d look up my street, Ogden, toward the Hollywood Hills looming up high, hopeful and alluring, the sweet smell of night Jasmine on the sidewalk strong enough to make you feel melancholy over the smell memory decades later, and I’d think ‘I kind of love this place. This place could be my home. Maybe it already is.’

Empty City

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 04:22:05 -0500

I was working downtown as a file clerk/process server. I went in on a Sunday to catch up on some work. When I broke for lunch I realized I had the downtown to myself. It was as if all the other people in the world had just vanished. It was the first time I realized how beautiful the city was. Pershing square, Angels flight, the courthouse, the LA times building. I wandered all day in this sense that I had been missing out on something and might not get a chance to see it again. The Bonaventure, the Library, the Biltmore, the Eastern building. I’d lived in LA all my life but it wasn’t till I had it to myself that I really felt like I saw it.

Laura Nyro, Royce Hall 1968

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:48:36 -0500

Congratulations Stew and Heidi on your residency at UCLA and concert at Royce Hall!

I saw Laura Nyro there in 1968 when I was 16. She played for, I think, 3 nights and I went to 2 of them. I believe we were the first West Coast fans to see her perform post-Monterey Pop. Judging from the footage on youtube, she did a night club act at Monterey. Good, but nothing like what we were treated to. It was pure, raw emotion, with Laura pounding the piano, hair completely in her face for most of the show. She wore long dresses and I recall a number of pale, pre-goth Laura look-alikes in the crowd. I can’t remember the set list, but I know for sure she did “Lonely Women” from her songbook and a medley of “Up on the Roof” and “Spanish Harlem,” songs she would later record.

A reminder of the old 'hood...

Wed, 14 Dec 2011 15:48:25 -0500

I’m still in residence. [Hope the photo transferred - if not, email me]

Missing Arthur Lee - ‘Love’ never leaving my head.

Tried writing - you changed your email address…

Urban

I grew up LA in the 60’s and 70’s. I graduated from Granada Hills High in 1980 and for...

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 22:21:14 -0400

I grew up LA in the 60’s and 70’s. I graduated from Granada Hills High in 1980 and for the most of the next 23 years I was living in other cities. In late 2003 I returned and lived the last few years of my mother’s life with her in the house that I grew up in acting as her support system. She has passed away and I am back now on my own living in another part of metro LA. (An interesting footnote that Stu and Heidi’s departure might happen coincident to my return.)

Living again in my old neighborhood as I did the changes to it were something that impressed me greatly and I learned that the reason that “you can never go home” is that your “home” will never be there, even if the four walls and roof and mother who raised you within them are still there. Things simply change so rapidly in a city like LA that the life you knew is very much a thing of the past when 23 years have transpired.

The easiest way to see this was in racial and ethnic terms. Granada Hills, a modest middle-class neighborhood then and now, was largely a white enclave when I was a child. The Catholic grade school I attended was so lily-white that there was but one Hispanic boy in my class over 100 students. This a remarkably contrasting situation to today’s majority Hispanic LA. Today that same school is a small sea of brown faces (mostly Filipino-Americans, if I had to guess) and the roles that I and young Mr. Mezzaros played then would today be just about exactly reversed.

This is not a story of any great novelty, of course, but observing it in the context of the whole eventually raised a question in my mind that I have not seen addressed. That is this: why with all of the uproar and upset in certain quarters about the dramatic racial and ethnic evolutions in LA (and elsewhere) is no correlation drawn between it and the reduced rates of local violent crime that for years I have heard reported? I am no sociologist tracking any of this in detail, but anecdotally it is my definite impression that while LA has become less white it has become less violent.

If such as this intrigues you with respect to your project you might look to see if my impression is correct. Thank you.

In The Valley

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 22:32:59 -0400

Armenian folk songs float over the east garden wall and bump into the Persian pop that beats in the west. The cats make their feral night music, driving all the dogs crazy. Mariachis play in the warm fall night and the pumpkins dance. In the leaves of the old citrus, doves hide from the waiting hawk. On the night before Halloween it’s busy in Van Nuys.

The third world with better shopping

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:29:18 -0400

When I first moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago after spending a decade living in Zimbabwe (and after growing up in Canada), the first thing I noticed was that certain low-income, high-density areas reminded me a lot of the developing world (townships) - except in LA one could actually buy things in the shops (unlike in Zimbabwe where you needed black market connections to get products like rice or tinned tuna). At that time, lots of things in LA reminded me of southern Africa. The vegetation in LA was similar, there were high security walls around mansions, there was cumbersome bureaucracy at places like the DMV and immigration services, there was corruption/nepotism, and there was the same divide between the rich and the poor. I used to joke that LA was the third world with better shopping.

In L.A. we wait For the dry, impending wind Old blooms safe for now.

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 00:27:46 -0400

In L.A. we wait

For the dry, impending wind

Old blooms safe for now.

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning, palm trees are...

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:46:53 -0400

When the hills of Los Angeles are burning, palm trees are candles in the murder wind…
Bad Religion

Red Fruit. Hot Day. October in L.A.

Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:54:53 -0400

Red Fruit. Hot Day.

October in L.A.

ARLINGTON WEST MEMORIAL “Each Sunday from sunrise to...

Sat, 22 Oct 2011 16:42:02 -0400

ARLINGTON WEST MEMORIAL

“Each Sunday from sunrise to sunset, a temporary memorial appears next to the world-famous pier at Santa Monica, California. This memorial, known as Arlington West, a project of Veterans For Peace, offers visitors a graceful, visually and emotionally powerful, place for reflection.” - Arlington West website

Stew and Heidi missed CARMAGEDDON 2011 (good thing there will be...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 17:50:48 -0400

Stew and Heidi missed CARMAGEDDON 2011 (good thing there will be another one next year, ha!)

Three of my five kids were living in L.A., enjoying moderate success as actors: Darrow, Eden and...

Fri, 21 Oct 2011 06:33:05 -0400

Three of my five kids were living in L.A., enjoying moderate success as actors: Darrow, Eden and Rainbow. I flew in from NYC in February and was amazed to see that they had color there! Green green lawns, big yellow sunflowers, bright blue sky and on and on. My eyes had gotten used to the Grumbacher Grey palette. It seemed cheerful, but unnecessary. However, returning to New York, I was a mite annoyed at how flat it all looked, until I got used to it again.