Month: April 2007

What People Earn.

Posted in Economy8 Comments

Being a “temporaily” unemployed writer, I have had to scrounge around and look for job opportunities. One of those desperate moments is when I register with an agency, and submit to hours of testing on my MS Word, Excel and “Numbers” skills. The last category is when you have to type the same number in a box that is above the empty box on the monitor screen.

These employment agencies are as depressing as a hospital, nursing home or the DMV. They are usually windowless, flourescent lit evironments staffed by very fat women. These mediocrities sit at a desk and assess you in the narrowest and least imaginative way. “Let’s see. Do you know Vista? Because if you do, I can place you at Atlantis Motels in Reseda and they need a front desk greeter for $12 an hour!”

There is no accounting for the strange ways of wealth in Los Angeles. People you think are rich, might be broke, but lease a $700 a month BMW and live in Beverly Hills. The millionaires next door, actually are on my street, here in Van Nuys. They live behind gates and own acres of land in one of the largest retail developments in the Mid-Wilshire district.

An investment banker in New York, who dresses so stylishly that his custom made suits were noticed by Ralph Lauren, recently wrote me to ask if he should give up his job and try moving to LA because he is “creative” and wants to work in film or do “something” in design. He probably makes at least $500,000 a year and perhaps he has some savings and can make a go of it here in LA.

But imagine the day that his savings run out, and he has to walk into the musty offices of Apple One in Glendale and submit to a typing test. Maybe he only can turn out 30 WPM. The fat lady with the donuts and generic hand moisturizer bottle at Apple One will look at him with bewilderment and say, “But what are your SKILLS?” He will walk out of there and down the street and buy a plot at Forest Lawn just in case…….

Seizing Land for a School? Start Here!

Posted in Van Nuys and the Valley6 Comments



Only two blocks SW of the Hart/Bassett neighborhood near VanOwen and Kester, is this frightening slum district which is also home to the DMV. The LAUSD has proposed buying 22 single family homes just to the NE of here to build an elementary school.

VanOwen, w. of Kester, is decaying, overcrowded, filthy and dilapidated. Lou Dobbs and Caesar Chavez could make thousands of speeches about this inhumane environment which is a horrible and unsafe place to raise a family. Why not buy out the slumlords who own these properties? Then condemn and demolish these tenements instead of an intact, well kept street of homes!

Maybe I just don’t understand zoning, but common sense tells me that you try to build something better by removing something bad. The slums of VanOwen are a good place to start.

Senor Cardenas and LAUSD, are you listening?

Mid-Century Demolition in Studio City.

Posted in Architecture2 Comments



Until recently, “The Whitmoor” stood at 4422 Whitsett, just north of Moorpark, in Studio City.

These past few days, however, the 1960’s apartment house of decorative concrete blocks and white brick, has been torn down. The property will no doubt sprout an ostentatious Mediterranean/Persian condominium with $900,000 a unit, crown-molded, granite blocked grotesqueness.

While liberal and white Studio City protests the Iraq war every Friday night on Laurel Canyon and Ventura, the irony of their own neighborhood’s destruction from Levantine forces escapes them. Just kidding…sort of.

“The Whitmoor” was rumored to be home to UK born director Andrew Nock, who may have lived here in the mid 1990’s. Women and cats roamed the complex in those days…

The structure represented a more casual and less pretentious Studio City. Hidden behind trees and courtyards, it was a place where actors, writers and non-conformists lived in reasonably priced bright and modest apartments.

The bulldozer and the developers have moved in. The apartment & adjoining house did not occupy every square inch of the property: an intolerable offense in our age of only indoor activities. Before the PC and video games, people often sat outdoors and read books. Now those iced tea and lawn chair memories are just rubble.

So much of this area is being torn down little house by little house.

The sweet and gentle streets of Studio City need historic protection…does anyone care?

One Way Streets and Pedestrians.

Posted in TransportationLeave a comment

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las ramblas, originally uploaded by Colin Busby.

Photo: Colin Busby

The LA Times writes:

“L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has his finger on the Easy button: Why not just turn Olympic and Pico boulevards into one-way streets going opposite directions?”

This is part of the ongoing conversation in LA on how people can get from one part of the city to the other. Especially on the Westside, traffic is now unbearable, and the wealthiest are the angriest at having to sit in their S.U.V.s for hours just to travel one mile.

I have seen one way streets in NYC and they basically work at moving traffic. Fifth Avenue goes south, Madison goes north, etc. But NYC also has a strong public transportation system and legions of walkers. There are more people on the subway trains and on foot than in cars.

Barcelona’s Las Ramblas is an enormous sidewalk full of life, commerce and urban pleasures. Can one imagine a one way Pico or Olympic providing the same amenities to Angelenos?

Part of the sickness of Los Angeles, and I do term it a disease, is the obsession with getting from point A to point B with maximum speed without stopping to enjoy the city along the way. We have built a massive, sprawling, polluted sea of monotony and junk billboards that barely qualifies as a world class metropolis.

The proposal to turn Olympic and Pico into one way freeways, full of red light running speeders, is a bad, dangerous and destructive idea.

Barcelona has a better idea. So do most cities outside of the US of A.

Destroying Homes to Build a School?

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyLeave a comment

By now, even people who do not live in Van Nuys, are aware of the vast pockets of blight that exist along such major streets as VanOwen, Victory, Sepulveda and Kester. Broken down apartments with graffiti gang tags, old motels that house prostitutes and drug dealers, vast asphalt parking lots without cars, and a variety of underused and undermaintained land.

Then why does the LAUSD want to invade a quiet, single famiy neighborhood, just north of VanOwen and east of Kester, and seize 22 homes for land to build its next elementary school? What greater good is accomplished by destroying a coherant and healthy community when so much around it is blighted and neglected?

In an eloquent essay that he wrote for the LA Times this past Sunday, writer Marcos M. Villatoro, who lives in this death sentenced area, ridicules the vast bureaucratic explanation for their plan:

“Not only can the government take my land without my permission, it can also set the price . And here, between the little streets of Tobias and Willis, Hart and Bassett, it can bulldoze a community that’s taken decades to build.

Over the years, I’ve learned to be mistrustful. I don’t take much to the phrase “the greater good.” Especially when it comes out of the mouths of powerful monoliths like the LAUSD.”

Neighborhood activist Norma says that the school sent a letter saying there is no vacant land in the area for a school. But Villatoro writes, “There’s a huge, fallow field one block north of us, owned by a church. Six blocks east of us stands a plot that the LAUSD bought up over a year ago. The houses are still there, behind barricades. There are overgrown fields, an abandoned Ralphs, an empty Red Cross building.”

Van Nuys Boulevard, north of VanOwen, is begging for some humanizing architectural plan. It is an eight lane highway of nothingness, surrounded by junk. Why not create a school, and perhaps some multi-family housing, as part of a development on Van Nuys Boulevard? Pay for the school by selling residential housing. This would make business sense and help foster a sense of caring for the people of Van Nuys that the LAUSD lacks.

But don’t murder a quiet, tree lined neighborhood and tell us its for our own good.

Desperate Housewives: How To Kill a Golden Goose.

Posted in Media3 Comments

Watching “Desperate Housewives” is like having an addiction to Taco Bell or Vons brand white bread: you know it’s bad and full of empty calories, but you consume it anyway. Like most junk food, you feel sick afterwards, vow to stop your consumption, and then you’re hungry again.

But ABC is not only turning away its audience, it’s starving and sending them away, never to return. How else can I explain the sixth week of re-runs and last night’s awful clip show with the “best” of DH? The “new” season only started last October. By December, they were pre-empting it, and now it’s April and the show has still not aired any new episodes. May is only around the corner, so I’m prepared for a bombardment of announcements…. “An all new episode…..”

Yet the storyline on DH is frankly awful and getting worse. The amnesia of Mike, the weirdo husband of Bree and his murderous mother, the engagement of Susan, the shallow Gaby and her fat husband, and the opening of Lynette and Tom’s pizza parlor…big deal. The great moments of DH are shorter than skits on Mad TV. But I’ll be watching, no doubt, when a “new” installment comes up.

The actual time that the 60 minute show airs, between commercials, is probaly about 35 minutes. There is a commercial about every five to seven minutes. From 9:20-9:40 pm, one basically watches ads, if one does not have Tivo. This one does not!

I imagine that the creator of the show, Executive Producer Marc Cherry, is quite worried about how ABC is treating his baby. EP’s are mostly powerless these days, even when they rake in milliions for a network, and then millions for themselves. If you really put your passion into writing and producing….you can only supress your nausea and revulsion as the corporate behemoth squashes you even as it proclaims its love for you.

DH is badly written, well acted, badly scheduled, well intentioned. Compared to the great camp dramas of the past like DYNASTY and DALLAS, it’s small potatoes. But why strangle it now?