Category: Uncategorized

The Uninvited.

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These days, nights really, the house is full of a crying person, one whose mournful sobs remind me of the ghost of Mary Meredith in “The Uninvited”.

In that 1944 film, Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey are a brother and sister who fall in love with a beautiful haunted house, “these stretches of Devonshire and Cornwall and Ireland which rear up against the westward ocean. Mists gather here… and sea fog… and eerie stories…”

The ghost of Mary fills the long nights and her dreadful crying is a plea for someone to render some justice for a youthfully truncated life. Milland and Hussey soon learn that there are some bad people who covered up some bad things in this gorgeous mansion on the rocks.

And what about me, the person who sometimes just gets out of bed and walks from room to room, remembering those ghosts of lives who had lived here in the past 30 years? Some of these people are still alive, but in other rooms, I bump into the young Andy, the one who walked into this house at 17, and thought he was dreaming.

Not all the times spent here were nice. Some were rotten and dishonest and wasteful and cruel. Hours and days were expended worrying about situations beyond our control. There was yelling and screaming, and bitter times too.

But mostly I think of my times in New Jersey and New York as the best years of my life because I was young. When I walk around now, I touch the walls, and drink from the tap, and breathe in the air of three decades ago.

And the crying in the night comes not from a ghost, but from my heart.

The Two Birchwoods.

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When we moved to Birchwood Drive in 1979, there were only six houses on the whole street. It dead ended at six acres of woods, and coming from flat Chicago, I marveled at giant old trees.

Inside those woods one could swing on an enormous vine. There was an azalea farm next to it and more acres of property including an old lady inside an old Victorian house.

When it rained, we would sit on the covered front porch and watch sheets of water slice across the street. The enormous branches would bend and the air smelled of electricity, wet leaves and damp earth.

The neighbors on our street were comprised of doctors, small business owners, a financial executive and an architect. They lived in quaint “Dutch” houses and I don’t remember anyone driving expensive cars. Their bedrooms were small, some of the houses lacked air conditioning and the luxury consisted of living on big pieces of land surrounded by nature. Privacy and discretion intermingled with self-denial and self-improvement. The kids went off to college while the old folks stayed behind.

When the street and historic forest was bulldozed, to create a world of moonscape McMansions, I predicted that the new residents would drive up and down in SUVs. Back and forth, they would speed, to enter three car garages while hardly interacting with each other. My premonitions have now materialized, and to quote Hillary, “If I knew then what I knew now, I would have voted against…..”

An architectural metaphor exists in a new super-sized house buried below grade, an obese dwelling dying under the weight of too much debt, too many cars. It seems sad to think that even this inferior lot had to be maximized to please the developer builder investors. Nature has its revenge, it always wins…..

The destruction began in 2003, and now it is 2008, and the old Birchwood Drive is changing. We are selling, the two other neighbors are selling, and we live on a road where the way of life is exiting to be seen and heard from no more.

Tragedy in Lush Surroundings.

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For the past 30 years, my parents and some of us children, have lived in Bergen County, NJ. We moved here from Chicago into an area of small towns, woods, farms, and historic homes.

Some of the charm that once existed here has been replaced by the sweep of corporate headquarters or in the robotic commercialism of strip malls. But there is still an old fashioned human feeling in the day-to-day interactions.

I have come back here from Los Angeles, almost yearly, and now the reasons that I return have to do with medical emergencies. The latest has been my mother breaking her hip. My father is disabled, so I flew in to oversee his care. And most heartbreaking to me, to put their house up for sale and move them to the “safer” confines of the badly named “Golden State”.

I wish that Northern New Jersey were not so lovely. I drive my father to physical therapy past vast green lawns and little towns with flag draped streets. I pass the barn where he once sat in art class; I stop at the Ridgewood Library to return a book; I take him for a walk in the park. We cut through country lanes and those suburban roads where one still may see the occasional horse and where vast forests of maple and birchwood keep homes cool even when the humidity is 80%.

Once upon a time this region was my promise of a glorious future. I would live in Manhattan, and when it got too stressful, I could come back to Woodcliff Lake and my parents would barbecue on the back deck, surrounded by hundreds of trees…never planted but spontaneously growing and enveloping the house. Down there, along the property line, an old stone wall stood as a border.

I guess I am one of those who went West, more out of escape than adventure, and landed in Los Angeles as one lands in a prison. I tried to convince myself that the friends who never showed up for lunch and the hours I sat on the 405, were somehow just small inconveniences and not evidence of a larger pathology, a geographical cancer that grows and grows each year and devours more of America and the world and calls itself…Hollywood.

Here in the waning days of the New Jersey chapter, the neighbors are still here to wave hello; the local handyman is working on three different houses on this street; and someone at the Town Hall owes my mother $100 as reimbursement for joining another town’s library since this one is too small to have its own.

Was I spoiled? Yes, I think I have been. I haven’t yet bought into Charles Phoenix and his paens to the junk and kitsch of the Southland. I still admire the stone houses of the Dutch settlers, and think it looks nice when men in gray flannel suits board a train to go work in the city. I love a thunderstorm and look forward to waking up everyday in New Jersey and knowing that the weather is unknowable. I don’t need sun everyday.

But mostly what I need now is what’s gone. I dream of a restoration of a lost time, but each day this summer is one step closer to the end of the best years of our lives.</p

Shopping Cart Blight.

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The perennial problem of what to do with shopping carts that people use to transport groceries is again on LA’s agenda.

In my Van Nuys neighborhood, I’ve seen carts from: CVS, Costco, Office Depot and 99 Ranch Market. But I have not seen any from Jons, which is on the corner of Sepulveda and Sherman Way. Why not? Because Jons uses an invisible electronic fence that locks up cart wheels.

People who do not own cars cannot reasonably haul bags of groceries by hand. It is understandable that families must get food from the store to the home. But why can’t the grocery chains sell portable steel carts that fold up? Why doesn’t Ralphs institute an aggressive new policy to DELIVER groceries to its customer’s homes so that gasoline might be conserved?

The shopping cart blight is a symptom of an environmental problem that begs for a creative solution. It is an outgrowth of a “cars first” mentality that puts food only in the reach of those who drive to buy it.

The Fart Billboard.

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For at least a year, this degrading billboard advertising “Power 106” Hip-Hop Radio has stood atop this equally nauseating mini-mall near Sepulveda and Victory.

Perhaps it’s a coincidence that it sits right over the beans and burrito El Pollo Loco.

This is the free market at its finest, where freedom of expression, for enormously wealthy outdoor advertisers like Clear Channel, takes precedence over the civic quality of life in Los Angeles.

We live in a sea of grossness, surrounded by the absolute lowest quality of commercialism and we are supposed to just turn a blind eye to it and move on.

But this is our city, where we live, raise children and hope that our urban surroundings might have just the slightest elevating effect.

The joke is on us.

The "Never Finished" Tower in Hollywood.

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shameless, originally uploaded by jeremy!.

I’ve wondered about this building, which is on the corner of Sunset and Vine.

It has been at least five years since they ripped down the old facade and then sheathed the whole thing in white. Now they are putting up the curtain wall, which is taking forever.

But of course, there is always a place for an enormous billboard. The advertising appeared seemingly overnight.

Maybe the construction company needs to be instructed by the advertising people on how to get things going faster….