Category: Uncategorized

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This charming and historical building, in downtown Westwood, blocks from UCLA, is evocative of the old romance with Spanish themes, courtyards and the beautiful architectural dialogue between sun and shadows. A place to go for refuge from the oppressive El Sol of this region.

This is what visitors once expected Los Angeles to look like, and it might have delivered this for a brief time between the World Wars. But today, this structure of old tiles, lanterns, bow windows and decorative coffered ceilings, is largely second rate. There is no nice café, strumming guitarist, pastries, wine bar or art gallery to visit as one meanders down these halls or up the patterned stairs.

It still is a strange thing, and a disquieting one, that the “action” of Los Angeles largely takes place along the periphery, away from the center of any particular old town. Century City, The Grove and Third Street are real only in the sense that they are not places to live, only to shop.

But where people might live and shop, time and neglect have beaten down our oldest districts. I see it in the abandoned decrepitude of Van Nuys, in the struggling cacophony of grossness in old Sherman Oaks along Ventura, in North Hollywood and other areas.

Granted, there is a new “hipness” to downtown Los Angeles, but how many upper middle class families take their kids to see a movie on Broadway and 7th or stop afterwards to shop in a store or eat in a restaurant near Union Station? The biggest crowds are in the outlet stores, the giant malls, or in front of their computers at home. You have to drive to a huge parking structure, and descend into a land of Crate and Barrel, Abercrombie and the Banana Republic. Where is the special and the different parts of the city?

Perhaps there is just too much retail in L.A. Could we restore some equilibrium to our lives by demolishing certain bad neighborhoods of bad shops (like Victory and Lauren Canyon) and creating garden villages where asphalt once roamed free?

To bring life back to old Los Angeles, the one that this courtyard exemplifies, will take a transformation of the imagination, partly private enterprise, and partly zoning. These magnificent spaces should be natural magnets for life and laughter, not ghostly spaces inhabited by the hot, desert winds.

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I watched the latest episode of HBO’s “Entourage” with more than casual interest because they wrote about Yom Kippur, Hollywood, money, faith, and missed communications.

Entourage is all about how people don’t communicate and just suppose that they can understand what other people are thinking. There is Vince imagining that his new girlfriend and agent is somehow dragging her feet in getting him a new movie; there is the girlfriend angry and hurt that her boyfriend and client is still in bed, so to speak, with his former agent, Ari. There is Ari, who cannot be still or spiritual for one minute, even on the day of atonement, because he imagines he will lose out if he doesn’t keep running.

I wish that “Entourage” like “Desperate Housewives” were patent fantasy and implausible. But it is so on the mark in its exposure of vulnerabilities, fear, ego and feelings, that it almost a documentary of modern Hollywood.

As a non-believer, in both God and the afterlife, I sometimes find myself wonderfully moved by what I hear on the pulpit. I wonder where I measure up in the scheme of this mad city.

“The wise man is in his smallest actions great: the fool is in his greatest actions small”…..as seen this week in “Entourage”.

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The first time I visited Disneyland I enjoyed it immensely. I was 12 years old and I was inside the Magic Kingdom.

Then I went back, 20 years later, and wondered if there was anything to like. Is it sacrilege to say that you don’t like Disneyland? I hated the lines, the enormous hot asphalt parking lots outside, the artifice of the park, the bad fried food. I was shocked at the rip-off admission price and the long, smoggy drive to stand around all day in the sun waiting to get onto rides that lasted about 6o seconds.

Disney is currently fighting an Anaheim city proposal to build affordable housing outside of the park. Why would Disney do this? The current appearance of Anaheim is appalling: cheap, tacky, and embarrassing to both the city and the amusement park.

For many years, Disney has been in the forefront of good architecture and patronage of architects. They built “Celebration” (Florida) a community of sidewalks, front porches and walkable streets. Why wouldn’t it use its immense wealth to better the lives of the modestly paid workers who toil in its Anaheim showplace?

It seems that every time there is a wealthy organization or corporation who has a chance to change and build something better in Southern California, they ignore the surrounding community. I see it in the Getty Center, with its destruction of the natural landscape of the Sepulveda Pass and those egotistical towering laboratories overlooking LA. Why couldn’t Getty have taken $1 or $2 billion and transformed South Central with an “Arts Center” and gardens? How many times a year does the average Angeleno even go to the Getty? I wonder….

Disney is another example of a corporation who only cares what happens within its own walls. It may make big, public donations but when it has a bricks and mortar opportunity to give back to the community, it chooses the side of cheapness and legal argument to short change Anaheim’s poorest residents.

The mouse smells like a rat.

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Yet again…..

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KCAL disguises its advertising for “Spiderman3” in this “news report” in front of the ArcLight.

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Obesity. Sprawl. Cars. Diabetes. Public Transit. Heart Disease. Walking. Asthma. AIr Pollution.

Are there connections between the aforementioned? Of course there are.

At a workshop that I attended today at Our Lady of the Angels, speakers included Dr. Jonathan Fielding of LA County Department of Public Health; Richard J Jackson, MD, a professor at UC Berkeley School of Public Health and Gail Goldberg, LA Director of City Planning. They told an audience of community planners and non-profit health, environment and education workers that green planning will be remaking LA.

Higher density walkable neighborhoods, linked by buses and trains, with pedestrian friendly commercial streets are some of what LA may build in the coming years. The vision of the city of the future, will not be the Jetsons, but Andy Hardy as folks sit on front porches and walk down the block to pick up their dry cleaning, mail a letter and pick up groceries.

The idea behind the greening of LA is that we can improve our health by living in a healthier planned city.

The present statistics on the health of both the US and LA is not encouraging. There is an epidemic of fat, grossly fat children whose parents are also obese. They are costing us both lives and dollars as they come down sick with diabetes, heart disease, cirrosis of the liver and cataracts.

California is busily paving over the most productive farmlands in the world in the Central Valley and by 2030 it will have a population greater than NYC (20 million). And LA continues to have the foulest air in the nation, and the most traffic and hours spent in transit of any other metropolitan area.

I asked the experts if they had any comment on how LAUSD can condemn single family homes to build schools while blighted commercial strips and underutilized asphalt wastelands (Sherman Way, Van Nuys Blvd) sit nearby? They answered that LAUSD is a power onto itself.

Goldberg said that LA is a great, unfinished city and that its challenges should inspire us. Think of her hopes as you drive through Arleta, Van Nuys, Sepulveda, Compton, Watts, etc.