Tag: America

Karen Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

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For those who knew her these past 63 years, Karen Jane Rogers was a good person. Ralph and Karen lived on Hatteras St. in a house they bought for $45,000 in 1971. Kenny, Lisa and Albert were raised there.

Karen taught English at one of the high schools. She grew up here, and was a debater, and also studied nursing, and environmental sciences. She was active in preserving nature: parks, birds, hiking.

Ralph had loaned my dad $5,000 in 1975 when he was out of work. And never asked for the loan back. Karen had taken my cousin to the hospital and paid for her surgery after a car accident. Kenny saved a boy from drowning in Lake Balboa. 

Karen was always guarding the neighborhood from bad things. She would organize clean-ups of trash and illegal dumping. She got the city to condemn a motel used for prostitution. She also called to complain about food violations at a bakery. She was particular about food safety as one of her babies had died after contracting illness from tainted milk. 

A couple of years ago Karen lost Ralph who died of lung cancer. Then a year later Karen herself had a double mastectomy. She survived but was weakened from cancer. Her children, by now married, lived out of state. The only one who stayed in California was Lisa who married an artist, an African-American sculptor named Jacob Livingston and they both lived in Baldwin Hills.

Last year a neighbor lit off some illegal fireworks and one landed on Karen’s garage setting the roof on fire.

Karen was tolerant. She came of age during the 1960s and had empathy for outcasts, minorities, unpopular causes, immigrants and the disabled.

Her street had always been nice, but around 2011 the homeless vans and RVs and tents started appearing. People who lived in homes were experiencing illegal dumping, trash, vagrancy and thefts. 

Karen, along with other neighbors, went to community board meetings to talk to the police and other officials about what could be done.

Then Karen discovered NextDoor which she thought was a wonderful way to keep an eye on her area and get helpful information from other residents.

She posted about one of her neighbors who was illegally selling fireworks out of his garage and who also was burning trash in a backyard incinerator against the law. Karen believed her post would help end these violations and be a bulwark against neighborhood decline and decay. 

When cars started speeding down the street, and one went through an intersection and crashed into a wall, killing the driver, Karen asked for speed bumps to be put on the street. 

When a homeowner rented out his back and front houses to seven noisy TikTok performers who had all night parties, Karen opposed it. 

And when an empty lot two doors down became a dumping ground for mattresses, furniture, televisions, and human excrement, Karen stepped in and called LAPD and reported it on Next Door. 

Then one day, on Next Door, a woman, Jannelle Ju Suarez, posted.

BITCHY OLD WHITE LADY BEING KAREN

Jannelle Ju Suarez

I’m a renter so I don’t get no respect. Which is fine by me. Struggling to feed my kids and working to support our family. So I come out to this community and find that this old bitch named Karen, who doesn’t know me from a fucking hole in the wall, has called the police a number of times just because some young people hang out and have a good time across the street.

Not everyone can afford to call a trash hauling service to take away furniture. Yes, I have placed my old sofa and bed on the curb for anyone who wants it. But I don’t appreciate this Karen calling me and profiling me just because I don’t look like her. 

Katrina Sordec

Oh, thank you for this! I park my car on the street and it’s supposed to be two-hour parking but this Karen lady is constantly reporting me. I have to work all day and sometimes don’t move my car which doesn’t mean I can afford tickets for $75. This Karen should mind her own fucking business!

Krohbar Semati

I agree! These old boomers should just all die! I hate when they think that just because they own a house that everyone who doesn’t is a lesser human bean. Karen has to mind her own business. How does it hurt nobody to lite fireworks and explode M80s! Karen is a pig. I saw her too. She is old, fat, wrinkled, and looks completely miserable!

Tamara Sue Yzboil

I know exlaxly who you are talkings about! She live in the house on Hatteras and she got lemon trees in her bakyard. I went over the fence with my little girl last year to takes some lemons and she comes out and starts yelling at us. I mean I’m wit my little girl. I know lady it’s your fuckin backyard but I don’t got know backyard so do you mind if I takes your lemons? Why are peeps so selfish? This is what is wrong with society. They got know human kindness.

The pile on continued for weeks and months.

Then last week I heard Karen died.

She hung herself by rope in her closet.

Note: Names Have Been Made Up in this Social Satire. None of the events are true. But all of the behaviors are.

Photographing Near the Sepulveda Dam.

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Tim Schneider:  Sepulveda Dam

Recently, I photographed Tim near the Sepulveda Dam.

He was visiting North America from Muenster, Germany, spending a few months traveling around from Cuba to Toronto to Chicago. He bought a used van in the Windy City and rode out to California, criss-crossing the country through Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Arizona and finally ending up in California.

Tim was “discovered” one day outside a fashion show in downtown Los Angeles and signed to a small model agency whose owner hired me to photograph Tim.

He was in California tasting wine in the Santa Ynez Valley when a gunman burst into a Pittsburgh synagogue and killed twelve parishioners. I know because we were leaving the winery when a friend of mine from Pittsburgh texted.

Tim was in California, staying at our home, on November 7, 2018 when a gunman opened fire in Thousand Oaks, CA and killed thirteen people at the Borderline Bar and Grill. 

Tim was here for the Woolsey, Hill and Camp Fires and he walked and biked and lived among us under the smoky skies. 

A friend of mine let Tim visit him in San Francisco and the young German arrived in the most polluted city on Earth on Wednesday, November 14, 2018 when you needed a face mask to walk outside and the hazardous air reading was 300 near the Golden Gate, and only 29 in Van Nuys. 

Tim went to the Huntington Gardens, to Pasadena. He rode electric scooters with me in Santa Monica. And one morning I jokingly used Google Translate to wake him behind his closed door with a German woman saying, “Angela Merkel requests you to wake up.”

He came with us to our pot-luck Thanksgiving where we went to three neighbors’ homes for appetizers, wine, beer, the main course and an array of desserts. 

He celebrated our holiday of thanks, of gratitude, of wonderment, for our American blessings.  Blessings often forgotten or wasted or trampled upon by the ungrateful.

Tim Schneider: Sepulveda Dam

Tim worked as a landscaper in Germany so he came into our backyard, inspected our young trees and set about anchoring them in the correct way according to how he had been taught.

Anchoring a tree.

He is a vegetarian, so for almost a month there was no meat, chicken or fish served at home.  One night he fried potatoes and onions just like his grandmother in Schapdetten.

He was neat, polite, punctual, funny, good-natured, and open to advice. He eschewed the crowd thinking of his generation, preferring to use his own mind to navigate his own tastes in music, movies and pop culture. 

Unique to my experience in Los Angeles, he never didn’t show up on time, or fail to keep an appointment. He kept his word. When I brought him to Koreatown to meet a so-called filmmaker with 10,000 followers on Instagram and that person didn’t arrive, or text or email why,  I told Tim that was how people normally behave in this city. If they think there is nothing in it for them they don’t bother to show up.

He had stayed in crappy AIRBNB’s in a $20 a night place with three strangers. He had slept in his van in the parking lot of a Home Depot in Kansas City. He had stayed with someone he met on the road who allowed him to crash in El Monte. And then he was photographed by a hustler who called himself a photographer and never gave Tim photos because Tim kept his honor and his heterosexuality intact. 

The liars and the con-men and the grifters somehow passed over him without harming him.

This was the 20-year-old German man’s first visit to the United States. And he saw how we live, how we treat one another, how we co-exist. 

Often this nation recalls wistfully its battles against fascism and how freedom prevailed in 1945. We love to replay that song over and over again, thinking of the atrocities of the Nazis and how horrible that time was. 

Yet now we have a different kind of improvisational cruelty in the United States that happens suddenly with violent surprise. We think we are better, yet we tear gas women and children fleeing violence at the border and think we are defending our nation by keeping 5-year-olds separated from their parents.   We go on, living our lives, after random shootings, after walking past homeless people sleeping on the street, and play Christmas songs in the car while others pick food out of the alley dumpsters.

And now a young German man visits and reminds me of what civilized behavior and expectations are. And how sorely lacking in those we are in the City of Angels. But what can I do to correct that? We are what we are as the American Nation.

So I go back to photography, and writing, and lamentations.

Tim Schneider: Sepulveda Dam

Sometimes our city shows off a side of its environment that is at once sublime, cinematic, and, perhaps lonely in its vast arid spaces. Sometimes something noble sprouts up in the ground and manifests its greatness before your eyes like the old Sepulveda Dam with its repeating arches and graceful artfulness. 

And sometimes, a friend is made out of the most unlikely of strange and wondrous coincidences, because they showed up at your house, and you took them in, treated them with respect and kindness, and reaped some reward of brotherhood and international understanding and even love.

Last week, before he left town, before the rain came, we hiked over to the Sepulveda Dam before sunset to capture the late afternoon light.

And then the next day, at Burbank Airport, we said goodbye.

Imperiled

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We are hosting, for the next few weeks, a family gathering. There are guests from Malaysia, Singapore and Switzerland, women all, except for the family patriarch, 83-years-old, who, despite his recent health setbacks, flew 19 hours to see his granddaughter graduate from business school and join the festivities.

The house is crowded and people are sleeping on futons, air mattresses and sofas. We bought sacks of sweet potatoes and Vidalia Onions and cartons of organic cherries, blueberries, and strawberries.

For mental health reasons, I stocked up on beer.

Because this is a Chinese-Malaysian family, I get to see and be a part of, close-up, the Hainan dialect, the Straits accented English, so sharp and so distinct;  and the laughter, and sometimes the arguments which I observe but do not partake in.

Prescriptive, advising, pedantic, loving, cautionary, understanding, this is the general aura. When you are in the embrace, you are looked after, and you look after others.

Around 3 O’Clock in the afternoon there are cakes and coffee and people gathered around the dining room table chatting and laughing and sending photos over mobile devices.

As an American, I take pleasure in people being awed by the things I never think about: the copious enormity of Costco, the directness of speech, the assertive and self-assured women, the large portions of food, the open vulgarity of sexual talk and provocative dress, and the friendly kindness of strangers.

On “The View”, a show blaring today, they were arguing and screaming about politics, and our guests, fully conversant in English, must have wondered about how we get away with saying what we want without fear of arrest or condemnation. There are sedition laws back in Malaysia and public discourse is held back, and one would not broadcast aloud against the government for long without inviting arrest.

Whoopi Goldberg could be a political prisoner there. Imagine that.

One of our guests liked the small chatter and joking banter she saw on the local KTLA news. It was so casual and relaxed she said; so un-like her country.  Target, Costco, Sam Woo…we really do have it all.

Nothing is so nice as being admired for banality.

We went to Vegas for a two-day trip to stay at room cheap, free parking for now Mandalay Bay and visit Hoover Dam.

In the casino, where machines insatiably swallow $20 bills, Liberty Bell shaped smokers waddle through. The smell of second hand smoke wafts through the air like hay in a stable.

We drank at Red Square during their happy hour and had two whisky cocktails for $24. Later on we ate Japanese food where a fist-sized piece of salmon goes for $49. When I went to withdraw cash from the ATM they took a $6.99 fee.

At the elegant Japanese restaurant at Mandalay Bay, men wore Affliction T-shirts and baseball caps or square toed dress shoes with cargo shorts.

DSCF3778

At Terrible’s Gas Station on The Strip the attendant who rang me up called me honey and at the Market Grille Café in North Las Vegas I was darling and I was sir and sweety at the Mizuya Lounge. Vegas is nothing if not affectionate to strangers.

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DSCF3794

DSCF3783

On our way back from Las Vegas yesterday morning, we stopped in the Mojave Desert to see the world’s tallest thermometer, use the restrooms and buy some water.

Hardscrabble, windy and roasting, Baker is significant in its nothingness: a strip of dilapidated and defunct motels, a country store selling hot sauces and craft sodas, and the home of the Mad Greek Diner, occupying a key corner off the highway.

We parked first at the thermometer, which was cool at only 93. We were looking for bathrooms, but we couldn’t find any there. Instead there was a metal and stone monument featuring an egg in a frying pan.

As we made our way down to the country store where urinals and toilets awaited, one uncle received a text from the young woman about to graduate. She was in her classroom at UCLA and her school was in lockdown after a shooting. A gunman, or possibly two, was on the loose.

The uncle told me, but we kept the knowledge of the unfolding events from the mother, the elderly father, and the aunt.

We got back in the car, and were stopped in the middle of the desert by road construction. The temperature outside was about 100 and the air-conditioning was blasting. The two aunties and their father were sleeping in back.

So I turned on the LA news, KNX 1070, and gradually the terrifying words filled the car: police, shooting, FBI, active shooter, two dead, locked in the classrooms, students, LAPD, bomb squad, SWAT team. The mother, napping in back, awoke, and gradually, without us saying anything, realized her youngest daughter’s school was now a crime scene.

A few more texts came from our girl. She said they were hunkered down in darkness. But she was all right.

We are all in our classroom with locked doors and the lights off. I think they confirmed it’s a murder-suicide.

Worried, in suspense, we listened to every development at UCLA as reported by KNX. Why did I turn on that radio?

We inched along at 15 or 20 miles an hour. The traffic broke, and we continued west, now at 60 or 70 MPH into Barstow, and then that steep, disorienting angle into the brown cloud that filled the mouth of the Cajon Pass, and later travelling along the flat 210, in Rancho Cucamonga, we got relief.

We are being let out now.

Our loved one was OK. But someone else lost a son, a friend, a husband; and a killer died who was also someone’s child. Bullets, brains, and blood took their monthly seat alongside erasers and magic markers.

America! What is wrong with you? You have so much going for you! Everyone likes you! People are so impressed by you! Don’t fuck it up! Use your God-given talents! Just like my mother used to tell me.

I am still deeply in love with the United States of America. When foreigners say something against it to my face, I remember it. I want to present it and show it proudly.

Born, was I, in the Land of Lincoln, 97 years after, the 16th President, died.

Riding back from Las Vegas yesterday, a typical American morning unfolded for our guests from Malaysia. I wasn’t proud.

I was ashamed.

Something Quiet and Urgent…

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Something quiet and urgent was hanging over the radio this morning soon after I awoke in the darkness at 5:30am.

LAUSD was expected to make an announcement.

It was forthcoming:  a rumor the schools might be closed down here in Los Angeles.

The sun rose, the skies were clear, the winds blew, and it was a cold morning in December, 9 days before Christmas.

Then it was official.

The schools were, indeed, closed.

A bomb threat had been “sent electronically” (how else are communications sent these days?) and over a half million children would not go to school. Which made many of the students happy, but caused those parents, who work at jobs, to work at worrying, about their kids.

Our alerted and nervous minds went to school, where poisons and dangers and societal toxins lined up near the entrance, under the flag, ready to march past the lockers, down the hall and into the classroom. The diversity of fear, one nation under lockdown, forever ready to give up liberty before death.

Internet, Islam and San Bernardino, caution, children, unforeseen terror, substantiated threat, hoax, fear, prayers, moms, guns and explosives.

It was a day of mayoral and school chancellor pronouncements, of the FBI, the White House and the LAPD, all speaking in front of reporters, and the line of authority acting competent when deep down we know that the sick and the violent soul of humankind casts a darker shadow across our nation these days.

No wonder the blurted and un-thoughtful utterances of Mr. Trump lure us into his mad funhouse of revenge and strongman demagoguery. We know or think we know that he knows what we know. When he blurts out what’s on everyone’s minds, we imagine he can fight and win the battle.

In our country, there are many days when children go to school and nobody tells them to go home, but instead someone armed and ill enters a school and kills.

Those are the days we should fear. Those are the days that have already come too many times.

But it is hard to know what to fear first, so paralyzed with dread are we at red blood under the blackboard.

State of the Union

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Chicago, IL
South Side
2013

“Tonight, I propose a “Fix-It-First” program to put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs, like the nearly 70,000 structurally deficient bridges across the country. And to make sure taxpayers don’t shoulder the whole burden, I’m also proposing a Partnership to Rebuild America that attracts private capital to upgrade what our businesses need most: modern ports to move our goods; modern pipelines to withstand a storm; modern schools worthy of our children. Let’s prove that there is no better place to do business than the United States of America. And let’s start right away.

Part of our rebuilding effort must also involve our housing sector. Today, our housing market is finally healing from the collapse of 2007. Home prices are rising at the fastest pace in six years, home purchases are up nearly 50 percent, and construction is expanding again.

But even with mortgage rates near a 50-year low, too many families with solid credit who want to buy a home are being rejected. Too many families who have never missed a payment and want to refinance are being told no. That’s holding our entire economy back, and we need to fix it. Right now, there’s a bill in this Congress that would give every responsible homeowner in America the chance to save $3,000 a year by refinancing at today’s rates. Democrats and Republicans have supported it before. What are we waiting for? Take a vote, and send me that bill. Right now, overlapping regulations keep responsible young families from buying their first home. What’s holding us back? Let’s streamline the process, and help our economy grow.” -Barack Obama, State of the Union Address, 2/13/13

Back to the Future

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Once or twice, I’ve implied, on this blog, about the deep conservatism of the car show crowd.

I stand by my intuition and observation, as shown by this Romney bumper sticker incongruously and sloppily stuck on the back of a 1956 Ford at Bob’s in Burbank last Friday evening.

Car people are particular. Engines are buffed, vacuumed and wiped flawless with glass cleaner. A piece of dust under a foot pedal is upsetting. So it must be quite a matter of some significance to deface an exquisitely perfect 1956 Ford bumper with a taped on Romney sticker.

Car shows are also about nostalgia. They represent what we imagine and love about the past, a past that never ages or grows old, whose icons and places, Elvis and Ike, Van Nuys Boulevard and the Hollywood Freeway were once young, promising and fresh.

The machines of 50 or 60 years ago had style, they were adventurous in design and innovation, capable of exciting and seducing us, in a way that new cars do not. They ran fast, they took us to drive-in movies, to midnight picnics on the beach, up the road to hide and make out in the moonlit orange groves in the back of a convertible.

In the car show fantasy, nobody ever sat in traffic on a freeway and commuted to a dull job as an actuary in an insurance company. Everyone had a permanent erection and a pretty young thing next to them. And every night was Friday night.

Now the car show crowd is hot and heavy, excited and worked up over the next new marketing invention, Willard Mitt Romney.

31 years after Ronald Reagan took office, the car show crowd is again hoping that a reassuring old model will be inaugurated, a model whose exterior charms and surface good looks represent the best of what America can be, a model male whose wealth, beautiful children and blonde wife stand as proof of the veracity of our nation’s promise, a leader whose banal aphorisms and smooth clichés may soothe our rotted souls and whose lies and reversals masquerade as moderatism.

Like a new car, the new president promises good times, advertising his suitability for any family, his practical experience on the road, his durability, his proven assets, all dramatized in commercials, on stage, in front of an audience of millions. He is shiny, buffed and prosperous.

But there is one deep, dark pothole, on the road to Romney, which may cause him to lose his political goal.

If, by the intervention of Satan, Obama is re-elected, the car show crowd will grumble and groan. The old, red-nosed, white-haired men with their fold-out, blue, big cup chairs and plastic flags will still gather at Bob’s; but the talk, of taxes and debt, war and health care, the big issues, those will once again go underground in hibernation, for four more years, and the focus will shift back to 1955, 1962, 1969, 1972, a past that never dies, a young and eternal past which the old haunt like a prospector panning for gold in a dried up stream bed.