Tag: Biden

Obama Fundraiser: Silverlake, October 4, 2008.

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For ten years a dead external hard drive lay abandoned in our garage, a device that once backed up our desktop computer from 2007-2012 and then suddenly died.

We cleaned our garage last month and found the dead drive. We took it to a tech in Toluca Lake who retrieved everything for $150.

Now we have tens of thousands of revived photos, seemingly taken yesterday, but actually 14 years old. I’m going through the files now and labeling them.

One folder contained a memorable evening from October 4, 2008. 

On that night, we attended an Obama fund raiser at a private home in Silver Lake along a winding street above Sunset.

There is my 36-year-old brother Rick with his wife, Pri, and her 27-year-old sister Rue. Muscular, smiling, shirtless Jeremiah and his girlfriend Ivy.

There are good friends and acquaintances in floor dragging denim and long t-shirts under short ones. Fun includes John McCain, Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney piñatas, lots of Shepard Fairey designed HOPE t-shirts with Obama’s face, and me in an Obama mask. There are masks of Biden too.

There is food and drink and Ivy in with her Smart Women Vote Obama button.  

The crowd is gay and straight, black, white, asian, male, female. There are high tech devices like digital cameras that are strictly digital cameras, not smartphones.

There are cute young kids and old dogs snuggled up on the sofa.

What I remember most from the event is that one of the guys there wanted to sleep with me, and a woman who had a high position in production wanted to hire me for photography but never hired me.

Through time all the famous faces from that night are connected in our long political show that never ends, jumping from event to event, begging for analysis, but often falling into irrationality, emotionality and missed opportunities.

#BlockGarcetti: A City United

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  • Hollywood Freeway Offramp, Western Av., Homeless, 2020
  • Old Post Office
  • Homeless, Bus Bench
  • Homeless Trash
  • Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016
  • Van Nuys Boulevard, 2018, at the height of prosperity, before the pandemic.

The possible, rumored appointment of Mayor Eric Garcetti to a post in the Biden Administration has provoked protests at the mayor’s house in Hancock Park, daily, for the last week.

Black Lives Matter and other leftwing groups are angry at him for everything that ails this city. He hasn’t disbanded the police, he hasn’t legalized illegal trash camping on streets, he seems to sympathize with those powers who wear uniforms and carry guns and enforce laws against lawbreakers. Appalling. 

And those who are not protesting, but living here in this city, under the Garcetti years, are also angry. 

We are disgusted with encampments that burn up the parks, that litter the freeways with tents, shopping carts and garbage, that destroy the environment as if it is their right, befouling beaches, streets, sidewalks, bus benches and the urban region. 

We are aghast that a state, whose economy is the seventh largest in the world, cannot manufacture housing to house the unhoused. We are appalled by the sight of squalor everywhere and the abandonment of the most ill, helpless and lost people who are permitted to turn the entire city into a mental institution.

We are bitterly laughing that a new lamppost contest was initiated by Mayor Garcetti in the midst of an unprecedented housing crisis. Who would devote city resources to the redesign of streetlights when there are people living on mattresses under all styles of outdoor illumination?

We know 2020 has been a year unlike any other. But we also know that all the other years that lead up to 2020, when Los Angeles was allegedly prosperous, humming along happily, these were the years when this city fell apart, way before a virus arrived.

So we cheer the protesters at his house, and hope the new administration does not promote him to a position undeserved. 

Somehow Eric Garcetti has brought the people of this city together, all the people who disagree, for they all agree that he has destroyed the quality of life in Los Angeles and should not be called to Washington for any high title or undeserved honor.

“He cracked open a space where the light could shine through.”

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“As the country waited for ballots to be counted, it was Biden — not the occupant of the Oval Office — who was reassuring people that this democracy was intact, that the system was working and that the center would hold. He was the voice of calm optimism in the midst of tumultuous times.

When he became president-elect late Saturday morning, he did something far more herculean than accepting responsibility for a worsening pandemic and a struggling economy. He removed a terrible, suffocating weight from the back of this nation. For the more than 74 million Americans who voted for him — and surely even for some of those who did not — Biden’s election allowed this country to laugh, to dance and to breathe. He cracked open a space where the light could shine through. Indeed, his victory caused people to weep in joyful relief as they became aware of the heaviness that had afflicted their hearts, after they’d suddenly been relieved of it.”-Robin Givhan, Washington Post, Nov. 7, 2020

  • Rainbow Over Van Nuys High School
    Rainbow Over Van Nuys High School