Tag: Culture

Gift of the Pinoy.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , Leave a comment

Across the street from where I live, over the past few years, a succession of health care workers have taken care of an older Guatemalan born man and his wife.

When we first moved here, I would see the old, white-haired, squinting man come out of the cyclone fence gate, and pull up weeds or pick up litter in front of a narrow strip of lawn that bordered a lush garden of banana trees, cacti, grapefruit and Birds of Paradise.

The pink stucco house with the old red tile roof and its inhabitants entered the driveway in a large van from which emerged people on crutches, and on canes, carrying shopping bags and sometimes waving to me.

Then there were strange faces, workers, behind the gate, sweeping the driveway, watering the pots of geraniums, staring across at me, as if I lived beyond their imprisonment, in a free world of orange trees, athleticism, sunshine and youth.

I thought that perhaps some of the men who looked over were looking at me, cruising, or maybe trying to ascertain if I were gay.

The old man and his wife, and his family who used to come outside, have gone away, and now I only see Filipino faces entering the house; and I wonder often if the old man is sick or dead and what has happened to the wife who once kindly brought me a bag of backyard grapefruits.

The weather was ambiguous and tentative today, opening up to sunshine and clouds, wind and stillness; so I went outside and took a long, wooden citrus picker and harvested some of my oranges on the tree.

A white Honda pulled into the old man’s driveway. And two men, a young man, and a woman got out. The woman went into the house, and the three males walked out of the shadows, into the sun, and suddenly appeared on my driveway.

Short, smiling, in sweats and baseball caps, they introduced themselves: a father, his brother, and a 20-year-old son.

The young one asked me about my house. He wanted to know how long I lived here, what the neighborhood was like and who I lived with.

He said that he and his family lived near Beverly and Normandie. He worked downtown, in a restaurant, on the 54th floor of the Wells Fargo Building.

The father took a bite of the orange and said it was sweet.

I told the son about my Filipino connections, the friends I know who come from there and visit there.  My ignorance of the Philippines is immense. There is simply nothing I really know about the people, food, language or culture;  yet somehow I retain a great admiration for them.

“Do you live here with your wife and children?” the son asked.

“No,” I said. “I live here with my partner. And sometimes we have a roommate. But that doesn’t usually work out.”

“You have a really beautiful place. We want to buy a house. Maybe get everyone together and chip in. It’s so loud where we live and it’s so quiet and peaceful here,” the son said.

He admiringly looked at my modest blue Mazda 3, sitting in the garage. “I’ve seen you driving that car. So that’s what you drive.”  In his earnest search for life knowledge and practical know-how he seemed to have found me and imagined that I had answers.

I had gone for a run that morning, and then showered and put on an old, gray Pringle cashmere inherited from my late father. To the family from the Philippines, the ones who came over today and look after the old sick ones across the street, I was blessed. My clothes and my house and my face and my education, designations of class and wealth and privilege, they all worked like a stage show in front of these visitors’ eyes.

But the truth is that my situation seems as tenuous and fragile as the dried out branches on the orange tree.

Last night, it was time for that yearly meeting with the accountant who laid out, in numbers and boxes, ominous red digits and impending taxes.  Like a heart patient who visits the cardiologist, an unemployed man dreads April 15th. Despite the withdrawing of pension money, the borrowing of money, and maternal cash infusions, the balance sheet is indeed awful. How long we might live here is anyone’s guess.

But today, there were smiles and handshakes and humanity under the California cumulus. The Pinoy brought a gift to me today. They showed me again what it means to have been born lucky, even when you think you are not.

On the Train to Hollywood.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , 2 Comments



Your Best, originally uploaded by Here in Van Nuys.

I rode the train down to Hollywood and Highland the other day, my way to enter the city that is part protest and part convenience.

Los Angeles is fast becoming a city. It is true that millions live here on mountain and plain extending from Palm Springs to the Pacific, but to disembark from a Hollywood subway and walk up into a dense conglomeration of bars, restaurants, stores, apartments, and theaters; that has eluded the City of Angels which prefers to offer up asphalt and sunshine and days spent inside looking at the TV in air-conditioned isolation. But things are changing.

Near Hollywood and Whitley, there was police action. A Mexican bicyclist had accidentally clipped off the side mirror of a Bentley and the owners, two black men, beat and bloodied his face. The bruised Latino sat on the sidewalk, while several cops filed reports and dozens of witnesses watched.

Across the street, another young man on a bike, Derrick, told me that he just came here from San Antonio, TX and was staying at the Roosevelt but had been robbed and had nowhere to stay so he just rode around the city all day. He had come to LA to get away from bad people in Texas and now he was living the dream here.

Hollywood Boulevard, incidentally, has some of the ugliest clothes in LA seen north of Melrose. Everything tacky from five years ago: graphic t-shirts, baggy jeans, garish jackets, they all are presented with vast indifference by smoking shopkeepers. The sidewalks outside of the store smell like urine. The north side is baked in sun and smog, and the south side in perpetual darkness and shade.

I was down here on one of my “jobs”, photographing a model who, in his demeanor and looks, emits privilege, elegance, health and happiness. And on his Twitter stream, asks for dog-sitting jobs, begs for car rides to Silver Lake, and tweets of eviction, depression, exhaustion, sinus infections, flu and seeing Jennifer Anniston on the street.

You want to warn young hopefuls not to be, to advise them to get out of here before they get old and fat and move to Woodland Hills to work for Anthem, but it is futile when you have a mouth full of white teeth on an unlined face and your body fat is only 3 percent.

On the train back to North Hollywood, there was a bicyclist, holding his new thin-tired machine evocative of Italy and leanness. He told me how he rides from Van Nuys to Hollywood and got hit by a car last year. He was sanguine and not-at-all bitter about his injury, and seemed to be a genuine chipper urbanite of the new, denser Los Angeles who looks beyond his car, engaging the urban life with feet and rapid heart beat.

Later that night, we went to my favorite cheap sushi restaurant in Valley Village. As I sat eating, a young man walked by the window. He had greasy long blond hair and sad eyes. He looked, not with lust but in need, directly at me.

After we left the restaurant and got into the car the haunted young man walked up to my window and asked me if I had any change to spare.

And I didn’t have the kindness, I admit, to give him anything.

So I was back in the Los Angeles, not in Hollywood, not in the train, but in the land where nobody has money but people with money.

Studio City Farmer’s Market.

Posted in CultureTagged , , , , Leave a comment

And sometimes, on Sunday morning, after the gym, I go to the Farmer’s Market on Ventura Place, in Studio City, where I eat a Blue Corn Tamale with Salsa, walk around, and observe and pronounce judgment on strangers who look familiar but whom I’ve never met.

At the eastern end, near Radford, animals and children’s amusements are crowded into the street, under the mirrored façade of an office building reflecting light onto juvenile encampments of goats, chickens, rabbits and ponies.  A large, inflated trampoline hums with laughter and an electric generator.  A little Choo-Choo train carries parents and their popcorn-munching progeny around an improvised track.

There are fathers and mothers of all ages, and they all seem to have children between 1-5 years of age. Observing these parents, one sees education and ambition on lined faces, framed in semi-silver hair, who once came young to Hollywood, in search of work that could be prosperous and creative but found instead:  exhaustion, humiliation, and defeat.

These are not the round bellied, 40-year-old men in suburban Chicago or Houston. They are basically trim, stubble faced, capped in baseball and wearing the team hats of the TV shows they once worked on five years ago.  There is not a 40-year-old who dresses older than 25, and for that matter, there are barely any real 25-year-olds here. Perhaps they are sleeping off hangovers.

These aging crowds, in a street performance which could be entitled, “Facade of Youth” are like plastic and paper, to be constantly remade in the liberal precincts of Los Angeles. Their careers and lives, ever recyclable, will be trashed or used again depending on the whim of employer or lover.

I would like to come here to take pictures, holding my new Nikon d3100 DSLR with the interchangeable lens, but I dare not. A real camera is a real threat to this crowd. It is legal to photograph anyone, including a minor, in a public place, but the new custom, adopted by those whose individual lives might turn up 8,000 entries a piece on Google, is to deplore photographers.

Once, 30 or more years ago, an unlisted telephone number was enough to insure privacy. But today, Zabasearch and BlockShopper would probably uncover the age and home addresses of most anyone walking down Ventura Place with their environmentally correct canvas bag full of organic mushrooms and Meyer Lemons.

There is communal kindness and sartorial casualness on parade at the Studio City Farmer’s Market. It seems that people run into each other and exchange stories about what day care or diet their children are on. With sunlight and warmth bathing the fruits and vegetables, sellers and buyers, one feels marinated in the ideal recipe of life in the Golden State; a cornucopia of the imagined happy life….

But later on today, the market folds, the crowds disperse and the stands go away.

And the cars–speeding, honking and texting– will return and another week of busy unemployment will consume the lives of those who walked and shopped here on Sunday morning.

Kunstler on the Tuscon Killings.

Posted in CultureTagged , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

James Howard Kunstler writes provocative critiques about the decline of America, interpreted through the aesthetic ugliness of our strip malls, billboards, and vacuous suburban environment.   He speculates about why young men, facing meaningless work and oppressive debt, might go mad in a nihilistic nation that has destroyed its own character and integrity:

“The rewards of entering the realm beyond college are paltry-to-miserable. Solitary cab rides to the mall. A burrito and a Big Gulp. Later, back home, an hour in the virtual company of the Kardashian sisters via the E-Network on your parents’ cable TV. Where are the initiations into manhood? (Try the channelized dry-wash, courtesy of the Barrio Blue Moon boyz.) I’m convinced that the reason video games and movies aimed at young males in America are devoted almost solely to fantasies about super-heroes and supernatural power (especially the power to kill) is because adolescent boys feel so impotent, so powerless, so unlike real men. The adults in this culture do not furnish any meaningful alternative scripts. That’s the market’s job, I guess.”

Cloudy Morning: Van Nuys.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Cloudy Morning: Van Nuys

Under the cover of clouds, I walked along Kester, Sylvan, Van Nuys Blvd., Aetna, and Oxnard streets this morning.

Kester is well-known as perhaps the filthiest street in Van Nuys, with trash-filled curbs, wrecked vehicles, and yards full of debris and neglect. Slumlord owners and indifferent managers create much of the property abuse. The tenants, amazingly, do not. It is not the fault of a renter if a building fails to repair a damaged roof, or if a mini-mall cannot sweep its curb daily.

Sylvan, between Kester and Van Nuys Blvd., is a mixture of older homes, 1950s and 60s apartments, and new construction. Some of the buildings are quite neat and tidy, while others have couches, garbage cans, and discards strewn about.

Van Nuys Blvd. is neither broken down or upscale. It is just simply unpleasant. There is nowhere good to eat; nothing fashionable to buy. Cars speed by, on a six-lane street, under the daytime burning sun and nighttime orange glow of the cobra lamps.

Most of the stores are for bail, legal services, pot dispensaries and do-it-yourself salvation/damnation churches.

A very red-hot dog stand is a bright note on Erwin and VNB right across from the Mall. An apron clad, Asian woman working there, seeing my camera, came outside and motioned me to not photograph the building. Business must be very good there to turn away free publicity.

Aetna and Bessemer, two streets that parallel the Busway, are industrial and contain machine shops, car repair and other functions involving grinding, grease and garbage.

On Aetna at Vesper, there is an elegant, two-story, Art Deco, 1930s structure that must have served some governmental function seven decades ago. It stands amidst the vast asphalt car lots and waiting braceros.

All that is missing from this environment is a plan and the money to remake it. Kandahar, Islamabad and Baghdad stand in front of the line, ahead of Van Nuys, at Uncle Sam’s bank.

Old Burbank in Photographs.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Reader Boyd Kelly sent me a link where one can find many old time images of Burbank.

They show an all-white, all-American town, baked in sunshine; a place of boys and men in close-cropped hair, girls in braids, and women in dresses. Magnolia, Hollywood Way, Victory, Olive, Alameda, San Fernando Road: all the storied and exciting locations, sprinkled with cops, firemen, government officials, soda jerks, grease monkeys and the common folk. Lives lived out alongside the train tracks, or inside the studio grounds, saluting the flag, and kneeling in front of the cross.

Aviators and movie makers, weapons makers and homemakers, ball players and ice-cream eaters, swimmers and parade goers, Nixon rallies and Nazi gatherings….yes, this is Burbank as it was….and perhaps Burbank as it still is.