Tag: opinion

Young Asia.

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They were young when we boarded Singapore Airlines at LAX, bound for Tokyo. 22 men and women, flight attendants, smooth skinned, well mannered, and slim, women with hair pulled back wearing Sarong Kebaya. Graceful, smiling, polite, they maneuvered in and out of the aisles, pushing carts, pouring tea.

The flight left on time and touched down in Tokyo as silently and softly as a Kleenex falling on a pillow.

The airports were dazzling, slick, architectural and inviting: Tokyo Narita, Singapore Changi, and KLIA.  Customs officials in every nation were polite, well-spoken, welcoming. Everything they are not in Los Angeles.

The skyscrapers were young, newly built, tall, dropped into every corner of Kuala Lumpur: Icon Mount Kiara, Charigali Tower, 60 floors tall, St. Regis Hotel, 80 stories tall, Menara Tradewinds, Warisan Merdeka (118 Floors Tall!), KL Tower (Menara Kuala Lumpur) 1,381 feet tall, Ilham Baru Tower (62 floors).  They were clearing out jungles, paving over valleys, erecting vast suburban housing and vertical towers in Cyberjaya, Shah Alam, Bangsar, Petaling Jaya. Soon, a high-speed train will connect Singapore, KL and Bangkok.

The land was young, landfill on the west side of Melaka, thousands of acres of new commercial buildings lined up like soldiers in a future army of retail, uninhabited infants.  Old classical mansions that once stood on the shore were abandoned and empty, their contents stolen, their memories wiped clean.

The KL malls were new, full of shoppers, hordes of black haired boys and girls in bright scarves and long dresses, eyes glued in their smart phones, moving through vast air-conditioned, bright spaces. The Pavilion! KLCC Suria! Star Hill Gallery!

The Malaysian highways were new, and along the new landscaped lanes, billboards shouted advertising with smiling faces, multi-cultural Malay and Chinese faces beaming in Samsung, Jasmine Rice, Panasonic, Thai Airways, Telekom Malaysia, Air Asia, Hyundai.

The Malaysian born bride was young, effervescent, intelligent, ambitious, and well connected. She owned a condo, a house (under remodel) worked for a bank and travelled to Singapore, Bali, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seoul, and Melbourne. She had a lot of friends, a lot of family, a lot of generosity and much love around her. She was the future, for just this moment, of a region where education and money are exploding exponentially.

And the trains in Tokyo, the intersections of Shibuya, Shimokitazawa, Ginza, Shinjuku, they were young, overwhelmingly so, populated with hundreds of thousands of post 1985 human beings pouring off the modern perfectly run trains, into stores and shops and cafes, hurrying everywhere, acquiring purses, shoes, makeup, perfume, suits, electronics.

Inside the endless shops of Tokyo Station, the bowing and the smiling, the serving and the selling, a furious, unabated, exhausting and exhilarating controlled carnival of commerce, this was Japan.

And everywhere, in every corner, the spirit, the energy, the optimism, the faith in tomorrow and the future, a region poised to take over the world, relentless in its work, socialized to harmonize, grouped en masse into money-making and modernism, this was young Asia.

I went here on holiday, for three weeks, to attend a wedding in Kuala Lumpur, to vacation in Phuket, Thailand and stop off in Tokyo for four days.

I came back to Los Angeles in culture shock. For what I saw back there made the Golden State seem dyspeptic, backward, self-congratulatory– without merit.  Our new international airport had dirty windows; the customs people were fat and shouted angrily at passport holders. The bus was late and the driver made jokes (“This bus isn’t going to Van Nuys. Long Beach! Just kidding!”) that delayed our trip.

And the news was that the government was shut down. I thought of that on the 405 bus ride home, having just seen, 10 hours earlier, postal workers at work at Tokyo Station, on Sunday afternoon.

America is no longer young, in outlook or output, and I wonder if we even have any dreams left in our national imagination.

The Holdouts.

Posted in Culture, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 1 Comment



Not far from my house in Van Nuys, there is an unimproved street without gutters or sewers, where the blacktop was probably laid down 80 years ago, past large parcels where grew walnuts, oranges and figs.

On Columbus Avenue, there are perhaps five properties of 20-30,000 square feet each. Most of the houses are rented, ramshackle places with overgrown weeds, dry grasses, cyclone fences, trucks parked on the meridian, and slanted roof cottages housing lawful people and unindicted felons who hide behind tall lumber and cinder block and eek out a living as gardeners, actors, piano tuners and truckers.

Up until the last wave of prosperity crashed into itself, speculators had bought up some of these places, intending to tear them down and stack together stucco developments.

Some of these places, which nobody can sell, might be worth $300,000. But a few years ago they were asking $700,000 and now the owners are defaulting and trying to unload their gambles.

I rode my bike last week and passed a man who I see once a year at my neighbor’s Christmas party and he invited me into his compound where I met dozens of cats, picked figs off the trees, and walked into a Depression Era scene that might have come out of Bonnie and Clyde.

While we talked, another man, a younger man, carrying a Canon DSLR, walked up the very long driveway, and joined us. He was a location scout interested in photographing the place.

There is a lot of filming in our area. A show called “Workaholics” is shooting here now, on a street where many people are jobless but where some young post-collegiate comedians posted a Youtube video and sold a show to Comedy Central.

One might drive past the Workaholics House and see a horse and carriage, or a rowboat tacked up on the roof, and on other occasions I may have seen an elephant hosing down a car, and some old lady with a broom chasing straw hatted kids on skateboards.

Every other week, dozens of trucks and hundreds of crew- members come here, and film a fiction about life in Van Nuys, using our real world as a cheap and ironic backdrop for the callow humorlessness of modern hip Hollywood.

My idea of funny is still “The Dick Van Dyke Show” or “All in the Family” just as my idea of a film is “The Best Years of Our Lives” and my favorite singer is Frank Sinatra and I don’t think any house built after 1945 is attractive.

So I live in the past and I run from the present and wander through this city with a camera and a laptop computer. And hope that someone will anoint me with gold dust.

And escapism, and the ability to dream and imagine, and produce and prosper, that is only for a lucky few in Van Nuys.

The rest are holdouts, living in rented places, or hanging onto places they own but will never own and may lose before they die.

Positivism.

Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , 1 Comment

We went yesterday, Sunday, to visit C & J at their new home near the Pacific.

They moved here, retired and prosperous, in good health and of their own free will, to be nearer their children and family.

Tall, well educated, erudite, self-confident, witty, they both exude a mastery of life.  She runs her own design business and is a great cook. He was a financial whiz and worked in that industry and retired young.

Now he can joke about his busy life: playing tennis, bridge, and reading novels on Kindle.

They moved to a privileged slice of California, one that is available for only a chosen few, a place where the temperature is always 30 degrees cooler than the baking interior, and the lovely fog settles over the land every night, bathing the abundant roses in moisture, insuring that youth and spring are eternal.

The host drove us around the neighborhood in a BMW convertible. His impressions of the Golden State were effusive. We descended towards the Pacific, and he spoke, “The state is bankrupt, but look at the marvelous parks and recreational facilities they provide.”  He marveled at those drivers who let him into their lanes, and who stop at four way intersections. His California was benevolent, courteous, lush and unhurried.

He characterized his life as “blessed”. The kids were doing well. One worked in executive compensation and made a “shitload”.  He recalled his own fortunate work life, and told of leaving one company, and then semi-retiring, waking up one day and realizing he needed money again and then earning it, copiously.

Back inside the home, we walked past a fountain and into freshly painted white rooms scented with baked butter and ocean air.

C showed us her enormous kitchen with countless driftwood stained cabinets, acres of countertop, and floor-to-ceiling pantry painted in an exact shade of medium green that matched a leather purse purchased in Italy.  We drank mimosas and ate Cobb salad. The windows and doors were left open. No flies were present and the temperature never deviated from 68 degrees.

We went back into the convertible and drove down the coast and stopped by a new red-tiled resort.  We took a golf cart tour of the property and saw the golf course, the swimming pool, the casalitas, the cabanas wired with wi-fi, the restaurants, and the requisite environmental park, a piece of do-goodiness meant to offset the rapacious materialism and overt gaudiness of the overreaching resort.

In the car, I had a deja vu experience.

30 years earlier, my Uncle B, eminent cardiologist from Glencoe, Illinois, had divorced my Aunt M and absconded to Hawaii with his girlfriend. He then came back to practice in Newport Beach. We went to visit him, and he lustily and happily showed us his new life in Southern California with his stucco covered, cathedral-ceiling home and gleaming white medical office tower overlooking the lushly landscaped luxury shopping mall.

I was young then, but saw coastal California for what it claimed not to be.  Even then knew it was a mere slice,  a dessert topping, a chimera, a dream, a fabrication, a tangible and mythical construction of lies, temporarily seductive, but ultimately unreal, sustainable only by the sheer force of a mind that can block out the state’s vast interior with its suffocating, smoggy heat, and ignoble, sprawling insipidness.

Today, I am back in Van Nuys and the temperature will be close to 100. I will search for a job, and hope I can find a way to make a living, and I will think about that certain Sunday along the ocean.