Westward Ho!

Across (And Around) 110th Street

This NYT article has a hidden joke -- author John Freeman Gill interviews a black person named Keith White and a white person named Jamie Black. The piece is one of many "there goes the neighborhood" gentrification stories the Times has published, but this one hints at something pretty interesting without having the column inches to give it proper investigation.

If every part of New York City has its L.A. equivalent, then the Central Park North and Morningside Heights analog would be Exposition Park/Historic West Adams (where USC is, basically). Central Park's northern border is 110th Street, and much like the 10 freeway out here, it's got a reputation as a cultural dividing line for a lot of people, a Rubicon never to be crossed or even approached. In real life (and to be sure, the real life of 2006), the lines are much blurrier than that. Morningside Heights, to the immediate west of Central Park North, is home to Columbia University and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, while just southeast of CPN proper is Museum Mile (ending at 104th St.).

There's money all over that area, and never in the history of the city has it been considered one of the worst ghettos (the apartment buildings that dot 5th Avenue around Museum Mile cater to some honest-to-god wealth, in fact). But we still see the north end of the park as somewhat sketchy. The sky-high housing projects and impossibly wide avenues give it that awful '60s "urban renewal" feel; however this only represents a couple of blocks' worth of bad planning. The elegance of the mixed-income Morningside Heights, and the Echo Park- like community pride of Spanish Harlem, make this section of Manhattan lots of fun to walk through. The gentrification has happened, but perhaps because of the geography it's happening a little slower than in other 'hoods.

There are very few Manhattan neighborhoods that are still significantly (if not predominantly) lower- or middle-income, and all of them are above, say, East 96th St. On the east side, Manhattan ends around 131st St. and becomes the Bronx, while on the west side, it technically ends on the U.S. Mainland -- a bit north of 225th St. in a Bronx-bounded area called Marble Hill. Harlem, though it's experienced a renaissance over the past decade (Bill Clinton rented office space there!), has such negative associations with its name that it's retained a lingering, South Central-ish stigma. (And Harlem, like the former "South Central," is a whole urban region, a state of mind.)

Doing better in the whitey-reputation department are Inwood and Washington Heights. Economically, the L.A. equivalent might be Venice (stockbrokers and gangbangers side by side), but Inwood and Washington Heights aren't beach-culture trashy (no beach), they're as rocky and cliffy and viewy and far-from-the-madding-central-city as Malibu, and as full of serene, majestic deco-era apartment buildings as the nicer parts of Hollywood and Los Feliz. Apartments are still vaaaaguely affordable there -- people I know who like the area say it's just too much of a commute to midtown and downtown, and people I know who've been there but don't really "get" cities (and will move back to Darien in six months) are turned off by all the Spanish signs and the old guys hanging out on the street. Despite a reported increase in median income, it hasn't lost it's character, and I don't believe it ever will.

Anyway: I'm not predicting the end of the world with this Central Park North condo development. It takes a hell of a lot to kill a strongly settled New York neighborhood these days -- as Bruce Ratner is finding out over in Brooklyn. Angelenos can learn from New Yorkers that one of the best forms of protest is proactivity. If you build a great, solid community that's worth fighting for, the battle will end on your side regardless of the outcome -- even if the bad guys win (and they do win, cuz they've got $$$), they'll look really stupid and the history books will not be kind to them. Compared to Ratner's Atlantic Yards project, this condo is a lone drop of piss in the ocean. Choose those battles wisely.

L.A.'s Olympic Theme Song

The Olympic games get their share of face-time in big historical retrospectives of  sports and pop culture and patriotism. But do you remember any of the official theme songs of Olympics past? Superproducer Giorgio Moroder wrote two of them: "Reach Out" for the '84 games in Los Angeles, and "Hand In Hand" for the '88 Seoul games (I have the corresponding LP for the latter in storage back home; I found it for like two dollars in a Jersey City used-vinyl shop). And now, according to a Chinese news site, Moroder is interested in writing a theme song for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Like "Hand in Hand," "Reach Out" manages to be both motivational and maudlin, and ultimately not that different from the original material Simon Cowell and friends make the American Idol contestants sing -- appeasing everyone while appealing to no one, being just likably vapid enough to keep the lawsuits at bay.

Moroder made some inspired music in the '80s, from the usual oft-cited soundtrack hits to albums with Nina Hagen and L.A.'s favorite sons Sparks. In 1984 he could have rolled out of bed and plucked a terrific Olympic contribution out of his left nostril. Instead, L.A. was given this.

Dear Giorgio: We're bidding for 2016. Come through for us or we're calling Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

Scared Squid, With Pirate

I woke up with the TV on this Saturday morning and was momentarily disoriented -- I'd fallen asleep to the persuasive drone of a Pilates-ball infomercial, and when I opened my eyes again there was a screaming cartoon squid who had recently escaped the Sharpie of a swarthy live-action pirate. Following the URL in the frame, I learned that the show, It's Curtoon Time, is in the regular rotation on South Orange County's Cox Communications - Channel 3, shoots out of Rancho Santa Margarita, and has been on since 1987. The "Curt" is cartoonist Curt Visca, who wears outrageous costumes and teaches kids how to draw, in a Pee-Wee's Playhouse-like setting.

I know I'm a newbie to these shores, but I've long been familiar with Southern California's local TV legends (Huell Howser, Cal Worthington, etc.), and this one caught me by surprise. Is he a legend, or just some crackpot who won't give up?

And speaking of Cal Worthington: a couple of weeks ago, I spotted him in a 1973 film called Save the Tiger. Here he is, flickering in the background on a bar's television while Jack Gilford and Jack Lemmon talk business (and baseball). In the movie, Gilford and Lemmon are aging Los Angeles garment-industry bosses arranging to burn down one of their factories in the hope that the insurance payout will help them meet their annual budget.

The Two Faces of Westward Ho

viewfromaloft gives me a namecheck (thanx), and writes "I wonder what her take of the city is." Well, I probably shouldn't try to answer that while I'm sick with food poisoning, but I'm not sure what would qualify as a better moment.

Short answer: Boundless, unabashed, all-consuming love. (It's a tough love, though.)

Longer answer: There are two sides to my personality.

One is no-nonsense, efficient, a concerned citizen-of-the-earth who adores people but wishes they'd wake the fuck up from their stupors -- and sometimes I'm very ascetic too, requiring little to get by and alternately feeling indifferent to and disappointed by the extravagances of other humans' lifestyles. A hippie, if you must, but with the ultimate goal of remaining grounded in reality rather than the utopian astral plane. Like a reclusive hack writer: gimme a cheap room, a gallon of coffee, a newspaper, and some antacid for when the newspaper gets too upsetting.

The other side of me is just OBSESSED with the 20th century: with ill-advised but wonderfully hideous modernist cultural fiascos, with the psychology and hilarity of megalomania, queeny auteurism, Cold War paranoia, etc. And cars! I don't have a license and I've never driven an automobile for more than a few minutes, but I TOTALLY have a thing for the aesthetics of vintage cars and mid-century Route 66 road culture. (TV series I'm most looking forward to torrenting: Alton Brown's upcoming Feasting On Asphalt.) My inner art-nerd can't get enough of atomic design, googie signage, opulent neon, decaying stucco motels that still retain vestiges of their awesome period detail, tiki, Mexigoth, and of the decadent-but-chic elegance of Old Palm Springs. I'm a movie buff with a penchant for big-budget studio endeavors (and small indies too). I love listening to the coffee-shop convos of film-biz dudes with their namedroppy industry shorthand. I'm fascinated by rock-star chutzpah and excess and glam-punk arrogance and the '70s L.A. subculture we now call Yacht Rock.

I think that both NYC and Los Angeles have their lion's share of manic modernism (for better or worse) and proletarian humility (for better or worse), and it's why both places feel like home to me. Plus I can find anything I want here even if getting to it might require some extra time and strategic planning -- and adventure is my favorite cure for homesickness.

I refuse to let my cities rest on their laurels though, or shrug my shoulders and excuse their problems because "that's just how it is." We have to forge ahead, to expect and demand greatness, and to never forget our own role in cultivating that greatness.

Is There a New York Housing Crisis?

This post makes a brief detour into NYC, since both my hometown and Los Angeles have similar policies on affordable housing. A City Journal article titled "Is There a New York Housing Crisis?" has been making the internerd rounds (originally via Martini Republic), and I stayed up late last night chatting about it with my friend Chris and marveling that the line between me-first shock-jocks like Tucker Carlson/Bill O'Reilly and the ostensibly more cerebral world of "legit" journalism and academia is such a thin, opaque one.

Conservative views, when measured out with SOME semblance of concern for humanity, can be useful as a means of keeping liberalism in check, and it's unfortunate that both sides have learned from TV that there's only everything and nothing, my way or the highway. I'm interested in good ideas, and I know that very often the best ideas are the ones that neither (or none) of the warring factions is emotionally attached to. So I tried to read "Is There a New York Housing Crisis" with an air of detachment, but then the (female) author had to get her digs in at "the dysfunctional underclass" and unwed mothers who aren't shrewd enough to find husbands to solve their financial woes. And I just felt like she rendered moot any good points she might have had and made me wanna kick her in the uterus, repeatedly.

I wasn't gonna blog about this, but I may as well.

New York's real estate market is an interesting case and shouldn't really be compared to most of the rest of the country (LA exempted, maybe). The most socially desirable part of the city, Manhattan, isn't as pricey as it is merely because of rent control -- it's because Manhattan is a relatively small and extremely narrow parcel of land with an 843-acre park in the middle of it (which is lovely, don't get me wrong). And because white-collar businesses want to be in Manhattan rather than the philistine outer boroughs with their philistine 718 area codes, they acquire scads of Wall Street and midtown office buildings that eat up yet more available land. The waterfronts (on both the East River and Hudson sides) are very valuable too, and much of it is being rezoned away from industrial use and towards "leisure." (An anti-preservationist would call for the lower-density historic brownstones of Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side to be razed for high-rises, but I think it's important for cities to have a variety of densities and differences of neighborhood character. Besides, those neighborhoods aren't exclusively brownstones; there are many beautiful, well-appointed, landmarked 8- or 9-story apartment buildings that were built between the late 19th century and the end of the '20s.)

The author, interestingly, notes that if you go into the outer boroughs, it's not difficult to find decent apartments under $1200/mo -- and it's very very true, which kinda destroys her theory that there's no middle-class housing in NYC. (I think she means "no middle class housing in Manhattan," which is her real concern for People Like Her -- all those yucky low-income minorities are free to flee for the boroughs, though.)

I also wonder about these mythical $600/mo apartments (where are they? East New York?) and whether the mojo of the free market is going to suddenly turn a $2400/mo luxury 1-bedroom into a more middle-class $900/mo 1-bedroom. Not in Manhattan. But then, this disparity isn't a problem in most parts of the boroughs. However, wealthier people can forget that if you're making $20,000 a year and struggling to eat and pay your bills, even a hundred-dollar increase in rent is a fuckin' lotta money. (And yeah, some of the hardest-working people I've known, people who want to be upwardly mobile, have needed some help on their way up. So I'm not against some sort of subsidy, as long as it's implemented smartly.)

What resonated the most with me was the high cost of upkeep of the older, more worn buildings that are harder to get up to code (or are exempt through affordable-housing variances or whatever but still need things like proper heating and insulation). Could a solution to this be a small annual maintenance fee on top of the monthly rent, which the renter would start paying upfront upon moving in? Co-op buildings have similar carrying charges that buyers pay -- the renters' maintenance fees would be affordable but would help create a sense of investment in where they live and ease the property manager's financial burden. And paying a larger sum of money once a year is easier than paying a higher rent once a month -- you have more time to set the money aside, and it eats into your usual cost-of-living a little less.

The NYC housing "crisis" is much more complicated (and less of a crisis) than the author makes it sound. The old bitties who refuse to leave their rent-controlled penthouses are all dying off anyway, and most of the housing projects and Mitchell-Lama buildings in Manhattan are up against noisy, congested highways that are long walks from the subway. Developers might be able to make some more money from the land since it's near the water, but the current residents are hardly stealing anyone's pristine country getaway.

Brand Boulevard

Fellow USC-er Peter McFerrin read my mind: we've both been thinking about Glendale lately, more specifically Brand Blvd.

I've been in that area a lot over the past month. It's an interesting ride on the 92 from my part of Silver Lake: past Fletcher, Glendale Blvd is a gnarled, winding mess before crossing the river and giving way to the linear calm of Atwater Village, which seems to end at a lonely-looking overpass (near the post office) and eventually kinda mutates into downtown Glendale. Brand Blvd opens with a flood of car dealerships, low-rent strip malls, and freestanding '70s-era Chinese restaurants, and once that's done it starts becoming more gentrified: there's the intractably immense Glendale Galleria, while an empty lot across the street, fortified by wall-high "coming soon" signs, promises "the Americana at Brand" (aka "the Grove East"). Then there's a movie theater, a CPK -- this portion of Brand is a bit thrown-together, with nothing that really unifies it (it reminds me of some half-assed revitalization attempt on a dying outskirt of Queens). After that, though... well, here's an excerpt of a comment I posted earlier.

Brand becomes this idyllic (and realistic) Main Street U.S.A.: the wide sidewalks that reward pedestrians by making them feel like the city is rolling out the red carpet for them, the cohabitation of chain stores and thriving (often ethnically owned) mom 'n' pop businesses, the way it seems like it's not really "for" one particular income group even though the high-end stuff is there if you want it, the way it's not JUST the one main street but that the urbanism spills over onto the cross streets and pulls the activity on Brand into the rest of the neighborhoood. I also like that the shopping/dining district comes to a somewhat abrupt end, which puts the brakes on the sprawl and provides a nice visual seam for the neighborhood, like wrapping up one chapter of a book so the next can begin.

The Alex: Brand Boulevard's Art Deco crown jewel:

A vintage LAPD squad car stakes out on Brand a few hours before Cruise Night:

Hey Luke Wilson

It gets lonely for a touring rock band on the road, especially when you're a couple of savvy boho bicoastalites bedding down in Texas for the night. In heat like this, naturally a young man's mind turns to... the Wilson brothers. Steely Dan, writing two days before their Irvine, CA show, entreat Luke to have a word with Owen regarding the "MAJOR harsh-ass karma" he's generating and warn that he may be "creating an extremely retrograde reality matrix for himself with his whole sellout moviestar game and there may be some righteous dues to pay, amen." And they invite Owen to join them onstage.

(So far, there's been no news of Owen sightings at the Irvine gig, which I couldn't make. I'm looking at their San Diego date on the 24th -- all the cool kids go out on Mondays.)

Mexico has NIMBYs Too

Good piece in today's LAT about the busloads of deportees dumped in Nogales, Mexico after their border-crossing plans go belly up. Author Nicholas Riccardi finds that Nogales residents -- like so many of their neighbors to the north -- are complaining about how these newcomers are putting a strain on city services, and that they're bringing a criminal element to a region that's "very clean and quiet and proper." Akin to our language-barrier issues, communication can be difficult between Spanish-speaking northern Mexicans and indigenous southern Mexicans.

I have a hard time tolerating comedian Carlos Mencia's incessant death-to-P.C. hobby horse, but this article seems to agree with his claim that Mexicans hate other Mexicans (is this like the self-hating Jew syndrome?). It's pretty hilarious that after leaving their native country for the promised land and being told "we don't want 'em," Mexicans are booted back over the border to find that no one at home wants 'em either. It's kind of a Stroszek scenario in reverse: In Herzog's movie, the titular character is a newly released German prisoner who is greeted with pure disdain by his fellow countrymen, and when he gets to America to start his life over from rock bottom, he learns that his adopted homeland is equally hostile and inhospitable.

What Jeff Killed

"Jeff is a large orange tomcat that lives and kills in Shadow Hills, CA.

Jeff has adopted our back porch and yard as his home. He uses our dog's house when it rains, but mostly he likes to sleep on our patio chairs and keep watch over his domain.

Though he doesn't really belong to us, we provide Jeff with food and water; however, this does little to lessen his killer instinct. To humans, Jeff is an exceptionally good-tempered and friendly cat; to rodents and other small animals, he is death itself.

It could be that Jeff likes to bring us gifts to repay our hospitality. Perhaps he is simply a hardwired killing machine. All we know for certain is that he hunts down a wide variety of small animals and disembowels, decapitates, and dines on them. Often."

Power Outage

We had a power outage in my neighborhood this afternoon. It only lasted about an hour and a half, but a lot of the local business owners seemed annoyed by it -- that their perishables were going bad, that their cash registers weren't working, that they might have to close during the blackout and lose the already small trickle of midday customers they were lucky enough to have. This is my second outage since I moved here; the first was in the middle of the night and lasted for several hours. I could have just slept that one off, but I ended up pacing my apartment in the darkness, listening to the schizophrenic across the street bellowing out his paranoid delusions and shattering glass. Short-term outages like this are rare in New York City -- we just let it build up until all the circuits overload and then get situations like the '77 citywide blackout, or the one a couple of years ago that apparently started in Ohio and took down the whole northeast power grid.

In today's LA Times there's an article about the heavy power usage that comes with heat waves like the one we're experiencing. The piece suggests we can prevent worst-case scenarios by conserving energy -- and that's something we should be doing anyway, but in weather like this, even the greenest thinkers will be chaining themselves to their air conditioners like Darryl Hannah to a South Central tomato vine. This also comes at a time when our public beaches are too contaminated to swim in, and there's pathetically little honest-to-goodness parkland where people can sit comfortably under shade trees. How are we supposed to turn to nature to keep us cool? My little western-exposure terrace is wonderful in the morning or after the sun has gone down, but it was so impossibly hot yesterday afternoon that I didn't even want to go out there to water the plants.

The greatest moment in TV history was on Married With Children when the Bundys decided they'd had enough of the heat and moved into the freezer aisle of their supermarket. Would that Ralph's actually bothered to keep its food cold...