Tonight, as you brush your teeth, you’ll be scrubbing them with the same material that goes into stockings, combs, parachutes, spaceships, car engines — the list seems infinite. That stuff turned 75 this year, but it’s tragic human back story is rarely told. It was a decade when chemistry was the most exotic of […]
Month: July 2018
Off-Ramp® | Haefele on Carey McWilliams | 89.3 KPCC
Off-Ramp literary commentator Marc Haefele says Carey McWilliams is required reading for anyone who is serious about understanding Los Angeles Source: Off-Ramp® | Haefele on Carey McWilliams | 89.3 KPCC […]
Off-Ramp® | Fifty years later, Off-Ramp’s Marc Haefele remembers the ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’
What an odd lot we were, the Lower Eastsiders who boarded a chartered train for Washington on August 28, 1963 … fifty years ago next Wednesday. First, there were the grandmothers with the food: Fay Lucia, a blonded Italian lady in her 50s from the projects, who brought a huge lasagna; and Nicolasa Benitez, the […]
Off-Ramp® | Philip K. Dick’s editor – Off-Ramp’s Marc Haefele – praises Amazon’s ‘The Man in the High Castle’
Off-Ramp commentator Marc Haefele reviews “The Man in the High Castle,” a ten-part series from Amazon based on Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name. Marc edited Dick in the later 1960s when he worked for Doubleday. Back in 1961, Putnam decided to roll his career-future dice publishing an alternate-history book as a major […]
Haefele on Off-Ramp
Listen to Marc Haefele on 89.3 KPCC’s Off-Ramp Off-Ramp takes a look at news, arts and culture in Southern California. It is hosted by John Rabe John Rabe is KPCC’s Production & Promotions Director, a post he assumed in July of 2017 after 35 years behind the mike. His job is to shape the sound […]
A Stretch for Garcetti
FOR A WHILE LAST YEAR, I SEEMED TO RUN into former District Attorney Gil Garcetti every week. He was hyperactive in his son Eric’s successful campaign for the City Council, and wherever Eric, a dogged campaigner, turned up, so did Gil, his top adviser. On one of those occasions, I asked the elder Garcetti what […]
Imperial Times
Has our freshly Chicagoized L.A. Times really forgotten which new century we‘re in? In June and July, columnists James Ricci and Steve Lopez cascaded blame for all California’s problems upon the immigrant population. Suddenly, we found ourselves back in the foreigner-bashing, night-riding days of the early 1900s.Then last Thursday, our Times sought to raise the […]
Cruel Priorities
LAST WEEK NOT ONLY DID THE COUNTY of Los Angeles resolve to close 11 public and four school clinics belonging to its Department of Health Services, reduce beds in one hospital and cut immunizations for more than 80,000 children. It also decided, on grounds that it was improving the urban health environment, to spend DHS […]
Call Rewrite!
THE HEADWATERS OF MOST LOS ANGELES COUNTY police reporting is a very small pond known as the Norman “Jake” Jacoby Press Room. Named for a legendary City News Service police reporter who retired a decade ago, it sits to the rear of the first floor of Parker Center, the 40-year-old, six-story LAPD “Glass House” headquarters […]
Autumn Follies
CITY GOVERNMENT SANK INTO TROPICAL lassitude during the council’s recent summer recess. But in one critical area, things actually sped up: Would-be council candidates were scurrying to roust signatures for their initial filings for the 2003 election. The new haste is because next year’s city primary comes in March instead of April. So now the […]