That was the last time I’d seen such disaster-torn earnestness — until last Friday at City Hall, after the legislative train wreck in the Council Chamber that left the mayor’s long-planned city-business-tax proposal lying on its side with its wheels spinning. It seemed a tremendous derailment of the mayor’s all-time favorite cause.But there are those, […]
Month: July 2018
The Short List
MARTIN AMIS IS ONE OF THE WORLD’S BEST-KNOWN writers. Martin Amis’ work sometimes mimics classic science fiction. That the first fact is better known than the second gives Amis a bit more reputation for originality than he deserves.Imitation science-fantasy makes up nearly half of the collection Heavy Water and Other Stories. The results are mixed: […]
The Arroyo Special
Six p.m. on the northbound Pasadena Freeway and nothing is moving but time. Red taillights as far as you can see, with hundreds more feeding into the narrowing traffic stream near the four-level. This is high-tech travel at three miles per hour.This is also a prolonged, interactive commercial for the construction of the Pasadena Blue […]
Nine Out of Ten Doctors
So just the idea of a doctors union was worth a laugh. Yet it was probably the elevated prestige and prevailing remuneration levels that eventually helped to chip away at the American physician’s social and economic pedestal. Craving wealth and prestige, hordes of young people trained to be doctors, just as drugs and research were […]
CRA, Change Your Way
What’s left to say about the CRA? Downtown Los Angeles is the graveyard of its mistakes. Over its 50-year history, the Community Redevelopment Agency became the favored scapegoat of anti-government critics from left to right. Now, sapped by its obligations for its many failed projects, the CRA’s been laying off staff and lying low. No […]
Top Dog Politics
Barbara Perkins may well have been the best candidate for the 7th District council seat in Tuesday’s city elections. Besides being up on the issues, she had the most experience in community activities, high recognition in the North Valley and the longest-standing connections at City Hall. She seemed to know just about everyone in her […]
Alatorre Takes the Fifth — 108 Times
It was not, on the whole, a good month for lame-duck Los Angeles City Councilman Richard Alatorre. There was, for instance, the April 13 election to pick his successor. About which two things were, from the incumbent’s point of view, noteworthy. The first was that the candidate he endorsed, neophyte Luis Cetina, got about 8 […]
No Fun To Stay at the MTA
Graw, you may recall, is the former MTA construction executive who claims that, in part because he prepared the special panel of experts that rejected a certain dubious bid for a $65 million Eastside subway contract, he was fired out of hand in 1996. As we noted last week, that Metro East contract — 20 […]
Los Dos Richards
Photo by Slobodan DimitrovThey were sniggering together again, the Richards Alatorre and Riordan, at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority meeting late last month. And why shouldn’t they share some mirth, old buddies that they are?There is, in fact, probably not an adequate English word for their kind of closeness, but there’s a great term in this […]
Enviros Can Kill Marsh, but not Playa Vista
Here’s a good example of the law of unintended consequences.You may have read how U.S. District Judge Ronald Lew’s decision earlier this month that halted grading at the future Playa Vista site actually applies only to 16.1 acres of “permitted area” – that is, an area in which no building was ever planned. By staying […]