So. For the first time in 84 years, we’ve got a real Los Angeles County sheriff’s race. Chief Lee Baca, with 32 percent of the votes cast, will face Sherman Block, whose 36 percent was probably the worst showing at the polls by an incumbent sheriff this century.The only problem is, the surviving candidates from […]
Month: July 2018
Rev. Callaghan runs wild | L.A. Weekly
It’s gone forever now, but once there was a residential complex as close to paradise as such a place could ever be. Not far from the ocean and adjoining undeveloped hillsides, it had great views, cheap rents, funky old wooden units, lots of trees and shrubs, and a cooperative spirit in which most tenants became […]
Los Angeles’ Shuttered School Yards
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I keep telling him (if only […]
Los Angeles’ Shuttered School Yards
The mayor of Los Angeles and I have this thing going. Well, maybe you could better call it a casual relationship. Richard Riordan keeps telling me (along with the rest of the world) that his top priority as mayor is to help the Los Angeles Unified School District. And I keep telling him (if only […]
Stein-Hubbell affair
Big lies are perfect for people who can’t handle the facts. Since they appeal to the lazy mind, big lies can go far. How easy it is to say that Steven Spielberg wants to build DreamWorks on endangered wetlands – it’s not true, but it carries the validity of myth.Big lies are usually born in […]
No Mercy
Homeless activist Bob Erlenbusch’s usual eloquence ebbed slightly during his last attempt to get the Board of Supervisors to stay this month’s General Relief termination, which would drop 7,000 people from the rolls. You saw him wondering just how many times he had to say, “They’ll return to homelessness, to the streets and alcohol.”The supervisors […]
Jail Time! – Or how to get higher-caliber L.A. public officials
Herewith a local conundrum: Why has no Los Angeles politician been arrested, sentenced and jailed for corruption for almost 60 years? Is it because, ever since the 1937 Frank Shaw scandals that dumped a mayor, a police chief and, ultimately, most of a City Council, they’ve all been so clean and respectable?Or is it, as […]
Fulfillment
Words were more real than the world. I’d been an avid, sheltered reader since age 6, long on facts and fancies and short on ideas. So in 1965, when it came time to make a living, I thought words. As in the business of books. Back then, publishing was still a gentile – make that […]
Paper Paradise
So charming and evocative are Ana Serrano’s creations that you want to knock on their little doors, then peer inside – curious at what they may contain. Serrano terms them sculpture. You might call them “habitations.” They are 2-dimensional friezes and 3-dimensional tiny model homes, all in the vivid hues of tropical flora that characterize […]
Topsy Transmuted
“Oh Lord, Miss Eva, I is tryin’!” said Topsy, wiping the tears from her eyes. “But Lor’ it is so hard to be good! `Pears like I ain‘t used to it, no ways.”“Jesus knows it, Topsy; he is very sorry for you; He will help you.’’– “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” by Harriet Beecher StoweSince her first […]