There was a great entry on Dr Housing Bubble Blog this week on why it’s not time to buy yet in “banana republic housing areas” like Los Angeles. It’s a great overall analysis of why it’s not smart to buy in L.A. right now…and why the rental market will start getting tighter as all the people losing their mortgages become, again, renters.

It’s not exactly news, but the Dr. does a good job reviewing all the arguments against buying. For those of us who have non-L.A. based parents that keep asking why we are not buying a home when we get married, this is the article to clip and send home. Go here to read the article in full.

Yesterday, one of my co-workers came back to my department to tell us that there was a car fire at the Pavilions across the street. We all immediately raced over to windows facing the event. Yep, that was a car fire all right. Smoke was billowing out of the garage, and there were TWO fire engines, plus a couple police vehicles, parked outside.

I went over to investigate – and counted three policemen and six firemen on the scene. All of them were gathered around one midsize American car, a Chevy Cirrus. The car was a mess: the hood was warped and blackened, and the driver’s side window was smashed open to unlock it. [photos on flickr set] The assistant manager of the store was trying to find the car’s owner, who had left the building. She finally appeared: a small, white-haired old woman in her eighties, confused as to how this had happened. The store manager told me, as I left, that she had had the car fixed the day before, and now it had combusted. I was extremely saddened to hear that – and I left the police and Pavilions’ representatives to handle the car fire victim. Hopefully, she will be able to sue the repair shop – if they are responsible.

Anyways, the point of all this is – how many Beverly Hills firemen does it take to extinguish a small car fire? The answer is about six. Apparently, it was the most exciting thing to happen for the BHFD all year.

A couple years ago, Koga posted about about bad tow truck drivers in the L.A. area. He also followed up with an update on the article, which included great tips for fighting a corrupt tow truck.

However, two years later, the madness hasn’t ended. The Consumerist posted today about a tow truck investigation that KNBC conducted in Southern California. This time, it’s about tow truck drivers that have “spotters” watching lots with towing policies. These goons wait for you to leave the lot, and then they call the trucks. Then the tow truck company demands a cash ransom. Only with the receipt from the store in the lot, could you possibly hope to get your car back without extortion.

The expose also says that the tow trucks can show up in as little as 15 mins. I’m going to be way more careful about leaving my car in the Ralph’s lot at 3rd & LaBrea when I go to Trader Joe’s across the street.

Today is the start of Banned Book Week, which is from Sept 29th – Oct 6th, 2007. The theme of Banned Books Week 2007 is “Ahoy! Treasure Your Freedom to Read and Get Hooked on a Banned Book.” Libraries and bookstores around the country are expected to mount exhibits and schedule readings and special events through Oct. 6. I searched, but was not able to find any for Los Angeles, save for a a dance performance in Mission Viejo And the LA Times Books blog entry only covered the basics about the week in general, and what it stands for. (If anyone has any to post, please do so in the comments!)

The book with the strongest California connection on the list, by the way, is #6 on the Top 100 Challenged Book List: Steinbeck’s classic Of Mice And Men. It’s challenged for its references to racism and euthanasia. This book was the pre-cursor to the “Okie” influx depicted in “The Grapes of Wrath”. While neither are directly set in Los Angeles, the ranches and agricultural bases of the Inland Empire and Salinas Valley had a great deal of influence in the 1920s and 1930s on Los Angeles’ strength as a commercial center. But, like “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”, it’s a little too much history to be remembered- hence the banned book list.

Anyways, to celebrate, go out and read! Visit the Central Library! Or stage a mock trial of a book or author using materials from the Constitutional Rights Foundation, which is right here in Los Angeles. But, most of all, we have to remember to stay vigilant, even in the cultural mosaic and left-wing vortex that is Los Angeles.

This is a city that only has to talk about itself, and it speaks about the world.

So speaks the PBS series, “Independent Lens”, in Los Angeles Now. My TiVO picked it up, randomly. It features over two dozen Angelinos, from all over the city, including two of our favorite authors: Norman Klein (“A History Of Forgetting”) and Mike Davis (“City of Quartz”). And it covers so many of the concepts of layers – of history, of culture, of geography – that make up Los Angeles. It was about how there were so many new, competing myths in Los Angeles, layered over and drowning out the old Anglo-American culture of the mid-20th century. It was about how “individuals and groups construct their own Los Angeles out of the zones and areas that are meaningful to them,” a quote I think also applies well to Metroblogging. We create our own Los Angeles in our posts out of the everyday places and events that are meaningful to us on this blog.

There are no upcoming showings in the next two weeks on KCET or KOCE, but I’m sure PBS will run the special again. The official PBS page links to viewing times. And, if you know someone who is moving to L.A., you can buy them the DVD before they get here. I think that it did a wonderful job of showing the city as it is, the cultural mosaic rather than the melting pot.

OK, everyone, pop quiz on civics. Who are California’s two senators? I’ll give you a hint: they’re both female Democrats. Answer: Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer. (Maxine Waters is a representative to Congress, so those who guessed her, you were close but in the wrong house)

I received a newsletter from Ms Boxer today, letting me know how bad the traffic is in L.A. In fact, it was specifically about the traffic here and the new study from the Texas Transportation Institute which determined that we suffer from the worst traffic in the nation (all together now: DUH!). Boxer goes on to write that “[t]he only surprising fact from this study is that the average resident spends only 72 extra hours stuck in rush-hour traffic.” If that means 72 hours per year added to what our commute time would be without traffic, then yes, I am surprised. Somewhere, someone is not being delayed by traffic in Los Angeles, and I want to know how they’re getting to work.
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The good folks at Esotouric have been keeping their fans up to date with the posthumous saga of L.A.’s most beloved dirty old man, Charles Bukowski. The bungalow where he used to live and write, at 5124 De Longpre in East Hollywood, was recently vacated. It was immediately advertised as a $1.3MM “vacant lot” on Craigslist. But not willing to let this go without a fight, the Bukowski Preservationists have taken up the cause, campaigning to have the bungalow saved as a historical/cultural site.

And late last week, they achieved the first round of success at City Hall. Thanks to Lauren Everett’s application and speaking, the Cultural Heritage Commission at City Hall agreed to consider making the buildings at 5124 De Longpre Avenue a historic-cultural monument. That means that no demolition can take place for the time being.

What to do with an old bungalow in Hollywood? The Bukowski preservation faction suggest that it become a blue-collar writers’ colony, where people like Bukowski, who have been working at blue collar jobs to pay the rent, can stay at low or no cost while they work on their writing. It will also be a place to display art of all kinds – readings, screenings, exhibitions. The details are the 5124 De Longpre Initiative Site.

I got a flier this morning, through the Craftnight mailing list, for a live drawing & music event event this afternoon. The Outpost for Contemporary Art Monster Drawing Rally is happening in just a few hours in Eagle Rock. Also, Triple Chicken Foot are playing, whom I saw at Life Can Be So Car Free last year, and really enjoyed (they play fabulous “old time” music – and brought their instruments in on trailers attached to their bikes!)

Anyways, the drawings will be sold for $50 apiece to fundraise for the Outpost, and it does sound like a fun event. If I wasn’t writing this remotely from Canada, I’d totally go. Flier is behind the cut.
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On Saturday, the fiance and I were sitting around the house, when I realized we had nowhere to be that weekend. And I remembered that in some book of SoCal getaways, I had read about someplace called Oak Glen that had an apple festival in the fall, and a campground in the vicinity. So we dug out our camping equipment, threw everything in the car, and headed for the 10.

And let me just say, Oak Glen was even more corn-pone Wild West tourist trap than I could have imagined. It had a whole reproduction town, with little scaled-down wooden buildings selling souvenirs, dolls, and potpourri. There were employees in cowboy and cowgirl costumes, including the girls running the pony-go-round. It was like a ramshackle version of Frontierland – only more like a temporary California gold mining town than the permanent settlement that Disney imagined. It was pure post-frontier West, something straight out of the era when the frontier no longer really existed in the lower 48, but America was still obsessed with the West.

Of course, all this meant I thought the whole place was AWESOME. I LOVE Americana. Plus, we got to see a small, non-dangerous fire (above) being put out. And all this was exactly 92 minutes from our doorstep. Who knew that there was so much Americana so close to Southern California? Photo goes to my Flickr photoset for those who want to see more photos of tourist trap awesomeness.

I am marrying a nerd. Not a geek, a nerd. There’s a difference. So when the billboards for CBS’s new filler sitcom, the “Big Bang Theory” started appearing around L.A., I noticed. And was vaguely curious – does CBS seriously think that everyone watching TV today is too young to remember the original “Revenge of the Nerds”?

CBS was also smart enough to push the show through TiVO in a desperate attempt to create early loyalty, so I was able to watch the pilot. And I sincerely hope that CBS just pulls it now and sinks all their billboard and production money into, say, Jericho, because this show really is a piece of crap. Two ridiculous TV nerds get a hot female neighbor – but with added bonus Los Angeles area cliches! The neighbor is a waitress who wants to be an actress. She’s even written a screenplay about a girl who moves from Kansas to L.A. to become an actress…but has to work as a waitress until she makes it. And the nerds are some sort of quantum physicists, who are – wait, this is really original – socially awkward! They have trouble with women and non-nerds!

Anyways, the show is really terrible – even the nerd jokes are last year’s nerd jokes – but the punchline was when we realized that the nerds were driving around Pasadena. “Oh my gosh, honey,” I said. “CBS is stealing your life!” My fiance, who does work for a spinoff of CalTech, just chuckled and said, “Well, all TV nerds must work at either MIT or CalTech.” I guess there weren’t enough blondes in Boston to make a show set there credible. CBS really needed to mix in those bad L.A. cliches to make the show cohesive – and that is even sadder.

My mother just left after a few days in L.A. Mom comes down once or twice a year, visits me, visits her best friend (they met back at Van Nuys Junior High), and then heads back up to Canada. But unlike most parental unit visits, mine are exercises in dredging Mom’s memories. Crossing June Street reminds her that her paternal grandmother lived on that street. Echo Park reminds her that her father, my grandfather, used to take Mom out in the little paddleboats there. And the mention of Westchester reminded her that it was one of the first places that her parents settled after emigrating from Brooklyn in 1950.

I thought I’d look up a bit more about Westchester, and about that area of the city, and that’s where I ran into Fritz Burns. I can only assume that it was one of his houses that my grandparents bought upon arriving in L.A. Without much money, and with three small children six and under, they must have wanted to flee their temporary accommodations in the Jewish community of Boyle Heights and move someplace with space and a yard. Fritz Burns is credited with developing Westchester, by building “thousands of attractive homes that sold for less than $4,000 [Architectural Digest's 1946 article quoted the houses starting at $6,950] and which could be purchased with a down payment of only $150″. Within ten years of developing “new innovations in pre-fabricated housing,” Fritz had:

“…developed a tract of inexpensive prefabricated single-family homes on the site of a former hog farm at the intersection of Manchester and Sepulveda Boulevards. This community, dubbed “Westchester,” grew by leaps and bounds as the aerospace industry boomed in World War II and afterward.

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When I first came to Los Angeles, three years and change ago, I read a lot of books about the city. I read them in an attempt to understand what made Los Angeles seem like seven cities in one, how it could be so different in so many places. I had expected a city with no history, except the recent past, and I got a city than has a different history for every perspective. So I started reading to try to grasp all those perspectives, all those pasts, all that collective memory that seemed so fragmented. And I have a shelf full of books I thought I should start sharing.

This week’s book isn’t mine though. Last weekend, I picked up a large, thin, photo book from the shelf at the Popular section in the Central Library. It is called simply, “Los Angeles”, and is published by Whitecap Press. And I’m sorry to say it’s a Vancouver company. I can only assume that this book was published for consumption overseas, because it focuses on nothing but the top-line tourist attractions. In fact, I had to check the publication date to be sure it wasn’t put out in the 80s, because except for the Disney Concert Hall, there’s nothing of twenty-first century Los Angeles.
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Looks like there’s a whole slew of new discounts and free events up at the Metro Discounts Page. Including a free CANON show on Friday in Union Station. And discounts on local festivals, like the the Feast of San Gennaro at the end of the month. Metro also encourages you to take the buses to the concerts at MacArthur Park on weekend (link goes to calendar, also free, so no additional discounts can be offered)

Most of the stuff is small or more hassle than it’s worth – but you can still subscribe via email for new updates from the Metro Discounts Page.

A good friend from Vancouver came to visit a couple weeks ago. She’d been to visit me before, and had no problem amusing herself by wandering around Los Angeles’ museums and attractions. But she came back after her first day extraordinarily happy, because she had found a butterfly garden outside of the Science Center.

I wondered, butterflies? We don’t have a butterfly zoo. But we do – the Pavilion of Wings, which is being hosted at the Natural History Museum’s South Lawn. You can go visit the free-range butterflies for just two more days – and then they will be going back to…well, wherever it is butterflies come from. The exhibit closes on September 3rd.

Photo by Nafeesa, who always has great adventures in L.A. when she visits me.

The LA Weekly has a shockingly under-researched article on Bats Day up. They managed to write a paragraph about a counter Bats Day called “Babs Day” that never happened, but didn’t have anything from Noah K, the actual event organizer for both Bats Day and Fright Night. I’m shocked, Weekly. You usually do such wonderful research on local counterculture.

By the way, speaking of Noah K, it looks like Fright Night is closing so you all may want to go get your bad horror fixes soon. Just three more showings left!

L.A. is seriously lacking in a cohesive goth calendar ever since LAGOTH got hacked one too many times & shut down. Therefore, I’m posting a handful of bigger band name shows here. More behind the cut, so I don’t clutter up the site for the non-goths out there
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