Joshua Malbin

In the course of marshaling statistics to explode the myth of rampant Latino immigrant criminality, Ron Unz of the The American Conservative makes the following observation about LA:

Los Angeles today ranks as America’s least white European large city. Half of the population is Hispanic, and many of these are impoverished illegal immigrants and their families. Yet all crime rates have been falling steadily over the last two decades, with homicide dropping a further 18 percent just last year. As Chart 14 illustrates, most major crime categories are now back down to where they were in the early 1960s, when the population really did look very much like the actors appearing in “Dragnet” and “Leave It to Beaver.” And indeed, violent crime is now roughly the same as for Portland, Oregon, America’s whitest major city.

This Los Angeles example also raises important questions about the official claims that Latino youths have exceptionally high rates of gang membership, 1800 percent higher than for whites. Los Angeles supposedly has among the worst Hispanic gang problems, yet the city’s actual crime rates are roughly the same as what they were back in the lily-white days of the early 1960s. So if these local gangs aren’t committing much crime, what exactly is the definition of a “gang”?

A cynical observer might draw a connection between the hundreds of millions of dollars the federal government distributes each year for gang-prevention programs and the zeal with which local officials uncover the severity of their gang problems. In the case of Los Angeles, public officials have held January press conferences each of the last several years hailing the unprecedented drops in serious crime rates. They often follow these up a few months later with contrary press conferences on the horrific state of local gang violence and the desperate need for increased federal funds to cope with this scourge. If the federal government pays cities to find gang problems, many city officials will surely oblige them.

This has the ring of truth to me, but I don’t live in Los Angeles. What say you, Angelenos?

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The Los Angeles Times features waiters who work at Los Angeles’s two notable south-of-Mulholland delis: Langer’s and Canter’s. Canter’s is the Hollywood deli, set in a neighborhood full of young writers and actors, up all night, and host to The Kibitz Room (where Boots recently brought Edmund Welles). Langer’s, The Restaurant Saved By The Red Line, sits in “transitional” MacArthur Park, an easy lunch destination for downtown office workers who can ride the subway or get curbside to-go using their cell phones.

And Langer’s — as the Times notes 20 grafs in — is union.

Eva Francois began serving at Canter’s 17 years ago. The nighttime shift allowed her to spend days with her young son, but once he grew older, she was able to work days. A co-worker who served at both delis suggested lunch shifts at Langer’s, an extra job she has been working the last eight years. Like many dual-deli waiters, Francois takes the health benefits at Langer’s — a union shop.

Good on them for spelling out the difference. What the article neglects to mention–though the story’s in the archives–is that a little less than twenty years ago, Canter’s was union too. As I understand it, the original owners passed management to their children, who overturned a longtime arrangement with labor. A decertification campaign bitterly divided the staff. The former bass player in my band was a union organizer who worked closely with one of the shop stewards who manned that picket line (at a different job, years later). So we were not about to play The Kibitz Room.

Also, Langer’s is widely thought to make the best pastrami in the United States. Any meat-eating New Yorkers wanna come try it?

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Via LA Observed, this video of Los Angeles buildings demolished in the 00’s:

Lost in the Aughts from curbed los angeles on Vimeo.

Given the vastness of the subject, “We’ve Only Just Begun” would be as good a Carpenters song for the soundtrack. My first job in Los Angeles, for H.E.R.E. Local 11, was at 321 S. Bixel Street, a building owned by the union. It was taken by the school district and today is Miguel Contreras Elementary School.

Following that, I worked for the Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy at 548 S. Spring Street, one of many old, underutilized downtown commercial spaces. Before it was turned into lofts and LAANE had to leave, it was used to shoot the 7½th floor in Being John Malkovitch.

City Hall, the location of my last office job, still hosts the seat of governance. But a brand new jail sits on the parking lot where I left my car every day for five years, and our former field office is today a furniture store.

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In a gesture towards a clean slate, a fresh start, and a healthy digestive reaction to the upcoming bowl of black-eyed peas, here are four quick sketches for blog posts that I started to draft but never completed. Fly free, little half-born angels.

• Great Daves of the 90’s. I read Infinite Jest as part of the Infinite Summer challenge, and David Foster Wallace’s twisting, reflexive, ouroborean self-consciousness took me back to the early 90’s. The middle year of my college career was marked by emerging consciousness of the fictions involved in pronouncements about Generation X, and the same kinds of impossibility around newness and protest that Kurt Cobain seemed to reel from in his final famous years. When Dave Eggers (whose Might magazine I had enjoyed) published A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, its hysterically self-aware style felt immediately familiar, and I put off reading it until a few years ago, when I devoured it quickly, enjoyably, and without surprise. Wallace, however, resonates with the maddening headaches of that young consciousness that everything you think is already always being said, programmed by a machine you may operate but never master. But by approaching these struggles through the character of Don Gately, a recovering alcoholic, and showing us his experience grappling with the seemingly empty but vitally true dogma of Alcoholics Anonymous, Wallace validated this familiar and vertiginous self-reflexivity while challenging and expanding it, using a feature of my upper-middle-class overeducated habits of mind to create sympathy for a broken, giant ex-con. Also noted: while I was obsessing over the meanings and traps of “Generation X” I bought a Malcolm X hat (purple X on white baseball cap) and Sharpied “Gen-” in front of the X, and added “Generation Next” to the back, a gesture which in retrospect was a bizarre fashion error.
• Where The Wild Things Are. Where The Fantastic Mr. Fox presented a fetishization of material goods behind its trumpeted wildness, the Jonzes’ Eggers’s Sendak’s wild things are figurines in staging a Oedipal passage to adulthood. Lauren Ambrose’s monster KJ is a cool babysitter, providing a mother-figure who is also a safe object for the early stirrings of sexual desire (she swallows Max whole to protect him at one point, keeping him safe in a sticky cavernous interior). The movie’s exploration of childhood sets sail from the therapist’s couch, turning Max’s inchoate childhood rages (very well represented) into figures with names before the journey home — and into healthy adulthood — can start. A delightful adaptation of a childhood story to a therapy generation, Where The Wild Things Are was good but both HJ and I wished it wasn’t the definitive take. We wanted the magnificent sets and costumes put in the hands of two or three more writers, so they could play out their own versions of WTWTA against their own idiosyncracies.
• Interzone. At the time, the Los Angeles City Council was considering the prohibition of medical marijuana dispensaries within 1,000 feet of any residence. More typically, restricted uses will be prohibited close to schools, churches, parks and playgrounds–y’know, because the children are the future– but someone went and threw residences in there as well, leaving about two or three industrial districts where dispensaries could fill prescriptions. My proposal was for the creation of an L.A. Interzone, a la the portrayal of Tunis (?) in Naked Lunch, where head shops, dispensaries, sex offenders and strip clubs could all profitably locate.
• Road Not Taken. I noticed that the people running to replace Paul Krekorian in the special election for California’s 43rd assembly district were all people that I knew and had come up with in L.A. politics. When I started working in City Hall I toyed with the idea of one day running for office, and if I had, it would be that election today. I made the choice not to seek elective office a long time before I got out of local politics entirely, but if I hadn’t, I could be out there today. Mutatis mutandis, I would have stacked up well. They’re a talented and friendly lot, and it should be an interesting race, but the Assembly today is no place for someone who wants to make a difference in California politics, sadly.

There. No more ideas! I’ll have to go see a movie or something. Big Josh, you back yet?

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But we must also remember that the Afghans, menaced even though they are by the evil of the Afghans, are not blameless here. Have they sufficiently appreciated our efforts to kill them? No, they have not. Have they effectively and efficiently rebuilt their nation whenever we’ve had cause to blow it up? No, they have not. Have they become full and effective participants in the ongoing mission to kill them? No, they have not. It is long past time for the people of Afghanistan to step up their efforts to kill themselves, and not merely rely on American generosity to finish the job for them.

–Fafblog

I want to scream against this war, but I don’t want to deal with traffic out to Westwood at 5.

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John B. Cannon is exactly right about the unpleasantness of California winters:

Now the problem with California winters is that, since it never gets that cold, most houses are not properly constructed for heat conservation. They are poorly insulated. Windows often have gaps (and storm windows are not to be found). Instead of central heating, the average home in the Bay Area will have one or two rinky-dink wall heaters. What makes matters worse is that most native Californians are kind of macho about heating. They don’t think it should be on except for the two or three coldest days of the year, and they don’t even bother to close windows consistently. To me, an open window in November is an anomaly – not out of the question, but always to be remembered and closed at the earliest moment a nice day turns cold. I like being macho about going for long walks in the cold in Kansas. I hate being out-machoed (and therefore being what, weak and soft?) about feeling cold in my house in California.

I had a lovely November day today, as I made a cup of tea and broke my reading fast (more on that tomorrow) in the dim midafternoon and the need for a sweater. But soon it will be chilly inside all the time, when it should be toasty inside and chilly outside.

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Tamara has show.

Main Gallery
October 17, 2009 — November 14, 2009

Reception: Saturday, October 17th, 5-7 pm

Rosamund Felsen Gallery is delighted to present our first solo exhibition of emerging artist Tamara Sussman. Tamara Sussman’s work is a richly layered combination of two practices: visual art and fiction writing. Her visual forms include photography, collage and installation. Her written stories, presented in the context of her photographs and collages, serve to amplify the aura of narratives that waiver beautifully between language and visuality.

Go!

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Thought I might put a question to this blog’s labor-friendly fellow travelers in Los Angeles about this story:

A landmark California hotel is shuttering its doors and laying off 250 union workers as it prepares to undergo two years of renovations. The problem for the union representing those 250 workers? The Hotel Bel-Air is refusing to rehire the workers in 2011 and UNITE-Here says they are using the renovations as a union busting tactic. … A federal mediator will be brought in to oversee further negotiations. Hotel Bel-Air is operated by the Dorchester Company which closed the Beverley Hills Hotel in 1992 for a similar two-year renovation project. When that luxury hotel reopened it replaced 300 union workers with non-union employees.

Is this a commonly-tried tactic? Obviously it worked at least once before, but I’m curious whether it’s something that’s been in the hotel-owner’s playbook for years or a newly emerging thing.

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Curbed LA (via The Eastsider) says that the Board of Commissioners at the Department of Building and Safety voted to allow the demolition of the Sunset Pacific Motel.

The “Bates Motel” sits at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Bates Avenue in Silver Lake, and the shoe fits. When I started working in City Hall in 2001, it was a universal neighborhood complaint, and no amount of objection from the police and the community could get the motel owner to make it less of a nest of drugs and prostitution. After the city withdrew its conditional use permit in 2003, there was a short-lived attempt by the owner’s children to re-open it under new management. It was taken over for a period by Eastside impresario Dana Hollister, and while it wasn’t quite as much to start with as the Paramour or even the Brite Spot, we locals were excited at the prospect that she might bring a snazzy little hotel and spa to Silver Lake. Whether it was the economy or the Bates’ bones, that project never launched; the current Michigan-based owners sent a lawyer to register an objection at the hearing.A

A police officer working on the case back in 2002 told us that “it was the first time I’d ever seen the prostitutes come to us because they were afraid of the drug dealers.”

Image: Sunset Pacific MOTEL by Meltwater, on Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

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There’s something a little freaky going on behind the doors of the inconspicuous suburban households of the San Fernando Valley. Blogger and friend L.J. Williamson discovers, in her own neighborhood… Buddhism.

When I rang the doorbell, I was greeted by a man wearing a flowing, saffon-colored Lakers T-shirt named Bill.

Read on for the most accurate description of meditation that this bemonkeyminded blogger has ever seen.

Also a treat: L.J. has a good eye for church signs.

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