Joshua Malbin

View from P & M's balcony

Not two months after we started going out, HJ took me to a friend’s wedding in the Angeles National Forest. The forest gets most of its views from the return to Los Angeles through the Antelope Valley, where from the 5 freeway it appears brown and scrubby, but the wedding was in a hilltop grove, medium-close and green with pine trees. We danced on a big carpet set next to a generator-powered sound system and her friends scoped me out. I asked, “How many sentences can I start with ‘At my wedding…’” and she said “As many as you like as long as you’re open to another one,” and thus we got the ball rolling.

The forest will be considerably less green for a while. By Tuesday morning, the Station Fire had grown to 122,000 acres. The friends who got married there reported that their home in Big Tujunga Canyon was one of two remaining on their block, and they weren’t sure how remaining it was.

A giant pyrocumulus cloud has been standing over the basin, visible from just about everywhere:

Time Lapse Test: Station Fire from Eric Spiegelman on Vimeo. (via LAObserved)

It’s cloudy today, and when HJ left for work it was raining ash. Last night we sat with friends on their balcony with a good view of the flames and tried to figure out why California can’t prevent catastrophic forest fires. Would controlled burns help? If so, why aren’t they happening? My sense is that local property owners would not be enthusiastic about controlled burns — after all, the second google hit for “controlled burn California” returns an instance in which a controlled burn took 23 homes. The Angeles National Forest page on fuel management says that “Although the window for using prescribed fire (broadcast burning) is very narrow in southern California (winds, humidity and a variety of other factors have to be just right for this to be done safely), this method is sometimes used to remove hazardous fuels and improve habitat conditions for wildlife.” It may be the case that the technology of fire control is not the problem so much as the pattern of human settlement. And it may be that, counter-intuitively, the aftermath of a devastating fire may not be the best time to address that pattern.

Since I’m just starting in on the question and don’t have too much light to shine yet, policy-wise, here’s another time-lapse video. With more flames!

Station File Time Lapse #4 from Dan Finnerty on Vimeo.

BLAST FROM THE PAST: Followers of this blog’s prehistory will know that Bush tried to sell off fuels management to the timber industry.

READING LIST: Let Malibu Burn, Mike Davis.

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Midnight in a Mexican restaurant. Two dozen musicians–3 vocalists, 3 clarinets, a violin, a cello, two on the keyboard, two electric guitars and two electric bass guitars, vibes, a piccolo, trombone, trumpet, bari sax, a few others — performed Terry Riley’s In C. And it rocked.

The promotional blog post suggested a typical modern-classical performance:

…not exactly stodgy, but irrefutably professional. (Not Ed Parker-professional. Just new-classical professional.)

This was rock-club, casual-dress, BYO-music stand. The trombonist and the trumpet shuffled and swayed together. The reed players displayed a kind of typical sweet and generous band-camp dorkiness. It looked like this:

From Wikipedia:

In C consists of 53 short, numbered musical phrases, lasting from half a beat to 32 beats; each phrase may be repeated an arbitrary number of times. Each musician has control over which phrase he or she plays: players are encouraged to play the phrases starting at different times, even if they are playing the same phrase. The performance directions state that the musical ensemble should try to stay within two to three phrases of each other. The phrases must be played in order, although some may be skipped. As detailed in some editions of the score, it is customary for one musician (“traditionally… a beautiful girl,” Riley notes in the score^[2]) to play the note C (in octaves) in repeated eighth notes. This functions as a metronome and is referred to as “The Pulse”.

The freedom of each musician to advance as they wished, while respecting the injunction to keep mostly together, created an exquisite tension between predictability and randomness. The vague wash forward between movements felt like a game of Guess the Leader. But much harder to guess.

I’ve been helping promote the upcoming Beethoven Bragg concert. Describing it to a classical music writer, I felt completely out of my depth. “I don’t know if it will be of interest for exactly the same reason people go to classical concerts… Could you call it ‘folk classical’?” Maybe there’s nothing exceptional about this category, about an orchestral piece that synthesizes social context and sound to create an element of freedom. I have sat through very few orchestral pieces. But I really liked this one.

Thanks to Professor Pessah for the Juanita’s clip.

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Chief William Bratton announced his departure from the Los Angeles Police Department he helmed for the last seven years. He leaves better-liked than any chief in recent memory.

The chief has twin gifts that he employs in complement to one another. The first is his CompStat program, which he invented in New York City and imported in finished form to Los Angeles. Monthly meetings see the attendance of auditoriums full of police, held publicly responsible for tabulating, mapping and comprehending every reported crime in their geographic sub-regions. It has the soothing power of maps to render the unknown known and the unknowable inexpressible. It gives Bratton his own numbers to marshal against criminologists, whose efforts to qualify the effectiveness of his methods he regards as mean-spirited.

The second gift is his personality, which he can reel out and retract as easily as if it were a lipstick, or a stiletto. Bratton’s arrival in Los Angeles was marked by a series of delightful gaffes. He called a community activist who had more of a base in the media than the community a “nitwit” (you be the judge). When the city council amended his budget request, he goaded them by suggesting they “start attending some of the funerals of the victims of crime”.

He performed adequate apologies and, having established a reputation as an uncontainable truth-teller, retreated to his quiet, mammoth number factory. Crime fell and CompStat recorded it. Community policing took hold, to good effect.  When LAPD officers beat up media representatives at a May Day immigration rights march, Bratton swiftly condemned their actions, earning praise by eschewing the reflexive defensiveness of law enforcement officials responding to reported abuses. His candor had turned from abrasive to charming. The LAPD now has record levels of public support that spans ethnic groups.

Fusing statistics and panache, Bratton is an Irish beat cop swinging a sheaf of TPS reports. William Parker, the midcentury LAPD chief whose name activists hope will not transfer from the department’s rotted old headquarters to its brand new one, is known in promotional materials for “professionalizing” the LAPD, and in history for developing a police force that fell upon minority neighborhoods like an occupying army. If Parker’s LAPD was professionalized, Bratton’s is managerialized; its reams of data make it look sober and prepared for the Monday meeting.

Now, those data and their father have proved persuasive enough to win the lifting of the department’s consent decree, despite the troubling persistence of racial profiling.

It’s a capstone achievement, but it seems to have been won with an unsavory ratio of panache-to-stats.  The federal overseer who lifted the consent decree, Michael Cherkasky, is a longtime friend of Bratton’s and has invited him to join the private security firm Altegrity.  His swift departure appears baldly rigged, the hasty work of someone eager to reap private-sector bounty. In the rear-view mirror, Parker’s “professional” LAPD looks abusive. Bratton’s managerial LAPD looks, well, managed.

The next chief will have a lot to do to live up to Bratton’s record. So, it seems, would Bratton.

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