Cobb

Stand and Deliver

When I was a skinny kid, I learned one day at Susan Miller Dorsey Pool, how to do a 1 and a half. As soon as I write this, I am brought to mind of a girl who came there one day and did a 'half gainer'. I had never seen anything like that in my life. A bunch of us kids would do a couple bounces on the board (which was pretty high quality) and manage our 1 and a halfs, but she did what I later learned was called a hurdle, which is the standard way a springboard diver gets the board to flex in a continuous motion to the edge with one final bounce. And she got height, which in our own way of judgment was as important as it is in the real world of competitive springboard diving.

Like most kids my age, I hated being shown up, but I also didn't hesitate with my props. After all, it's about being the best, and she kicked all of our asses that day as well as showing us something new. One of my friends said it was a gainer, but she told me there are five categories of dives. Forward, reverse, inward, back and twist. I knew about inwards, but was never really impressed with them. We did 'backs' off the board lots of times. I couldn't get my head around the physics of a twisting dive, although I could do a back 1 and a half with a half twist. That was my best dive. In the flip-flop world of street tumbling we called that an 'arabian' which started backward and ended with a full front. I did it often enough when I wasn't confident about the doing backs, or I was just lazy. The idea of doing a reverse dive was just frightening beyond belief. How does someone move forwards and rotate backwards at the same time?

For me, the value of diving was adjunct to tumbling. While a few of us had a number of dives, the number of tricks we could do on the grass was much bigger and so were our audiences. I was one of the best divers I knew, but to climb the hierarchy of tumbling at the local parks delivered a great deal more glory. As I went around various area parks, it was good to be king or close to king. My brother Bryan and I were constantly on the lookout for good 'FFG', flip flop grass. I still have vivid memories of impromptu pickup battles at Sportsman's Park, at Centinela Park, at Dorsey and in front of the Olympic Swim Stadium at Exposition Park. Speaking of which, I did dive off the 5 meter platform back in the days when the City of Los Angeles was not so pussified to have them around. I never bothered with the 7.5 and 10 meter platforms. I did wear glasses after all.

I never became the great tumbler I dreamed of becoming. There were a couple of insurmountable barriers. The first came in the form of money and the second in terms of opportunity. The City of Inglewood had a summer program for tumbling over at Rogers Park just around the corner from their City Hall. And like their pool at Centinela, there was one fee for Inglewood residents and another for outsiders. Dorsey pool cost a quarter no matter where you were from. Centinela charged a whole dollar, and you couldn't leave the pool and come back. Similarly, Rogers Park charged an unthinkable $100 for their summer gymnastics program. It boggled my mind. Later, when I attended high school, they simply had no gymnastics team. Also, no wrestling team. Also, no band. All of the things I was decently competitive in, were not an option. My first semester, I hated the place. But there was a diving team.

I joined the AAU diving club in Santa Monica. I can't even remember if I paid much for it. But I finally picked up on all of the techniques I vaguely recalled from the good old days at Dorsey Pool. One or two nights a week, my brother and I would take the bus from Crenshaw to Pico, take the Pico bus to Sears, and then take the Big Blue Santa Monica Bus all the way to Santa Monica High School to practice under the watchful eye of Jim Wood. Jim was probably one of the best influences I had as a teen. He demanded as close to perfection as you were capable of. He always threatened to put my toes in a pencil sharpener. Sometimes it's hard to focus on pointing your toes when you're half scared to death of the stuff you're doing in midair. Carl was our best diver. Chris Horne and Chris Monaghan were my friends. Coleen McNamee was the belle of the ball. Her blonde hair would turn the brightest shade of green of anyone. I, like a flying Q-Tip left my afro at full length. I first borrowed a pair of diving shorts from Chris Monaghan and finally got a pair of my own. Most people don't know, but when you do dives to your feet, like a double front, it is not kosher to hold your balls. But if you are ballsy enough to dive in Speedos, you won't be for long. It stings like the balls of your feet when you land from jumping off a roof. These things I knew at the age of 14.

I lettered varsity in my freshman year according to the points I earned that first season. I peaked in my junior year, making the quals to go to State which was held at Beverly Hills High School. I was good enough for highschool and AAU. I won gold once or twice and I had a decent 11 dive list by that time. My best AAU meet was the Chula Vista Invitational. My first, and worst was at the Jack Kramer Club in fancy Palos Verdes. It was at that meet where I made my first fail dive. I can't even remember what went wrong. There are three horrible things you can do as a springboard diver. The worst is just what you think. You can slam some part of your body on the diving board. That never happened to me at practice or in competition, but some time after highschool I did so doing an inward dive at the pool at Val Verde Park north of Magic Mountain. It wasn't so bad that it drew blood, if I remember correctly and it got me a good dressing down from the lifeguard. I'm sure if I impressed any girls with that stunt, they were the wrong ones. The second horror is called a balk. Just like with a baseball pitcher if you start your hurdle and then stop in the middle and then start over, it will cost you half the points on your dive. I also never balked in competition. I did land a ridiculously laughable and grotesquely embarrassing fail dive at this, my very first meet. Of all things, it was a 1 and a half. This wasn't a serious meet and unlike in more serious competitions you only needed a five dive list. But to get a zero on any dive.. well that sucked.

Somewhere else on this blog, I've thought back about my diving career. The fear of diving with a boner. The days the team called my Kunta Kinte. The win at Leuzinger that made me a role model. My mentoring of Adrian Hernandez and Tremelle Jenkins as captain of the team. My first merciless sunburn at Madera. My win at the Mexico USA dual meet at SMCC. The first year banquet at the Hennebery's in Toluca Lake. The medals and trophies. My rival who smoked me at East LA College. The non-kosher slide at Camp Stevens. The day Chris Horne hit the wooden lane lines at Northridge Aquatics. The black dude with the burn on his left ankle who was an incredibly fast spinner, and of course the mutual contempt held between every diver in California and Greg Louganis. Chris Horne healed up and made the team at USC, but didn't make varsity. California has produced the world's finest divers- the competition is fierce. But I did once get a 7, at Chula Vista.

This past weekend I got up on a diving board for the first time in at least three decades. It was a crappy little joke of a board, typical of the sort you find at home pools, not the glorious and expensive Duraflex sort you find at a high quality pool or at Colleen McNamee's house in West LA. I wouldn't be surprised if more people hurt themselves on these stiff little boards than on public high dives. My inward dive suffered horribly. But I did manage a decent forward half twist and forward pike. My daughter's Instagram of my crumpled back layout got the most likes. Fortunately, or not as the case may be, she published it in a one time fashion with no remaining record. I have yet to get the original video.

There's something dramatic about approaching a diving board. All eyes are on your mostly naked body, your teammates, your coach, everybody in the stands, your parents, other divers and of course the judges. You prepare the acrobatics in your mind, clear the water from your ears and eyeball the sprayers that mark the surface of the water. You get on the board and move the wheel forwards or backwards to your ideal spot. I liked mine a touch firmer than medium for my earlier career. As I gained weight and skill that place was still good. I changed from a three step to a four step hurdle in my sophomre year. Your hurdle needs to be smooth, you have to line up your spot so that you're not staring at your feet as you land them as close to the front edge as possible to gain the maximum momentum of the board which pushes you up and out. It takes a while to feel and trust how the board pushes you forward. You should aim straight up, not out, to get the height you need. Sometimes if you have a lot of rotations, say a forward 2 1/2, you want to grab your knees too soon or throw your arms down before you reach a good top.  The score depends upon three parts of your dive, your approach and hurdle, the 'top' of your dive which includes your form in the air, and your entry which as everyone knows, should make as little splash as possible.

It's during the approach where you have to rid yourself of distractions. They call your name and the dive. On more than a few occasions, they call a dive out of the order you remember submitting on your list. You have little choice once you place your foot on the board. Balking costs. As the crowd hushes and your coach gestures his last signal to remind you not to do that weak part of your dive (Jim makes a cranking a pencil sharpener gesture), you are under maximum pressure. Breathe in. Stand and deliver. Focus and perform. Once the thing is in motion, it's all practiced mechanics and then finding the right split second to reach for the bottom of the pool. Push your arms forward, left hand grasping the right wrist, palms forward, locking your elbows and punching a hole in the water for the whole of your body to pass through. Are you under rotating and short? Are you long with your legs going past your head on entry? Did you finish your twist square with the board? Did you screw up the top and let your legs and feet go limp with frustration? It doesn't matter. The dive is over, you swim over to the side of the pool, adjust your trunks and pull yourself out of the water, triumphant or otherwise. You listen you the judges but you knew what score you deserved the moment you hit the water.  Shake out your hair, grab your towel and prepare for the next dive.

I was pleased to learn that Jason Statham was a springboard diver. You have to have style as well as discipline. You have to be comfortable with your body and abuse it. You need to be fearless of both pain and embarrassment. You get to show off. You get to learn the intricacies of something that takes place in seconds. And other than during the Olympic Games, you don't get to show off how well you can anticipate what a judge will score any particular dive. It's a dying art, I think. The Chinese have taken over the aesthetics of diving. They are slim and smooth and elegant. During my era, the era of Phil Boggs, Klaus Dibiasi and Greg Louganis, a combination of grace and power was what the judges liked. Then when Mark Lenzi came forward, his muscular hairy chested diving was acrobatically amazing. He could finish a forward 3 1/2 pike above the three meter board which is astounding to watch. It changed the sport. Now there were many dives that were included in official competitions with greater than a 3.0 degree of difficulty. Not so graceful but exciting in a new way. The Chinese and all divers, due to the new higher DD dives tend to be a lot shorter than those in the old school. Louganis was 5' 9" and by memory I recall Boggs and Dibiasi to be taller. But the sport moves forward, alas with fewer American world champions and contenders.

I am pleased to have recalled all of this and recognize the impact it had on my life. Getting into the yearbook sports page thanks to the drawing of Gary Suard, was one of my proudest moments as a teen. And doing well in a sport that wasn't my first choice or my second I guess taught me some valuable lessons. But I think the most important was to stand and deliver under the pressure of failure and against all odds. I think I did OK.

Living in Black Neighborhoods

"Your daddy's rich, and your ma is good looking. So hush little baby, don't you cry."

Q: What is it like living in a majority black neighborhood?

A: It’s kind of obvious to say they are all different, but I think it is useful to take note of the matter of class. You see since there are about 42 million in the US, that would make African-Americans the 35th largest nation on the planet. It’s also easy to remember that black median household income is about $42,000 per year. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to compare that with median household incomes of other nations.

At any rate, I have used class:

Class in America
When I look at the standard definitions of class I have basically started with a compressed version for black Americans. These are from top to bottom {Hill, Burbs, Hood, Ghetto, Projects/Sticks} It was conveniently five, but there's probably enough reason to split Projects and Sticks into their own separate categories. My upbringing was in the Hood, in the shadow of the Hill, but with ample distance from the Ghetto. I think I live in the Burbs, but perhaps I live on the Hill considering the priceyness of this particular Burb. By the way, I've always considered $300,000 to be rich. In my mind you make that kind of money not just being a doctor, lawyer or businessman, but a *good* doctor, lawywer or businessman. Be all that as it may (and not so crucially important) these follow a kind of 'geography / demographics as destiny' sort of thinking that was useful in my investigations of redlining (with the subheader 'American Apartheid' c.f. Massey & Denton) and my own national search for the right place to raise my family. It also played along the dialogs of 'mentality' for those interminable internecine discussions about proper blackness.
And so I have lived like this in the following majority black neighborhoods.

Hood One - 90016
I grew up in what is now called Jefferson Park / West Adams in Los Angeles. It is in Southwest LA most notably known by its major thoroughfare, Crenshaw Blvd. I grew up in a 3 bedroom 1 bathroom house with my three brothers and my sister. My parents were civil servants. I would say that we were above the median income for the neighborhood. We moved in about 3 years before the white families started to move out. It was a very nice neighborhood with a good public school and lots of friendly neighbors from 1964 through about 1980. There were some street gangs on the periphery, but none in the neighborhood. Our neighbors all went to different churches and were quite diverse. So you could immediately tell that a lot of people lived there because it was a black neighborhood - meaning this was one where blackfolks could get mortgages, whereas others were off limits. The consequence was that it was not truly organic like an ordinary urban or suburban place. A lot of us had very little in common. After 1980 when I moved out, the drug wars began and the entire area started to run downhill. But that place was, to me, a very normal and often pleasant place to grow up. The place now looks a touch nicer than it did in the mid 60s. Values in the property have gone way up.

Hood Two - 90047
I then lived near the Circle Park in Inglewood with my father after my parents split up. This was a nicer neighborhood, but I was personally very broke. The middle class families were a lot more plentiful and similar to us. But the main boulevard, Manchester, was not as economically viable as Crenshaw was at the time. Shopping was not as nice. I didn't even think about crime, so much as I did worrying about how I could get my old car working again. I was there for two years then went off to college. The place looks pretty run down these days.

Hood Three - 90016
I didn't live in a black neighborhood again until five years later when I came back home to West Adams. Knuckleheads now populated the neighborhood. Ball scratching idiots nobody respected when we were kids. They didn't play sports. They had no mechanical or handy skills. They just smoked dope, acted tough, shoplifted, did B&Es and chased nasty girls. They evolved into gangsters. When young men like my friends and I left, everything went to shit. The little brothers and punks began to rule. ('hood trending towards ghetto, but still good houses). Looked ratty those days.

Hood Four - 90043
I got out as soon as I could, went to live with my ex-girlfriend on the edge of Inglewood in a duplex on a busy street. That didn't work out long. It was on the border of one of the worst blocks in the area called Hyde Park. Ick. Lots of Section 8 housing and crackheads roaming the streets, panhandling bums at the gas stations, steetwalkers and pimps at the McDonalds. But it was a very busy neighborhood at the intersection of Florence and Crenshaw. Lots of bus commuters, kids. Not quite a solid working class neighborhood but one on the verge of that. There was a big lumber yard nearby, a regional park, a little Jamaican grocer, a busy car wash. The McDonalds there, like two others on Crenshaw was owned by a black man who was pretty well known. (definitely ghetto adjacent)

Hood Five - 90016
I then moved in with my brother into another West Adams neighborhood. We lived in a very modest back house - which was basically a studio apartment. We got on each other's nerves sometimes, but I now had a good job, a new girlfriend and a serviceable sporty vehicle. We didn't interact much at all in the neighborhood. Our landlady was a quiet older Christian woman. The place felt quiet, definitely downscale, but not dirty. It was on the edge of what I call a burglar-bar neighborhood - where B&Es (breaking and entering) were so common that people put iron bars (ornamental as they might be) on their doors and windows. Unfortunately we didn't have those on the back house and the landlady's gardener(!) of all people had his 10 year old kid(!) crawl through our window. My brother busted them in the act and we we had to testify in court against him. ('hood accomodated to ghetto behavior)

All of this time, living in Los Angeles, most of my friends and associates were what we used to call 'buppies' - black urban professionals. Many of them came from the affluent neighborhoods of View Park and Baldwin Hills. So while most of us were not affluent, we enjoyed the same middle class culture, fashion, music and everything else. None of us were wannabe gangsters and music by Rick James was considered quite risque, but yeah we danced to it. I wrote about this social scene in People of the Dons.

I moved to the beach and in 1991 just before the Riots, I moved to Brooklyn. I wanted to live in the newly hype neighborhood of Fort Greene, where Spike Lee and other wealthy blacks were gaining a foothold, but I wound up in (still very nice) Prospect Heights. As I moved from Brooklyn to Boston and back to NYC., got married and moved to Atlanta, I didn't live in a majority black neighborhood until 1997 when I came back to California and lived in Altadena.

Burb One - 91001
Altadena is a super uniquely oddball neighborhood. The feel is like shabby gentility. 80 year old houses with old electric sockets, peeling paint, unkempt lawns and basketball hoops with no nets. The neighborhood grocer had old cash registers. It felt like a small town store somewhere in the middle of Texas. There were horses in the neighborhood and we'd see riders every week. The big public park had dirty foul mouth kids I liked to keep my kids away from, but a big hearted woman who ran the afterschool program. I befriended a young Nation of Islam man who would drop by occasionally. Jehovah's Witnesses were always trolling. But the police helicopter was trolling as well - around every Saturday night. Occasionally we heard gunshots. We had a swimming pool in the backyard - one day we found somebody's rooster had flown into the yard. The house next door was shrouded in tall bushes and was on a double lot behind an iron gate. It definitely looked like a haunted mansion. Fortunately the old man there would through the kid's balls back, eventually. This was the kind of neighborhood where the McDonalds runs out of french fries. Just crazy odball dysfunctions. When it was time we went to talk to the (young black) principal of the local elementary school, Edison. He told us that 40% of his students were foster children. We couldn't get over it. The private school was expensive and required parents to forbid their children from watching television (and probably eating meat). The parochial school had a total of about 25 students. We had to move.

Burb Two - 90745
From 2001 until last year, we have lived in upscale neighborhoods where rich people were not uncommon and black families were. Last year we moved to a majority black suburban community. I realized when we got here that I had not lived in a house with central air conditioning in 22 years. This place is a joy in pretty much every way. Even though we haven't gotten to know our neighbors very well everyone we do meet is cool. I never thought I would enjoy living in a gated community, although there was one at the top of the hill in Altadena I could not afford. Although this place isn't as upscale as View Park and Ladera Heights, it's easily nicer than Baldwin Hills. But that's Carson. It has always had a solidly black middle class suburban vibe. That means people drive a Lexus to the fish market. I didn't happen to watch 'Blacki-sh' on TV but that would describe this place, though there are almost equal numbers of Asians here. A lot of late model SUVs to be found here and retirees as well.

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LA Riots: Myths & Stereotypes

l.a. riots myths and stereotypes
(from deep in the boohabian archives - spring 1997)
boohab - organic hiphop metaphysician

boohab - 07:42am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#6 of 185)
jesus christ. never have i seen such blatant revisionism. horowitz, you are seriously tripping! but you
know what? i forgive you because you are white and you didn't grow up in south central, so the only
access you have to the whole truth is through black folks like me who, on the whole don't care what you
think. you are so wrong it doesn't matter any longer if you ever get it right.

so despite all which has been said and truthful, people close to the facts understand that perhaps the
context will never stick. certainly after the fact of john woo's political descent, and riordan's ascent, the
political truth doesn't matter any more, so it is appropriate that your piece starts and ends with myths,
stereotypes and perceptions.

but just to give you the slightest clue, perhaps you should research back to those fateful days and ask
why people outside of los angeles rioted too.

further, as a matter of fact and record, kjlh 102.3 fm headquartered on crenshaw boulevard, right next
door to the angeles funeral home (an institution as distinctive as its name), played NO MUSIC. it was all
talk and call in for days. rap music indeed.

the only journalist closest to mainstream credibility i can give any credit for having any amount of context
on the subjects would be warren olney in his radio show 'which way la' in the aftermath.

boohab - 07:49am Apr 28, 1997 PST (#7 of 185)

the more i read that article the more i am amazed at how absolutely clueless the author is. i find it hard to
conceive what prompts him to flap around in the shallows of hearsay... i can't even find words which
describe how retarded his 'analysis' is. thank god he's on the web.

cause and effect. let us assume that this principle is universal, that it holds sway over all human beings
and begin from there...

---
boohab - 09:28pm May 1, 1997 PST (#41 of 185)

nobody is giving money to inner city schools. public high school education is being defunded, by what i
suspect are reactionary reasons. in california, the longstanding compromise has been to leave high schools
separate and unequal and attempt to take up the slack at the jr. college and state university level, where at
least there are state and federal funds available. that means, of course, affirmative action. now that
commitment is being dumped at the level it really matters because of all the rediculous hype over
berkeley. anyway...

horowitz, at least on charlie rose, doesn't appear to be a raving lunatic. at least now i understand what
stick he's shaking. and considering his enormous disenchantment with the black panthers, it is
understandable why his revulsion to the logic of violent insurgency infuses his rhetoric with such alarm.
still, i find his analysis flawed, and wonder who exactly he is talking to as regards the orientation of
african americans to the events of 5 years ago.

for example, as i talk about in the 'racial extermination' thread, there's no mention of the black church in
southern california, nor that of maldef, and left asian and black organizations in their response to the hype
about the uprising. what was clearly an outburst of rage has now been transformed into some grand
conspiracy in horowitz' description. i don't buy it.

i'm not entirely sure what anyone is supposed to learn about the events of 5 years ago. southern california
and the nation has failed to implement any serious policy related to the basic problem which was and
remains police abuse. there is no national watchdog and despite some efforts to implement community
policing, the public is not well prepared to act intelligently when such situations repeat, witness st.
petersberg.

if indeed the country is disintegrating into anti-government hysteria, there is no greater threat to civility
than distrust of police. anyone who recalls (or recalls reading about) events involving clashes of federal,
state and local authority regarding local police actions, should know what kind of mess this can lead to.
yet it is clear, in the wake of willie williams' dismissal that public confidence in the los angeles police
department is far from restored.

so what now?
---
boohab - 08:33pm May 3, 1997 PST (#44 of 185)

I was staring at that book just the other night in charlotte. well, that one and a dozen others. what i was
looking for specifically was something by john mcphee, but what section? over in the hype section was
cochran's book, radical son, the race card, fuhrman's book, and gates' book '13 ways to look at a black
man'. i read gates' dust cover and put it back. completely disgusted with everything surrounding oj, i can't
imagine what's left to say worth hearing besides chris rock's joke about if it were jerry seinfeld and the
only person who found the bloody glove just happened to be in the nation of islam... i ended up buying a
copy of the new yorker (with gates on black london - since i'll be over there this month) and gorbachev's
memoirs. i had picked up reginald lewis' 'why should white guys have all the fun' because it was
autographed by his widow and jett is in the news, but i decided to put it back.

at any rate, it would be interesting to hear angela davis dissected. as well it would be interesting to see
david horowitz deconstructed. now that i'm reviewing some history of actual marxism, it would be
interesting to see where these fellow travellers get off. as far as i've seen, all they do in black
communities is show up for king day parades and say "we're all the same". hmmm. let's try a thread shall
we?

---

boohab - 09:06am May 5, 1997 PST (#53 of 185)

whoa, slow down there pardner. my rage is my rage. i own it and i am responsible for it, it is not some
negotiable social anger to be farmed and framed.

what gives bell hooks, of all people, a special credibility is her unique ability to make clear the
distinctions. as soon as you got up to 'the killing rage of black women and men', bell steps in and lays
bare the differences in her critiques of 'she's gotta have it', for example. in that movie, men didn't see the
rape.

i'm going to crosspost some of my observations on black rage specifically, and i think that will illuminate
a bit more about the l.a. thing and the type of analysis bell hooks performs. overall, it is my belief that
'black rage' has become a commodity which too often substitutes for political action. that has a great deal
to do with the way non-blacks dismiss it (in the case of dh) and co-opt it (in the case of sa).

boohab - 09:51am May 5, 1997 PST (#54 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 27 Jul 1996 13:49:31

black rage is not a theory.

i'm not sure that it makes so much sense to explain it in any other terms than malcolm x's. 'whatever you
will do to me, just know that i will do the same to you'. considering what happens to black americans
ever day *not it theory* but in reality, it's a mutha to face. most white folks who have looked closely at
the situations many blacks find themselves often recoiled in shock. to a person, in my experience, it
comes out like 'man if they did shit like that to me...'. in the end, there is a profound respect for the many
black strategies used to displace or redirect that rage.

coming from that perspective, i respect that many folks are likely to respect the words and deeds of mlk.
but that is rarely the case. there is often a sense of resignation americans feel in confronting the facts that
justice is so often an impossibility - that oj will be virtually barbecued forever, yet the korean shopkeeper
videotaped shooting a black teenaged girl in cold blood received a suspended sentence and is forgotten by
the nation. white folks and blacks alike come to agree that black rage, given american society, is
inevitable. that is why white people live in white neighborhoods, stay away from downtown at night,
understand the fear of bernard goetz, get the message of willie horton and respond in all sorts of ways in
every aspect of american society in a predictable fashion to the images of danger associated with black
rage.

black rage becomes not only a self-fullfiling prophesy but a necessary component of american politics.
white folks accept their guilt and fear, as they realize their collective historical incompetence as the
political majority in addressing the injustices faced by blacks. they bow out. they accept the destruction
of cities and the perpetuation of tragedy. black folks do the same thing in their relationships to each other.
we abandon our brothers at the first sign of trouble despite what we know, better than anyone, about the
content of their individual characters, and we use our own successes and absence of (external) rage, as a
justification of our own evasions of responsibility. thus the enraged black man or woman has become a
staple symbol in everyone's rhetoric. but few of us are serious or busy addressing the fundamental
injustice.

---

boohab - 09:52am May 5, 1997 PST (#55 of 185)

rage is not hate.

rage is visceral reaction to a severe victimization when all else seems hopeless. rage is the explosive last
lashing out of a man facing death with his back to the wall. it is not sustained or calculated like hate. one
speaks of acts of rage, not strategies of rage or ideologies of rage. you rage to get shit out of your system
and scare folks into not pushing you any more. it's a natural thang.

what's unnatural is that there is black rage. that a society is so predisposed to pushing black folks to the
limit that their rage is almost predictable.

although i never do, well - i haven't in memory - i know very well what this rage looks like and how to
use it. the expression of black rage as a dramatic device is (over)used by black and white artists alike. it's
part of the american lexicon. but that is very distinct from the real thing, as different as individual rap
artists are in rhyme character in a recording studio are from real killers behind bars. the expression is
romanticized in typical american fashion (i can think of no better example than the western movie, and in
particular the role of the writer in clint eastwood's 'unforgiven').

also, black folks front. that's not rage, that's frontin'. and i know one of you stupid punk ass white boys is
going to want me to please explain frontin'. don't even try it. you know what i'm sayin? just be glad i
didn't straight wax your sorry ass from the jump. cause you wouldn't be standing there with that stupid
look on your face gettin all huffy. you'd be pickin your ass up off the floor. oh oh oh now you know
what i'm saying. damn skippy. if your shit was correct i wouldn't have to go there. lame ass mu'fukas.

(i need to invent a new smiley to cap off that last paragraph. it is the following expression: i am tilting my
head to the side, rolling my eyes up and smacking my teeth and straight walking away - kind of like what
dennis johnson did to chris collingsworth last night)

boohab - 09:56am May 5, 1997 PST (#56 of 185)

articulation of rage is a valuable skill.

so often black folks feel it, but don't know exactly where it is coming from or what to do about it. they
equate that existential anger, confusion and the resulting frustration as an essential characteristic of being
black. but it is not. while it is certainly part of the black experience, the permanancy of which white
supremacy replicates generation after generation, it is not the defining core of who we are.

every generation (and ethnicity) of african americans finds different ways to articulate and diffuse or
redirect this rage.

boohab - 10:02am May 5, 1997 PST (#57 of 185)

(boohab) Sat, 03 Aug 1996

the articulation of black rage or any other black sentiment or thought serves as a critical discourse on
american society.

however, as many exemplify in their admittedly undernourished comprehension of articulate black voices,
most of america does not pay attention. there are certainly *reasons* behind white fear, defensiveness
and reactions to perceived threats posed by blacks. but they are not good reasons, and they must be
challenged. 'consistent patterns of thought' within black communities are either well articulated or they
are not. those which are well articulated have names as do those who represent them. if there are issues
to be discussed and contention about the validity of claims, then there are real ways to deal with them
which are not grounded in fear, defensiveness and reactionary rhetoric. to direct such discussions are the
reasons black thinkers of all types write histories, teach classes, create novels, compose music, sculpt,
rhyme, dance, preach, witness and otherwise work to expose their thoughts.

yet despite this fact, americans continue to beleive in or be unduly influenced by the racist hype, often
beleiving themselves to be as well-informed as anyone. because of this there is practically an industry
dedicated to knocking ignorant people upside the head. i take up the cudgel of the race man from time to
time, but this time i'll defer to farai: http://www.popandpolitics.com

certainly ms. chideya is not the first, nor will she be the last to bring clarity to issues of racial prejudice,
oppression and injustice. there are today and have been so many who have directly transformed rage into
productive lessons without pandering themselves as victims. they don't expect nor ask for pity; these are
teachers. and their lessons stand in defiance of fear. too often we extract soundbites out of these lessons
believing there are golden platitudes that stand for all time in any varitey of circumstances. but how many
times have americans consoled themselves with the pathetic plea of a brain damaged man beaten into
submission by brutal police officers? (if there was ever any question of whether or not rodney g. king
was willing to surrender, consider those words). there is no excuse for americans to pretend to
understand the lessons of the past without any consistent discipline and evaluation. racism invariably
leads to injustice.

like disease, racism needs to be fought with thoroughness and vigor every generation. yet unlike disease,
if you harbor racist ideas wittingly or not, it *is* your fault and your responsibility whether or not we live
in a democracy, everyone's attitude should bear scrutiny on the issues.

---

boohab - 10:07am May 5, 1997 PST (#58 of 185)

black rage is a self-perpetuating phenomenon.

there is a vested interest in american politics to use black rage. white political majorities are particularly
attuned to black rage, whether that is constructive or raw rage. in short, black rage is a legitimated form
of political protest. a lot of blacks recognize this and make use of it. if i sit here in this forum and
complain that black folks get harrassed unnecesarily by the same police that should be protecting them,
that does not carry the same weight in american society as the artist ice cube writing the rap 'fuck the
police' and having 17 year olds pump the beat in the car next to you with an evil stare on their face.

when black representation on the city council of los angeles is resisted for decades, and there is no forum
given for the tyrrany of the darryl gates administration, that doesn't get the same attention as video of
blacks burning police cars. often enough, there are no acceptable political compromises offered by a
polity which ignores the facts of black life. consider how it is that 'law and order' has become a 'white
man's burden' in our society.

such political intransigence is often enough reasonable provocation for black folks to take rage to the
streets. the spirit of compromise - cant we all just get along - is not proactive. it comes after the violent
fact. clinton has demonstrated this in his dismissal of sista souljah, for example.

boohab - 10:09am May 5, 1997 PST (#59 of 185)

(end of blasts from the past)
---

boohab - 05:54am May 6, 1997 PST (#70 of 185)

my rage is what i say it is. but that doesn't stop the patronizing bullshit. but i don't need to go there. like i
said before, you can be so wrong for so long as to be irrelevent.

america can survive the burning of its cities and not change its mind. that is the one lesson i have learned
above all. myths and stereotypes are what count.

the inevitable destination of dh and iv's condescention can be found here, as they demonstrate the snide,
callous, intransigent politics which creates police brutality in the first place and defends the misapplication
of justice as applied to black folks in particular. it is clear, that after an exhaustive and patient explanation
of the human element of rage in the context of los angeles 1992, both were content to reduce complexity
to the snappy reiterations of the most ignorant and prejudiced comments about the tragedy.

no doubt, they will recount to me 'the facts'.

"The tones of lies are vulgar facts but they are not noble sounds. But there is another truth and that
truth passes through time in the very same way that an irresistible force passes through an immovable
object. That's what I said: this truth is so irresistible that it passes through immovable objects. It is the
truth of a desire for a refined and impassioned portrait of the presence and the power and the
possibilities of the human spirit."

-- Stanley Crouch

---

boohab - 10:27am May 6, 1997 PST (#75 of 185)

you are being silly ilya. maxine waters *is* a duly elected leader of south central los angeles. is this her
call, or does it matter to you what she thinks?

take a look at these photos, (the essay is a bit obscure but it's what i was thinking at the time). who was
out for revenge?
---

boohab - 10:52am May 6, 1997 PST (#76 of 185)

I don't think it's beneficial to think about the accuracy of the aim of the looting, torching, shooting ragers.
those who riot best, riot. those who lobby best, lobby.

what is important is to recognize the disposition of political forces in the aftermath. to consign this matter
to the police as merely a crime wave is to foreclose the possibility of a transformative politics of the
ragers. yet this was the status quo of the racist stereotypes against south central and east los angeles, and
this is precisely what horowitz has done. such is the justification for the lapd being one of the most
advanced paramilitary police forces in the world. is there any reason to believe horowitz' dismissive
majoritarian position might be moderated by intelligent or (heaven forbid) compassionate consideration?
well, not if you are preoccupied with maoist history and the love affairs of opera singers.

so instead of engaging (which would probably have been very easy, considering salon's recent article on
maxine) on a level of political negotiation, we witness crude and egregious examples as par for the course.

this does not bode well for the future expansion of democratic politics in the united states. there are
generations and geographies for which adequate political representation has never been achieved. where
the practice of voting and speaking out is the experience of defeat after defeat. where human rights issues
become 'special interest' issues. where people don't expect suspects to be brought to trial - merely shot in
the street. where people are suspects for just being alive.

my experience tells me that the fire next time will be put out by next wednesday. american society and
politics absolutely crushes such political dissent even before it gets the opportunity to become political.
and as long as americans can distance themselves, with haughty indifference from the truths of these
matters, hiding behind the thin blue line of police force rather than engaging in constructive political
engagement, then as malcolm x said "as long as those ingredients, explosive ingredients exist, you are
going to have the potential for explosion on your hands".
---
boohab - 08:35pm May 6, 1997 PST (#84 of 185)

speaking of salvadorans, i forgot to mention that there was an improper degree of cooperation between
the lapd and the ins in the aftermath. having arrested a large number of latinos and holding them under
emergency rules, ins records were searched and individual suspects turned over to that agency for
deportation.

korean liquor stores were a particular target primarily because of the murder of latasha harlins. her killer,
the owner was caught on tape shooting harlins point blank for allegedly stealing a quart of orange juice.
she was given a suspended sentence and placed on probation. as i recall, no homes burned except one
apartment building adjacent to a strip mall. lots of pawn shops were burned.

I wrote "How will theory transform the monsters created in our nightmares by our abusive white
fathers?". i was thinking of several things, primarily the dualism gerald early calls the 'lure and loathing' of
american society. white cops protect white folks in white neighborhoods like beverly hills and like
hawthorne, meaning they keep you out, by any means necessary, but you are supposed to respect the
law - you hate the powerful society that you wish to be a part of because it is so eager to use violence
against you. so when you are successful, do you replicate that abuse? does the son kill the father and set
himself up to be killed, or does the son live forever in his father's shadow?
---

boohab - 07:23am May 9, 1997 PST (#125 of 185)

120 posts until slavery and the founding fathers. actually i thought nazis would be first. before we start
talking about the caucasian wars, the long march and the battle of hastings why don't we look a bit closer
at our own politics today?

the mike davis analysis is a very good piece. it clarifies for me some things that i knew but never looked
at very closely. (i studiously avoided all of the books coming out on the subject back then - the level of
ignorance was so astounding that i couldn't stomach it.) davis' ability to talk with gangbangers and his
understanding about their longstanding war with the lapd is unrivaled. although i didn't read leon bing's
bio on kody scott, i did read his own book, which i take to be more accurate.

I have some 30 or so photographs of the destruction which i'll scan in and add as a special addendum to
boohab's factotum.

Donna Dear - 07:47am May 9, 1997 PST (#126 of 185)
"A modest woman; with much to be modest about"

Boo....ya got a link to the Davis stuff?

boohab - 08:03am May 9, 1997 PST (#127 of 185)

http://www.exuberance.com/rut/miked/burning.html

david horowitz - 08:44am May 9, 1997 PST (#128 of 185)
Author, Radical Son

Sherman: Yes, the movie.

boohab: How come lefties like Davis always line up on the side of the criminals?

boohab - 09:19am May 9, 1997 PST (#129 of 185)

that depends on your definition of 'senseless death'.

if one is capable of compassion for the murdered, then one can measure ones tolerance for all murders
on the same scale. so justice denied to crips and bloods hurts just as much as justice denied anyone else.
davis lays bare the symbiotic relationships between local politicians, fear of crime, lapd funding and gang
warefare. what emerges is a picture of gang violence which is allowed to fester because it serves police
interests in obtaining paramilitary equipment, political interests in demonizing 'south central' as one big
sinkhole (which actually is one of america's largest and most ethnically diverse urban areas), and gang
interests in bloody revenge. despite the large number of gangs and gang members in los angeles, only a
small minority are involved in drug dealing and the murderous crime associated with that - but that
understanding is impossible to come by through conventional means. so there is essentially an ongoing
war between the lapd and gangs and it's the gangbangers who get shot on the street, not the cops.

the net result is that criminal suspects are systematically denied due process because of the agressive
tactics of the lapd. the courts try to compensate for the cops zealousness, then the cops try to
compensate for the courts.

on the other hand, davis illustrates clearly how operation hammer and gang sweeps affected everyone in
that geographic area. you recruit cops from all around the country, send them to the academy and then to
work an internship at the county lockup, then out into south central with orders to sweep, and you spend
millions of tax dollars with overtime for mass arrests with 2% criminal booking rates. nevertheless you
add thousands of names to a computerized arrest record system, available online to every patrol car -
which effects police thinking. they don't know, or care to know, the difference between criminals and
ordinary teenagers. to them, all youth of color in south central los angeles are potential gangbangers, thus
potential enemies.

also remember that the great myth of los angeles policing is that the area covered by the lapd is far too
great for community policing. the reason los angeles has helicopter patrols is an outgrowth of that old
idea. los angeles does not have community precincts - they have these large bunker buildings which spit
out squad cars. all the busses in the rtd have numbers painted on their tops, as do squad cars, and certain
public buildings so that la can be monitored from the air. cops don't get out of their cars unless they
*must*. they don't fight crime on the ground, they cruise around 'hostile territory'.

when pcp was (for a short time) the new hot drug on the streets, the lapd testified about its ability to give
superhuman strength to suspects. that's when they started with their more agressive baton techniques and
chokeholds. it was assumed that anyone resisting arrest was a potential pcp addict, and a great deal of
force was used. that whole technique we saw used on rodney king came from that period. the chokehold
got the lapd in more trouble than they could handle. so they got stun guns, then they got 9mm pistols,
shotguns and they even got tanks. well, they always had shotguns.

anyway, the lapd has been very successful in publicizing certain gang activity, bringing up the racial
spectre and in cooperation with local polticians, securing for themselves more and more paramilitary role.
the lapd's anti-terrorist and intelligence divisions are probably the most advanced in the world, and that's
no exaggeration.

the great irony is that citizens in los angeles, especially in south central, do not feel protected or served by
the police. everyone (these days) buys weapons for self-protection.
---
boohab - 03:13pm May 9, 1997 PST (#140 of 185)

So defending police officers somehow means that you are protecting
"the owning class"? Whatever that means. So many people seem to wish
to excuse criminal behavior due to the us vs. the cops mentality.
Does it suprise you that the cops will start to have the same
attitude? Americans today view our police as corrupt and violent
when the truth is that the vast majority are neither. You want to
see violent cops go to Germany. See what the Polizei constitute as
police brutality.

the vast majority of police departments in america don't have a credibility problem, and the vast majority
of police chiefs in california said darryl gates should have stepped down a long time before he did.

the vast majority of police officers in the foothill division which was that of koon, powell, wind and
brisneo also failed to cooperate with the fbi investigation of systemwide corruption. nor was there any
legal recourse for non-cooperation.

the vast majority of african-americans are unconcerned with police abuse and bruality in germany
because they know what it is like firsthand.

you seem to forget that african-americans specifically haved lived through an era when police exclusively
protected white people. so as much mouthing off as people do about 'defending criminal behaviour', this
country still writes off huge sections of its population as criminals, and not long ago that included any
black folks who asserted themselves in any dispute with whites. someday there will come a point in
american society when blacks, clearly and still america's most despised (except perhaps for gay blacks),
will be able to assert themselves in any situation without having to explain and carry their constitutional
and civil rights on their sleeves. but while we still do and are smarting from abuses, you'll hear a lot
whose rights are being stepped on, and that includes criminal suspects - because that's who we are.

---

johnny cochran is wealthy. why? because he has been successful in winning civil judgements against the
los angeles police department. the taxpayers as a political class, changed the law in order to limit the
liability of the lapd on several occasions.

the first example was after the successful prosecution of wrongful death and criminal negligence in the
case of (whatshisname) who was hung in the signal hill jail by police -(they claimed it was a suicide, and
were busted by a coroner's inquest). it limited the liability of police officers and jailers in civil and criminal
matters as regards the safety of suspects in custody. the second came on the heels of the successful jury
award of about 6 million dollars to activist michael zinzun, who lost an eye during his arrest and lockup. it
put a cieling on the amount juries could award.

it is perhaps not widely known that the legal defense fund for officer stacey koon amounted to about 13
million dollars. i beleive rodney king's award was about 4 million. these figures may be wrong, i am surer
about koon's defense fund, and i am certain he got more than rodney king.

so these are concrete examples of defenses of the police, specifically when they are at their worst. why?
because people like johnny cochran would bankrupt the city..

--

boohab - 09:17am May 10, 1997 PST (#146 of 185)

and even the abolition of slavery did not reject the presumed inferiority of africans... anyway.

neither the aclu or any other 'liberal' watchdog group has the political knowhow to work gang
intervention. the fact of the matter is that the few people IN the system which are successful at
reconstructing gang members get no respect or funds from either liberals or conservatives.

I think it is reasonable that juveniles of high school age convicted in the 'big four' violent crimes should be
tried as adults, but i don't think it is reasonable that special abridgements of due process are called for in
any case. just keep the police in their place.

but the fact is that before we can deal with violent crime, we have to undo the huge mistakes made in the
war on drugs and mandatory sentencing. i challenge anyone to convince me that prisons are not tough
enough, but they are wasted on the wrong people. the burden of prison overpopulation lies almost
exclusively with conservative neo puritanical prohibitions. violent criminals get out because crackheads go
in.

and yes it is a shame that the united states jails more people per capita than any other nation. the aclu is
right to fight against that. then again, the political majority seems to desire a police state.
--

 

A True Angeleno

A true Angeleno (from the archives April 2015)

1. You have at least two favorite Mexican beers.
   
Need I say more? Most people in the rest of the country only know Corona. You've been there, done that, gave it up, came back. You know your Tecate from your Negro Modelo, your Sol from your Pacifico. Rolling Rock? What's that?
   

2. You are some kind of burrito snob.

   Tacos are tacos, and from time to time you can accept something other than the usual, but when it comes to burritos, you are specific and exacting. If they put the wrong thing in it, you will take it back. You try to avoid conversations about the proper burrito like some people avoid religion and politics.
   

3. You have a beach.

   No a beach is not a beach. When you say you are going 'to the beach', you have a specific beach in mind. Venice Beach is nothing like Zuma. You try to explain to your friends from out of town that what they are seeing at Will Rogers is not volleyball. Volleyball is at the Manhattan Pier. You know loud pit parties at Dockweiller after dark, and the special quiet of MDR north of the channel. You know beach etiquette is local.
   
   
4. Deep down you miss the Raiders, kinda.
We don't lose a lot of sleep over football. I mean it's not like we don't have other things to do, like Ohio or Pittsburgh. But if we ever get another team, the bar is going to be rather high.

   
   
5. You have a love-hate relationship with local news personalities.
   
   
6. You recognize California in motion pictures.
Yeah that's supposed to be some exotic locale, but you recognize those hills. That's California scrub and you cannot be fooled. That cave? That's Bronson Cave, you've been there yourself. That distant mountain road? Griffith Park. That cliff by the beach? Zuma, dude
   

7. What's a tree? Yeah I recognize it, but if it's not a palm tree I don't know what it's called.
   

8. You have an innate earthquake sense.
Within 2 seconds, you know if that shake is going to cause annoyance or panic. You are wary of putting too many fragile objects on bookshelves. Glass coffee tables? No.

   
   
9. You recognize a sweet ride.
And you give props to somebody whose hooptie is tight. Not just your ordinary Porsche or S Class can turn your head, but a matte black BRZ with the sport exhaust, or a retro Baja Bug? That's a car.

Pray For Me - An Open Letter from an LAPD Officer

Doc speaks in an open letter to Pops. 

Time to speak up. To keep nation from dissolving into civil unrest, I think it is imperative that people of good conscience stand up and loudly counter violent voices stirring for race riots and the death of more cops. 

The graffiti on the 5 Freeway just outside of downtown LA, "Kill more cops" is indicative of the tactics violent revolutionaries seek to employee against the people's guardians. You and I both know that there is no American institution that is done more to preserve black lives the nation's police departments.

The Democratic Party -- with its welfare practices, condom distribution schools,  abortion on demand and union-controlled substandard school systems has decimated the black family. Margaret Sanger (Ms Kill-a-Negra-in-da-womb) is a hero of Hillary Clinton and Planned Parenthood locations are smack in the middle of impoverished minority neighborhoods.

It's time to speak up. I'm appalled by the lack of courageous, creative and articulate leadership within our nation's police ranks. Big City Chiefs are largely mum on the deadly threats being posed by militant black terrorist organizations that have emerged. David Clarke is it! But what a powerful force he's become.

I was born for such a times as these. It's my turn to speak up. Later this week my partner and I will be assigned to patrol the BLM protest encampment of LA's City Hall East. The protesters have vowed to remain in place until the Mayor fires Chief Beck for deeming "in policy" the shooting of armed (with knife) female black who charged officers. They were in foot pursuit after she robbed a store.

I've been reading voraciously to equip myself with facts to counter false BLM narrative regarding white cops. Here's one; although blacks comprise just 12% of the population, they are 40% of those who confront cops while armed. Despite this WHITE COPS fire LAST! It's three times more likely to be shot by a non-white. As to the statistics re: unarmed suspects, cops are 18 times more likely to be shot than people who aren't armed are to be by police. 

BLM is comprised of interest angry blamers who don't have strategy for reducing black on black homicides. 97% of homicides Black suffers are the hands of blacks. 81% of whites on murdered are killed by blacks. Whites kill each other only 16% of the time. Blacks hate THEMSELVES more than ANYBODY else. [Editor's note: These stats are off. c.f. FBI]

My first few days on assignments I'm just going to smile and wave. Over time I'll lay down my 'ghetto credentials' and gradually educate them on the fallacy of their premise that white cops present an existential threat to them.

Pray for me.

Peace. (Doc) 

The Ride Along

Like many of my fellows and most of my closest friends, my priorities and concerns were significantly changed by 9/11. That shift ultimately moved me from Left to Right. Folks who know me know that I tend to be something of a fearless adventurer. I go there. I follow where my curiosity and truth lead me, which is generally outside of the comfort zone and into the danger zone.

These days I’m engaged in what I call my martial education. As part and parcel of that I am preparing, as intelligently and reasonably as I can, for survival in the worst country America could become. That stands outside of my prior fields of ambition, but the more I study history and pay attention to the world outside of my comfortable upper middle class lifestyle, the more I learn. I find this new world fascinating. So I joined the local citizens police academy.

In my corner of Los Angeles County we are fortunate not to suffer from a lot of the gang problems elsewhere, and although budgets are always tight, it’s not from citizens trying to defund cops. So for some time now we’ve had a citizen’s police academy. I’m in Class #38 which runs from January to May, three hours a week. Officers and staff from the Chief on down, come to instruct us on how our police department conducts its business from everything to animal control to internal affairs to the City Attorney to SWAT to communications. Every week there are at least two sessions that give us way more info than you might think is possible. Last week we learned about the K-9 patrols. Next week is a focus on domestic violence.

As part of this instruction, everyone in the class has an opportunity to join an officer on patrol. I chose the 8pm to midnight shift on a Friday night into the relatively rougher area of the north side of town.  Here is my story. 

I hit the streets with Officer K. As we left the station and he prepared his Dodge Charger squad car, I picked up the sense that we were late. He was all business as he straightened things up. Usually officers go out singly in the squad car; he pulled some stuff into the trunk – while he was there, he showed me the orange handled less-lethal shotgun. We got in and I asked about the ground rules. I could talk and ask anything I felt like.  We took off to the Northside.

My left arm was squeezed uncomfortably next to his console and keyboard that projected from the dashboard into the space between the driver and passenger seat. On the computer screen was a series of Windows looking screens mixed in with some text only green screens. He popped back and forth through them with ease. Cops have as many acronyms as we do in IT, but most of theirs relate to 10-codes and penal codes. So he’s driving along, banging on the computer and listening to the radio. Dude is multitasking like a pro.  Our first call comes. I become instantly aware that we are on the other end of 911 calls, and they’re constantly happening in our city of 67,000.  Our first call was to a local park. Nine males were reported to be smoking in a non-smoking area. I joked with K that I’m sure he could handle that without much trouble. He seriously replied that he’s not interested in starting trouble where there is none, that he’d use his nice voice.  It turned out that the offending smokers had moved along before we arrived, and I am reminded that cops will tell the assholes to move along so that we don’t have to, but by their mere presence a lot doesn’t need to be said. I was reminded of how interestingly that works from several angles as the night progressed.

We stopped for a quick meal at a local healthy chicken joint where we met another officer and his probie. The cops sat with their backs to the wall and tore through baked chicken and veggies. Officer K pulled off the skin from his bird and sipped his big Coke. We hadn’t been outside the restaurant 20 seconds when the call came for a 242. A fight. It was at the big park where all the joggers and soccer players hang out. The time was about quarter to 9. 

 As we pulled around the second to last corner the dispatcher clearly said ‘vehicle vs pedestrian’ at the same call. Possible hit and run. This was not your ordinary fight. The squad car lights flashed red and blue as a crowd of young men were waving us in. Officer K was out of the car almost before it stopped. As usual cops arrive on scene just after the crime, and so the police work began. I stayed in the car as more units poured in. There was a stabbing. I could hear people saying that the back of the victim’s shirt was soaked in blood. He lay down behind a minivan in the parking lot over to my left. The ambulance and fire truck were there after a short period and more cops came in to tape off the crime scene, two large rectangles in separate areas of the parking lot.

Officer K allowed me full access after 20 minutes or so. What happened was that a player got a red card near the end of a game, and a fight broke out on the field. After the game, the two teams kept fighting and breaking up fights and swinging and grappling again at the two areas marked off in the parking lot. And then it got vicious. I followed K into the larger of the two areas where the victim had previously lain bloody and he began questioning witnesses.

Everybody seemed to have smartphones but nobody could identify who was fighting whom. Plenty of selfies but very little incriminating evidence. The vehicle in question was identified multiple different ways. Some said it was silver, others said it was grey. One guy said it was burgundy. Everybody pretty much agreed it took off, burning rubber out of the parking lot. One of the witnesses got a partial plate. That same person was read some legal notifications, and positively identified one of the players from the other team as in the melee against the victim. K took statements from half a dozen witnesses. Then we crossed the field to get half of roster from the rec center staff. Now we were getting somewhere. Almost.

The kid with blood on his knuckles sat quietly under a large tree in the parking lot median.  He didn’t see a knife. By this time we had deduced that the primary suspect must have taken off in the vehicle, but this was the only one on the team who was identified fighting the stabbed player. A dozen witnesses and ‘Knuckles’ were all officially detained. A couple of sergeants on the scene directed officers back and forth coming up with questioning strategies as they tried to piece together exactly what happened. We came up with a new set of questions for Knuckles, now he opens  up with a name, ‘Folder’.  There is only one name that resembles that on the roster, but that person is not around.

The senior sergeant wants to bust Knuckles and says so with some enthusiastic choice words. Officer K, whose call this is, disagrees. Knuckles is too calm. By now he’s been sitting under the tree for over an hour. Even though he’s answered questions, this whole thing is still a mystery. When three or four groups of men are fighting, what they see of the other fights is very little, what they say about their own fight is typical. Yeah I threw a few punches, but I was breaking it up. The general rule is that you let fighters fight. Nobody presses charges. But a stabbing is different. If you’re fighting 300 yards away from the first fight and break out a deadly weapon, that’s attempted murder. We’ve dispatched two sergeants, a fire truck with four guys, an ambulance, the local security guards are here, there are at least 5 city cops including Officer K and I, plus the CSIs and we’ve been here almost 90 minutes. If we let Knuckles walk, we’ll never see him again.

There are families and friends of the soccer players still hanging about. Some can’t leave because their cars are roped off in the crime scene.  The other half of the roster comes, as well as intel on the vehicle. The sergeant orders us to the neighboring city to go get it. Officer K is harried. All these statements and paperwork are going to have to be done. The 911 calls are piling up because we couldn’t make a good arrest or figure out exactly what happened. Now we’re heading out of town to confiscate a vehicle. I’m excited by the fact that I can stand see and hear everything that’s going on and I’m trying to solve the mystery myself. Fine for me, I don’t have to do the paperwork. Before we arrive, the call comes over the radio that Knuckles was arrested on an 836. This is a provisional arrest without charge, in the grey area between reasonable suspicion and probable cause. K groans.

We arrive and park in the street near an alley a block from the house of the owner of the vehicle. There are three other officers on scene, one from our town and two local cops. The attitude is more loose. We’re shooting the shit, but there’s an undercurrent of nervousness. This is definitely a burglar bar neighborhood. There’s a large abandoned building overshadowing the place, a line of aircraft trail out to the east. We are under the flight path for LAX. Lately there have been a lot of shootings around here, they say. Nobody knows why. It’s 11pm and we’re about to grab the vehicle of an attempted murder suspect.  The tow truck arrives, and the plan is set. Can you hook up this vehicle quickly? We’ll give you cover in case the family starts beef. Some cars are arriving in front of the suspect’s house. Time to move.

We jump into the Charger and flip a U turn. There’s still a little traffic around and people are looking around to figure out why there are three cop cars here. We're agitated that it takes 30 seconds to drive a couple hundred yards behind these rubbernecking guys in their slow cars, but we don't want to blast lights and sirens to get these civilians out of the way. We take position on the far side of the house and vehicle. Sure enough, the witness got the license right. Lights come on people come out of the house, some men, women and kids. Officer K gets down to business and the tow truck dude works his end. I’m staying back this time.

It turns out that these two guys, the owner of the truck and his passenger, another young kid were super cooperative. Yes they know Knuckles and Folder. While the fights were going on, they wanted to get the hell out, and so they did. Their soccer team is mostly friends and family and Folder is a friend of a cousin. They’re not surprised that he would do something like that. We have the rec center’s roster and they identify that he put a fake name (not that ‘Knuckles’ and ‘Folder’ are real names) on it. The kid pantomimes the fight. He actually did see Folder on top of the victim beating him while he was face down on the ground. It was interesting to see the way he held his fists when he recreated the fight, those looked like stabbing motions to me. We have a name, and a cell phone number of our primary suspect. Our work here is done.

All of this time, I pretty much played it cool and poker-faced. I know people couldn’t tell what my position was. I was dressed in tactical black, sometimes witnesses at were ease, sometimes they got nervous. Officer K was consistent at all times interacting with the public. I got a sense of his confidence and sense. While my mind was rushing all over the place, I could tell there were very clear priorities he was working from. Although that's to be expected, I still find it remarkable, the calm in enforcing the law and the details of the workmanship that make something like a stabbing just another day's police work. 

There are still a few more classes for me to attend before I'm done, and I don't know which steps are immediately next in my martial education. This has been an eye-opening experience in understanding the justice system and the priorities of my local cops. I'm still glad I don't have to do the paperwork. 

Driving Around the ExxonMobile Refinery in Torrance

The following is my route around the site. My realtime audio recording is here:

Download TorranceExplosion  (yeah I know I said the wrong date at the end. Today is the 18th not the 17th.) I drove clockwise around the refinery. My route is the yellow line. The large damaged building is the red rectangle. The police checkpoints are the blue squares. 

 

 Here's the flare you can see as normal traffic is driving by about a quarter mile west from the checkpoint at Del Amo and Maple:

This is the best picture I have seen illustrating the damage done to that large building. It's an angle looking northwest from about Del Amo & Crenshaw. That's a big building. Credit to SoCalPix

 

 

Actually, this one is even better and shows that the explosion went clearly through the entire structure.  As you can see, this building is a good 12 stories high. The unit is an electrostatic precipitator.  My guess is that it is a wet setup owing to the steam that is visible. It's basically a very large air pollution device. It conforms with my experience of smelling hydrogen sulfide on that stretch of Crenshaw. 

Redondo Nike Track Festival - A Great Tradition Begins

(whole cloth)

A special Thank you from Coach Bob Leetch

This past weekend Redondo Union High School played host to one of the finest track meets in the nation. What was one of the largest high school sporting events in the history of the South Bay was also an extremely high calibre meet. We hosted 2,200 athletes from throughout the southland to 3,600 events in the span of two days. EPI Elite marks are a standardized level of excellence used to determine high level track and field marks. They are very hard to obtain. The top performing meet in the country so far had produced 60 EPI Elite marks. Last Friday and Saturday the Redondo Nike Track Festival produce 138 EPI Elite marks! In terms of excellence our meet has quickly jumped to become one of the top 10 invitationals in the United States. Pretty big time stuff.

And this was not produced by a group of paid professionals hired to host a meet like the famous Arcadia Invitational or the Mt. Sac Relays. This was hosted by, set up, built up, broken down, cleaned up, escorted, cooked for, picked up after, announced by and run by us. Parents, coaches, friends, family all of us volunteers somehow connected to this track program. Rich Gonzales, our dear friend, editor of PrepCalTrack.com and Meet Director of the Arcadia Invitational said, "To host this large a meet with that much precision and timeliness was amazing. Hats off to your amazing crew. That is one of the finest meets in the country." 

The size of the meet was impressive. The level of excellence achieved during the meet was astonishing. But the warmth and personal touch from each and every volunteer is what makes this meet special. To hold a high calibre meet with these types of numbers became a vision of mine the moment our school bond to improve our facilities passed. I knew we had the facilities and I also knew we had the type of people that cared about this program and our fine school. But this weekend we exceeded any of my expectations. We ran an amazing meet close to perfection. But it is the friendly, caring manner that every volunteer displays that makes the real difference. Every athlete and coach I spoke with commented on how much fun they were having and how nice they were being treated. Folks, we run a class operation and it shows. One of the best compliments came from the coach at powerhouse Notre Dame High School. He said, "We love this meet. One of the reasons we come here is to show the kids coming out of soccer and football that our sport is Big Time. The Redondo Nike Track Festival makes all our kids feel like stars. After this meet the kids are really fired up. And everyone is so friendly and nice. How do you do it?"

One of the things I determine in a town's 'quality of life,' is it's sense of community. To me this is how involved are we in our own town. Do we try to shop at a local grocery store, buy our morning cup of joe from around the corner. Do we support our little leagues, local charities or even get to know the people who work and live around us? I think all these things that make up a community are very important in our daily lives. This weekend we showed that we have an amazingly strong sense of community that is very active in promoting the lives of so many around us. This was all of us. Everywhere you looked, we were there helping, leading, assisting all with a smile that said, "have fun, run fast, jump far, be strong, I'm here to help." Our kids performed superbly. How could they not, everywhere they turned was a familiar face offering encouragement. One of the real joys of this meet is the look of pride on the faces of our kids when they see a their own parents making a contribution. I see the pride in their eyes and I know it is making an enormous impact on them.

I would like to thank all who helped make the Redondo Nike Track Festival the amazing event it is. Everyone who helped in any way is responsible for our successes.

We could never do this without the substantial financial support from the Nike team, Scott Lash, Vida Rabizedah and Lino Almeida are the key players who have worked behind the scenes for months in the planning stages all the way to helping decorate the track. They are not just our sponsors, they are our friends. Whenever we need a thing this team is first in line to help. Since this meet began I have work closely with Scott and Vida to shape the concept of this unique meet.

Special thanks to Laurie Baker, Melanie and Kevin Sullivan, Leslie Mull, Cathy Herold, Tracy McMartin, Doug Boswell, Wendy and Tony Ulizio, Susan and Kevin Ryan (the voice of Redondo Track & Field), Dave and Mona Dill for taking many of the time consuming lead positions. And my lovely wife Kirsten Leetch for taking the reins and organizing the whole event. They are the real nuts and bolts of our organization. They put in months of work before the first starting gun went off. Thanks to our friends Debbie Brossard, friend of Leslie Mull, who flies out from Scottsdale, Arizona every year to work the lower concessions and my best man Nick Carr and his girlfriend Wendy who fly down from San Francisco every year to help with field management. Those three don't even have any skin in the game!

On behalf of the entire coaching staff, thank you for all your hard work and efforts. Each and every one of you has touched our program and in a simple way made lives a little better and Redondo Beach a finer community.

 

Bob Leetch

Track and Cross Country
Redondo Union HS
1 Seahawk Way
Redondo Beach, CA 90277

Gill/USATF National High School

Coach of the Year

 

Obligatory Seriousness on Christopher Jordan Dorner

We woke up this morning with a police helicopter hovering over our neighborhood. Two women delivering newspapers early this morning were shot about 4 blocks from my house. I sleep like a rock, but once I was up the annoyance was persistent. It turns out that a couple or three counties in Southern California are on alert on the lookout for a manifesto writing ex-cop and Iraq reservist whose name will now live in infamy whether or not they shoot him dead. 

You see Dorner has promised to wage asymmetrical warfare on the LAPD, and he sounds like he knows how to do it. So obviously they'll be bringing in any number of hotdog specialists to track down this man who doesn't seem to have any pathological pictures available for the press to make him look crazier than he is. Now that I think about it, I hope they don't bring drones - but I have a feeling this could be the beginning of something ugly for a number of reasons.

Manifesto Destiny
Whenever somebody writes a Manifesto, it basically means - "Hey I know I dont' have a legal case but I'm about to go off the deep end - here's why..." In Dorner's life story we learn that he's been fired for not getting some other cops fired, and essentially being zero-tolerance for called 'nigger'. It's rather sad when even Snoop Dogg has more self-esteem. I mean nobody likes being called ugly names, and anybody ought to take offense, but usually a slap in the face followed by throwing breakables across the room generally gets that point across. This nutcase is talking about whipping out the .50 cal and sniping the freeway. 

How Many Is Many?
Right now, although it's unclear, Dorner is a suspect in a double murder. A basketball coach and his fiance were the first targets, tangential to some ugly part of his career. Since that happened yesterday, I think he has either shot or killed two or three police officers. So obviously they've got eight or nine law enforcement agencies on a big old manhunt. Last I heard, he hightailed it up to the mountains. So the irony of course is if he's actually up there, then they'll be chasing him through the woods with dogs. So he's some sort of mass murderer, I'm just not sure what the tipping point is. Either way, a lot of us will feel a lot better to see him hogtied. 

The Devil You Don't Know
Whatever the manifesto says, whatever the locals report, whatever the amount of dirt you might find in the LAPD, there will be a campaign of shame against Dorner. It's not really necessary though. A double homicide is all the bad you have to know.  So that's why this is obligatory seriousness.

Under the Jail
Dude is planning jihad and he's not afraid to die. Blaze of glory? Naw. I say get the gas and the tranquilizer darts. This dude needs to be humiliated. Too bad we don't pillory.

Related articles

Christopher Jordan Dorner, Disgraced LAPD Cop, Suspected In Irvine Murders

Manhunt for Former Cop After 3 Officers Shot

1990s Gang Warfare in Los Angeles County

Gang-Related Crime in Los Angeles County

                                                                                                      Gang Homicide Study - Los Angeles

Year	Gang-Related Homicides Los Angeles County	All Homicides Los Angeles County	Percent of L.A. County Homicides Which are Gang-Related
2001	587	1,070	54.9%
2000	448	1,000	44.8%
1999	349	891	39.2%
1998	399	959	41.6%
1997	452	1,176	38.4%
1996	614	1,398	43.9%
1995	807	1,682	48.0%
1994	779	1,669	46.7%
1993	724	1,944	37.2%
1992	803	1,919	41.8%
1991	771	1,856	41.5%
1990	690	1,768	39.0%
1989	554	1,587	34.9%
1988	452	1,320	34.2%
1987	387	1,398	27.7%
1986	328	1,408	23.3%
1985	271	1,322	20.5%

Obligatory Seriousness on Boy Scouts & Pedophilia

The worst thing about the Boy Scouts is that they're awfully serious about their programs. And if you are a traveling consultant like I am, there is no amount of assuaging you can do which is up the level of guilt you must bear by half-doing it. You can't just let your kid be a Scout. They pull you in. Nevertheless, I wanted to participate a bit, got certified in Youth Protection, and helped out with my local troop. 

Boy Scout Youth Protection certification is onerous. I will say that without question it is more difficult than traffic school which I've done twice. About 40% of the matters and situations you study are somewhat reasonable common sense.  The rest gives you an indication of how little, in our everyday lives, we think about the implications of being around child molesters. I can tell you that's what the Scouts are today and have been since I've been involved for about 7 years as a parent.

Clay Shirky snarked a remark today that rubbed me all backwards. But who am I to take tweets seriously? But the upshot of his remark was that one can expect that pedophiles can get away with more in organizations that are homophobic. My retort was that it is amazing how much slander you can get into one tweet. So obviously I take issue with the charge of homophobia. I also disagree with the counter-intuitive argument. But most of all I resent the attitude.

There's not much I can do about my resentment towards anyone's attitude. It unnerves me when intelligent people who are otherwise deserving of respectful consideration have their mental and ethical transmissions pop into neutral and drift into oncoming traffic. So I'm unnerved; I'll get over it.

What to think about the Scouts? Well, an accusation of homophobia is like an accusation of racism. How much is six pounds of homophobia? That's a matter for you and your neighbors to discuss. Despite the fact that we are chockablock with meddlesome people whose mental wellbeing seems to cry out for their every social desire to be legislated, we still haven't turned over the country to such fashion police. I can't say that I'm sanguine about the longer term prospects, but at least we know political correctness when we hear it. Is New Hampshire more homophobic than South Dakota? If you had to scratch your head more than you might about Michigan vs Mississippi then there might be hope for your objectivity yet. That doesn't change the fact that we're already aware of the stereotypes which affect our judgment. My point here is that people generally live in communities where their social expectations are in the median. So if six pounds is enough to cause you outrage, chances are that your neighbors are outraged too. But what does your outrage matter on the national stage?

That should be a matter of objective measurement. 

So I would like to know, as a matter of objective measurement, what can be inferred by the number of pedophiles in the general population and their rate of apprehension, vs that in Scouting. I quite clearly recall that when the matter was dealt with in the Catholic Church that the numbers told the tale that the organization fared better in identifying the perpetrators. After which all of the noise became moot, despite the controversy. 

I must say in this and in many matters that I have the advantage of indifference which is quite apart from disinterest. I have a Randian distaste for disinterest.  I never say it doesn't matter one way or another. It does. But from my point of view, I'd much prefer that we seek an objective standard. Let it be six pounds without question, how you react is your business.

I've twice taken the USADA to task (up to a point of indifference) for what I percieve to be a radical standard of evidence in its dogged persuit of Lance Armstrong. Considering the amount of power they seem to hold over such matters of the fate of cyclists who break the rules of that sport - to me they seem as much as a civil court - they certainly don't operate in ways that would be acceptable in an actual court of law. The same can be said about the Boy Scouts. The amount of scrutiny we give adults around Scouts at our events is Orwellian. OK let's say six pounds of Big Brother. The fact of the matter is, that it is a clear violation of Scout policy for there to be less than two adults present at any pickup or dropoff point, for example. If an event is over and a parent is late, and there's just one kid left, there had better be two adults present. Think about your kids and how you pick them up and drop them off for school or over a friend's house. I'm sure most families are not up to the Scouting standard, one that is necessary in light of what we know about child predators. I've seen the grated nerves of Scout leaders, personally.

What little I've heard about the news on NPR this evening which might be behind Shirky's reasoning is that the Scouting standard has been responsible for booting suspected gay leaders and suspected pedophiles with a ridiculously tendentious evidentiary standard. Yes, well that's the problem with zero tolerance. We all have that same problem. It is the same problem as zero tolerance of homophobia.  The good news is that the Boy Scouts recognize the ambit of their influence and don't go trawling for other people's misdeeds under some inflammatory non-standard. The bad news is others do and so we get unnerved. We'll get over it. The Boy Scouts have defined their six pound weight limits, and you don't get to be a Boy Scout in any way unless you are certified against that standard.

Of course that wasn't always the case. To get fired from the Boy Scouts of America as a suspect of pedophilia is a rather serious indictment and the process is well understood in the here and now. I don't know which other organizations might have publicly disclosed their history, rules and actions to a similar degree aside from the Catholic diocese of various major cities in the US.  The stories in the news that I read today gave their egregious examples from the 70s - you remember the 70s don't you? Some standards of those days wouldn't fly today, for that there's no doubt or controversy. But today's Boy Scouts are a strong and proud organization which I defend against flippant charges. 

Yes, they are ahead of the law, and when it comes to pedophilia, I think that's a good thing, and so do the people in my neighborhood.

Associated Stuff:

• Rude Questions About the Catholic Priesthood
• The Depravity Scale 

Space Shuttle Endeavour on Crenshaw Boulevard

626 Night Market

I just woke up from a moderate nightmare. I was in this huge indoor clothing store in China with me and my cohorts being chased around.

We had just made a deal with the head laundress to process our bulk clothing at $3 per 20 pound sack. She had the hots for my young, aggressive associate Yung, so I encouraged them to indulge themselves. Just after the deal was sealed, Yung decided to stir the pot by spitting on the sacks of our Japanese rivals. (Their sacks are bright red, ours are white with three blue stars and an outline of California). Yung goes left, I go right, the Japanese are chasing us. Meanwhile the people who run the joint are trying to find out what the chaos is all about. So Im scrabling through aisle after aisle packed with shoppers trying to get back to my American group and maintain some dignity and not have to whip out the pistol...

(cliche of man rising up in bed, breathing deeply covered in sweat)

Last night I took my daughter and her friend out to Pasadena for the 626 Night Market. There was no chasing, but there were huge crowds of Chinese people everywhere. The traffic was horrendous, but it was indeed a spectacle. 

The Night Market is an old Chinese tradition and if people have any sense whatsoever, it's going to be a new huge one in the San Gabriel Valley. It was a shopkeeper's nirvana. The foot traffic was Times Square intense. For a measly one block setup of no more than 30 odd tents, you had easily 15,000 people.

It was nostalgic for me to get out to Pasadena. I used to live in Altadena and in South Pasadena so I have more than my share of memories about the place and its affinity for Asians of all flavors. The girls, by showing up, practicing a little of their Mandarin and taking photos will get extra credit for their class and there were certainly plenty of opportunities to overhear conversations in all sorts of dialects. 

We ended up eating down in Old Pasadena six blocks away to get away from the swell. Great steaming bowls of spicy ramen could be had at Naga Naga. So we had ours after a 40 minute wait. I say go for the kimchee + beef, and the green milk tea is great, but too small - you should order two, or just get a Sprite. The huge fishtank in the middle is cute for about 10 minutes and then you start noticing how disgusting it is in the nooks and crannies. That is if you are sitting at the bar that surrounds it. My advice is to get a table far away. 

Ont the whole, it was nice to get out of the house and into the street, but I hate crowds and there was absolutely nothing worth buying. Not even a cool T-Shirt. The experience was rather like Venice Beach, but not as well organized. 

Key Faith

James Key:

Still, even though the demands of war have put a strain on many families, our troops continue to pull from the same side of the rope as one cohesive body. When Hurricane Irene recently threatened the East Coast, including Washington, D.C., the sentinels at Arlington cemetery's Tomb of the Unknowns refused to leave their posts. Their willingness to look beyond personal comfort for the greater good is something from which we all can learn.

As the U.S. works her way out of today's economic turmoil, our nation's leaders and the public should follow the lead of our men and women in uniform: Attack this challenge head-on, but as one. The unified spirit in the aftermath of 9/11 could guide us through the troubled waters we're navigating today.

Jim and I are frat. He and my brother went to middle school together. He has always been one of the most destiny bound men I have known, never questioning his duty to do good. It's good to know he's out there, fighting the good fight.

Thinking Too Much About America

I was going to write a 9/11 piece and I haven't really thought of what I wanted to say. But now I see in my periphery a host of productions now starting to pile up. It's almost as if, having done one dastardly deed, Osama has created a new American holiday. Walk it off America, walk it off.

Dennis Miller is the smartest conservative on the radio because he reads people very well. He is one of those rare individuals who can talk with the ordinary Joes and understand how they're twisting themselves up to be something they aren't in the presence of celebrity. It's a sense that I think all stars get, but few handle well. His lesson to me is to go home. When you start getting emotionally involved in something over which you have absolutely no control, go home.

There is something about American democracy that has been tweaked a little too much - given too much attention in the abstract and not enough direct focus. We all feel that we have some right or duty or function in standing up on our hind legs and barking at the moon of America. There's always some pundit that nobody in any American highschool has ever heard of who can, in his market segement of the long tail, go on about 'the problem with American x'. It brings to mind a conversation I had with a psychologist who said that people overuse their strengths in a crisis. When the crapstorm begins, singers will sing, bloggers will blog, complainers will complain, presidents will preside. Except for those at ground zero whose lives are directly affected, we knit up the metathreads into some narrative tapestry whose patterns need to be familiar. Something about our history keeps reminding us that we the people are supposed to be involved in our little part of history.

I don't think so.

I don't want to be harsh, but I think we are bearing burdens our shoulders weren't meant to carry. It has to do with our judgment in the details of things - details we don't care to know and wouldn't make sense of if we were presented with them. And I think we believe a bit too strongly that our positioning is all that significant. It's easy for me to say that we are all peasants and nothing peasants say matters, although what it is we do is the basis of the entire economy. That should be, in it's own way, self-evident.

But what is not self-evident is the extent to which we are actually not getting added value from adding our voices to the democratic end of our national governance. Mind you I see this in more and more things these days. Are newspapers really improving because they have comment sections? Is there really something to be appreciably gained by reading through all that? I'm tending to think not. Rather I think we're all a bit neurotic about describing what's going wrong in America.

The worst part is that all of this is a function of who we are, that is to say, Americans love America but hate the other-Americans polluting this place. What's emerging is all of that literate discontent in e-text.

En Passant: Gloria Molina, as tenured a pol as can possibly exist, is proposing creating a second Hispanic majority minority district.

 

The Man With The Camera

He sat at the table next to us, looking to be about 56 years of age, with a new Canon digital camera on a bold black strap. His hair was thinning but not quite grey. He was of average height and wore a pale yellow polo shirt and sneakers. He didn't belong at this California beach, and he kept staring at the viewfinder.

You could see his cell phone in its belt holster. It was the most noticeable thing about his hips. He was armed with the technology. But he did not aim and shoot. He did not send or receive any signals. He merely an air of hesitant confidence, like the driver of a new 1967 Cadillac who had never had power steering before. Empowered. 

I look at men and women and imagine their histories, especially the older men and women. 

The Asian woman in dark blue shorts walked talking with her Caucasian friends. Her legs were stout but beginning to lose their firmness, and her bangs were now more grey than black. She canted her head at an angle that seemed puzzled that they weren't hearing what she was saying. She was a fifth wheel on an automobile that had lost its pizazz which only made her more their equal than she ever was in her younger days. 

The multi-million dollar houses along the Strand have a studied kind of clutter. The grizzled old man who sits staring could be the father of the owner although he looks like he was just rescued from the gutter and hastily cleaned up. There was resignation in his eyes barely following the joggers. He could be jaded beyond the ordinary world of the beachcombers, or he could be hung over, or he could be the owner. There's no guarantee that a conversation with him would yield any greater knowledge of anything. He was just one of the few privileged to be welcomed on the deck, and he didn't have any reason to say anything more. He was there, everyone else was not.

--

Everyone rests on laurels. Sometimes it's difficult to belive they are earned by acts of greatness this foggy morning on the beach. Everyone has their little crutch that gets them near to the sand. The tourists had their ITALIA shirts and colors. The girls volleyball team had their engagement. The Six Man teams had their warmup exercises started and stopped by the command of a shaken cowbell. 

It's a free country and so many people are literate and diversely employed that there is no discernable order in their social intercourse. We seem impossible to judge.

Jazz Under the Stars

Featuring Chris Bowen. The best birthday gift is to see your children doing well.

A Question of Evangelism

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty."

I'm not going to be involved with the Runaway Slave thing today. An unfortunate series of events have conspired to keep me home working. And yet I am relieved to be in my hidey hole and not part of that thing which I think begs me to answer questions I'm not sure I have answers to.

It is part of my dilemma as a writer, that I am of a particular sort which defies explanation, except for those of my rivals and opponents who all feel confident that they've got my number. I have a love-hate obsession with describing myself and my purposes because I know them so well, and I fear others know them so tangentially. What am I doing here? Why can't I just do x? These are not questions I ask myself very often because I know the answers - it's just that I don't think anyone else wants to hear them.

Yesterday I went over to Booker Rising and read some of the comments that people over there have been making about what I write here. I have this oddment of conviction about myself that I acquired when I turned 30. I stopped qualifying my statements with 'IMHO' and just said what I meant, and let the counter arguments fall where they may, correcting myself as logic dictates. So I tell you what I really think, all of the time. The problem is, that's all it is. Whereas I think most people assume that I mean to tell other people how and what to think. I don't. I only presume that others might be doing what I do when I speak, which is give them the benefit of what makes sense to me. Still, when I say it, I don't mumble and I guess it sounds evangelistic.

I am quick to take correction when I am mistaken and to de-emphasize my conviction when I am wrong. These are not the qualities of what we tend to call 'Alpha Males'. The assumption, like the social prohibition of fat hairy guys in Speedos at the beach, that only certain types have any business speaking out in a non-subversive manner. So to hear me proclaim loudly some thing, and then to hear me disallow that speech on another occasion augers against the sort of heroism I gather people expect of one so bold. 

Which brings me to my relief.

At some point, I'm going to get out to meet Hindraker and Ponzi and other fellows at Claremont. In another life I was destined to attend college there, recruited as I was to the first coed class of Pitzer College in consideration of a Philosophy major with computer classes over at Mudd. It would have made a world of difference to me, I think in retrospect, and I would not be so much of the streets. On my credenza is the Rand Experts Guide 2010. I am open to the page with Eric V. Larson and I sit here with some consternation at the fact that I sat through a Meetup yesterday at Coco's in Manhattan Beach discussing our Afghanistan policy with people I know don't know our Afghanistan policy. When was the last time I read something by Eikenberry or Crocker on the matter? I hate forgetting. I hate not knowing. I hate spending time listening to people who don't know. 

But in the mean time there's this place I can walk up to, take a seat and be considered. It's called 'black Republican' and it is essentially meaningless because it is essentially derivative. I know that and I don't believe I can be convinced otherwise. For me to speak up on the matter, as welcome as I am to do so, comprises some element of compromise. That's because I'm not really seeking an audience. I'm not out to gather support for my position. I'm merely curious, and as usual, I'm saying what I say because I'm a writer. 

Of course that's not all there is to it, and it's not entirely under my control. But I have a conference call in 3 minutes, and I really have to go...

Of Tea Parties and Runaway Slaves

One of the toughest things about being particularly literate and attempting always to be well read upon the subtleties of the day is that one often finds oneself in the company of those who are not. I am reminded at this particular moment of my first visit to Fenway Park. Not being a huge baseball fan, I wasn't particularly interested in buying expensive tickets, and so I found myself in the bleachers. If you've ever been in the bleachers at a Red Sox game, you must know what it's like to be surrounded by loud, rowdy fanatics on the very borderline of public drunkenness. Not my crowd. But it was still a good game and I rooted for the home team. 

It's often like that when I present myself as a Republican or as a conservative. I'm not so fanatical about it that I buy the expensive placements, but it doesn't mean that I particularly enjoy being associated with the rowdies. I'm a conservative and a Republican because my experience and thinking dictate that I should be. I didn't do it for the company. 

So this puts me in the odd position of, well, being a bloody individual who chooses what he chooses as an expression of will, not as some existential crutch. I do so with the express understanding that some conservatives have unfairly earned all conservatives the reputation of not having such a vocabulary as 'existential crutch'. Then again, there's a certain kind of projection going on in the minds of the opposition. 

It is with this sort of situation in mind that I deal with the loaded brickbat terms 'Tea Party' and 'Runaway Slave'. You see, this week I intend on attending an event with 'Runaway Slave' in the title. A certain minister C.L. Bryant is making a film about black American conservatives, and I'm very curious to check it out. Having been apprised of the situation, I'm going. It turns out that Breitbart is involved, as is Jesse Lee Peterson, two lightning rods.

I've encountered Peterson only briefly, and about 20 years ago through his association with BOND. It was at a Black Family Reunion in Exposition Park back in the days when that was going strong in Los Angeles. BOND reminded me of a gang for squares, a kind of bush league Alpha Phi Alpha for the kids who never made it to college. Snob that I am, and liberal that I was, it was easy for me to look down my nose at the whole program. But I did respect the young man I did meet, took his business card and smiled at the thought that there were still some people around who believed in the propriety of marriage, wearing a shirt and tie, and minding one's English. One is hard pressed at times to deal with the reality of hard knock cases trying their damnedest to become and remain respectable in a slavishly cynical society as ours can be. Such young men are so vulnerable. You never want to see their modest dreams upset, and wonder if they are properly self-possessed rather than merely enchanted by such a fearless leader as Minister Peterson. 

Without going back into the sort of scathing excoriation I might have served up to Peterson in my early days of 'black' conservatism, I know that he is not the sort who inspire the loyalty of bloody sophisticates such as myself. So I'll not belabor the analogy to Fenway Park. But we are on the same side, and we root for the same team.  Or perhaps I should say we are in the same American League. But, truth be told, I'm more of a Yankee fan. 

The same kind of disdainful fellowship I share with those addicted to analogies to slavery when speaking of the fate of contemporary black Americans. Powerful, tired, over-freighted metaphors keep peppering the dialog - enough to make me sneeze. How many times have I heard 'off the plantation' or 'house vs field' or 'Uncle Tom'? But there it is. And so it is with 'Tea Party' and other symbols of liberty and freedom that are abstracted into abuse by every partisan who joins the fracas. 

There's no way around the history. You can't avoid the terms, but I hope that Bryant and his collaborators can move beyond them quickly and smartly towards issues of import. Yet and still I know that it is impossible to corral all of the African American interest in the broad Right. So I'll be checking out the general progress of black conservative politics as it becomes manifest in its various ways, especially in Los Angeles. 

No Street Vending Allowed

Coolest Electric Bicycle Ever

Just wow. I want one. Check out the gears on this badboy.

USC Festival of Books

A perfect day in the sun.

Megalodon is the group led by the sax man on stage. I like 'em a lot.

Breitbart

I know, I know. I'm supposed to be doing other things but today was the Festival of Books and I got the opportunity so I took it. I hung out with Andrew Breitbart today. This man is very interesting.

The first thing you notice about Breitbart is that he's a lot more energetic and natural in person than he's appeared to be in videos I recall of him. When he busted ACORN, I seem to recall him as smarter than the average bear and a lot more disciplined and articulate than the wildman he appears to be today. But I think he's just getting his groove. He's riding a large beast and has drawn a sword across the noses of some fierce enemies. But Breitbart has something very powerful going for him. He's genuine, and he's motivated to unite people. 

What's more, in some important ways, we two think alike. We think alike about Hollywood. He sees the big cultural picture. It turns out that my day today was connected to David Mamet two ways. You see, I went to the FOB to see Breitbart and Ricky Jay. As Andrew and I were walking, he mentioned to me that there's a book coming out by David Mamet that's going to turn the country, or at least the chatting classes of it, on its ear. But wouldn't you know that Ricky Jay was a consultant via Deceptive Practices to David Mamet in a number of films I always loved but didn't know Mamet was involved in, including Ronin, House of Games and The Spanish Prisoner. Triple wow. What Breitbart and I see about Hollywood is that it makes you love the bad guy and turns Americans against each other, and that finally all of the wickedness in the entertainment industry is just become that banal evil. It's boring, that decades long rehash of acceptable rebellion. 

Like me, Breitbart is a recycled liberal who thought his way out of the paper bag. He grew up in Santa Monica, and now finally looks the part - rather like we all want to look, perfectly comfortable with ourselves and other people on a sunny day in Southern Cal. 

Breitbart is smart in the way that people who have a million connections to other people are smart. He's heads-up smart. I didn't see it today, but I can tell he can get things done through other people and that is because even though he is clearly  a lightning rod, he's the first to connect dots and see what it is that other people do well. In the half hour we spent together, I had to make him talk about himself. I watched him get off the ETC stage where he had been rescheduled and hang out with friendly folks while other folks had stalking debates with him about controversies. On stage, he was polemical in the way you are for the media, offstage he was, quite literally, a man of the people. Kaus was in the audience. He noticed. 

Breitbart's strategy is to disintermediate what he calls the Hollywood Democrat Media Complex or something like that. The Yang to Hillary Clinton's VRWC. But he's not so shrill about it and understands what he's up against. He's up against money and the inability for journalists to talk out of school. So he's going to use judo against them. He'll be nimble and he'll be quick and watch big media trip on it's own, eh petard. It worked for the ACORN videos, what else can it work for? Hard to say, but he's got common sense on his side. I think he could be too clever by half - I see he's in the middle of the whirlwind right now, but he doesn't show any signs of fatigue. I think it's because, even though he drinks from the media firehose, he's got a very good sense of when people are trying to snow him. I watched people walk by and call him a racist, I could see the smug contempt on their faces. I could anticipate them jumping to their conclusions. Breitbart doesn't try to be wonky and out-wonk them, and that's why he survives.

His dust jacket speaks of Commonsense Conservatism. He told me that he didn't set out to support the Tea Party, but that after 30 times seeing them all over the country he realized that they were people he couldn't deny any longer. He had come to know too many of them to let the lies go unanswered, and I think that's where he is at his center. He just hates the arrogance of the lies and he wants to bust the liars. He's got a big streak of honesty in him, and I think he genuinely loves people.

Breitbart walks around in big man's shoes. Almost anonymous in the crowd but the guys at McSweeny's know him. One of the booth dudes gives him a book for free so an author could sign it. It's some kind of in-joke I don't quite get, but Breitbart handles it smoothly. He reminds me of Dennis Miller when Miller knows some fan is buttering him up for the big snarky remark. He's got the sense of when people are being real or fake. He doesn't hate the fakes, but you can tell he's out to expose them. We went over to the RAND tent. He knew somebody in that organization and left his regards. He can distinguish the distractions from the serious stuff and didn't give Birther Madness much of his attention. He's working on bigger plans.

It took me a while to determine if and how I should approach him, and I'm glad I did. He doesn't strike me as a wonky guy, and my interest is much more political philosophy than media presence. But media presence is a critical part of the game  - and the game is melioration of moral, honest ideas - something for which this is a false oligopoly in the Media Empire. Breitbart naturally understands it, and now he is a double agent. That's dangerous, of course, but he seems relentless and up to it. For now. He's going to be, through his websites, a force to reckon with. 

Famousity is an interesting beast. You cannot undo it. So Breitbart has to parlay his name into something that channels the common sense energy he sees in the Right into something that conveys the ability to see through the information conspiracy. I remember when I moved to NYC and tried to find more intellectual writing and all I heard was about The Nation. I had nowhere to go and it took me 8 years to find it on my own. I too am sick of the Frankfurt School and am not a joiner. Breitbart is aiming to defeat the naysayers and put the Democrat Media Conspiracy on its heels and beat back the Marxist social experiment. 

I'm on his side. 

 

LA [G]Unified School District

Yesterday, over in Gardena, about a mile from where I work, one teenager shot two others. It was an accident, but it was a school shooting. Today, about 20 miles from where I work, there was another school shooting. How many days ago was there an assassination attempt in Arizona? I don't know, but it's enough to put politicians into overdrive to *do* something. I think the something will inevitably be bad, if it's allowed to happen.

For the record, I say this is a criminal justice problem. No legislation or executive action is required. Those two branches of government should sit down and shut up. Bring the guilty parties to justice, nuff said. I mean, we know that aggravated assault and attempted murder have been crimes for thousands of years. We don't need to hear anything new. We don't need to do anything new. But we've got peasants addicted to new, so new they will get.

For Gardena High School it's likely going to mean metal detectors and searches, TSA-style. I'm trying to think of a more obvious sign of social failure but I cannot. 

Classic Bloviation in Long Beach

There is, my gentle friends, a difference between bloviation and blather. Bloviation is the process of expounding upon passionate intellectual subjects without any sense of purpose. Blather is the product of purposesful rhetoric that has no real intellectual substance. While I enjoy bloviation, I try my damndest to stay away from blather.

After enough alcohol, any discussion of a serious subject descends into bloviation, or bloviated debate. At some point, bloviated debate devolves into blather. I had the good fortune last evening to get into an almost unending zone of bloviation that never dropped off the precipice into the blather zone. My interlocutors were, The Large Professor, Red and Doctor V.  (The Kid left early).

Doctor V offers me a challenge which I am eager to understand completely and I am wary of earning his distrust. You see, he represents the humanist I think it should be my duty to reform. He is a person centered person who requires a revolution. The sort of expectations he has of people and society are both annoyingly high and benign. And so as with most humanists, he requires a thorough undoing of what has evidently been done wrong. It probably wouldn't go too far afield to say that the good doctor is a Liberal, but I am no longer interested in means, so all those political matters are tending towards the insignificant. I hope earnestly that I can learn the proper meaning of revolution and understand exactly how much directed chaos we can sustain for the sake of Progress. But I sense that our great difference may lie in the following matter of principle.

Mankinds great challenge is not with the nature of civilization, it is with the very existence of civilization.

It is for that reason I seek to concern myself not with matters of reform but with the consequences of that with which we don't control. I am conservative because I doubt that we can control what we learn and direct in society in revolutionary ways. But more importantly our economics and wars reflect exactly what mankind actually does, all intentions aside. To talk about reform and making humanity better without any consideration of war and deprivation as the means to that end is naive and shortsighted. My humanist friends don't seem to recognize that they are the scions of victory in war and business, and they are deluded by the promise of improving that which has been achieved by war through peaceful means.

Which puts us on the doorstep of the Large Professor, who is a cherub of deliberate delight. But I'll talk more about those guys next time.

Brown v Whitman

Jerry Brown is serious. Meg Whitman is full of rhetoric. Neither of them deserve my vote and neither will get it. I listened to about 20 minutes of this so-called debate on the radio on my drive home. When I got home, I found my 13 year old daughter transcribing the rhetoric using a pencil, paper and DVR. She says they're both childish, blaming each other for the problems of the state. 

The only interesting moment of the entire farce was Brown qualifying quite precisely what the limits are to the Governor's power in speeding up capital punishment. The answer, throw better lawyers at it. And he was right of course. The other interesting moment might have come if I had the stomach to wait for it, but it was implied in much of what Whitman was saying in her nominal comparisons between California and Texas. Texas has no state income tax and they're not broke. California does have state income tax and we're broke.

Whitman flubbed her question about her experience negotiating with labor unions. She said she'd negotiate, and then she said she'd punt to the initiative process. There was supposed to be a third leg to that stool but she started blustering. It's all rather fraudulent, I think, and perfectly astonishing how someone supposedly as intelligent as she is is reduced to the exact same caricature of a blowhard candidate. 

She's weak, and she's going to get stomped. It's astonishing that she actually clicked the wayback machine and brought Rose Bird into this campaign. And then she had the temerity to suggest that the $800 fee for an LLC being waived would spur economic growth. 

Where's Duncan Hunter?

It's Got Groove, It's Got A Meaning

Scholar, aka F15, aka Coco Loco, my oldest daughter is once again contributing to the arts. This time around she's in the Belasco production of Grease. If you happen to be anywhere in Southern California between now and the 11th of July, you could do far worse than spend a couple hours in Hermosa Beach enjoying this musical. I guarantee that you will be impressed by what these young people can do.

Opening night jitters have now been dispensed with and the company is confident. They had a celebratory dinner last night at CPK and Loco is very excited about how things are going. I've seen these kids do The Wiz and Fiddler on the Roof, and they're very good. Check them out. All you need to know is right here.

Armed Forces Day in Torrance

It was all about the people. Nothing spectacular. No big show of heavy artillery. No jets for a fly-by. Just Americans showing appreciation for Americans. Simple.

Daryl Gates: Dead

They say that if you can't say anything good about somebody, you shouldn't say anything at all. This may be a short entry.

Yet I don't have any words to malign Daryl Gates. He stood in opposition to a lot of his peers who came down on him hard in the wake of his oversight of the police beating heard around the world. Rodney King and Daryl Gates are a pair whose lives are intertwined in the public consciousness - a consciousness which has slept for quite a while. After Gates came Williams. After Williams came Parks after Parks came Bratton. There's a new guy in charge today since Bratton left, and I don't even know his name.

But Gates' LAPD is the LAPD of the Batterram, of SWAT, of DARE, of CRASH.  Before Gates modernized and started recruiting from all around the country, including for God knows what reason, Alabama. The LAPD lived under Ed Davis. Davis was easy to hate. Davis could easily substitute in my mind for any irrational defender of Dixie, but then again I was a kid. Gates was rational. Gates was disciplined. Gates was a hardnose and Gates had black cops. Not a huge amount, and famously, many of them were meter maids under a new recruitment program. But no matter what the weather, Gates had a program.

Sometime his program didn't work. Sometimes it worked to a scary degree. The LAPD as everyone knows it, paramilitary was created by Gates. He got the hardware out there, including most notoriously, the Batterram. But for me it was Blue Thunder that most characterized the sort of feelings I got most viscerally.

Almost every weekend, where I grew up in 90016, it seemed like there would be some kind of robbery and police action on Saturday night. Ice Cube wrote a rap song called Ghetto Bird that described the situation. Gates ran the helicopters with their powerful spotlights out to crime scenes like there was no tomorrow. Being under the huge kleiglights of the modern helos gave one the kind of Big Brother feeling that had no equal. You were the target. The helicopters were loud and they flew low. They rattled windows and woke children from sleep. When they flashed on your house you knew that a foot pursuit was in progress. The public transit bus had a number on its roof. Your neighborhood was a sector on a grid for air surveillance.

We used to pretend to have guns in those Bruce Lee days. We would aim and shoot with broomsticks at the police helicopters flying over us in the daytime. They would circle, looking for somebody. We could see them looking at us. Yeah. We hated the pigs. They wouldn't let us ride our minibikes on the street. They took our nunchucks and threatened us with juvy. 

If you can unseal my juvenile record, you'd find that. I was told by my parents in no uncertain terms not to ask the judge why Pep Boys could sell minibikes if they were illegal to ride on the street. They were obviously too fast to ride on the sidewalk. Who did they think we were, suicidal? So I shut up and was forgiven.

Gates had his own adjective. It was 'embattled'. It seemed like there was nothing he could do without raising the ire of my fraction of the public. He initiated the chokehold in response to his claim that suspects on PCP were immune to pain. Somebody died, or at least that's what I remember. Some wrongful death suits went on for years in our political memory. Gates gave no quarter to gangbangers. Whole neighborhoods became unsafe for civilians due to the battles between Gates' cops and those perceived to be gang members and affiliates. He initiated sweeps where your hangout became no-man's land, sweeps with arrest percentages in the 2s and 3s. You'd get in the system simply for being there, detained and let go - like human fly fishing. It earned him no sympathy,  no friends and no cooperation. Everything Gates did was by the book, with no room for warm and fluffy. LA had no beat cops, no friendly cops, because there was no way on earth he could hire enough for them to leave their squad cars. 

Every criticism of Gates ultimately came down to that controversial and unavoidable calculation. LA taxpayers would never spend enough on hiring officers such that the ratio of cops to people would be comparable to other big cities in the East and Midwest. We joke about donuts, but there were no fat cops in LA. They were soldiers in patrol cars, and they didn't get out of those cars in 'hostile territory' for no good reason. There was never a friendly Irish 'top o' the marnin t ye laddie'. It was 'put your hands where I can see them, sir'. Sir with a sneer. 

I've often told folks that I had been detained something on the order of 27 times between the time I was 15 and 30 in LA. I was cited 3 or 4 of those times. I came to know the excuses by rote. Well I'm running a check on you because there's a Michael Bowen who just escaped from jail in Chino. Gee officer, this is the third time. Then the look that says, OK you know the drill don't you wiseguy. They hold up their maglites and check out my forearms for jailhouse tattoos, and let me drive away with a warning. 

Back in my post-buppie politically radical days, I would sit in my beater in Beverly Hills parked on a side street and wait to see how long it would take some cop to tell me that I was in the wrong neighborhood and should go home. I do those kind of things, you know. I don't take anybody's word for it. I recognized the difference between the LAPD and the Beverly Hills cops, and the Sheriff's Deputies and California Highway Patrol as well. The LAPD was on a mission. The BHPD was legendarily polite. The CHP actually cared about your safety. The Sheriff's deputies were not to be trifled with, but encounters were rare. None of them were the cowboys of the notorious Hawthorne PD. Whatever could be said about Gates, he tolerated no rogues. 

Hawthorne, back when I was growing up, was from my perspective, a 'white trash border zone'. Between the 'hood where I grew up and quiet upscale beach cities where I live now were two towns where our very own rednecks lived, Hawthorne and Lawndale. If I remember correctly, Torrance, immediately south of Hawthorne was one of the last places where racially restrictive covenants were defeated during the Civil Rights Movement here on the West Coast. It might have been Hawthorne, but who wants to live in Hawthorne? Lawndale is still living down its reputation. Hawthorne has since been overrun by blacks and latinos of all sorts. Legendarily Don Jackson, a black officer in the Hawthorne PD who has since changed his name to Diop Kamau organized stings once he was run off the force. This crusader has since dropped racial revenge from his agenda and serves the public trust in what I consider to be more honorable manner. But everybody has got to get through their rage. Jackson had plenty good reasons.

After Rodney King, I chased down reality with the same vigor as I loitered in Beverly Hills. I found cops doing their jobs. Good, important jobs. Long before Gates stepped down and Williams took over, I paid more attention to the politics of policing and I recognized the distance between public opinion and police policy - I recognized how race blurred the picture and ultimately served to make the police a proxy between people who didn't know each other, but trusted in stereotypes to hate each other. Gates didn't care about being the politician who could smooth things out, and so there was never any such thing as community policing under his rule. That is something that had to evolve and could only do so after Gates was out on his ear.

Daryl Gates is dead and has been politically dead for a long time, to the benefit of LA politics. I missed the Riots and what Reardon did to fix things. But today I see a much less tense Los Angeles over his dead body.

Fire

For My Young Black Brothers

Every once in a while, I am invited or encouraged to to join an organization aimed at improving the lives of young black men. I am mostly flattered by the invitation, but I almost never join. So I'll take a moment to talk about this and related matters.

I asked some folks, when Cobb was interactive, how many men they would trust with the keys to their house, without a second thought. That's the benchmark. Why? Because it really doesn't matter what happens to 'black men'. You can get up on a podium and proclaim that you are sensitive to the pain of the world, but you ain't Jesus, so what are you trying to say? What really matters is what happens to you, your family, your friends, your people. And that all depends on your ability to handle your business. Unfortunately there's a lot of marketing and not a lot of product that goes under the heading of 'organizing to help'. When we look back at black American history, what stands out are the towering individuals, but those institutions that survive are mostly conventional. A church, a college.

I say to young black men that you must come to understand the difference between weak links and strong love. And my experience tells me that many black organizations end up as weak links and not as strong love, the exception being black fraternities and sororities. In my opinion that's because fraternities are organized only secondarily about abstract uplifting principles, but primarily around relationships. Organization racial uplift fails because such organizations don't scale and they are too abstract to be practical.

There's a couple of caveats before anyone takes it that I am badmouthing black organizations wholesale. The first is that I come from Los Angeles, a big city where people with big mouths try to make big organizations. I haven't seen it work much better than a good church, and well that's already done. In a smaller city, I think there might be a more pressing need and a greater commitment to make strong love out of weak links.

Secondly, the objective progress of black Americans means that on average the organizational ability latent on the black communities is greater than it was when I was a young black man. So the chances of an honest effort ending up okeydoke is smaller today than it was 20, 30 years ago.

All that said, the biggest skeptical brick I have to throw is this. If you are middle class, the chances that you are going to lift poor people into the middle class are slim. Especially in times like this when times are hard and messianic politicians are taxing you back down into the ditch.  If you're rich, the chances are better. What I'm saying is that if you've got a 50k job, it's likely that the time you spend trying to get somebody with a 20k job into a 35k job might often come at the expense of you getting a 75k job. So volunteer your time very carefully, because it's the man with the 150k job who has the time to recognize the ways and means of the rich that paves the greater path. And if you don't believe that, then why aren't you moving to Cuba, comrade? But then again, that's just all about money.

What I do believe we all should be involved in no matter what our background is the principle and practice of advanced civility. What America lacks is a firm sense of practical decorum. The proper way of doing things is in doubt. We haven't completely forgotten our manners, but we've seen them beat down so many times that we think they don't matter any more. And it has practically destroyed our ability to communicate trust and strong love in public. Everybody is putting on a game face. Everybody is self-promoting. The people this hurts the most are those who have not experienced the ways and means of power, because they see the game but they can't tell where the game ends and the realness begins. I think that especially counts for young black men who are not in close proximity to the ways and means of social power in the mainstream. When the mainstream carries power over you and your boss is gaming rather than authentically civil, then you will instinctively reject. You'd be right, but you sacrifice your own promotion. People who come up like that carry the dual consciousness, it destroys confidence in self and society.

Gaming generates many weak links, fans, groupies, hangers on. It doesn't lead to trust.

The author of choice in the ways and means of decorum and civility is Stephen L. Carter. Read him and then read him again. First read his Confessions of an Affirmative Action Baby. I avoided it because I thought I knew exactly what he was going to say. I stereotyped him. It turned out to be a much deeper book than I expected. So then when I read his books Integrity and Civility, I wasn't surprised that they would be so excellent.

Carter is not a man you hear about every day. But he's been out there for years teaching law at Yale. Not many of us are going to get a chance to hang out at Yale University and speak with the man. It is an organization, perhaps of weak links or of strong love, that the overwhelming majority of people will never experience. But we do have the mind of Carter on paper and his lessons to learn. And if you're reading me, you know that reading can be a valuable connection.

So my advice to everyone is the same. Read Carter and know that civil people with integrity are out there, dispersed and often unavailable, trying to express something better than a game face and working with integrity to earn the trust they deserve. That's the civilized world I'm living in, person to person in America, because I don't have time for anything else.

No Black News

I'm not the most diligent reporter in the world, but I went searching for black local news and from what I can tell, ain't no more. From this point forward, when it comes to large enough news, if it ain't mainstream, it ain't happening. 

Ever since I did my TVOne show a couple years ago I was intrigued to find why all of the best black produced political, news and information shows were on PBS and NPR. I didn't find a comprehensive answer today but I think the signs are clear. There's no money in it. Independent black news reporting in the next five years will take place on the web or it will not take place at all. In the words of Angela Bofill, it's time to say goodbye.

Today was the first annual Urban New Media Conference put together by Kevin Ross and the USC Annenberg School of Communication. A panel of notables, including, Mark Ridley-Thomas, Rolonda Watts, Rev Mark Whitlock, Karen Slade and Jasmyne Cannick were on hand to give an accounting of the state of things and what gives for the future. The state of affairs for traditional black media is bleak. I mean really, really bleak.

How Bleak?

Ebony and Jet have only one full-time photographer in the country. Shared between them. Radio One lost 60 million last quarter. Black Enterprise is laying off.  There was a loss of about 20% of black radio stations and markets last year. 

I think we are witnessing with black media what we witnessed with black banks. Understand that this is a particular type of extinction. The money just goes to other banks. Just like people from New Orleans just moved to other cities. But there will no longer be, if the current trend continues, no exclusive purchase of black owned media on black news and information. The entire practice, if not the idea, is going up in smoke. 

I don't mean to suggest that this conference was a failure or some exercise in futility. What was palpably noticeable in this gathering was the absence of desperation. People came to this forum with agendas that did not depend on the forum. There was no feel of 'you people are not doing enough for the community'. It was more like, this is what the challenge is, how are you going to deal with it? If there was any one flaw with the conference itself, it was that sharp people in attendence might have liked to get more time to network in the space provided. 

Of the panelists, it was my estimation that Rolonda Watts got it best. Now while my interest isn't in entertainment, she had an instant grasp of the fact that this new media works very well with her brand, and it is a brand down the long tail. There are only so many people who want to see a dance lesson with James Brown, but Rolonda knows that when she streams that video, her crowd is going to be there and she doesn't have to beg a network for airtime. What she has got may not be a mass market phenomenon, but it is a significant number of eyeballs on the web. So even if she were at the very end of her broadcast career, she has a long soft landing by monetizing her properties in the lower cost medium of the internet. You're not going to get huge media buys for those segments, but they're not sitting in a vault gathering dust either. 

Local Radio + Local Blogging

What's of interest to me, whether or not there's a possibility that our economy and markets will support it, is a link between national news production and local news production in the new media. There's a sort of irrelevance black-owned media has at the national level. My example would be Soledad OBrien from CNN is going to gather all the ratings there are to be had when her special airs. Those black news producers on NPR or PBS if and when they get an opportunity will pale in comparison, and yet I am of the strong opinion that shows like Michel Martin's Barbershop would be a big hit if it could be done locally. What's required is a business model that understands the handoff.

Here's what I mean. 

You take a local black radio station like KJLH. Extremely loyal following, but struggling in these tough times just like everybody else. They might not be able to get Colin Powell to drop by the station, but the Congressman from the district? Sure. There is plenty of pull that radio stations have locally, but when their audience wants them to get serious about news and politics they have to use the web the way the Netroots have. 50,000 listeners might be very small for a radio station, but it's huge for a community website and if you had 50,000 registered folks on a community website, there would be no issue that would escape notice. So how does black radio make the handoff to those bloggers and local politicos in the Netroots? That is what this kind of conference can facilitate.

Let me give you an example of the gap. When Jamiel's Law became a hot topic of discussion here in Los Angeles, I blogged about it and I spoke about it on Warren Olney's radio program. I also followed the issue in the online part of the LATimes. I didn't get an opportunity to follow up at any of the hearings or press conferences, but I think I saw pretty much everything that went on online. There was an energized, activated community around a hot political topic of broad interest and of special concern to blacks and latinos in Los Angeles County. A radio station like KJLH could have increased its connection to its audience and brought a great deal of focus and actual representation if they worked the issue in coordination with bloggers and online communities. I can't say that they didn't spend a good deal of time on that issue in their broadcast, but I don't listen. I do watch the web, and I know they weren't here. 

There are no black issues but local issues. The question is, who owns access to those voices? Local radio working in tandem with online communities are the absolute best way. And the sharpest voices online will naturally syndicate themselves in the blogosphere. That's the way it works. Townhall.com is the proof. If black radio doesn't move soon to use their local cred to cover community politics on the web, they will lose the opportunity. It's really the only thing they have.

In 1984 or thereabouts, the Black Business Association, a bunch of us undergrads, took a field trip to Motown in Hollywood. At the time, only Michael Jackson was doing the video thing, but I'm pretty sure this was before his collab with John Landis on Thriller. Motown was getting no play from MTV, but it was made directly apparent to us that this was a business decision of Barry Gordy. He thought videos were an expensive waste of time and told his artists that they would not be getting any support for that. This was whispered to us in desperate tones. Of course the whisperers were right and Gordy was wrong, and the rest is history. If anybody thought black talent would get no play outside of Barry Gordy's Motown, they were dead wrong.

This relates to the web opportunity of local radio stations in this critical way. Now I might be wrong but I don't see how local radio promotes local talent in the music business. You can make money as a radio station playing hiphop and urban contemporary no matter what your location and if you're not playing the top national hits, you can't possibly be making any money. When it comes to listening to Snoop or whomever, I've got DJs at the club, iTunes, Cable, XM/Sirius, the record store, movies, video games, and cellphones. Eight ways into my ear that ain't radio, not to mention concerts and bootlegs at the barber shop. People are going to get their Beyonce on - music in local radio is a me-too game with a declining market share. But in any and every community, the opportunity to be the local personality on the air is a great driving factor and it is something that a local radio station can have a lock on - and while my focus is news and politics, it doesn't have to be that. 

Still, it seems to me that local community activism and politics that does not get involved with an active online community of the local people is just asking to be co-opted by Soledad O'Brien and her editors and producers. They will decide what the coverage of X is going to be when it hits your neighborhood if the local radio station does not make that move to engage the community online. 

An online community of eyewitnesses cannot be pushed around, but they can be accellerated and energized through synergy with local radio. And that's all the good news there is.

The bad news is that black radio in particular will fail to be significant if they don't make the connection. That means that program directors are going to have to find a way to connect with the right sort of online communities and/or bloggers. They're going to have to find a business model that takes advantage of the dynamics of the web and they're going to have to be smart about the way the technology is configured. It's a separate line of business with different cost structures. 

I am of the opinion as I said above, that without this connection, there will be no black news. There will be no community ownership or control of the comings and goings of those communities, because quite frankly, a website that cannot get 100 comment threads on local issues cannot compete with newspapers which are failing anyway. 

Again. If this particular extinction does take place, it will follow the course of everything else. The unique market and social conditions of communities will be subservient to national policies. Now in some ways that's a good thing. Nobody wants a Big Mac Philly Style. They want a Big Mac. But if all you have is McDonald's, then Philly Style disappears. You have to get critical mass in the convergence or else. 

Let me close with one final word about money, and I want to talk to you mister black newspaper editor who's about to get laid off. If your skills are to mean anything, you need to take them to the web. The web will evolve an economic model that will get you paid a new way sooner than your newspaper will evolve an expanding market that will get you paid the old way. Your question is not if, but when. And if your interest and business has been local political and cultural news at the community level, then you have an obligation to do what you do best in this new medium. I would have liked to believe that there were lots of black news producers just twiddling their thumbs trying to get their content into mainstream and large networks - but I'm coming to believe that those people are few and far between. Meaning for black radio stations, maybe 75 news folks in the whole country. Online, that would be a juggernaut organization. But in declining local news markets, it ain't much. 

Watch GM. They refused to downsize, lower their costs, revise their business models and now it's too late. Their hand has been forced. The internet is over 15 years old, there is no excuse. 

About That Earthquake

I think they are calling it the Inglewood/Hawthorne or the Lennox Quake. It happened last night about 8:45 while we were watching America's Funniest Videos. I could hear and feel it coming and was on my feet in a half second after it was clear that some real shaking was going on. I grabbed my daughter and my wife and pulled them towards the back door after something crashed off of a shelf.

I had to do some quick calculations and guess which way glass might be flying if we were outside rather than inside as I paused in the doorframe. But even as I could hear car alarms going off and see powerlines swaying, I sensed that it was just about over. So I didn't worry about glass. Everybody was fine although my daughter was still cowering a bit. Five seconds after the first aftershock I headed to the computer and began recon.

Flap was the first one to Twitter. He must have been sitting at the terminal when it happened. I first tried for CalTech but could only get to the front page of their website. Slashdotted. Twitter was alive so I sent several messages. My youngest daughter was en route from her best friend's house. She had just sent me an SMS two minutes before the quake asking about who was the artist who recorded 'Man in the Box'. Sent back 'Alice in Chains' and then 'OK?' almost back to back. Her SMS didn't get back to me until she was already home. 'Did you feel the earthquake'.

I didn't even bother trying to use the phone for voice. I figured everything was tied up and so as I sent my fifth tweet, there were voices in the house confirming that suspicion. Facebook seemed to be alive - several message were coming through, Twitter style, from local friends. My brother Doc finally got a text message through. I tried to send a reply but it wouldn't go. There was nothing at Google News yet, but the TV news guys were breaking a story.

LAX area they said. It felt to me like a 5.5 but it was very short. So 5 sounded reasonable. I got to the USGS and filled out a questionnaire for their records. Their site said 5.0. Next I decided to check my XBox Live buddies. One out in Fontana felt it and kept right on playing Guitar Hero. FB friends from San Diego chimed in. Lots of people who never felt one spoke up. This one was really very short which was surprising given the joltiness of the big jolt. It wasn't a surprising earthquake, there was a good number of seconds of twitching before the big shake slammed home, but then it was over. Still, I figured aftershocks would be coming. I felt two.

Some of our paintings were all crooked. I never figured out what fell down off which shelf. But everything was pretty much back to normal within half an hour. And that's the way it was.

Fear and Freedom

Don't tell people what you're going to do. It just gives them an excuse to second-guess you. Shutup until you're done, then tell people what you did.
-- D. Bowen

Doc and Pops treated me to lunch yesterday. It was all Doc really. He's not angry, he's a happy man but you have to listen a long time until you know that. He's deep in the middle of a struggle, the dimensions of which seem to be beyond him and all of us. But that's how he lives. He's the manly man - the one that rushes into the middle of the conflict. He enjoys donning the armor and putting on a heightened sense of awareness so that he's always prepared. He said that we don't understand, that he's made of cork and nothing can sink him, but you can tell that he's surrounded on all sides by deep, dark, cold water. That is the life of one LAPD officer.

The context of the quote comes from Middle America, the America of South Dakota, the one that doesn't exist here. He said that he told people that he was going to buy property in South Dakota, something that is supposed to be a crazy endeavor for a black man, in certain minds. But he got there explaining the dimensions of fear.

He put himself in the shoes of fear. He was walking near his home in downtown LA and a white woman was coming up the street towards him at night. He described himself in silks, carrying groceries - but he knew what was coming. Her jaws were clenched, she was scared to death. What could he say to put her at ease? A second scenario. The Asian woman alone in the elevator with the black man. Scared to death, but he's a cop. She's actually safer around him than anyone else. People in Los Angeles are living with Black Pathology Television in their heads, and that's all they know. It's not America.

Switch gears. What is the black man's greatest fear? He has run out of gas out in the boondocks and is lost. He has to get service at the lone gas station run by Bubba. Out front is Bubba's red pickup truck with the gun rack and inside is Bubba wearing a plaid hunting jacket. What can Bubba say to put him at ease? Doc runs down the specs on the pickup truck - he finds where Bubba's love is and the bond is made in 20 seconds. A second scenario, reality. He's driving from Yankton to Wakonda South Dakota. He talks to the man who tells him a shortcut. Wow, thanks. Takes 15 miles off the trip but you have to go through some cornfields.

One hour later it's dark and he is at the corner of Corn and Stalk. The sky is clear and the land is flat. The stars are out and they come all the way to the horizon - not that he can see it because he's in 8 foot corn as far as the eye can see. He stops the car and puts on the blinkers. He's lost in South Central South Dakota in the dead of winter and it's mind-numbingly cold. The car pulls up slowly. A woman gets out, white woman and she asks what she can do to help. "I'm lost and I'm trying to get to Wakonda". Wakonda is a five block square of houses in the middle of 1000 square miles of farmland.

She says "Follow me".

That's where America is, Doc says. Not here in the Los Angeles where officers of the law are not permitted to look at anyone's breasts lest they get written up administratively. Here, everyone is afraid of men who have to be men. It's enough to defeat the courageous. So he's out to rescue liberty and wondering where everybody's honesty has gone.

Doc has got a fantasy. It's about living where the living is honest and good. Right now he's got some small parts of middle America but in the future it's in Western Australia. Out there where people don't step on each other's feet you understand that you have to look out for your neighbor. Western Australia is like Africa without the Africans. There are no tribal conflicts, no wars. Millions of acres of unpolluted wilderness and gorgeous shorelines in a constitutional republic with liberty. Western Australia is like what America used to be before it got too crowded and hated - where people had to work to make life work rather than spend all their time trying to vote themselves into existence and politick themselves into the receiving end of demographically proportionate patronage.

I don't know much about Kenny Chesney. That's something both Doc and Pops share that I know very little about, but I do know the effect he has on people that love and respect his music. It was on the list of basics that you need for a life of liberty in Western Australia, including the four-wheel drive, the Brazilian wife, the cargo pants, Tommy Bahama sandals, and a year's supply of Chimay Ale. Silly me, I kept wondering if he was going to say broadband access. But I couldn't disagree. I mentioned Bora Bora, but he said no. Not enough land, you'd get cabin fever. You need to see out to the horizon full of land and know that the land is free.

I'm impressed.

Pops still sends all the emails about Obama in 48 point caps. Sometimes he sends them in different colors. On the way to the spot yesterday I saw a poster from the Californian Medical Marijuana League inviting people to Celebrate Change at some rally. At the bottom of the poster was the notice that smoking of medical marijuana was not allowed at the rally. Funny we were just talking about that. Funny they had to mention it. Funny I can't remember when so many people made such a big deal about going to any Inauguration.  But Pops doesn't care really about winning any political battles - really, not any battles at all. All he wants is to spend enough time with his 10 grandchildren to enjoy the fact that they're not engaged either. So that's why there is no method to his madness. He's just being, as the kids say, 'random'. Well he does know how to pick a good ale. 

I'm watching romantic comedies because people knew, back in the days of Cary Grant and Myrna Loy, and before, what their roles were. They knew how to be men and women and not issue administrative citations for improper breast observation. Masculinity and femininity have lost their moorings because the Boomers felt obligated to reject EVERYTHING and celebrate that as freedom. But now all of the descendants who watch television and movies don't know how to deal with each other's passions, and the land doesn't require them to meet people on the road and be something more than 'a young hispanic female', or however the description comes across the network. Because when Americans react to each other in the modern terms, it's based on demographically assigned fears. Walking on downtown streets and riding in elevators and shouting out of cars in traffic doesn't require people to be Americans, and so America is lost here in Los Angeles, which very few people identify as land that goes out to the horizon where the people are free.

So the votes are in and the symbol is in place but life doesn't change. It's no surprise that people of a sort would vote for the man who talks the right game, but the talking is not going to change. The clenched jaws of fear are unable to open and ask "How can I help", not here in the urban jungle. That counts for the Los Angeles with the Latino mayor and for the America with the African president. It's not the adjectives that count, but the verbs. 

Living in fear vs living in freedom is always a matter of reaching out to touch in truth with passion. I sometimes wonder if we do that enough, and today when its 20 below in South Dakota and sunny and bright here in the Southland, I think the difference has to do with the demands of the land. Out here we wear sunglasses and only smile if we've had our dental perfection done.

Loyola Beats Mira Costa

The last time I shed a real tear, as in cried, it was when I realized that I had allowed the application deadline for freshman year at Loyola High School to pass for my son. 'Nuff said on that. Since then, I have gotten used to the idea that Boy will accomplish what he needs outside of that well-wrapped universe, but every once in a while it stabs me like a splinter in my mind.

Whenever that stabbing pain arrives, I console myself primarily with the knowledge that he will be in a better position socially than I was, and that as a Loyola alum myself, I am quite capable of transferring those lessons I got. But then again, he won't live it.

Be all that as it may, I am coming back around into the old high school family slowly but surely. It has gravity. Last night I attended the opener against Mira Costa High one town over from me in Manhattan Beach. It was the second high school football game I've attended in as many nights (Boy's frosh team stomped North Torrance High something like 45 - 7 on Thursday - he got one unassisted tackle.) and also the second in about three decades. I can tell you that it's truly weird not to be able to see the replay or hear the commentary, but extra cool to be one of the few with binocs and see the fumble before the crowd does. Still, I have to bone up on my football observation skills.

What struck me most about this whole deal is that the spirit of the Loyola fan base is monstrous. I can't say that I know what to compare it to, but it was truly pretty awesome to see first hand. I never hated football, but I've always disliked the whole 'fan' thing. I'm not a very good booster. I like to play, I like to make a difference personally. But last night I put on the hat and sat in the bleachers and shared the binocs and met a whole lot of people I hardly expected to meet. It got to the point when I was asking strangers if perhaps I knew them. Marlon and Darryl, I knew and I rather expected to be there, pillars of the Family as they are. But seeing Michael and Kirk and Ty and Frank was pleasantly unexpected.

The game itself was jerky. It had no offensive continuity. As Coach Porterfield said, it looked like a bad soccer match, nothing happened until one team made a mistake. We counted at least five illegal procedure calls. There were about 4 sacks, several fumbles and interceptions. A pass interference and a technical foul within a couple plays of a punt return had everybody scratching their heads. And if that announcer says 'Boom Shacka Lacka or 'punting situation' one more time, I was going to scream. I don't know how bad high school football kicking games are supposed to be, but some of this was straight Keystone Kops. Nevertheless, there were some breakout plays especially by a kid named Jones, I think #84 and especially Loyola's #2, an unstoppable hole-splitting running back who seemed to break tackles just for the fun of it.

Most impressive to me was the energy of the place. It was standing room only from the opening kickoff until pass the closing 'boom shacka lacka'. I couldn't catch the chants that the Loyola student section was doing with their tomahawk motions, but that block of them about 20 wide and 8 rows deep was pretty awesome.

I think I could make this into a habit, that is, when Redondo Union is away. Go Seahawks! Go Cubs!

The Society

The Society met again for the first time Saturday. There were a lot of hugs going around.

I couldn't predict, but I would make a fair guess that something of import is going to come from the collected efforts of this group. Things are just getting started, and the lead dogs have a great deal of enthusiasm. We'll see.

Me, I'm just really glad to get in personal touch with folks I've always gave the benefit of every doubt. I tend to think more about myself as measured by them as anything else in that way we always feel about our hometown.

Among others who showed up (a lot more than I expected) were Jackson, Butler, Pugh, Shields, McKinley, Gabriel, Davis, Martin, Shepherd, Harvey, Houze, Meredith, Thompson, Walker, Sanford, Vicknair, Stewart and Baptiste. I wish I had more time to talk about the present with folks I didn't know very well but I had other commitments that day.

State Senator Mark Ridley-Thomas dropped by to say a few words as well. A key group to be sure. Go Cubs!

More on the Homeless in LA

Here is the correct piece of news from the LA Times. The link in that blockquote of Patterico's did not contain the proper information bolstering the arguments I have made on behalf of the police, citizens and businessmen who have to deal with the crime of the dumping zone called Skid Row.
Download los_angeles_times_plan_would_end_homeless_tent_cities.pdf

This was a compromise that hasn't resolved the problem. It remains. Here is another article that illustrates varying approaches to solutions. Joseph Mailander proposed New Yurt City. I like the idea and furthermore I would extend it as a kind of microlending solution. In other words, I would grant a sort of partnership / ownership of a yurt. Let's say that the city owns 51 percent of each yurt and that the city or county also subsidizes a grant for the person 'buying' in. As they get on their feet and have a job, they move out of the yurt and sell it to the next occupant.
Download los_angeles_times_magic_housing_solutions.pdf

We should keep in mind that this is exactly how Brazil has creatively dealt with favelas, or that seems to be the message among some of the blue sky and semi-radical testimony of Robert Neuwirth. It makes sense to me that some sort of financial incentive be given to users of the yurts and that it is made to benefit the city that these turn over - that people don't squat in yurts permanently, but that some provision be made that they are accommodating to people who might take 3-6 months to be restored to normalcy.

Beyond Special Order 40

Times They Are A-Changin'

From today's LAT, emphasis mine:

Hoping to find a successor to popular Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and end the decadelong shellacking that most other Republicans have suffered when running for statewide office, a group of GOP leaders and well-heeled donors Wednesday announced plans to stock a "farm team" of candidates they hope will put their party back in power.

The organization includes former Gov. Pete Wilson and a crew of moderate Republican donors from Orange County.

Although they insist that potential candidates will be judged by their quality and electability -- not their ideology -- some conservatives are already critcizing the move as an attempt to undermine their leadership in the party.

California Republicans Aligned for Tomorrow will work with the California Republican Party to find candidates for governor, U.S. Senate and state office seats starting in 2010, when Schwarzenegger terms out of office.

Among the potential gubernatorial candidates courted by the group is former EBay Chief Executive Meg Whitman, the 51-year-old billionaire who is now campaigning for Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain and once served as a fundraiser for his rival, Mitt Romney, according to one source.

It gets better.

Hudson noted that a number of the Republican group's board members also belong to the New Majority, which was founded primarily by Orange County executives who for years have tried to nudge the party away from social conservatives and their emphasis on issues such as abortion and gun rights.

Also, many members of the new group have close ties to Schwarzenegger...

That's what I'm talking about.

 

Dennis Zine Does the Right Thing

City Councilman Dennis Zine has read us right. That's responsive and responsible politics. The LA Times actually fairly accurately reports:

"If an officer stops an individual . . . who is determined to be a gang member, and it's determined they are also illegally here, then the department should notify immigration," Zine said. "It directs the resources against the gangs. Immigration needs to use its resources to go after gangs."

Zine's proposal would not overturn Special Order 40, which states that "officers shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person." But Zine's amendment would be more specific as to how officers can inquire into the immigration status of suspected gang members.

LAPD Deputy Chief Sergio Diaz said such actions were not directly prohibited by Special Order 40. Some officers already check the immigration status of gang members they detain -- but others don't because they believe it's not permitted under department rules.

Diaz said the new rules would spell out how officers deal with such cases.

"Special Order 40 prohibits only two things. It prohibits our officers from arresting individuals for illegally entering the country, which is a federal misdemeanor," Diaz said. "It also does not allow our officers to initiate an investigation solely for the purpose of discovering a person's immigration status."

I was on the radio with Deputy Chief Diaz, and he admitted that jurisdiction and rules can be complex. This clarification is an excellent first step that makes the PD more proactive. It gets more bad guys off the street quicker - a one-two punch.

I still suspect that there's a bottleneck somewhere in the judicial and penal end of this train of criminal custody. That gangbanger can be detained and arrested, but if ICE throws up their hands, as Villaragosa rather flippantly asserted last week, then there can still be suspects floating through the cracks and illegals sent back to American streets. What is not clear is the efficiency with which such persons, identified as in the country illegally are actually deported. I don't think that the reform's most critical feature is in aggressive policing, but in fast-tracking those known Mexican national convicts back to Mexico.

I am glad to see Deputy Chief Diaz do his part in this and I hope and expect that people who are specifically concerned about a chilling effect on other illegal immigrants cooperation with police recognize that the distinction between those who might be on an eventual path towards naturalization and gangbangers is a sound and reasonable distinction. Nobody should live in fear of gangs in America. You can be a good neighbor even if you are not a citizen.

Support your local police.

Special Order 40

I just listened to the show, I think it went very well and gave a fair hearing to what is actually a bit more complicated than was let on. I think I did a pretty decent job.

What was not mentioned in the show was the extent to which there's a great deal of jurisdictional overlap and borders. I could not determine, for example, whose responsibility it is to make the call on whether a Mexican national convict is actually deported or released to the streets of LA. The deputy chief made it clear that LAPD marks the forms that notifies ICE, but not what percentage of those violent or gang criminals are actually deported. Clearly it's not the LAPD's responsibility.

So I'm sure lots of people can say that they're doing their part to share databases and have information, but whose head rolls today? Who should be voted out of office?

Ms Salas said that the LAPD should spend its time apprehending dangerous criminals instead of being advance men for the Migra. I agree. In fact, the thousands of Mexican nationals in California jails and prisons attest to the efficiency of the system in doing part of its job. But if these ex-cons are released back into the California population and then can hide under the cover of the political protections of 'latinos' when in fact they are Mexican nationals, then something is wrong. And I don't think that latinos should be on the hook for being part of that 'community'.

I think it's rather astounding, in retrospect, that the Chief and his deputy are bringing up the matter of arresting jurisdictions. The LAPD in the end can no better hide behind the border of Culver City than Jamiel Shaw could hide behind the US border. And the City Council is not going to be able to hide behind its jurisdictional borders either. All the borders are porous and the political effects of this are going to spill over in all different directions. I'm sure we would want it to be neat and compartmentalized, but it's not.

In the meantime, I'm still looking for a hero, but I don't see a lot of guts out there.

Jamiel's Law is a spirit that I think is going to go to the next level. It's not going to end with LAPD policy reform. I know a lot depends upon the willingness of the family to step beyond being a symbol. Who knows the chances of that. It's the worst way of all to become famous. But this is another chapter in the long history of failed immigration policy, a bloody and tragic chapter. The problem will not go away, neither will I.

Jamiel's Law

Here's a law and order issue that deserves a good deal of attention. It's very hot on local radio.

Jamiel Shaw was gunned down by an illegal alien gang member who had just gotten out of jail. Jamiel was not in a gang. If Special Order 40 didn’t stand in the way, the illegal would have been deported, and Jamiel would be alive. It’s as simple as that. We say that Mayor Villar, Chief Bratton and the City Council have blood on their hands! Call City Hall and tell them to support Jamiel’s Law.  Jamiel’s family needs your help.

Here's the story:

Stanford University called about Jamiel Shaw a week or so ago, intrigued by the slight but speedy running back for Los Angeles High School, the Southern League's most valuable player last year. Rutgers University called a few days later.

The Shaw family already had reason to be proud. Jamiel's mother, Army Sgt. Anita Shaw, was on her second tour of duty in Iraq.

On Sunday night, it was Jamiel's father on the phone and then his son's girlfriend, Chrystale Miles. Jamiel Sr. called to tell him to hurry home from the mall. The 17-year-old boy was three doors away when someone shot him to death while he was still talking on his cellphone to Chrystale, friends say.

Jamiel Sr. heard the shots almost as soon as he hung up. He ran out of the house, raced around the corner and found his son lying on the sidewalk, bleeding.

The Shaw family is pissed, and they are on the verge of becoming the new face of anti-illegal immigration in California if not the nation. Their son Jamiel was an all-star and a very popular kid. This will not be swept under the rug.

Already, Chief Bratton is being accused of being a lapdog to the Mayor Villaraigosa who already has very bitter enemies over matters of illegal immigration. Nobody forgets how the Mexican flag was waved onstage at his inauguration, and how he has consistently pretended that Mexican gangs are not a real problem in Los Angeles. The recent spate of drive-by murders, killings of blacks by latinos have forced the Chief to say publicly that they are not racially motivated - meaning 'cool it baby'. And now he's waffling on that, semi-off-the-record. The black backlash has the potential to be ferocious, and as I said, local Right Radio is all over this. Talk about chickens coming home to roost.

I have a gut feeling that this story is about to go large and that the City Council is going to have a lot of explaining to do. I expect Ted Hayes to raise the roof. Patterico is on top of the story and the Deport Illegal Alien Criminals First, an idea I support wholeheartedly should gain some headway as well. I'm going to stick this one onto the Kwaku Network, but it's already on YouTube.

USC Credit Union
Foundation for Jamiel Shaw II
1025 W. 34th Street
King Hall, 2nd Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90089

Signs & Suits

Right around the corner from my office in West LA is a new jumbotron billboard. This is the new outdoor advertising. It's very impressive to see. The guys with the crane were out here last week and they put this together in just a couple days. On the current rotation are three movie ads. There are two for Sweeney Todd, and this one for a movie called 'Cloverfield'. (Is that the JJ Abrams thing? Yes.) I noticed the crout of suits staring up at the billboard today at lunch. I figure they're from CBS Outdoor or one of the movies or ad agencies involved. This is a marquee sign in a really great location. Next to Sunset Blvd, I can't think of many better places for a movie billboard.

Writers Strike

Today I had lunch at the world's most luxurious food court, the one in Century City at the Westfield. The place was lousy with Hollywood types, as usual. Today there was an additional heaping helping of writers. You could tell because they had on one of four sorts of T shirts that let you know.

"My movie was on You Tube and all I got was this lousy T-shirt".

With humor like that, one wants to sympathize with the studios and producers. In fact, all during lunch as i was eyeballing the crowd, I kept coming up with better slogans. For example, a picket sign with no writing. Or at least one with the small print "This picket sign left intentionally blank". I couldn't help but notice that writers were enjoying lunches at the most luxurious food court in the world. I sat near the wireless powered speakers that were carrying the tunes strummed by the strolling acoustic troubadour. I asked, and he obliged my request for "Hotel California".

As the troubadour played, I wondered about the mentality which would ask for a cut of his tip cup. After all, Hotel California is surely a copywritten song. And I'm sure that somewhere there are entertainment intellectual property lawyers out there who know exactly which clause in the law which allows street musicians to ply their trade of playing and singing popular songs without being forced to fork over a percentage.

Gerard reminds us that most writers, especially in the news business, write to be read, not studied. Hmm. what about bloggers? I know in fact that most of the time, well anytime I write under the category of Critical Theory, I write to be studied. Since I am a syndicated blogger and I do NPR I catch a little money on the side. Something like 170 bucks a month, in a good month. I hardly think that qualifies me as a professional. But I think I'm a good writer nonetheless, and I count myself fortunate that I don't have to work for the kind of asshats that would make me feel as though I needed the benefit of collective bargaining. I don't know, there's something about the very idea of a writer's union that sounds oxymoronic - it is bound to the assembly line of entertainment product. That's all we've heard in the news this week, how this disruption of labor is effecting the economy of Los Angeles. Nothing could be more un-writerlike from my perspective. I suppose that's because of my intellectual bias. I think of a writer first and foremost as an intellectual, a facilitator of an environment for the critical exchange of ideas central to ... yeah well that's my conceit.

In reality, the writer's strike is going to put more people out on the street at night. I mean with nothing good to watch on the tube, people are going to have to face their misery without relief. Good news for bars, taxis and eventually divorce lawyers. Just imagine the ripple effects. That's what they want you to do.

In the end, however, I fall into the same camp as Bill Handel, who explained the deal this morning on the radio. Writers get, from the sale of every DVD, approximately 4 cents. The studios get about 3 bucks. The writers want 8 cents, which is still less than what the guys get who make the box. I think that's reasonable, under the circumstances.

San Diego County Fires

FYI. Google has a map resource up.

Burning Burbs

Not very long ago, the Spousal Unit and I were figuring out how to make sense of California real-estate for us. We have openly speculated about moving to North Carolina and to San Diego. Before I landed this gig headquartered in LA, we were potential short-timers to LA County. Although it hasn't gotten much easier to plot our way through the shoulder crushing expenses we are aiming to bear, we are counting our blessings today for not having moved to San Diego.

All of our friends down that way are doing fine at this moment, one was directly in the path of the conflagration and then the winds shifted. The areas we planned to consider most seriously, Poway and Rancho Bernardo are today under constant threat as are thousands of families.

Like earthquakes, Southern California suffers greatly from wildfires. We call it Red Flag Season, and it also seems to bring out the arsonists as well. We managed to escape fairly well last year, but I've been up close to the scene of tragedy and it's damned scary. Just a few weeks ago, we dealt with a fire on the way to Big Bear. Growing up in Southern Cal is growing up with wildfires in memory.

Last night on the way home from a late evening at work, I stopped at Dockweiller State Beach just north of LAX. I could see the orange flames across the Santa Monica Bay northeast in Malibu stand out in the night sky. Just 200 yards below, folks sat around bonfires at the beach. I have a mustard cardigan that was ruined from bonfire smoke at Dockweiller but the smell is a familiar one. The crisp of manzanita and pine flakes in the air. We don't have limbago in our joints that tell us that storms are coming, in Los Angeles we sniff the air and check the coatings on our cars. Today is our hell time.

There's talk about raising taxes on the Malibu types who suck up fire resources on the regular. Mike Davis is likely waxing elegaic about the cosmic justice we are suffering today. I don't really go for the politics of tragedy, although I must admit that I get a good dose of schadenfruede when Californians lose million dollar homes to the fickle finger of nature's fate. Way back when, I used to wonder, as prompted by Davis, why the homes in Orange County should have such high values. Most of the OC is on sandy ground which is subject to liquifaction during earthquakes whereas much of South Central LA ground is bedrock. Location location location my black ass. But that was then. Now I'm gearing myself to be a proper grandfather and wise man, when every man's death diminishes me. So I don't wish ill for anyone nor retribution against the few. I merely hope we all try not to forget where we live and what we face.

Eleven, Double, Twenty Seven

I took the family downtown for an afternoon at the Music Center. There we enjoyed three dance pieces by the Mark Morris Dance Group. There were three interpretations of Mozart piano concertoes and we most thoroughly enjoyed the second piece, Double.

The odd thing about dance is that, well for me, there's not much vocabulary I have to describe it. For me it's all about enjoying the poise and the positions. I will pick out a dancer among the troupe and observe their hair, build and movement then try to understand what the choreographer sees in him or her. Then I reinterpret what I see from that assumed perpsective.

MMDG is largely uniform, but there are four breakout dancers. The first, most obviously was the soloist in the first piece, Eleven. She is petite with a short curly blonde cut and falls into her moves transparently. There is absolutely no effect or cant with her, she simply moves. The second is the darkest man, who is bald and medium thick build. He played the 'prince' in Double. His motions are consistently bold and regal. The third is a man who is visibly more graceful than any of the dancers. His arms are simply perfect and something changes when he is on stage, even and especially in the minimalist settings. The final man is the tall one with the pony tail. Something about him I liked - I can't put my finger on it.

All of these acts, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion took place on a black stage with a Franz Klein-esque swishes on a large white backdrop which was alternately lit in deep green or organge depending on the mood. Mostly the brushstrokes were left on the white. The dancers were dressed in simple togs, rather like what I imagine Greek peasants would wear, close and simple off whites but not too clingy and mostly sleeveless. All were barefoot and oftimes their movements would be accentuated by the squeak of their feet on the matte floor.

There were very signature moves in this set, most notably plain walking, brisk running and the most graceful kind of falling down one might imagine. I tended to recall Morris as the gropey troupe, but they showed none of that orgiastic slithering in the Mozart performance. Rather it was a well balanced set of motions one would expect for allegro-speed concertos. Classic but not too leapy at all, and not too much with the strange feet. Rather a set of unique arm motions done smoothly reminiscent of angular trees, budding flowers and falling leaves.

In our favorite, Double, the dark man wearing a black outfit which reminded me of a minimalist samurai robe began solo. Then the thinner men wearing off white vests would shadow him on angles up and down stage. It was a sort of teaching game at the end of which he marched off stage left. It was the first bit of humor in the performance. Then six men in vests began a complex set of moves across the stage in a prayer circle, finally working a sort of sets of assistance to each other and a seventh man. The seventh man then returns to the prince and these two men engage in a friendly pas de deux. Finally women appear on the edges and the entire village echoes the moves the prince originally performed alone. It was a marvelous entertainment that I found fulfilling on many levels.

The occasion was that we got free tickets from the school and that allowed one of Boy's teachers to gush about his artistic talents. We took photos out front. I rather enjoyed the crowd which I found rather unusual for Los Angeles. LA dowagers deeply freckled and makeupless, or wearing large brass hammered ornaments and oversized tortoise shells. Men in light jackets without socks in deck shoes.  A smattering of students, women in African dress, men in sweaters. Small girls with ballet frocks. It was a perfect afternoon, summery, different. And now there are three new Mozart pieces I can dig which were surprisingly unboring.

The Cultural Tour of LA - Part One

I've been writing restaurant reviews for the past six months and it has been a lot of fun, but what I haven't really done that I've now got an occasion to do is put together an entire cultural tour of the joint. So as I ease into that, I'm thinking of the top ten things you have to do as a tourist in LA. I know the list will grow to 50 but I gotta start somewhere. What things would I just not want to miss?

Lucy Florence
Any trip to LA is really not complete without a stop by Leimert Park Village. So the first stop has got to be the Lucy Florence coffee shop and gallery. The way to get there is half the fun too. I would recommend the back door side which is to take La Cienega to Slauson and come East on Slauson to Angeles Vista down to the village. That would give you a glimpse of the part of black LA few people know or talk about, my old stomping grounds. Or you could come in the front door from the 10 South on Crenshaw right down the strip. Either way is a tour through the core of Southwest LA, as contrasted with the more infamous and often mis-represented South Central LA. A Sunday afternoon is the perfect time since the drummers will be out in the park.

Sunset Cruise
On a Friday or Saturday night, one absolutely must cruise Sunset Boulevard. Depending on the amount of time you want to spend you can do the Full Cruise, the Eastside Cruise, the Westside Cruise or the Core Cruise. If you're going to do anything but the Core, you need to start at least one hour before sunset, especially if you want to head to the beach. The Full Cruise starts downtown at the LA River. There it's called Cesar Chavez. Head East through Silverlake and begin the right hand side of the Core at Vermont. Then drive through the seedy grit of Hollywood in the Core that gets gradually more cool until you're right in the middle of it at around Fairfax. Then drive west on Sunset to the sea, turn that jungle music up, as you go through Beverly Hills past UCLA to the 405, the end of the Core. If you want to continue on, the Westside Cruise goes all the way through Brentwood to Palisades. Then you can take your final left turn at Temescal Canyon and down to PCH.

Beach Time
The ultimate LA beach experience would have to be centered at Hermosa Beach for eyeballing. That is, if you want to check out the dudes and babes, the culture and the glitz, ground zero will be the Hermosa Beach Pier. This is the get out and walk part of the beach, as opposed to the cruise in your car with the windows down on the coast road part of the beach.There are plenty of joints of all sorts to cater to your beachy needs. If you want to get some authentic high quality beachwear, this is the place to be. Grab a beer at the Poopdeck and check out the volleyballers, or take a long walk on the long pier.

Walking, Shopping, Noshing
For urban sophisticates, (read people from NY, Boston & Philly) who feel like they don't want to get too immersed in doing LA things, one can exercise well-rehearsed street walking skills in crowds at the Santa Monica Promenade. There are bookstores, movie theatres, coffee shops, clothing stores, shoe stores, restaurants, bars, street performers, kids with balloons, babes on roller skates, dudes with tattoos, the entire microcosm of LA urbanity. Now there are alternatives. You could do Citywalk. You could also do the Irvine Spectrum, but my money is on the Promenade.

The Getty
Speaking of sophistication. You really don't know anything about Los Angeles until you have been to the Getty Museum. The first and foremost reason is the view from the South balcony. It is *the* way to view the city, and (if it's a clear day), you can suddenly see the beauty of this place from an angle you have never seen in any movie, photo or painting. The museum itself is spectacular and relatively uncrowded, but you do need a reservation.

Ports O Call
For a flavor of Latino LA, I haven't found anything to match the Sunday brunch at Ports O Call Village in San Pedro. There's something about ordering a huge amount of fresh seafood to order and sitting down with your family on the large wooden tables in the incredible hubbub of the place while mariachis play. It's a great solution for the big hungry. Plus, if you feel like it, you can take a harbor cruise for a fairly reasonable price.

Empress Pavilion
OK I know that it sounds cliche, and yes it's in Chinatown, but man you simply must experience the Dim Sum service at the Empress Pavilion. If you've never had dim sum served in the traditional style.. well it takes a little getting used to, especially if you're a pushover. Women push carts full of steaming delicacies and seduce you into trying a little bit of everything. It's all good from the simple to the adventurous. If you're really feeling wild, ask for the chicken feet. If not, everybody loves shumai and har gow. 

Farmer's Market
Farmer's Market is right in the heart of West LA and it's a perfect way to waste all kinds of time, walking around and gabbing with your buddies. Some nights there is public karaoke, and it's a great place to watch the big game in one of the open air bars. There is every kind of food on the planet, all fresh and delicious. If you can walk through Farmer's Market without eating, either you have the greatest discipline on earth or your jaw is wired shut.

That's all for now. But there is so much more.

 

Bowen Throws the Gauntlet

Sec'y of State Debra Bowen decertified most of the voting machines in California yesterday. OK now you've got our attention. So who's going to fix this mess. I say there needs to be somebody like Schneier and Lessig to sit on a board for an open source project to solve the electronic voting problem once and for all.

Danziger sums it up nicely:

Because the infrastructure - the plumbing - of our society is something we pay very little attention to. And yet when infrastructure fails - as we saw in Minneapolis last week or Manhattan two weeks ago - it fails spectacularly. Our electoral plumbing is also creaky and in bad shape; Florida in 2000 was bad - but at least the votes could be recounted (over and over again). With today's insecure DVR technology, the problem is that we will have more races like the one in Sarasota Florida in 2006 - in which there was a 15% under-vote possibly due to a glitch in the ES & S DVR systems. The final results in the race can never be audited, and the loser litigated to try and get the election run over again. Look, no voting system - no human system - is perfect, or exempt from error, fraud, or challenge. But just as our bridges need to strong enough to ensure that they don't spontaneously collapse, our voting systems need to be robust enough that we're not left in bitter dispute after an election on who voted and how. We don't need voting technology less secure than airport poker machines in Vegas and less auditable than Enron's books. This isn't a partisan issue. It isn't something that 'we can get to later.' A political system everyone agrees is legitimate should last us a long time. And if officials at all levels of government have to work a little harder and spend a little money to maintain and defend the fairness of our political system, I can think of nothing better for them to work on. Can you?

Seaside Lagoon

Seaside Lagoon

200 Portofino Wy
Redondo Beach, CA 90277
(310) 318-0681

Seaside Lagoon separates the realists from the dainties. As you know, there are two kinds of people in the world: the kind that know everything about diapers and those who don't know shit. Seaside Lagoon is for the former and our kids.

If you're political and you read Mark Steyn (Beuller? Anyone?) you know that the EU is depopulating and muslims and various other ethnic groups are multiplying. If you don't read Mark Steyn and are single and looking for a new rock band as an accessory to your car and car stereo, then you probably do not have a childproof abode. In either case, you know something about yuppie lines of demarcation and the ability to deal with messy reality. Either you have it or you don't. The good news for those of you on the dainty and young side is that eventually you will have a kid and eventually you will grow to like its smell and chaos, rather like you look for now at nightclubs and bars. At such time you will join with the real human race as opposed to being a market demographic blip for record company execs in Century City. We on the far side of parenthood will thus welcome you.

At that point in your life, unless you have a terminal case of the (eww grody to the max) dainties and decide to turn your offspring into a houseplant, you will realize the funky genius that is Seaside Lagoon, clorinated funky seawater and all.

Yes, you can let your kids run wild. Yes they will pee in the water. Yes they will splash you, throw sand at seabirds, spill mustard on themselves, get pushed off the side, slide down the waterslide backwards, get sand in every orifice, walk around with sunburned shoulders, wrinkle up your beach towel and if you're lucky swim too soon after eating and blow chunks (although I've yet to see it happen in 3 seasons). Still, after all of that, those kids will be five times as cute as Lindsay Lohan and everybody she parties with. Why, because they're your kids, they will have had unadulterated undisciplined wild monkey fun and they'll love you forever for taking them to Seaside Lagoon.

Now go and have some ice cream. You deserve it.