Notebook

First, ask for the name

Last night reporting on the non-apocalypse, I met an older woman with flowing silver hair at the Griffith Observatory who came alone. I introduced myself and it was like I had snapped her out of a trance. She was reluctant to speak at first, but then she looked past me at Los Angeles shimmering beneath the hill, smiled, and started to speak. She was a surgeon who had had a long day. She came to the observatory to clear her head. Waiting in line for the telescope, she befriended a young couple. At the foot of the curving staircase leading to the telescope, the guy proposed to the girl with a few minutes to midnight, and she said yes. She took their picture and congratulated them. She said it was an event to commemorate the ending of an era, but that couple’s life was just beginning. He gave a diamond, and the stars, and the moon. She’s crying now, trails of tears framing a smile. It’s dark now, a few minutes past midnight, and we’re walking to her car. I can’t even see what I’m writing, and soon I just stop. I’ve asked for her name several times at this point and I know she won’t give it to me. She said there was something beautiful about being at the intersection of that, on such a unique day - that that there was so much beauty in Los Angeles, because the city opens its arms to everyone, especially at a place like Griffith. She stopped and threw her arms wide - I mean, just look at this place, she said. We’re at her car, a antique cream colored sports car from the 60’s. I asked for her name one more time. She smiled, shook her head and got into her car. You can have the car’s name, she said. She’s a star. Her name is Bessie.

Los Angeles: A love/hate letter

Los Angeles will surprise you.

I’m convinced that this city does that better than any place in the world. I think it’s because you expect so little from it.

A surface-level evocation of Los Angeles involves celebrities, traffic and the Lakers. Stay here for a week and you might not see anything but highways, strip malls and the backs of other cars - all through dismal blur of a windshield.

Keep looking, and you’ll find that the city is conventionally and unconventionally ugly. It’s beauty is commercial and it’s beatifically commercial. The sun shines almost daily but no one seems to feel the warmth - at least not judging by the scowls on everyone’s faces.

John Lennon denigrated it best: “Los Angeles? That’s just a big parking lot where you buy a hamburger for the trip to San Francisco.”

He’s right. Los Angeles, at first glance, is a shithole.

But that’s why it’s a great city for journalists - it rewards you for looking closely.

That smoke rising through the air isn’t smog. Follow it, and you’ll find a Brazilian restaurant whose outer walls are obscured with stacked logs. Inside, they roast delectable chicken, all day long. You are, inexplicably, in Koreatown.

Explore that nondescript skyscraper and you’ll discover that it’s a shopping mall attached to an open-air driving range with four levels. The top level is an ineffectively schwanky restaurant. Why, how - don’t ask.

Turn the corner and you’ll stumble across an Indonesian culture festival, here for the weekend, gone the next, and nowhere to be found the year following.

Take that road you haven’t used in a while and you might not recognize anything. The city is always changing.

Los Angeles is ugly, unwieldy and inconvenient. Pleasures must be excavated - and even then only after you find parking.

Thus each slice of life, of culture, of beauty that you find is like an unexpected favor. The more you find the more inflamed your curiosity becomes. And soon, exploration becomes its own end. 

I’ll admit it - Los Angeles sucks. Sometimes I hate this city too. I’ve spent an alarming proportion of my life looking for parking. Superficiality, worship of wealth and just plain old bitterness from the citizenry have ruined my day on many an occasion. And I’ve cursed the Marilyn Jorgensen Memorial Interchange with the rest of you (Who is she? Regardless, I hate her for being the namesake of LA’s biggest time-suck). 

But I’m stubborn - I love this city. I’ll be sad to leave it.

Sources

The relationship between a reporter and a source is a strange one. 

It is on its face a professional interaction. Reporters are seeking information and sources oblige them for their own reasons.

But the exchange which I’ve just described is unequal - reporters benefit unambiguously from such a trade but sources’ rewards are uncertain.

When someone allows me into their life, I try to tread with care. Push only as much as necessary and obey all the stop signs and traffic signals. Be respectful, never judge, and most of all, be professional. 

But even that demeanor seems inappropriate after a while. You share laughs and empathize with each other’s struggles. You offer advice, compare opinions and reach agreements. A source shares things with a reporter that they’ve never told anyone and a reporter, in peeling away layers of pretension and formality, has to shed at least some of his own professional armor.

Eventually, it’s not just business any more, is it?

But then, the story runs. The relationship fades, like ink on a page, over time.

And the next day, you do it again.

I just found Gene Weingarten

A friend linked me to the Peekaboo Paradox the other day. I’ve been on a Weingarten-induced bender ever since. I rashly purchased this book on Sunday at 2 a.m. as I was halfway through the first article and it arrived yesterday.

I started with the Peekaboo Paradox, Pearls Before Breakfast, and Fatal Distraction, and quickly decided that they were the best three articles I’d ever read. Weingarten, writing in three movements about the tragic consequences of fast-paced modern life, spoke to me in a way I’ve really never experienced.

Edit: In this space, I was going to subject any readers of this blog to several enormous block quotes of my favorite passages, with line by line discussions of exactly why and how much I liked them. Fortunately I reconsidered, but I have to post just one:

“The Great Zucchini’s tattered loose-leaf appointment book is filled with the names and dates of his scheduled parties, months and months into the future. He keeps no backup — no other notes, nothing on a computer disk, nothing anywhere. If he were to lose that book, he’d have no idea where he was supposed to be, or when. For months of weekends, preschool children would be waiting expectantly in homes across greater Washington, and the Great Zucchini would simply never show.

Eric understands the importance of that book. Without it, the Great Zucchini would cease to exist, and all that would be left would be Eric Knaus. And so he carries it with him everywhere. He won’t leave it in a car, in case the car is stolen. When he goes out of his house, if he absolutely must leave the book behind, he hides it in a special place no burglar would think to look.

The sight that I could not get out of my head was the Great Zucchini hunched over the craps table, lost in that flagrant illusion, flinging dice with his right hand, his left hand pressing that book hard to his chest, white knuckled, like a man holding on for dear life.”

Halfway through the anthology, the high has faded slightly. I’m still enthusiastic, but I see at least a few decisions that I wouldn’t have made. I have retreated from my initial position, that I should move to D.C. and model myself after Weingarten in whatever ways possible.

I’m glad I found this though. Sometimes professional newspapering life doesn’t quite live up to a young journalist’ expectations. But the knowledge that work like this exists out there, as yet undiscovered, is vastly exciting to me. Someday, after I learn to construct better sentences than that last one, I’ll have the opportunity to do work like this.

Mostly, I am reminded that journalism doesn’t always have to be serious, that the essential job of a journalist is to make sense of the world, and that one of the primary tools for doing so is humor.

The Internet vs. the real world

I’ve been covering the potential closing of a 75-year-old United States post office in my community. The U.S. Postal Service is broke and closing thousands of offices, unable to keep pace with the rapid behavioral change that the internet has created. Watching tradition slowly succumb to economics - it’s a heavy thing.

It’s gotten me thinking: if brick and mortar existence is no longer financially justifiable for a variety of retail businesses, then what will our cities and towns look like in the future?

The Internet is leaving gaping holes in our built environments. Borders has gone bankrupt, Blockbuster has closed most of it’s locations, Circuit City is gone, K-Mart declared bankruptcy before that. Hell, even the 3.99 thrift store on Westwood Blvd. where I bought most of my clothes during college is gone. And when’s the last time you saw a Hollywood Video?

Look at the services which can be provided costlessly through the internet, match them to the familiar companies who sell them in real life, then look around you and cut them out of all the malls, retail complexes and shopping centers. While you’re at it, erase every businesses who can’t compete with parallels who distribute on the internet. I think what you’re looking at there is the future.

More stuff happens on the internet now, and that’s labeled progress. But we still have to turn off the computer and go places. Our existence is brick-and-mortar, and I don’t that will change for a while. 

I wonder what we’re going to fill those holes with.