Craig Berry

I figure Art Nouveau will be constructed a little further down the block.

Mixcoatl was an Aztec deity, the father (according to some versions of the story) of Quetzalcoatl. The word literally means "cloud snake". Here's Mixcoatl dancing with Coyolxahqui, the goddess of the Moon, over Westwood.

Last night belladonna93  got stuck in a massive anti-prop-8-ruling protest on her way home.  It took her more than an hour and a great deal of frustration and anxiety to work her way through blocked-off-streets, crowds of protesters, and jammed traffic.  The same thing happened to me twice in the week following the passage of Proposition 8.

I'm all for civil disobedience and nonviolent protest.  But may I point out that the communities where these protests have been happening -- Westwood, West Hollywood, and Hollywood -- are precisely the communities with the strongest support for (and largest population of) GLBT people in Southern California?  I would be extremely surprised if more than 5% of those inconvenienced by these protests favored Proposition 8.

So what we had here was a bunch of protesters disrupting the lives of their own community members, and of their most ardent supporters, to protest a decision made by a small group of judges who live in and around Sacramento, 400 miles to the north.  The net outcome for me was that I had a brief urge to support Proposition 8 just to avoid rewarding stupid and rude behavior.  Is that really the PR result the community wants?

Some days I really don't get people at all.

Looking northeast down Wilshire from the corner of Westholme at around 9 this morning. This was one of those cold crisp sunny LA winter mornings that I love so much. My little apartment building is behind the building on the far right, by the way.

I finally got around to trying out my new cell phone's camera while taking an afternoon stroll today. It looks pretty good -- not as crisp as I'd like, but with a focal length of about a centimeter, I don't expect perfection. This is certainly good enough for casual work. This was taken about two blocks west of my apartment. The marine layer was just starting to roll in, which produced a really striking bright hazy light.

Lately I've noticed that a lot of formerly quasi-public spaces are being secured against intruders.  My own office building recently reduced the hours during which you can enter the lobby without a key card.  The building across the alley from us has locked the corridor which used to provide easy access to the Promenade.  And it's effectively impossible to find an accessible rest room; many businesses have closed ones that used to be available, and the remainder are locked down with strict "patrons only" policies, rigorously enforced.

Is this a general trend, or just in LA?  Any ideas why this is happening now?  It seems to have accelerated in the last year or so, which means blaming post-9/11 paranoia doesn't seem sufficient.  The homeless are often mentioned in connection with these changes, but it doesn't seem like the number or nature of the local homeless population has changed in the last several years.

My conjecture is that the cost of purchasing, installing, and maintaining electronic security systems has become so low that people are doing it reflexively; in other words, if those costs were equally low in 1990, this would have happened then.  But even that seems like a weak explanation for a change that has caused so much inconvenience.

Any ideas?

Yesterday evening was exciting.

First, I dashed out early (for me) from work to meet the lovely rosefox  for a quick dinner.  It had been a long time since our last chance to visit, and the conversation zinged wildly from common friends to politics to the economy to our careers and relationships, and points between and beyond.  In retrospect, I'm amazed the whole thing lasted only 45 minutes.

I would have liked to linger, but later that evening I was due to coordinate a "Gnostic Boot Camp" session up in the Valley.  scorpio111  was going to swing by on his way up from work and give me a ride; it's a maneuver we've done many times, and I anticipated no difficulties.

Little did I realize that the anti-Proposition-8 riot in Westwood (which we'd heard about while I was still at work) had turned into a monster, sprawling from the Mormon Temple south of my apartment all the way up to the critical intersection of Wilshire and Westwood.  Essentially all of West LA was one giant traffic snarl, and getting up the 405 -- which passes right through Westwood -- was essentially impossible.  To add to the fun, so many people were using nearby cellular circuits that my phone stopped working, so I ended up just standing at my rendezvous point, figuring I'd wait 45 minutes past the arranged time and if scorpio111  didn't show up, start walking the six miles home.

He got there 20 minutes late, and we made an attempt to take a very, very alternate route to the Valley via PCH.  The California Incline was backed up out onto Ocean Avenue.  At that point, I realized that it's important to know when to give up, so I did.  His phone was working, thank goodness, so we were able to get the word to other attendees.  Then we spent just over an hour making that six-mile trip to my apartment via a roundabout route, since he was kind enough to give me a ride home.  Thanks, brother.

From the corner nearest my house, you can look south and see the spire of the Mormon temple that was the launching point for the protests, and Wilshire runs a block to the north.  So my quiet little neighborhood was in the center of the maelstrom.  Fortunately, nothing really spilled onto the residential backstreets, but there were low-flying helicopters, sirens, and distant megaphone rants still filling the air as I drifted off to sleep.  It's times like that when I'm very glad I inherited my mother's ability to sleep through a nuclear war, rather than my father's tendency to be kept up all night by a barking dog four blocks away.

By morning, everything was back to normal.  There were still some abandoned signs on the sidewalks, and other riot trash here and there, but either the rioters were very tidy (not unlikely, come to think of it) or the city had already made good progress on cleaning up by 8:30am.  This leant the morning a rather surreal air, especially as today was an especially pleasant day even for West LA, with cobalt-blue skies and a balmy breeze.  It was hard to believe the transformation from just eight hours before.  Los Angeles always eats its past, but this was an especially hurried meal.

Last night I left work around 7:15, stepping out into deep twilight in the alley between my office and the buildings on Third Street Promenade.  We're just a couple of blocks from the ocean, so it's always cooler here than further inland; in the fall, it usually gets pretty brisk out as the sun sets and the onshore breeze blows the fog in.  So as I step out the door heading homeward, I'm always unconsciously bracing myself for that first touch of cold, damp air.

Not last night.  It was around 80 degrees outside.  There was a breeze, but it kept shifting direction; it felt like a weak Santa Ana, dry and silky on the skin.  I caught the bus back to Westwood, around five miles inland, and it was even warmer there as I walked home in the velvety darkness, leaves rustling in little whirlwinds and chaotic rushes of air.

Santa Ana weather always makes me feel energetic and on edge, somewhere between anxious and exhilirated.  It was leaning toward exhilirated last night.  Apparently my cat Wafer felt it too; he came in with me just long enough to get fed, then rocketed back to the front door, begging to be let back out into the windy darkness filled with the chirping of heat-loving crickets and the echoed barking of distant dogs.

I've felt very much like an animal lately.  Not in the sense of losing my humanity, but of gaining an appreciation for the meat and bone I'm made of, and of how much like all the other animals on the planet we humans are.  This morning, on the way to work, i was waiting to cross busy Westwood Boulevard with a dozen other people.  The crosswalk signal was about to change for us when we all heard a siren approaching.  It was still out of sight but getting louder when our signal changed.  There was a beautiful moment of nonverbal tribal consensus as we all looked at each other, looked toward the apparent source of the sound, shifted toward the street, hesitated, and then all at the same instant concluded that the siren had stopped getting closer, had clearly turned on another street; and we all began moving in unison.

I'm sure that a Neolithic hunting band hearing a branch crack in the forest would have looked just the same.  Or a band of wolves catching an unfamiliar scent on the breeze.  And that is an intensely wonderful realization.

Last night, I met my family for dinner at the French Market, our favorite neighborhood restaurant. I got there first; when I called to see where they were, they told me they were just parking, so I walked out to meet them.

And I ended up following Angelyne out the door and to the parking lot, where her famous Barbie-pink Corvette was parked right next to my family. We waved as she drove away; Angelyne is not the sort of star who wants people to pretend they don't notice her.

All of us agree that this was a very good omen.

When I was about eight years old, I wrote to the local paper's "Ask Dr. Science" column with a question that had been bothering me: Are there stars between the galaxies?  I was very keen on galaxies at the time, and I couldn't help wondering if every last star in the universe was neatly packed into one of them, or if there might be a thin mist of solitary stars scattered through the unimaginable gulfs between them.  I never got an answer to that question, which ticked me off.  I continued to think about it now and then for nearly four decades, picking up hints of an answer occasionally, but never the final word I wanted.  Now, however, at long last my quest is at an end:  There are stars between the galaxies.  If only I could get word to my younger self.

The housing bust slash recession has arrived in Laurel Canyon.  I live in a funky part of the canyon, the cheap(er) part of an expensive neighborhood where well-paid bohemians tend to congregate.  I think of many of my neighbors as "studio hippies".  We rent, but I know the real estate values along my stretch of the road ballooned over the last five years.  Houses would frequently change hands, but you'd never see a "for sale" sign; anything that went on the market got snapped up within days, straight from the listings.  Now, on my two-block walk up to the bus stop, I pass four houses with "for sale" signs out front.  One of them has been on the market for two months.  Nobody seems eager to buy any of them. 

This morning, in a particularly poignant yet gruesome bit of symbolism, there was a dead squirrel lying at the base of one of the signs.  I figure it's our answer to Ground Hog Day; Mr. Real Estate Squirrel tries to cross Laurel Canyon Boulevard on February 7.  If he goes under the wheels of a speeding BMW and his corpse is flung onto the side of the road, expect six more months of recession.

Yesterday was unusually humid for Los Angeles, especially in July.  The sky was murky with ill-defined clouds, and the heat in the Valley was soggy and enervating rather than the usual crisp dry desert baking.  Yesterday evening I smelled rain on the breeze, and sure enough, when I went into the bathroom to take my morning shower, raindrops were pattering on the skylight in the inexplicable bathroom annex our crazy landlord added to the house a few months ago.  The annex may be inexplicable, but it's a nice place to stand with the lights off, listening to gentle rain under the feeble gray light of a cloudy dawn.

By the time I was done with my shower, the rain was done, too, and it was much brighter outside as the clouds thinned and the sun illuminated the hill opposite us.  The sun doesn't rise above our own hill to shine on our house until 10:30 or so, and then it sets behind the opposite hill at 4 in the afternoon, prompting laurellady to refer to our neighborhood as "Vampire Canyon".

In Los Angeles, a brief rain followed by bright sunshine leads to one of my favorite scents.  Both native chaparral plants and the invaders that have done well in LA are adapted to long dry spells punctuated by brief (though sometimes very heavy) rainstorms.  So when the sun comes out after a rainstorm, the plants open up all their pores and go into photosynthetic overdrive.  The vibrant green aroma of healthy plant respiration is blended with the sharper scent of wet dead grass, an astringent note from the eucalyptus trees down the road, and the bitter chalky smell of wet concrete, producing a scent symphony unique to Los Angeles. 

I was doing a lot of very deep, very happy breathing as I walked up the Canyon this morning.

Last night's LVX class ended up with a group of five of us there, none of whom had a car.  The other four were going to start an arduous bus-subway-lightrail-bus trek homeward, but I couldn't do that, as the only bus that goes anywhere near my house stops running at 9.  Since that meant I needed a cab, I suggested w all share a cab; that would save them a 45-minute bus ride to the Red Line station, which is more or less on my way home from LVX.

So I ordered a cab from my usual cab company, and specified we had five people and thus needed a van.  They told me it would be 15 to 30 minutes.

Time passed (rather pleasantly, given the company).  No call, no cab in the lot.  40 minutes later I called.  They hadn't even located a van for us yet, much less dispatched it.

To make a long story short, it took 90 minutes to get us all on the road, and that was in two separate cabs, as they still couldn't get a van to come for us.

Now, stuff like this happens.  Maybe all the taxi vans in the Valley were eaten by aliens earlier in the day.  Maybe a convention of van afficionados was in town.  I could definitely accept that there might be circumstances that made it hard for them to meet our needs.

What blows me away (and had me very pissed off) was the attitude.  Did they call me when they couldn't meet the 30 minute deadline?  No.  Did they apologize when I called them?  No.  Did they call me when another 20 minutes went by without the dispatch happening?  No, I had to keep calling them.  And each time I called them, they sounded annoyed that I was bothering them.

Oh, and they kept getting our address wrong, and then sounding annoyed when I corrected them.  When I'd finally had enough, I snapped "You people really need to get your act together," in reply to which I was told that I was getting angry at the wrong person.  I immediately asked to be connected to the right person.  He claimed no supervisor was there.

What very few customer service people seem to understand is that, when they are on the phone with a customer, they are the entire company they work for with respect to that customer.  There's no sense of pride, or even responsibility.  I don't know how you can work somewhere and not feel at least some sense of honor in your work.  But apparently I'm out of tune with reality.  Again.

In any case, we all eventually made it home.  My apologies to my brothers and sisters whom I misled into missing their bus ride home in favor of my crazy scheme.

Last night I was riding the express bus up to the Valley, and ended up sitting across from a young, rough-looking Hispanic guy with a guitar. He started noodling around on it as we began the longest leg of the trip, through the rainy darkness of the Sepulveda Pass. He was amazing; he'd play a tight, complex jazz riff, then suddenly veer into bluegrass, then toss in a Jimmy Page phrase or two before wandering into a hypnotic atonal almost-melody, and so on and on. I was literally getting shivers up my spine listening to him play.

When he put his guitar away in its case, I thanked him for the concert and complimented his playing, and we got started talking. It turns out he's a street musician who is trying to get a club band launched. He is Salvadoran, and his name is Miguel, but he goes by "Osama" most of the time. I asked him why that name, and he fed me a line about it meaning "Peace" in some Arabic dialect. I accused him of just wanting to mess with people, and he laughed and nodded.

The conversation was mostly in English, but every now and then his thoughts would go faster than his ability to translate, and he'd lapse into Spanish. Fortunately my brain was in Spanish mode, so I was able to understand him most of the time, and answer in both languages as the conversation ebbed and flowed.

He offered his guitar to me to try it out, and I told him I didn't play. He looked shocked and said he'd never missed a guess on spotting a guitarist before; I explained that I am planning to start lessons next month. He told me I'd better, because he didn't want to mess up his perfect record. So now I need to learn guitar or a guy named Osama will kick my ass. It's useful to have motivation.

After a century of bitter struggle, water is flowing again in the lower Owens River. The tale of fraud and corruption by which LA grabbed water rights from the farmers of the Owens Valley, and of William Mulholland's engineering triumph in bringing that water across the desert to a thirsty city, is the modern equivalent of a creation myth for my people.

If I had known about this event with enough lead time, I would have organized a few dozen Angelenos to drive up there, wearing easily identifiable LA clothing -- perhaps Dodgers caps or something like that. We would have stood below the diversion gate, along the dry streambed, holding empty buckets. And as the first water reached us, we would have filled our buckets and walked back with our stolen water to the cars.

Tradition is important.

It was 39 degrees out when I woke up this morning. I seem to recal that temperatures below 45 are actually against the law in LA; below 40 is just plain crazy. Worse, our bedroom is poorly insulated and doesn't get much warmth from our heating system, so despite running a space heater all night I'd guess it was about 55 in the bedroom when I woke up this morning. I tried to think of it as "bracing". It did have the useful side effect of encouraging me to really work hard at my morning exercises.

Poor madelineusher is still sick with the her flu-turned-into-bronchitis. She's been on Zithromax (best antibiotic ever) for four days and is just starting to improve. We convinced her to go to school today, with laurellady driving us in rather than taking the bus as usual. I'm hoping it went well; she's missed more than a week of school, and at her school a week is a lot to miss.

I dearly love my (adopted) home of Los Angeles. It's culturally vibrant, endlessly complex and surprising, and (most important) just feels right to me. But every time I travel, I'm left wondering why it is that LA can't pull things off that seem simple for other cities.

For example, last September, I visited friends in Berkeley, across the bay from San Francisco. I flew into SFO, where a large screen across from my arrival gate told me what luggage carousel would have my bag, which was just coming off the conveyor belt when I got there a few minutes later. A five minute walk from there and I was at the light-rail connector train; five more minutes and I was at the BART station. About an hour after landing at SFO I was emerging onto Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley.

Conversely, at LAX there are few informational signs of any kind, many of those that exist are broken, and many of the rest are too small, dim, and distant for me to read. The terminals are shabby and bland. On my last trip it took half an hour for my luggage to appear at the carousel. And taking public transit to the vicinity of my home would involve a long shuttle-bus ride on surface streets out to the Green Line station nearest LAX (two miles from the terminals), and then transfers to the Blue and then the Red lines -- and even then I'd be farther from home than one BART ride got me to my friends' house in Berkeley.

I had the same sense of airport envy in Orlando and Atlanta on my most recent trip. I have public transit envy in nearly any major city I visit.

So, Angelenos and others: What's going wrong? Why can't LA accomplish things that so many other cities are pulling off?

Yesterday I spent most of the day manning my company's booth at the CalTech job fair. It was a successful day for us; we got a good stack of resumes and handed out a lot of literature and business cards. Time will tell how much it really benefited us.

The job fair was held outdoors; our booth was against the wall in a Mission-style arched walkway, with a view of beautiful lawns, trees, and ivied buildings. It couldn't possibly have been a nicer day to spend outdoors; there was a weak Santa Ana condition, so the air had that brilliant clarity that I love so much, with everything in the sun seeming to glow with its own light, and the shadows deep and sharp-edged. Those who were in town to recruit for companies in less favored climes were threatening to stay behind rather than fly home.

By the time we were done there, it was only four hours before I was due at LVX for the membership meeting, so I decided to skip the remainder of the work day. I hitched a ride to the local Gold Line station and set out on a meandering trip, pausing to enjoy the beauty of Union Station before transfering to the Red Line, and then stopping at Hollywood and Highland for an early dinner before continuing to the Valley and my last transfer.

Hollywood and Highland is home to Babylon Court, a shopping plaza inspired by Assyrian architecture by way of Cecil B. DeMille. It features elephant statues on giant pedestals and a five-story bas relief of two gods making offerings. The arch on which the latter appear is aligned to frame a view of the Hollywood sign a mile or so away; in fact, the whole axis of the structure is lined up with that reference point. As a big fan of sacred cartography, ley lines, and matters of ritual alignment, this setup pleases me immensely.

I had dinner at CPK, located at the back of the complex, with a nice view of the sign and the Capitol Records building. I sat there drinking my Sierra Nevada as the golden sunlight played over the Hollywood Hills and beautiful people drifted past, and the warm breeze ebbed and flowed around me. I was just thinking that things couldn't possibly reach a more quintessentialy Angeleno height of perfection when Wang Chung's "Have Fun Tonight" came on the sound system. "On the edge of oblivion / And all the world is Babylon / And all the love, and everyone / A ship of fools, sailing on..." Life was good.

By the time I reached the Valley the sun was setting, the dry, warm wind was picking up, and the Verdugo Hills looked like a painted backdrop for a bad Western. As the sun disappeared behind a line of palm trees, the sky turned indigo and cobalt and aquamarine, shading to a brilliant peach-yellow in the west, gradually darkening as the wind danced and the hills faded to grey and maroon.

I love my city.

It's a wonder communication ever works at all.

Yesterday evening we got our first significant rain of the season, a nice ocean squall line that came ashore in blustery ranks of clouds and dropped rain haphazardly for a few miles inland. At the moment of sunset, I saw a 180-degree rainbow against indigo and grey clouds over the stepped-pyramid Sony corporate HQ building; it was like Nature playing with Photoshop.

Later, after full dark and with rain still pattering down, I was waiting in the stop shelter for my last bus, along with two homeless people. Following a pattern you see very commonly, one (a man) was incoherent and a little belligerent, while the other (a woman) was much more on top of things, trying to solve problems and take care of the other one. This kind of pairing shows up so often that I've developed the nickname "prophet and priest" for it.

The man struck up a conversation with me, and we discussed the rain, my lack of a jacket, and the cars going by for a while. Then he asked "Hey, how do you get to LA from here?"

My heart sank, because I could see what was coming. We were standing in West Hollywood, and so not in LA-the-city (but of course deep inside LA-the-county). But colloquially, we were already very much "in LA". He could mean "downtown LA", but if he did, they were waiting on the wrong side of the street; the two buses that stop there go to west LA and to the Valley, both parts of LA-the-city, but both further away from downtown.

So, in other words, three of the four buses he could catch at that intersection, two on one side and one on the other, would go "to LA" in some possibly correct sense -- but the one they most likely wanted was the one that stops on the other side of the street. Imagine my fun as I tried to ascertain if he meant "downtown LA", and he continued to bark "to LA, man!" like I was attempting to trick him somehow.

Fortunately, the woman finally stepped in and said "Honey, I think we need to cross the street." Which they did, right there, slowly carrying their many backpacks and bags through heavy, honking traffic, despite the fact there was a controlled crosswalk twenty feet away.

I hope they made it wherever they were going safely.

Fire in far hills
Smoke drifts over the dark bay
Sun a ripe cherry

One of my favorite things about travel is how it makes home look different when you return.  Tucson (where I spent last weekend) is a very spacious, very flat city.  Few buildings are more than a single story, and most of them are painted in desert colors that make the structures blend into the landscape.  Almost all are set back from the road by at least a small parking lot, and many are at the far end of long empty yards, and also set far from their nearest neighbors.  The city is ringed by mountains, which makes the lowness of the buildings more obvious.  Finally, the streets are almost ludicrously wide given the traffic they carry, which further increases that flat and spread-out feeling.

So, when I came home to LA, everything looked impossibly crowded and tall, with three- and four-story structures built right up to the narrow sidewalks, and the streets themselves barely wide enough for the cars jammed onto them.  The upper stretch of La Cienega in particular suddenly looked like something from an old European city, with ornate facades looming over the narrow channel of the street against the backdrop of tightly clustered taller buildings up on the Sunset Strip, and beyond that the seemingly random clumps of houses in the Hollywood Hills.  Still more amazingly, LA looked green; compared to Tucson, it is.  It's not often you return to LA and notice how full of beautiful trees and bushes it is compared to where you came from.

Meanwhile, I have been tagged by anubis75, and must give in to peer pressure...