That was last week. Yesterday, flames of a suspicious origin erupted from the lower floor of 7101 Sepulveda Blvd, a mile or so north. Vacant for 25 years, the building once housed a college for paralegals. With wood framing, the flames reached the upper floors quickly.
Directly adjacent is an empty lot at 7111 Sepulveda, site of the former Farmer’s Ranch Market. Permits were approved for 180 units almost two years ago, but ground was never broken on the project. The eyesore vacancy at 7101, a plinth for cell phone towers and Van Nuys’ most unloved structure, was rumored to be a hindrance.
Guess where the 405 encampment moved to? Guess how long it took them to crack open the back door of 7101 and pilfer wiring and play with matches? If you own the building, you get an insurance settlement. If you own the lot next door, you get south-facing light for your mixed-use development. If you live in the neighborhood, you’re quietly gratified to see something, anything, done with the place.
Everybody wins. Just how locked was that back door, anyway?
What do you do when you’re having your hardest year in a very long time, when your pride as a teacher is at hazard? You can have a cocktail. You can have two. You can ugly cry on the commute home. Or you can gather the dogs on Sunday and climb stairs in the hilly neighborhoods around LA. Then have a cocktail.
You huff and puff to the top and along the way, the permafrown surreptitiously lifts from your face while you’re not looking. Your husband tells you to stop right there and takes your picture and you pretend not to be annoyed. You wonder if he prefers this version of you, unburdened, eternally hopeful.
When you get home you close your eyes, put your hands together, and bring a measure of order to the chaos of the world. This too shall pass. Make it one year, lord, not two.
He was a bottom feeder, a man without talent. He plied the tourists on Hollywood boulevard for tips. When I crossed paths with him five years ago, his costume was visibly grungy, like he’d slept in it for days. He hassled me for money for taking his picture. I hadn’t been. He just happened to walk through the frame as I photographed a mural. He was missing teeth. He looked exactly like what he was, a meth-head impersonating his former self impersonating a comic book hero, badly.
Earlier in his two decades on the boulevard, Christopher Dennis looked the part. He had the length of bone, the jawline, an aquiline nose topped off with dyed black hair to evoke a reasonable facsimile of the DC comics version of the Man of Steel. Padding filled out the suit. By the end, he looked like Superman down to his last 50 T-cells.
During the descent, he managed to wrangle appearances on Late With Jimmy Kimmel and the Morgan Spurlock documentary Confessions of a Superhero.
He claimed to have lost his costume and his front teeth in a mugging. Crowdfunding appeals raised money for him to get his cape back and fund a web series about his life, neither of which materialized. He told different stories to different people to explain his circumstances. Sometimes he would be slumped in the street, in a fugue state, babbling to himself, drawing in his notebook. His decline was covered with uncritical sympathy by local media, heavy on the passive voice, always with appeals for assistance, as though his schtick was worthy of the character he was feeding off. His life became a meta-hustle of the public for the means to return to hustling the tourists for drug money.
Naturally, he ended up in Van Nuys, on Nury Martinez’s Skid Row North™.
Last week his body was discovered in a Goodwill collection bin. He had climbed inside seeking to pilfer donated clothes. This is his last known photograph, from the website People Helping People LA.
If you’re not sensing much sympathy for a dead man, I’ll tell you a story. I picked up a stand-up comic at the Orange Line station not long ago, on his way home from a gig in NoHo. I’ll call him Doug. He’d been working out new material, he said. After much trial and error, he found a way to make it click. He killed his set, and now he was treating himself to an Uber ride home. Not that Doug had been paid anything for his work on stage. Normally he would walk the two miles up Van Nuys Blvd. to his garage apartment off Saticoy. But tonight, on such a high, to navigate Nury’s Living Room for the walking dead, that would be asking too much of himself. It would call into question his entire life in LA.
Doug was avoiding Christopher Dennis, whose superpower was self-indulgence. I turned the app off and gave him a ride the rest of the way home for free. It was the least I could do.
Los Angeles runs on guys like Doug, who keep the cocktails flowing and the cash register ringing to pay the headliner. It takes balls of steel to get onstage and do original material. You can’t hide behind a cape. Even modestly successful road comics end their careers unmourned and little remembered.
That’s Sandy Baron second from left in a still from Broadway Danny Rose, Woody Allen’s sweetest work and a tribute to those on the fringes of show business. Sandy started in the Borscht Belt, and would have faded from pop culture right about here, in a cameo role at the Carnegie Deli, and probably died broke, were it not for this:
His turn as Jack Klompus was so successful Seinfeld brought the character back in five episodes, and Sandy got to spend his final years in notoriety, with some extra money in his pocket. He passed in 2001 in a nursing home in, where else, Van Nuys.
Because it’s Wednesday…and he has a plate of takeout at his feet, for which he needs to clear some room.
As of last month, any and all tickets for quality of life infractions in Los Angeles are null and void…if you are a street person. The rest of us have to pay our fines. LA is now operating with asymmetrical civilizational guardrails.
We need a new vocabulary for this since the old language of judgment is forbidden.
Fast Times at Ridgemont High was on TV the other day…I was drawn in by nostalgia but stayed for the spectacle of teenagers working after school. I couldn’t get past it.
Every character in the movie had a job, including Phoebe Cates, the Megan Fox of her time, dutifully served the public while draped in a corporate issue smock so unflattering it would never make it past the wardrobe assistant today.
First, the oddity: when do we see this anymore? Then the deep memory: we all did this when were young. Then the recognition: how completely we’ve restructured things. White teenagers working at the Galleria? That’s what an open border is for.
A job used to be the first step to adulthood and freedom from parental constraints, the children of professionals just as likely to be slinging pizza as those of an auto mechanic. Almost everyone today not explicitly rich claims membership in the middle class. It’s the conceit at the heart of the 1%/99% formulation. But in 1982 it was mostly true if you viewed it aspirationally rather than by income quintile.
1982 was faux wood paneling, Formica countertops, cheap linoleum, tchotchkes, and self-maintained yards. This could be Sherman Oaks as easily as Arleta. All rather downmarket by modern Dwell standards, but perfectly in keeping with the aesthetics of the time.
Anyone whose house looks like this today is, well, probably “poor” or elderly. Escaping…this… prison of dreck is the great motivator of contemporary LA.
The first commandment of Valley 2.1: all ranch houses shall be gutted and made Zillow-ready. Better yet, they shall be replaced with more units. Which brings me to the condemned house in the first picture, in the shadow of an IMT apartment block on Sepulveda. I have it on good authority Jeff Spicoli lived there. Now it’s going to be six McMansions. If they have kids, they won’t be working after school. They will intern. Peasants from Chiapas will man the espresso machine and pull the weeds.
The global south is on the move. The Red State high achievers are on the move. Both are coming here. Ambition leaves Cleveland as quickly as honorable men flee Chapo’s brigades in Sinaloa.
Chinese yuan is in search of a safe harbor. The Federal Reserve is printing money and handing it out at no interest to banks: start funding things, anything, spin the dials of consumption. Come pension fund apparatchiks, say the banks, come ye Central Asian strongmen, ye Israeli billionaires and Gulf sheiks looking to elude the virtue police, build an apartment block in Van Nuys, start collecting rent and citizenship is yours. Hedge your bets here, in the former land of hedges.
Stacy and Brad, Damone and Spicoli, Linda and Ratner, they had no idea what was coming.
