Month: June 2018

The Curse of Ed Asner’s Housekeeper

Everything about this picture is a lie. The frame, the context, the substance. The girl was not separated from her mother. Her mother separated herself from her three other children in an attempt to regain illegal entry after being deported in 2013. Yelena was taken from her father without his permission to be used as a ticket  to cross the border.

These children are not refugees, not in custody, and not confined to a dog kennel.  This tableau is political theater, staged for a pro-immigration rally.

This photo was taken during the Obama administration.

Suddenly the Media Class are virgins.  Until last week apparently no one knew how babies were made.

We now pretend we never had a Border Patrol.  We wail as though the tangled web of immigration enforcement hasn’t been operating like this for decades.  As though the particular wrinkle of separating minors from parents (the Flores agreement) wasn’t the consequence of ACLU litigation going back to Reagan.

In Brentwood no one wants to bend over and pick up their socks, but we are obsessed with detention centers.  We are in ecstasies of sanctimony about them.

Cable TV is now nothing but people exhausting synonyms for atrocity, clicking their soundbites of outrage like castanets.   Because the world began five minutes ago. Because Trump. Behold the horror™.

This is not a war over memory. This is a war over who gets to call whom an asshole.    For there are now two American populations: The Anointed, who have a very big megaphone, and their basket of Deplorables, i.e., the Rest of US, who get to vote every couple years.

Here, in my beloved Van Nuys, peasants are locked into storage containers without plumbing until their families settle with the coyotes.   Landlords exact tribute from women for the keys to a first apartment. Shift supervisors exact tribute from women as the gateway to a first paycheck.   Brokers troll the Home Depot parking lot soliciting cash kickbacks from day laborers in exchange for a place on the truck, in scenes straight out of On The Waterfront.  I have witnessed this.

Just behind the veneer of $600,000 single-family homes are second families living on the down low in converted garages without heat or ventilation.  Tool sheds are pressed into use as casitas where laborers sleep in shifts.  People sell their wares on the sidewalk.   This is our new normal.  Into these feral arrangements the Anointed propose to deposit a fresh stream of undocumented people of unlimited number.

In Marxist terms, who benefits? The people living in campers parked on Bessemer St.?

How about people living out of dumpsters?

Or utilizing baby strollers as pushcarts for can collecting?

Or the Off-Ramp Dispossessed?

On the other hand, how about the guy who owns the bungalow with a four unit add-on?

Or the local gentry?

Trump if nothing else has proven to be the Great Clarifier. In their zeal to denounce, people have revealed themselves.   To quote the activist mob who hounded the DHS secretary out of a restaurant: “No borders! No walls! No one is legal!” Okay, then.  Now we know.

We have on our hands a reverse election. The Anointed, having deemed les deplorables insensible to reason, has determined to dissolve the public and replace it with a fresh population. One which owes them.

All the Van Nuys pictures are true. They are taken within a mile of my house.

Except this one, from Boyle Heights, ground zero of the anti-gentrification movement.  Los Angeles contains ironies within ironies. It is an animal like no other.

Lights, Camera, Eat

Backstage at the the most ostentatious grocery store in the history of San Fernando Valley, opening Wednesday….

Ralphs started out as a local chain in Los Angeles. If you wrote a complaint to the manager for bad service, he would come to your house with a fruit basket.   Alpha-Beta started in Pomona, and it ran cheesy ads with low end brands emerging from a bottomless paper bag and actor Alan Hamel urging viewers to “tell a friend”.

It was a different world then. You could smoke in the aisles and fill your cart with Sugar Smacks and Jiffy, and give your kid a shiner if he was making too much noise.

Now Whole Foods and Pavilions and Gelson’s are taking no prisoners, sparing no expense in the war of luxury. Little zings of moral affirmation will be found on every shelf. Local this. Fair trade that. No preservatives, no hormones, no trans fats. The gentry will be satisfied!   The little people can f*** off to Costco.  (Or they can shop at Amazon. Win-win, Bezos.)

Whole Foods employees have been told they will be ticketed and towed if they park in the surrounding neighborhood.   But they are expressly instructed not to park in the garage. Those spaces are reserved for shoppers.   In a metropolis where every public land use decision pivots on parking space requirements, this is a remarkable oversight. Unless of course it isn’t.

A Kind of Hush

At twilight last night on Sepulveda the LAPD set up traffic cones, parting the cars like the Red Sea…and into the breach walked the parishioners of St. Genevieve parish, murmuring the Lord’s Prayer.

I don’t think any of the delayed drivers were expecting this.  I was out walking the dogs, and I didn’t expect it either.  A quiet vigil was met with respectful silence from the inconvenienced.

America is decidedly more pro-life than when I was younger.  But quietly so. Simultaneously, it is also loudly pro-gay marriage.  These are thought of as being in opposition. In a narrow political context, perhaps yes.  But they are more complementary than one would credit.  The politician willing to straddle the contradictions within us has an ungrateful nation waiting to tear him asunder.

I say come to Van Nuys. We ground zero for understanding.

1948, In Shards

This is the first sentinel we encountered on our way to the fancy tile emporium in NoHo.


The second sentinel, awaiting our return. He shuffled over to us as though he were about to deliver a handwritten letter.  One grows accustomed to panhandlers at the intersections, conniving or addicted, but not hunched with calcium loss.  I’d say he looked about 70, the same age as my bathroom.

The bathtub was forged in cast iron by the American Radiator and Standard Sanitary Co., then dropped into the framing by a road gang in 1948, with no thought given to later renovation, leaving only one exit route, via sledgehammer.

This was the American Radiator Building in New York City, gilded icon of the Jazz Age, all Gothic turrets and coal-inspired black brick.

It once had a showroom in the basement for its useful, class-neutral products: radiators, boilers and bathroom fixtures. Now it’s a Moroccan-themed cocktail lounge called Celon where one can order a Lavender Oasis martini for an undisclosed price.   The Radiator Building is now the Bryant Park Hotel.

Because one cannot over-improve for the neighborhood anymore, even in The Nuys.  Because we are all hostage to whatever 1948 house we landed upon in the somnolent years before The Restoration.  Because no one can trade up to Echo Park.    Because equity trumps the purchasing power of a paycheck, so we bloom where we’re planted.

Because a white tiled bathroom would make Mrs. UpintheValley so very, very sad.

That world is in shards, now.