Venice – Up In The Valley

The $850,000 Street Taco

So, last year I picked up a rider in Venice, Indian-American, worked in finance, newly returned to L.A. after a stint in Miami. He told me something interesting enough to write down:

“I’ve always dug Latino culture. One thing I realized moving to Miami is what I actually dig is Mexican latino culture, not rich South American exiles blowing their ill-gotten gains culture. I lived on the 39th floor, right across from the SLS Hotel and all these high end buildings that are 1/3 full because people are just parking their money there. There’s also only one month a year I can leave the house in the daytime without sweating through my shirt. I’m so glad to be back in L.A. I have no need to rent a Lamborgini for the weekend. Mexicans in America have earned their money the hard way and it shows in how they live. The Mayor of Miami is putting up billboards in San Francisco inviting people to move there because of lower taxes. California is worth the taxes. The climate alone is worth it. Don’t come here people, please don’t come here.”

He was speaking from the top of the economic food chain, ensconced in the ocean cooled Westside, a beneficiary of Latino labor, where California frequently feels worth the taxes. Would he have said the same thing if he lived in the Valley? Perhaps, but he wouldn’t care for the noise.

I thought of him again this week in light of Governor Newsom’s televised pitch to Floridians, on day 857 of his emergency powers, to come here, to the land of “freedom of speech” and abortion maximalism.

A thing of wonder, this campaign ad, considering our Public Square is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Silicon Valley: global engine of censorship, digital surveillance, de-platforming, de-monetization, opposition research, Twitter ratio-ing, brigading, tribal hate with your morning coffee, tattling on your neighbors, algorithmic manipulation of the young and impressionable, the ever leftward ratchet toward perfection, social apps bumping your phone when they know you are weakest.

Our information casino and the technology supporting it is now California’s chief moneymaker and export. Not Hollywood. Not agriculture. Not manufacturing. The farming of the human id, corralled in feedlots of narcissism, packaged and sold to corporations and politicians in equal measure.

Like Hansel and Gretel we entered the gingerbread house, filling our bellies. Now here we are, too frightened for our livelihoods to call the Witch a witch.

Florida is flat as pancake and as sweltering as the Congo. In a reasonable world who makes that trade? But it is governed for the time being by people committed to the freedoms California is determined to discard. The U-Hauls are only rolling in one direction, away from here, and it’s not just the price point.

Tellingly, Newsom mentions nothing about climate, which no politician can claim credit. At a certain point in life, when the mortgage is dealt with, or at least made manageable, Mediterranean weather makes it less desirable to re-boot somewhere else. It’s our indispensable and under-appreciated home court advantage. One window shops on Zillow, agog at what $850K will buy in Cleveland or the Carolinas (though not Idaho anymore), and then goes out for a street taco, squats on a crate admiring the golden light breaking through the foliage at the end of the day and thinks…I can wait another year. The center is holding, for now.

https://twitter.com/clownworld_/status/1544505941738999809?s=10&t=sT1ITBB-FA3TLWtzOM9oNw

This woman will not likely see a day in jail in Lord Newsom’s California. If you are the woman who owns the truck, to whom do you appeal for freedom from violence?

Twitter and YouTube will shortly censor this video and call it content moderation. The account holder will be warned, then suspended, then banned. Big Tech will pocket the ad revenue anyway, pad its earnings, bump the stock valuation. Executives will cash out, donate generously to Newsom’s presidential campaign and (as a papal indulgence) to criminal justice reform initiatives that insure no one goes to jail. They will fund organizations that pay activists to harangue officials at public meetings, to charge the stage, to show up at their homes in the middle of the night with a bullhorn and drums.

I love Los Angeles. It’s kind of an amazing time to be here. We have set in motion the Hobbesian forces of societal collapse at the same time we are upgrading our kitchens, fabulously. Nothing is too good for The House and no leftist nostrum is too crazy to affirm. Nouveau riche Highland Park, land of the $1.5 million bungalow makeover, set the bar by voting a police and prison abolitionist to the City Council.

As a Gen Xer I can afford to be philosophical. I watch. I note. I enjoy the ordered nature of my yard. I live embedded among Latinos unwilling to vote their interests. For now. And I have no idea how this movie ends.

A Gloss for the Greater Good

To escape this heat without end, I took the bike to the beach yesterday. After my ride, I topped myself off with a $20 kale smoothie on Abbot Kinney.

Twenty dollars! Strip club prices. Decadent. I’m sure I didn’t even spend that much on a premium cocktail at the posh Nomad Hotel last year but tis the season to do all we can to help small business.

The merchants of Venice are doing their utmost to bridge the distance between the necessities of commerce in a time of Wuhan, and paying obeisance to the woke mob, lest it erupt again in greater strength.

It’s a balancing act, meeting your monthly nut with limited customers while conducting socially performative capitalism.

Here’s the Abbot Kinney Straddle: make rich Wypipo as invisible as possible while marketing to said rich Wypipo.

Part of the gloss requires overlooking ironic facts…much of bungalow Venice was a black neighborhood not so long ago. It was also single story. Here I shall invoke UpintheValley’s Second Law of the City: the further from the actual friction points of urban life, the louder the virtue signaling.

In a synthesis of the cognitive dissonance in summer 2020, someone converted a vintage Porsche into a planter as an artistic statement…of indeterminate meaning. Guerilla marketing for a local garden store? Maybe. The backdrop for a fashion shoot? People assumed it was some kind of pop-up Instagram and queued up to pose in front of it.

While not as badly hit as DTLA or Melrose, about a third of the stores have gone dark…

…which might explain this banner. If the statement were true, though, would the banner be necessary? I sense a whiff of desperation. I have a feeling things are about to get cheaper.

On other end of the economic spectrum, 72 years after being cut from citrus orchards as a whites-only landing pad for returning GIs, 50 years after man landed on the moon, 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, thirteen years after the iPhone, my neighborhood this morning finally enjoys the benefit of street lighting.

We’re 17 miles from Venice. Hard to believe it’s the same city. There’s an upside to this. In the shakeout to come, we have a much shorter distance to fall. Our neighborhood doesn’t depend on $20 smoothies and sales of $150 graphic tees. We aren’t glossy. We are anti-fragile.

Go Away, Coffee…

All you Betabrand-wearing white folks from the other side of the river, begone. Begone, gentrifiers, and take your french press and chocolate lab with you. Shimmy off in your skinny jeans and spend your money elsewhere. Shoo, flies. Shoo! The arabica shall not cross Cesar Chavez Blvd.

Begone artists! Begone ~~patrons~~ apologists! We shall not be art washed! Safe spaces do not gentrify.

Meanwhile, the city is building, at fantastic expense, a modernist bridge literally marrying Boyle Heights to the Arts District, in which no artists reside.

Artist-filled Boyle Heights watches the money bridge approach each day, like manifest destiny…

..and in the advance, seeding the ground before it, the bungalow teardown trend going vertical…Venice East, in motion, and the answer that pops into the heads of the Defenders of Boyle Heights is…no coffee, dammit! No hanging your work in galleries. Yeah. That’ll stop it.

Verisimilitude

There are no streetlights in Baywood. No sidewalks. The only public light sources are the Alehouse, the Merrimaker and the laundromat. Locals hear the surf crashing on the sand spit a mile away across the estuary and complain, the way one might complain about the freeway noise back in Los Angeles, where the over/under starts at $100,000 year.

Baywood is where you retreat when LA doesn’t work for you anymore but you want to stay in California. It’s where the life you wanted to have in Van Nuys or Echo Park is re-booted.

L.A. 2.0, on wheels... — L.A. 2.0, now on wheels…

It is where you park your RV in your friends driveway and figure out your next move. And where you go when you close your bike shop, once named Best in the City by the LA Weekly, after 11 years.

Where you break out the wrenches and drill set, and turn the RV into a mobile bike base camp and solar-powered graphic design suite. Where you simplify things by designing your own escape pod.

LA being LA, the bike shop lives on as the filming location for a Netflix escapist fantasy called Flaked. The show is set in Venice and centered on a guy named Chip who owns a store hawking hand crafted three legged stools of his own design, but has no apparent customers yet manages to stay afloat. Chip also lives rent-free by the beach and dates women half his age, and spends much of the first season perambulating around Venice on his bicycle, unencumbered by adult responsibilities like a monthly nut, or a business plan. Flaked, by objective measurement, is not a quality show. The verisimilitude problems are impossible to get beyond. But I binged on it as a secret vice, the way Mrs. U watches the housewife shows. Punching a clock in the Valley, who wouldn’t want to live the life of Chip?

The world is smaller than we think it is. Fate not long ago placed one of the Flaked co-stars not named Will Arnett in the backseat of my Uber and he would spend the ride home trying without success to court, Chip-like, a much younger female passenger. After she exited the car without yielding a number, he laughed about it with me. He agreed with my assessment of the show. The lie it was telling about Los Angeles was his livelihood. He couldn’t have been nicer or more gracious.

The real life Chip is more more athletic and better looking. Also un-entitled and self-effacing and responsible. As he packed up his store he found letters to his workers he never sent, some dated five years ago, listing all the reasons he could no longer keep it going. Owning a business is not like a regular job. You cant just flake. He employed 15 people and spent years working with the city to open up bike lanes and paths. Now he loads up on packets at the hamburger stand to take back to the RV as he waits to hear from unemployment. Ask him if he’s bitter and he says no. He’s put in his time in LA. The only thing he misses about it is being faster than every car on the road when riding his bike.

The trail forward looks like this — The trail out of LA looks like this

Walls of Irony

The funky, old, ironic Venice — The fruitful, ironic, Baptist Venice of old

$3,850...cat OK — The rabbit-proof fence in action

The Very Old Venice, ten miles from Murphy Ranch, 40 days before the Nazis invaded Poland

Urban Renewal, the Venice Way

Step one, find a lot with a shack on it. Step two, knock it down. Leave the framing of two walls standing. You’re not building anything new, remember. You’re merely renovating.

Step three, install steel girders, go vertical. Three floors if you can afford it.

Step four, add floor to ceiling windows, so people from the Valley can peer directly into your bamboo floor Designista great room and fully contemplate the sin of envy. Discreetly draw the curtains at dinnertime so no one on the walk sees you eating takeout while surrounded by Miele kitchenware.

Step five, spend $1000 installing a garden box in the parkway that produces $30 of vegetables a season which you donate to the local food bank.

Step six, be sure to remind everyone of the virtue of being virtuous.

Made in Mexico*

Nothing gets done in this city without a Mexican, people are fond of saying by way of explanation Why Things Are. By people, I mean those who who are on the vertical side of the capital/labor equation.

People who live here, for example. Why should they have to bend over and pick up their socks in the morning? There are Mexicans* for that. They’re everywhere. Abundant and cheap.

They don white aprons and fetch things for us. Who knows where they live? We summon them, and they appear. Why shouldn’t it be this way? Wasn’t it always like this?

Don’t they have houses in the Valley, or something?

Or apartments, of some kind? Seriously, I don’t see the issue. Americans don’t want to do these jobs.

No, I don’t know what happened to the people who use to live in those apartments…I don’t know where they went.

They probably went back to Oklahoma, or something. It’s the natural order of things.

Hey, have you been to the new Whole Foods 365 in Silver Lake? Talk about abundance. Unfortunately, there are really long lines…

Van Nuys or Venice, 1948

The Choice, in 1948 — Pick your scenery, in 1948

What is more remarkable here, that Van Nuys was once priced higher than Venice? Or realtors once offered “clothes poles” as an amenity?

Or Venice was a choice at all?

In case you were wondering, $9350 in inflation adjusted dollars would be $91,921 today.

You could own a house, freshly constructed, near the ocean in California for $368.95 a month at todays wages.

As you may have already observed, the fates of Venice and Van Nuys, as neighborhoods, have diverged. In Piketty-ish terms, the family which chose the smaller lot by the beach, as opposed to the larger one in the suburbs would have realized an exponential rise in capital over labor.

Here’s 6817 Matilija today, courtesy of Google Streetview. Houses on this block are listed at $500,000. And they’re selling! Madness, right? Until you consider the alternative.

Here’s a house in Venice on the same block of Greenwood as the ad, listed on Zillow at $1.2 million. Two bedrooms, one bath.

Almost makes one nostalgic for clothes drying on a line in the sun.

#BikeLivesMatter

Actually, that’s not exactly true. Bernie drew a big crowd, and then, in a remarkable act of self-abasement, relinquished the microphone to two women who stormed the podium. They demanded four and half minutes of silence and proceeded to lecture everyone, including the candidate, for their “white supremacist liberalism” and insufficient fealty to the Black Lives Matter agenda.

“Don’t ask questions! We’re shutting it down! Let her speak NOW!”

As political performance art goes, it was a thing of beauty. Vermont folded its hand in under a minute.

After the rioting in Ferguson and Baltimore, the #BLM movement has alienated much of the country save two groups of people: the media, and a particular species of upper-middle class liberal who is as separated from inner city life as is culturally, economically and geographically obtainable. In short, Bernie Sanders voters. After this weekend, I’m not sure where this leaves them, in this the seventh year of the Obama presidency.

I have a pretty good idea where the media is leading the rest of us.

All this was on my mind at the Culver-to-Venice CicLAVia today, which was lovely and pleasant as always…but kind of, dare I say it, lacking in local color.

I didn’t see a lot of bikes like this one, from the Valley CicLAVia in March. Nor many riders of the type who make bikes like this.

The Yeti Bike, winner of the UpintheValley Most Creative award

The crowd was rather….er, Bernie Sanders-ish. White, prosperous and polite. If voting habits and campaign donations are fair proxy, blissfully indifferent to the political arson they’ve set in motion around the country.

A Walkable City

Between the bungalows — For a million five, you can walk home on this path…

...this could be your neighbor's dooryard — …and this could be your neighbor’s dooryard.

The once and future bungalow — Behold the once and future Venice bungalow

The abandoned churchyard — Consider the riddle of the abandoned churchyard…

The value of modernist sculpture — ..and the wit of modernist sculpture…

….and the spectacle of $650 lawn chairs made from scrap lumber.

The mystery of cross neighborhood political theater — Indulge in obscure cross-neighborhood political resentment

“Is Santa Monica a parasite to Venice? Every minute southbound planes leaving Santa Monica Airport, turn left over our blocks. Northbound ones turn right over the ocean so as not to disturb the rich white people north of Montana. Santa Monica benefits at our expense with preferential parking, dog park use, only citing non-SM bike riders.”

For $1.5 million, you can bitch about the truly advantaged folks next door in Santa Monica, living at your expense.

Or you can get back in your car after a wonderful afternoon under a darkling sky and return to Van Nuys, where tagging is tagging, alleys are for dumpsters, and nobody walks anywhere.

Tag: Venice

The $850,000 Street Taco

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A Gloss for the Greater Good

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Go Away, Coffee…

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Verisimilitude

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Walls of Irony

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Urban Renewal, the Venice Way

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Made in Mexico*

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Van Nuys or Venice, 1948

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#BikeLivesMatter

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A Walkable City

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