All Fried Up In The Big Smoke

Less political. More fictional.

L.A. Story III

Posted on March 11, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

This is a true story.

One from the archives, a part of an oral tradition told to anyone who’s ever asked if I saw anybody famous while I lived in Los Angeles.

Back in the early 1990s, on my first L.A. go-round, we were sitting in our 1983, rusting-out but still trusted Toyota Tercel, outside a West Hollywood boutique hotel. A friend of ours was in town, on some official film bid-ness, and we were waiting to take her sightseeing. The weather was agreeable, I can only imagine, as a remembrance.

As we waited, I noticed a fairly sizeable car approaching us, slowly, from the opposite direction. I’d like to think it was a convertible because it makes the story that much better. But I couldn’t tell you for certain that’s what it was. It was probably just a big car, windows down, soaking in the nice weather I think I remember it being.

What I do know for a fact was that James Caan was driving that car. Jimmy Caan, baby, in what should’ve been a convertible but probably wasn’t, eating what I think was an apple but might’ve been some sort of sandwich. He’s driving towards us, slowly, slow enough that I can tell you for sure, swear on a stack of bibles, it was him.

Now, you have to understand, for someone my age and with the undying love I have for The Godfather, this is a big deal, huge! (Or ‘uge, as I imagine Caan would pronounce it.) Celebrity sightings don’t get much bigger or better than this. I’m all a-flutter. When he finally cruises right by us, should I say ‘Hi’ or play it cool with just a ‘Whattup’ nod? Or maybe don’t even acknowledge him, pretend he’s just another guy in a big car that should be a convertible, eating what might be an apple or possibly a sandwich. James Caan? So what? So what have you done for us lately?

What I couldn’t do, this being the early-1990s and all, and having no circa 2016-era cell phone, is to video the entire proceedings that were about to unfold in order to prove that what I’m going to tell you is absolutely true except for some of the minor details which only really add flavour to the tale.

Unbelievably, as he gets to almost right beside our car, James Caan slows his already slow moving vehicle to a stop. He’s right there, James Caan, looking at me looking at him through his open window. Oh my god! Oh My god!! Oh My God!!! OH MY GOD!!!! OHMYGODOHMYGODOHMYGOD!!!!! Clearly, I’ve blown my cool and he noticed me, gawking at him, like some star struck, mouth-breathing, yokel from anywhere else other than Los Angeles or, possibly, New York. He’s going to say something smart-alecky or wise-acre like: Hey. Take a picture, pal. It’ll last longer.

But no. It’s even better. Miles better.

Through a partially full mouth (or maybe he took a moment to swallow, I can’t honestly remember), James Caan, car stopped, turns to look at us and says (and I’m quoting here):

“Where the fuck is La Cienega?”

It’s not a nasty tone. There’s no hotheaded Sonny Corleone ire directed toward us. It’s just mild frustration, expressed in an I-don’t-give-a-shit-what-you-think-of-me manner you would expect from James Caan. Note perfect, in other words.

While in this part of the city, La Cienega Boulevard is a pretty straight north-south (?) street, the layout of the area can certainly be disorienting. Santa Monica Boulevard has just finished going diagonally rogue, heading north-north-east toward Sunset, leaping up past Wilshire in the process. San Vicente meanders like an uncertain tributary. A regular grid pattern is interrupted enough times around here to unsettle even the calmest of drivers. James Caan does not appear to be a calm driver.

Not being from this part of Los Angeles but desperately wanting to be of assistance, I take a moment to get my bearings and begin to explain how he can get back to La Cienega. I’m not fast enough, however, to stop the driver behind Caan’s car from giving a quick beep of his horn. I imagine James Caan has been slow rolling for a while now, looking for La Cienega, and establishing something of a funeral procession of unwilling and not at all star-struck drivers behind him.

He’s not as understanding, it seems, as he shouts something like ‘Hold on a second, wouldya!’ back at the car behind him. James Caan then turns pleasantly back to me. “These people in L.A. Supposed to be so nice, right?”

I’m a little rattled, however, and try to quickly finish giving him directions. He has to turn left at the next stop sign and then another left when he gets to… whatever, whatever. It’s 20 years ago. Like I’ve got the exact details on this particular point.

Not that it matters anyway because the driver behind Caan, or one of them, at any rate, leans on his horn inciting James Caan to go ballistic. We’re talking They just shot pop/Carlo beat up Connie again/Michael went and enlisted full on nuts. An incomprehensible, expletive laced diatribe that felt like it went on for minutes but probably lasted 10, 15 seconds, max. Then, sweetly, pleasantly, James Caan turns back to us and thanks us for giving him directions that I’m pretty sure he in no way took in. It simply wasn’t possible. Not with all that commotion going on.

James Caan then proceeds to drive past us down the street, picking up his tirade in midstream, it seems, the yelling and screaming slowly receding, only due to the increased distance from us not its intensity. We sit back in our seats. Huh. So, that was a celebrity sighting.

Our friend emerges from her hotel. Getting into the car, she asks what all the noise was that she’d heard from in the lobby. I’d like to think, we took a suitable dramatic pause, looked at each other, and with simultaneous shrugs matter-of-factly responded:

James Caan.

The Bus

Posted on March 8, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

“What brand of shoes are those?”

While the question wasn’t directed at me, I looked up from my book, curious. Was this a typical conversation that you might overhear during a bus ride in Los Angeles? The two gentlemen proceeded to talk quite extensively about the need for having a good pair of shoes, where to get a good pair of shoes at insanely cheap prices (downtown L.A., if you’re wondering, 7^th and Los Angeles, to be exact, Little New York, one of the guys called the area), and how measuring foot width is as important as length. I silently regretted my choice of more sensible shoes for this outing. Man, I so could’ve been in on this conversation had I worn my Fluevogs!

I have become a regular bus rider during my time here, plopped down as I am on the suburban westside of town. The nearest rapid transit line is about a 23 minute bike ride or 80 minute walk. Nobody walks 80 minutes to take transit unless, you know, Fitbit, am I right?

So I take the bus. Like nearly 3/4s of all public transit users in Los Angeles. It’s a fact of life if you’re getting around this city without a car.

Buses aren’t glamorous. Buses aren’t spiffy. Seldom do you think of buses as sleek or any other car commercial descriptive that comes to mind. Buses rarely beckon politicians to ribbon cutting ceremonies.

What buses do, however, for almost every North American city that didn’t get in big to the 19^th-century subway craze, and grew up and out with the post-war automobile age, buses provide the backbone of their public transit systems. If your bus service isn’t fully functioning, your transit system isn’t either, regardless of your shiny subways and light rail. The quickest way to improve public transit is to improve your bus service.

But buses. So, 2^nd-class.

My painter friend, Donald – not actually a painter, not actually named Donald, actually named Ned, All Fired Up’s L.A. correspondent, it’s just a phrase I like to use because Lou Reed did – Ned and I took a trip out along the Orange Line across the San Fernando Valley. It is a dedicated bus lane that connects to the Red Line subway terminus at North Hollywood. A real life, honest-to-god bus lane, protected from mixed traffic and with either signal priority or incredible luck with traffic lights. We zoomed westward, stopping almost exclusively only to pick up or drop off passengers, through places anybody even vaguely familiar with pop culture would recognize. Laurel Canyon. Van Nuys. Reseda. Tarzana. Canoga Park.

As we went, Ned told me that back in the day, this was originally planned to be a rail connection to the subway, appropriately it would seem, since it was running along the rail bed of the ol’ Southern Pacific Railroad line that operated in these parts during the first couple decades of last century. But wouldn’t you know it, and in a refrain familiar to those experienced in transit debates, there was local resistance to anything but a subway being built on the route. Too costly an option and, again for anyone aware of Toronto’s Scarborough subway debate, not an ideal mode to build for the type of urban design, built form the Valley was and remains.

The debate got lengthier and wackier. Residents didn’t want rail unless it was underground or unless the alternative was a bus lane. What?! Buses? OK. Let’s make it rail, even if it’s at-grade. Problem was, in their previous anti-rail zeal, state legislators made a law banning all non-underground rail in the Valley, a law which has now been overturned, paving the way for an LRT to eventually replace the Orange Line bus lane.

There is no transit planning that is not politicized transit planning, it seems. Which may just be an unfortunate inevitability of living with other people, we are political animals, after all, all of us in our own ways. The real problem though, as I have seen it, is that those really politicizing transit planning tend to be people who don’t take transit very often, if it all. How will this transit project affect my ability to get around in my car?

Non-transit users tend to like the idea of buses because they see them operating in mixed traffic, big lumbering vehicles that have to pull to the side of the road to pick up or drop off passengers, easy, sooner rather than later, to get around and get along your speedy way. That is, until you propose, taking a lane or two of road away and building a dedicated lane where buses can go about their transit business, free of snarled car traffic. Then, all bets are off.

Non-transit users may also express a preference for buses because they can’t ever envision themselves ever getting out of their car and using public transit. Ever. So why spend all that money on fancy trains that they’ll never use. Never. Ever.

Public transit decisions made by those who have a transit choice.

I imagine if you ask even the most dedicated or dependent public transit user, what mode of public transit they’d prefer to use, the bus would be down their list. The ride is rarely as smooth as a rail glide. It can’t possibly go as fast as a subway. They can be bumpy, shaky and rattle-y.

Buses are the last option for those without many options.

So what’s with the buses already? Mothball them. Start building shiny stuff, fast stuff. Let’s pimp our public transit rides.

Even if the barrel of money to build transit was bottomless, and we all know it isn’t, you couldn’t dig subways to everywhere you needed unless we all were prepared to Manhattanize or go full on Hong Kong. There isn’t the street space or capacity to run LRTs along every route you’d need to generate the ridership you’d want to make for an effective transit system.

The simple truth is, to design, build and operate a fully-functioning, robust transit network, you need buses. Buses are like the capillaries of the system (if I understand my anatomy correctly which I can’t guarantee), feeding riders into and onto the bigger capacity lines that take them to their final destination, work, school, the mall, home. Buses best provide local service while at the same time, if done right, treated well, delivered with a sense of purpose instead of resignation, buses can build and strengthen ridership growth. Like the Orange Line has done in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley.

We need to stop dismissing buses, treating them as symbols of failure or reluctant compromises, or using them as a cavil in politicized transit debates, either in favour of spending buckets of cash on unnecessary high orders of transit or doing the exact opposite. Better buses, better bus service means a better transit system. More people happy and willing to ride the bus rather than choosing to do so as a last resort means fewer people driving their cars.

And fewer people in their cars mean more people knowing where to get good shoes cheap.

— round-and-roundly submitted by Cityslikr

Skid Row

Posted on March 4, 2016 by "Brother" of Cityslikr

You’d think that a city, competing as it might on a 21^st-century global scale to attract the best and the brightest, business and industry, its slice of the tourist trade pie, would do what it could to erase from the guide book maps the Skid Row name of a neighbourhood. It’s so, I don’t know, Dirty 30s. Old school dismissive and denigrating. Get a job, ya lousy hobo!

Or, you know, because morality.

Not Los Angeles. Right there below Little Tokyo, the Downtown Arts District, the Toy District, the Old Bank District. South and east of the Jewelry District.

Skid Row.

I didn’t make my way there to see if it was actually true, if such a place could really officially still exist. I arrived by accident. Not an uncommon occurrence for someone without much spatial-directional-geographic skill who likes to wander cities. Sometimes you wind up in unexpected places.

For anyone who’s been to Los Angeles, homeless encampments are not an unusual sight. Freeway overpasses provide shelter from some of the elements nature inflicts. Under-used strips of sidewalk space outside of fenced off commercial buildings like self-storage businesses keep pedestrian levels low and possible conflict to a minimum. There’s a woman outside the parking lot of my favourite Ralphs living under what seems to be a semi-permanent tarp enclosures.

But the magnitude of the homeless population in Skid Row is nothing short of shocking. Blocks and blocks of largely men, as best as I could tell, simply existing in the streets, some in full makeshift camping like conditions, sleeping bags, tarpoline shelters, suitcases or duffel bags or plastic bags, stuffed with their belongings. Others, just out there, with nothing more than a concrete bed.

I didn’t stop to linger, to take a closer look, to more fully assess the situation. I kept my head low, responded politely to anyone who engaged with me, but continued moving. The immediate response to finding myself where I did and recognizing the scale of it, of course, was to turn around, go back to the safety I’d come from.

But I didn’t. I couldn’t. Maybe if it had been dark or late. It wasn’t.

Besides, the immediate fearfulness I felt was completely baseless. No matter how justified every one of these people I passed would be in stomping me to death for my complicity in their current condition, there’d be more chance of me being struck by lightning in this place lightning seldom strikes than being assaulted by anyone here. Even if I were flashing hundred dollar bills and a Rodeo Drive purchased watch on each wrist, the upside for anybody here accosting me would only be short term, met most certainly with a heavy-handed crackdown that wouldn’t even have to explain itself.

As I was expressing my discomfort and disbelief on the Twitter (after safely reaching my destination, natch), Tobias Vaughan suggested I look up Jones v. City of Los Angeles. I did. Turns out this city has something of a sad, nasty history of trying to criminalize its homeless. “Is LA the meanest city in America to its skid row homeless?” The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty and the National Coalition for the Homeless cite a 2007 UCLA study pointing out that, at the time, “… Los Angeles was spending $6 million a year to pay for fifty extra police officers to crack down on crime in the Skid Row area at a time when the city budgeted only $5.7 million for homeless services.” The kind of crime? Stuff like jaywalking and loitering.

I haven’t seen more recent data to know if things have changed. If conditions were less dire for those living on Skid Row now than before, that’s difficult to imagine. How could it be worse? Less police harassment?

This, at a time when other jurisdictions have accepted the fact that using the criminal system to penalize and deal with the homeless is much more expensive and ineffective than actually trying to deal with it in a more constructive manner. “If you want to end homelessness, you put people in housing,” the director of Utah’s Housing and Community Development Division, Gordon Walker said. “This is relatively simple.”

It’s not as if there isn’t space to construct housing in the area of Skid Row, filled as it is, unsurprisingly with derelict buildings and empty lots. The problem with that, I imagine, would be you’d establish a sense of permanence. The homeless housed. Skid Row as an actual place, with actual foundations, as opposed to just a name on a map, a name that can be changed when the conditions warrant.

A more traditional approach would be to slowly squeeze Skid Row out of existence. As downtown Los Angeles DTLA continues to revitalize outward, and make no mistake, it is revitalizing – the margaritas I found out on the fringes were fantastic! — there will eventually be no place for a Skid Row here. It’ll linger only as a hip bar name. Homelessness won’t cease to exist, of course. It will simply be re-located where people like me wouldn’t possibly want to go to or find ourselves by accident.

This is not a problem unique to Los Angeles. Remember, even Toronto the Good criminalizes ‘aggressive panhandling’ with its very own Orwellian named bylaw, the Safe Street Act. Safe from what and for whom exactly? For the likes of me, naturally, from the nuisance and annoyance of having to deal with the result of the unfairness and inequality we like to, instead, ignore and wish away.

Until we actually get serious about dealing with homelessness, and all the facets that create it, there’s never just one reason someone finds themselves living on the streets, maybe it’s good a Skid Row remains on the map. It’s there for people to see if they choose to look close enough. Huh. Skid Row. That’s still a thing? How?

— incredulously submitted by Cityslikr