Griffith Park, Interrupted

I’ve made so many new friends through blogging this year, and it is especially nice to get readers’ comments and emails. It’s great to hear from real people, instead of spam, or long chain letters.

I’ll be going on holiday for a couple of weeks. Could one of you please water my plants while I’m gone?

Pink geraniums do well here. Click for best image. (Contributed by a fellow cartoonist.)

Or will both sides be happy? Given a choice, I like to err on the negative side.

I just talked with Julian Calvin-Harris at Councilman Tom LaBonge’s office yesterday. I haven’t written anything about the Silver Lake meadow here until now because a) I didn’t know enough about it, and b) I’m already working on behalf of Griffith Park, which is 800 acres as opposed to the 6 acres of Silver Lake Meadow.

But, big news. Garcetti is actually in charge of that 6 acres, with only a thin wire fence separating him from his bff, LaBonge, in charge of Ivanhoe; they both got “hundreds of letters,” protesting turning the Meadow into a public park. See, sometimes someone does read your letters! So Garcetti decided to split the child in two: only half of the park, or 3 acres, would be for roustabouts, as a public open park, and the other 3 acres will be kept as native preserve. For the animals, and nature. As if anything is left there. Keep Reading »

Another Silver Lake, another heron. Photo COPYRIGHT by the talented Michael S. Palmer. Michael took this in St Helens, WA. But I can see snow mountains like this a few weeks a year and if they leave the Meadow alone, this could be Silver Lake soon, if DWP does what it PROMISED!

Because I usually hum along with the sing-song voices in my head, I don’t always pay attention to what the outside world is doing. For instance, I was delighted to find the signs about missing herons along the fence of Silver Lake one night, and went back to take pictures a couple of days later. It turns out I’m not the only blogger who noticed these. From CurbedLA:

Fresh drama in the battle over Silver Lake meadow! As noted, the decision to open the meadow around Silver Lake reservoir was decried by some residents who wanted to keep the area human-free and coyote-abundant. Now these flyers (pictured above) have appeared around the west side of the reservoir. What do herons have to do with the meadow opening? One member of the Committee to Save Silver Lake’s Reservoir (which supports opening the meadow), accuses “Save the Meadow” advocates of using the heron issue–it’s on next week’s agenda before the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council Governing Board–as a way to stop the meadow opening. This is getting nasty. (sic)

Does anyone else think CurbedLA likes a little bit of nasty? I notice some of their commenters are racist, as in anti-white, like this one:

You are an asshole, and I wish you were standing in front of me so that I could smack you across your smug, white face. Keep Reading »

I wouldn’t be surprised if they have received threats because of the bird balls in Ivanhoe.

Two days after I blogged about the Corner o’ Rocks (TM) in Silver Lake that I thought was a graveyard, a guard started to park his car RIGHT there. (Apparently guards use their own vehicles, and none are marked.) I had been running there for almost a year, and there had never been a guard there before; they are always at the guardhouse, or on the median, right between the 2 reservoirs. A couple times one of the guards would race along the inside road (you can see just the edge of it in the center of the photo) to get there just as I did. (And I think paranoia is just another way of saying, nothing left to lose. The DWP has already made the situation grave.)

Corner o’ Rocks (TM). The DWP interprets Stonehenge.

As you remember, on June 9, the DWP let it rip, and tried to make a funny game out of dumping literally tons of possibly toxic black bird balls into Ivanhoe. Our jolly Councilman, Councilman Tom LaBonge, who never lets a photo op go by without sticking his head in it, also make some jokes, and I slapped the Times on the knuckles for sucking up to the DWP without ONE question or ANY investigative reporting of their own! Talk about naive!

There was a lot of press about the balls, (and many repetitive jokes about the black balls.) Two nights after that I was running along the path that circles Silver Lake, around 2 AM. (Don’t ask.) You can see the beginning of the dirt path in the photo; a tall wire fence and barbed wire separates the public from the reservoir. There was no other person on the street for my whole run (as usual). Perhaps 5 cars passed me in that 45 minutes.

All of a sudden one of those police type headlights on the top of trucks that circle around and look down dark alleys was fixated on me. Not from inside the reservoir, but from the street, right alongside me. From a DWP marked truck. And not just one truck. Another truck followed the first one and also lit me up with their spotlight. They drove very slowly past me as I ran, huffing and puffing in my uncomfortable way. As soon as they were past me, they turned the corner, the lights went off, and they drove up to the guard shed on the other side of the lake.  Keep Reading »

Hell hath no fury like a blogger scorned (and I wrote the book on hell.)

To put it more gently, bloggers have the thirst of desert crawlers (it’s a tech thing - see cartoon) when it comes to acknowledgments and links.

So I was feeling sorry for myself, not having been linked anywhere in a couple of days, and I googled myself, for a change of pace. To my surprise, I saw my name listed in a Gawker blog. You may have heard of Gawker, one of the biggest blogs in the world. Or chain of blogs, actually. This was in Gizmodo, which I never heard of, but which is so so techy, the biggest Gawker, with 50 million readers a day, they claim.

“This is a trick, to make me try soy milk, isn’t it?” COPYRIGHT 2008 by Donna Barstow.

It was Gizmodo’s post on June 10, about those damn bird balls thrown into Ivanhoe, which the damn DWP twisted into a freaking PHOTO OP, instead of the stealthy environmental disaster, historical monument destruction, and probable degradation of the water quality that it really is. Also, an opportunity for every writer in the city to use their favorite unoriginal jokes about balls. (Gizmodo didn’t say all this of course, I did. They just said, like everyone else, look at the pretty black balls.)

Keep Reading »

One of my more popular posts is my April post on how the Times covered the Avenues gang: The LA Times has a secret crush on the Avenues gang!

A lot of looky-loos have been stopping by today, too, of course, because the Avenues and Drew Street gangs are on the front page again, and this time they’re not such heroes. The LAPD cracked down and arrested 28 of those poor guys. Here’s the Times this time:

Heavily armed police and federal agents stormed into a Glassell Park neighborhood Wednesday morning to wrest control away from a street gang — and loyalists with deep family ties to its members — that has in effect turned the sequestered swath of run-down apartments into rogue territory.

That’s a pretty good start. However, note the bolded description. When you read about a neighborhood painted as loyalists with deep family ties to its members, doesn’t that sound attractive? Perhaps a suburban enclave of LA, or one of those beach towns, with all those diehard volleyball players. Good people, in other words. And so these gangs are, in their hearts.

Photo of Latino Taming of the Shrew, by Bob Chamberlin, LA Times.

Last time, the Times writers defined the gang as resilient, powerful, and defiant: survivors, with loving neighbors. They’re definitely not as positive this time; I’m afraid they’ve gotten bitter, and that’s a sad thing to see in a journalist. The quotes they included from the Avenue homeboys and girls were understandable, but so darn negative: they described the police as “gestapo,” and they were frustrated by the show of force by the police and FBI, and doubted those pig bullies could change anything. Nobody on the street was happy the cops were cleaning house, and why would they be? Nosey parkers, those Feds.

Too, I notice a slightly different slant online as compared to in the paper, and this is because of the always powerful and terribly underrated photographs. The front page in the paper has a detective apraising photos of gang members. He looks a little mean to me. Inside, there is a photo of Patricia Gomez scolding police officers because her children were frightened by the early morning raid. Aah, that poor woman. She comes here from who knows where, just wants to be left alone with her druggy gang killer friends, and the police wake her up early. I hate that.

And the photo of the children, ah, the children. I don’t know how much English they understood, and they look confused - maybe bored, I don’t know - but it’s always touching to see children, even living in one of the scariest, dirtiest neighborhoods you’d never want your child to go in, isn’t it?

Online, there are additional photos of the police doing their jobs, and enforcing order.  It looks to be more balanced! There are over 400 comments, and not everyone is sensitive enough to put themselves in the shoes of the gang-bangers. Sigh. I guess the LAPD and the rather sexy FBI has to clean up messes once in a while, but I hate to see a close gang like that lose touch with each other. Fist bump.