I Predict a Riot!

Did Kaiser Chiefs' 2004 Indie Track Foresee week of Hollywood's Hyper-tweeting DJ Debacle, Washington's Budget Battle?

Probably not.  But sometimes the corny headline gene won't rest until it's satisfied...

So much can happen in a week:  Since our last post, the Hollywood district of Los Angeles has had a "riot," while the nation's credit rating, which has stayed unblemished with "AAA" as our score ever since credit ratings have existed, even throughout the Great Depression, has come perilously close to being sacrificed voluntarily by congressional Republicans who, it appears, would be willing to see it downgraded--thereby causing what economists almost unanimously agree will be catastrophic consequences, if not a sparking a Great Depression II--in order to appease the always-angry Tea Party cult.   

I mention the Hollywood & Highland "riot" in quotes, because, in the final analysis, MUCH was overhyped in news reports.  Yes:  somewhere between five and 8 youths jumped onto a police car.  But whereas when the "melee" (if you can call hundreds of people talking loudly and yelling, but mostly texting and tweeting, a melee) first began, radio reports said police patrol cars had been lit ablaze.  Even though it appears that didn't happen (RoLA is seeking clarification regarding the reports from some Internet and braodcast reports that, patrol cars were set on fire), the impression that Crown Victorias up and down Hollywood Blvd. were burning set the stage for a lot of innacurate portrayals of the event.  Certainly, something was terribly wrong with the way things went in terms of one DJs apparently wreckless social-networking misuse, plus poor crowd control planning by event organizers, and, to some degree, the police response.  However, I do give LAPD some props for their overall handling of the un-riot.  

You can read some of the details here and/or  here.  But it's hard to argue that this was a riot when you realize that a) no one was injured; and b) three arrests were made out of a total of five people who were momentarily detained, according to the L.A. Times; c) there are countless images and many videos of people standing; people walking; people running away from police anti-riot personnel--as well as ample footage of people jumping onto police cars; yet you won't find any of police cars burning from that afternoon, as has been widely reported.   At least we haven't been able to find any such video.  

What's most interesting to me is the police-car-set-on-fire aspect of this story.  It appears that nearly all headlines and copy written about the alleged arson since the day the near-riot (as the occurence was dubbed by the L.A. Times and other well established media outlets) is cited as "according to multiple news reports."  That's what RoLA found on websites ranging from pop-politics destination, Firedoglake (lafiga.firedoglake.com) to MSNBC.com.  In fact, our Web search found no attribution of the burning squad car report that could be immediately confirmed as an original, credible source; nor could we locate any imagery.  

That doesn't mean vandal-arsonists didn't burn LAPD vehicles on Hollywood Blvd. last Thursday (28 July, 2011) didn't happen. It does mean that there is confusion about important details of the "riot."   Check back next week, after RoLA has an answer (or non-answer) from the LAPD, and/or the District Attorney's office.  Meantime, not the L.A. Times piece does not mention a police car set ablaze by "near-rioters."  

★TUESDAY CONTINUES OUR SERIES ABOUT LAUSD'S NEW SCHOOLS at the SITE OF THE FORMER AMBASSADOR HOTEL, WHERE ROBERT KENNEDY WAS ASSASINATED BY SIRHAN SIRHAN IN 1968. 

Ambassador Hotel's Gone, Poignancy of New School's Design Honors Kennedy

Los Angeles' New Ambassadors   

Six Schools on a Campus Like  no  Other

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Reporter Surprised by Own Emotional Response to RFK Tributes at Ambassador (video)

[PART II in a multi-post, multimedia special RoLA Series.]  

We appreciate your patience in viewing video on RoLA in small snippets, which, at the moment, are the most efficient way for us to upload and for you to enjoy, in light of the currently very modest resources available to the blog.  


That said, RoLA expects to augment our capacities before the end of 2011.  If all goes as planned, you'll be visiting a much improved site in terms of content and format.  And, as a current consumer of information on Republic Of L.A., you can expect to receive special access to enhanced content on the new RoLA, as well as to some pretty cool events planned for election year, 2012.  


In the meantime, here are the first two videos in this special series about RFK Community Schools.  We've begun the series at the Robert F. Kennedy Inspiration Park and its memorial to the late brother also-assasinated John F. Kennedy.  BTW, It's okay to snicker at how strangely and unexpectedly emotional my visit there was:  

In the next video installment of this special Republic of L.A. series about RFK Learning Center at the Ambassador Campus, hear what muralized quotes were borrowed from Rosa Parks and George Bernard Shaw for the Ambassador site.  

Rob't. Kennedy's Knowing Smile Shines at the Gateway to L.A.'s Best Investment in Decades: RFK Community Schools at the Ambassador Site

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Los Angeles' New Ambassadors   
Six Schools on a Campus Like  no  Other   

R

R

Thom Senzee, dwarfed by the shadow of RFK.

Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, slain brother of also-assasinated Pres. John F. Kennedy, understood that government is supposed to be the common ground where human beings meet solve problems, share costs for the big things civilizations need in order to survive and thrive, and to band together against enemies as they come and go.

❝ each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance. 

❞

We hear so many throw-away assertions, nowadays, about how our government is the least of what makes the United States of America great and what makes this country's people so unique.  It's a very popular and, dare I say, fashionable point of view.  And so is has been for the past 30 or more years.  That's all of my adult life.  

The problem with the assumption that Americans have been and remain more free, more prosperous and more inventive than any other society in human history in spite of how we govern ourselves, is that it is absolutely wrong.  In fact, that perspective represents the epitome of missing the forest for the trees.  It is in fact our government's ability to be simultaneously run by those who decry its general "badness," 

Ask anyone from a country mired in endless civil wars, wretched poverty and hunger, sytemic corrutpion, violent oppression of women and minorities, institutional exploitation of certain classes if they believe the U.S. government with its strengths and weaknesses; its cost and size; or its very public vulnerabilities and shortcomings have anything to do with what makes ours the land toward which longing eyes point from lands with governments that are often (to borrow one of the revered business buzz phrases of all time) "lean and mean."

Business.  Business' goal is to profit.  Does anyone want a government looking to make a profit?  I didn't think so.  So, given that making money is not the reason we want our governments--federal, state and local--to exist; why do so many politicians keep acting like government should be run like a business?  The gossimer-thin considerations that lead some to the misconception that the U.S. Congress should act as savvy board members of a Fortune 500 company and that the president of the United States should behave like the CEO of the same firm must have to start lickety-split ticking of exceptions to that philosophical model of government.  

Take something as seemingly mundane as buildings for an example of what I mean:  Run the government like a Fortune 500 company, and you'd expect training campuses, i.e., public schools, to gleam be gleaming, luxurious towers, like the shimmering edifices that house their corporate counterparts.  Well?  If you want to run a successful business, you've got to look the part, right?  Can't have clients get the idea we're second rate.  Who are the government's clients by the way?  Taxpayers?  Well, no. We're the investors, I believe.  We don't want our own company selling us stuff; so, we're certainly not the customers...I digress.

Schools--public schools, that is, have mostly fallen into disrepair or at least just ugliness and bare-minimum upkeep during most of the past 25 years or so.  Meanwhile, banks, public corporations, media megalopolies and private companies have continued to be the beneficiaries of generous investment in their own infrastructures in the form of state-of-the-art technology and impressive headquarters across the nation.  

But, here in Los Angeles, there's a new story to be told about investment in public education, and perhaps surprisingly to some, the excitement among students that seems unmistakable to just about anyone who encounters students at any of the six schools of the Ambassador campus on Wilshire Blvd. , which sits on the site of, and uses some of the original construction of, the old Ambassador Hotel, where 1968 presidential candidate was shot dead.  The place is a temple to optimism and youth--just as Bobbie would have wanted it.  

Stay tuned as RoLA takes you to a the seat of public K-12 education's special new paradigm now open in the heart of the City of Angels.  

-Thom Senzee

Treespotting

Our recent post about Eccentrics and Eccentric Art in L.A. coming under greater scrutiny, and the photo of a blue-painted tree we published as an example of said eccentricities got us thinking and recalling that RoLA has snapped a you-know-what-load of weird, striking, and beautiful tree pics that were spotted across the city.  So, for some light Friday pre-carmeggedon, relaxing, blog-reading enjoyment, here are a few, including another angle of the aforementioned blue tree.  

eNJOY...  

On the streets of Los Angeles, Beauty Comes in Many Forms, Including that of of a Classic...

Pontiac Firebird

In 1968 it was another quite respectable American muscle car.Today RoLA is humbled by the opportunity to share with you this exquisitely maintained example of beautiful arrogance in the form of industrial design, as could only have been expressed by Detroit during a certain moment in time...just before the realities of domestic excess and nascent globalization were to hit home during the decade following that of this 'Bird's creation. 

(Photos by Thom Senzee)

This Firebird, with its illuminated-badge accents and chrome detailing, has conquered the barrier separating purpose from poetry;  transportation from transcendence.  Did her designers even ponder that their opus would, in another age, eclipse the drive for market share to become remarkable art that would be shared...by a stoic and contented custodian (for no one will really own her from here on), with me, a stranger with whom he sensed a common love of art on wheels...at an ARCO station in Hollywood, circa 2011. 

 ✧✧✧

As the encounter among men and machines ended, my new Nissan showed deference, waiting to activate its garish technology, which might falsely outshine the lights of the graceful, elder beauty dressed in tested sheets of turquoise metal, affording her the exit she deserved.  Yet unencumbered by navigation or Bluetooth, she required no handicapping.  The aged Pontiac glided out of the station, onto the street with an elegant precision, which bespoke a technical prowess all her own. 

 ✧✧✧

Now growling, her fleet rubber mitts grabbed the on-ramp to the Hollywood Freeway.  That's how I came to snap a precious handful of ghostly images before the Turquoise 'Bird vanished one Saturday evening last spring...in the new century...in the new millennium, when kindred souls born in the old ones crossed paths.

✦

L.A.'s Eccentrics and their Art Facing Greater Scrutiny

Endangered Off-beat Charm and Colorful Folk Art Defines L.A.

Like a not-ready-for-prime-time-at-Disneyland's Small World attraction attraction, or a rejected eighth-hole miniature golf course design, this blue tree, it's attendant lawn gnomes and a watchful blue owl atop its branches constitute a fixture in someone's idea of Shangri-La. Repulbic Of L.A. spotted this unusual assemblage lovingly appointed to the front yard of a corner-lot home in Los Angeles, near L.A. City College.

Perhaps the coolest aspect of this Dali-esque affair is the fact that it barely stands out amid the delightful (delightful--if you're in a similar mood that this blogger happened to be when charmed by the scene pictured above) hodgepodge of bungalow-style, mid-century, post-modern, contemporary, residential and commercial structures and the equally discordant intentional-aesthetic-meets-obvious-neglect atmosphere that define this and so many Los Angeles neighborhoods.

On the topic of L.A.'s oddest charmers, is the apparently imminent demolition by county bulldozers of Phonehenge West and the jailing last week of its 59-year-old builder, who refused the county's order to tear down the surprisingly "right-looking" buildings.

Kim Fahey, a retired phone-company technician, built an outlandish and playful world for his children and visitors to Lancaster to enjoy. In fact, there's a proper gift shop and regular tours at Phonehenge West. (We're not sure if there's a Phonehenge East.) The County of Los Angeles ordered him to tear down the permit-less buildings, and after years of battles in court, which Mr. Fahey seems to have lost, he's been incarcerated for not following those orders. Because of the inherent property and claimed constitutional rights issues, not to mention the great visuals, plus the David vs. Goliath theme of the story, Phonehenge West has captured national attention. Click here for a link to the Washington Times' reporting of the Fahey and the D.A., and here for an earlier piece by the Huffingtonpost

It's interesting to note that the current edition of the L.A. Weekly has a cover story about L.A. County's "War on Desert Rats" which the paper says is currently underway near Lancaster in the Antelope Valley. Here is a link to that story.

RoLA will keep the exact location of our whimsical creation secret. lest the city attorney tries to pull a (District Attorney) Steve Cooley on it.

HYWD BLVD; Not Times Square, but...

Evening Stroll Reveals Hollywood Renaissance Still Growing

Almost any weeknight on Hollywood Boulevard finds the stretch of road from Gower westward to La Brea pulsing with life. Each week, the sidewalks at Hollywood Boulevard and Highland Avenue are pounded by a sea of people the likes of which one would expect at Manhattan's Times Square.

Anyone who remembers the desolation and the nearly defunct nightlife of Hollywood Boulevard circa 1990, which consisted mostly of the homeless, runaways, and prostitutes should be amazed by all of this out-from-behind-the-steering-wheel foot traffic.

For now, the shoulder-to-shoulder quantity of pedestrian activity is concentrated at Hollywood and Highland, but it persists at least for two blocks in either direction of that landmark intersection (on both sides of the street, no less) most Thursday, and just about all Friday and Saturday nights.

Here are some pics RoLA took on a recent Thursday evening walk around Hollywood and Hghland with our trusty iPhone camera in hand:

Photos by Thom Senzee (c) Republic Of L.A.

Famed Surfer, Skateboarder Cahill's Passing Rekindles Memory of Summer of 1980

DYING DAYS in DOGTOWN

Photos by Thom Senzee

It was just a few days ago that I watched the acclaimed indie film "Lords of Dogtown" for the first time. It's a fairly heavy telling of the story of mid-to-late 1970s skateboarding and surf culture in Southern California as told through the eyes of a motley crew of Venice Beach and south Santa Monica-area youth, who turned an industry and a sport on its head.

But it was more than just skating low, fast, and "vert" that made these young lords legends in the long run. It was the fact that they had, as it's been called in other sports, "heart." They needed a certain kind of wherewithal to survive simply because of the circumstances of their time and place. For the most part, they had nothing besides one another, skateboarding and surfing--which the late Chris Cahill, an original member of the group portrayed in Lords of Dogtown (though his character was downplayed in significance) said was always more important to him than skateboarding. To paraphrase, he said: we skated because we surfed; not the other way around.

In any event, skateboarding, surfing and surviving were orders of the day.

As one Cahill's contemporary's put it: "We almost all came from broken homes." Dogtown itself (Venice Beach and south Santa Monica) was a place where you didn't want to take very many steps forward without looking backward over your shoulder. Venice of the 1970s was, in a word, dangerous. It was, in another word, dirty.

The Z Boys (a professional skateboarding team that included one girl skater) got their name from the Zephyr Surf Shop on Main Street in south Santa Monica. Chris Cahill is said to have "talked his way" onto the team. At the 1975 Del Mar National Skateboarding Finals, the Z-Boys won first place with their never-before-seen, aggressive skating style. It's largely agreed that event marked the primordial beginnings of extreme sports. After Del Mar came the magazine interviews, sponsorship offers and endorsement (not to mention money).

From that moment on, Cahill and his fellow Z-Boys set surf and skate fashion, whether they meant to or not. For instance, they helped make Vans tennis shoes famous throughout Southern California. Basic dark-blue Vans were the foundation of their competition uniform. We're talking at least five years before the film "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" made the sneakers famous nationally.

Chris Cahill was found dead at his L.A. home June 24. The cause of death has not been announced. Some who knew him say Cahill was battling cancer.

A personal memory about Chris Cahill:

My dad, little brother and I were homeless, living in a Ford Econoline Van in 1980. I was 12 and 13 during that period. It was the apex of surf-&-skate style in mainstream culture in the southwestern U.S., albeit a couple of years after it had been shaped and influenced by the Z Boys of Dogtown.

Although homeless, not really yet a teenager, and new to Southern California, I struggled to look the part by trying to get my dad to buy whatever O.P. or Qucksilver rags I could find at Goodwill or Salvation Army thrift stores that summer.

So much of our time living in the van was spent at the beach, where it was easier to stay clean (public showers, the ocean). Ironically, one of the dirtiest-looking neighborhoods in the city was where we often drove in order to remain hygenic.

I was familiar with the Z-Boys from skateboarding magazines. I knew what some of them looked like.

I like to believe a guy who stood up for my little brother and me while our drunken father roughly dumped a shampoo bottle and its contents onto our heads, lambasting us for being embarassed and ashamed about our obvious homelessness and use of the public showers as our family bathroom.

It was true; I was ashamed. And, I thought all of those "cool kids" laughing at us probably had really nice houses and moms and dads who doted on them. I only recently learned that guys like Chris Cahill were not the spoiled blond brats who had it made, as I had assumed.

I'll never forget the skinny, yellow-headed skater who kick-flipped his way through the little circle of youths gathered around our outdoor dysfunctional-family affair, during which Daddy downed a can of Bud, used his foot to kick Michael and me in the ass a couple of times each, and told us to soap up and be proud, because we had no right to be embarassed about him or about living in a van.

Then, there was this slight-looking young guy standing bravely between where I and my brother Michael stood and where my much larger and rather intimidating father stood, still ranting away.

The young man said something like this to my father:

"Lay off, man. Who do you think you are? Leave these guys alone, man. They're just kids."

Everyone watching us seemed to know him and acted deferential to the blond skater. They dispersed while muttering phrases toward my dad affirming the admonition of the guy I will always believe was Chris Cahill.

"Let the little dudes rinse off and kick it on the beach, man," were the last words he said before he slapped his board to the concrete and disappeared as quickly as he had arrived. I was sorry he was gone then; I'm sorry for he's gone now.

Postscript: My father got sober in a 12-step program and has remained so for more than 30 years.

One of L.A.'s Juiciest (& Most Forgotten) Stories of Mayhem & Malfeasance

This Week Marks the Anniversary of a Bombshell of a Murder Occured in the City of Angels in 1982

Q: What do this classic 1970s blonde beauty, her murdereous gay roommate, the late founder of Bloomingdales, Larry Flynt, Grauman's Chinese Theater, as well as both Nancy and Pres. Ronald Reagan all have in common?

A: The Story of how a set of Videotapes Reportedly Depicting some of these Famous People Allegedly Participating in Depraved-Sex Orgies were 'Stolen' after the Murder of Vicki Morgan, the alleged mistress of the late Alfred Bloomingdale. Click here for the full story, not mention of the most amazing (however plain) website about the 1980s you'll ever encounter.