LA TIMES

I seem to get back to my blog only once or twice a month these days. Sorry!

Today we had municipal elections in LA - for mayor and a few little trivial posts like member of the board of trustees for the LA community college district.

Being a civic-minded person, I decided that, even as a two-month-old Angeleno, I should do my part for my adopted city and vote. I appear to be a better citizen than most of the old-timers, though. I showed up at our poll at the little Assembly of God church in our neighborhood - and was the only voter there. In fact, from the outside I doubted I was at the right place: a couple of cars in the lot and some local kids playing basketball.

The apathy about the next mayor is everywhere. At the moment, we have the very gray, personality-less Mayor Hahn with 25%, a rising Latino politician named Villaraigosa with 25%, and Herzberg, a Jewish businessman from the Valley with 25% - with dribs and drabs of other identity-less candidates for the other quarter. Not great numbers for an incumbent. The LA Times on its endorsement page even suggested TWO candidates - Villaraigosa and Herzberg - "anyone but Hahn" basically. In any case, there will be a run-off election to come since no one is anywhere near getting 50%.

Meanwhile, I continue to work on my dissertation - getting ready to take it on the road again for one last time, this time back to Champaign-Urbana March 22-April 5 to meet with the format checker at the College of Education, whom I've been in contact with via email since I left in December.

I have had time to "play" a bit, too, to visit parts of this culturally very rich city I've never been to in all the years our family has visited or lived in this city. Saturday, a friend and I visited the Getty Museum on a stunning perch on a hill overlooking the city, like some sci-fi movie set for the utopian society of the future - all clean, white and shining stone and metal with carefully tended gardens. Exhibits ranged from Jean-Louis David, a French portrait painter during Napoleon's time, to medieval illustrations of torture (no trouble finding examples of those!).

Last Wednesday, an old Aramco friend of mine and I took the new subway to visit LA's new Catholic Cathedral (Our Lady Queen of the Angels - the city's original name) right downtown. It's a beautiful desert-colored stone building, where we arrived at the end of mass for an organ concert by the cathedral's resident organist (who got off the bench to bow after every number - a bit of a prima donna, I'm afraid). It was also the first day of a Lent/Passover exhibit by local artists - Christian and Jewish.

On my own one Sunday afternoon, I finally tracked down where the original canals in Venice (Beach) are. They didn't show up on maps, but from photos, I knew they had to be around somewhere. It was very frustrating, but I finally found them after driving around for about half an hour. The Venice Canals have become quite a trendy, upscale neighborhood with million-dollar + architect-designed homes on either side. The day was perfect and sunny, and I went wild with my camera, using up an entire roll of film on the area. Ducks and other water fowl (including one very active pelican) have taken over the area, even appropriating people's row boats as their own birdbaths.

A couple of weeks back another friend and I walked around Hollywood between the rain showers - starting at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, now a little pimple on the rump of a huge shopping/entertainment complex with huge Babylonian gates, Hindu elephants and "Sunglass Hut" and "Starbucks"-type outlets. When the mist cleared up a bit, I finally could see the famous "Hollywood" sign on the hillside just north of the theater mall. The Oscars this March took place in the new Kodak theater, which is part of the same complex. We walked down the boulevard for about an hour from the new Disney-fied "family" sections to the old, grungy part of Hollywood, where high-soled hooker boots and cheap cell phones began to appear in store windows. But from the look of things, the grungy part hasn't much longer to be there; gentrification is popping up all around. A lot of the buildings in the area are still original (decayed or refurbished) from the 19-teens to the 1930's, so it was fun to imagine what the area was like originally before it became a crime-ridden slum. (Most parts of LA don't allow that kind of imaging exercise anymore.)

More later ...

Paul