Dateline>City of Angels

Congrats to writing pal and fellow blogger Rebecca J. Lacko, author of the weblog Motherhood, Marriage and Other Wild Rides.

Loathe as most bloggers may be to admit it, blogging is a passion, not a profession. The vast majority of us pound our prose out in relative obscurity. If we’re lucky, we’ll manage to attract a small but loyal following of readers who enjoy our wordsmithing. If we’re really lucky, someone in the traditional media will stumble across us, like what they see, and hand us that elusive Big Break: Exposure to a mass audience.

Well, Rebecca has indeed landed such a golden opportunity in the form of a guest spot on a new CBS TV daytime talk show, The Doctors, to premiere September 2008. According to network officials, the show aims to present viewers “reliable and fascinating medical and health advice, dispensed daily by a distinguished panel of five professionals. Rebecca will appear in a segment focusing on the pros and cons of early potty training.

My single male readers are likely smirking right now. Young mothers, on the other hand, are probably nodding to themselves with knowing approval. Weening a kid off diapers is no easy task — and no small achievement for either a kid or a parent. Not only is successful potty training an important developmental milestone, it’s the cornerstone of polite society. Without it, civilization would come to a screeching halt, and it wouldn’t be pretty.

OK, I exaggerate, but you get the idea. Parenting is important stuff, and if anyone can speak to the joy and fulfillment that comes from doing the “world’s toughest job,” it’s Ms. Lacko.

Rebecca has been a trusted friend and colleague ever since we first worked together in the trenches of Advanstar Communications. I’ve always been impressed with the quality of her parenting essays. She manages to personalize what she writes, balancing research, conviction and humor without appearing dull, preachy or contrived.

So much of what you read in parenting magazines nowadays seems fired by the narcissistic drive to prove oneself a good mommy or daddy. By contrast, Rebecca’s family-oriented pieces celebrate the child and the “little things in life” that make their world truly wonderful, happy and empowering. It was only a matter of time before the media discovered her.

Hopefully, this Big Break will lead many more to discover and enjoy her work as well.

Don’t call ‘em a rehash. Think of ‘em as Summer Reruns — or better yet, “encore presentations.”

One of the downsides of blogging is posting an item you’re really proud of, only to watch it slowly creep down your homepage and eventually disappear into the Twilight Zone of your site’s archives, never to be seen again.

So why not resurrect a few oldies but goodies every now and then? (Especially during a busy week that makes researching and writing fresh content extra difficult?) The posts below rank among my personal all-time favorites and coincidentally all appeared a year ago this month.

If you’re a return visitor who caught them the last time around, enjoy reliving the adventure. If you’re part of a newer audience viewing them for the first time, all the better…

• Tarts and Misdemeanors — A glimpse at a deliciously sordid tidbit of history surrounding L.A.’s Hall of Justice.
• No Bull, The Ring Was Here — Uncovering a buried piece of L.A.’s Spanish-Mexican heritage in modern-day Chinatown — a post that will have you shouting Olé!
  
• Things to See and Tear Down in L.A. — Believe it or not, some readers missed the tongue-in-cheek tone of this post and thought I was really suggesting we bulldoze these landmarks.
• Parker Mystery House — Site of a particularly gruesome episode in our region’s history of sensational crime, murder and scandal.
• History, Murder and Intrigue in the 90201 — More murder and grave scandal, this time from the wood-paneled halls of Beverly Hills’ famous Greystone (aka Doheny) Mansion.

Postings to this blog may be light again this week as I focus attention on a number of pressing projects. First, cracking the code to add tagging features and a dynamic Blogroll page are proving more difficult than I thought. Looks like I’ll be spending a lot of time in WordPress support forums consulting CSS/PHP experts…

Next, I’ve finally completed the first chapter in my new book on the Feliz Curse. (Who knew that spewing 3,000 words could be so laborious?) Now it’s onto the next, which I figure I’ll have to tackle in two weeks’ time to stay on schedule.

Finally, I’m also wrapping up a few assignments for the off-roading section of Styling and Performance magazine, an automotive trade publication. (Something’s gotta pay the bills while I write and blog my little heart out…)

Meanwhile, all this comes in a week that Dateline>City of Angels has been accepted by BlogBurst for feed to newsrooms and media outlets across the U.S. This post isn’t exactly the auspicious, attention-grabbing first impression I’d hoped to make, but I guess that’s life in the blogosphere…

Talk about art imitating life! When Echo Park’s famous lotus flowers mysteriously vanished from the lake this year, a local photographer came up with a quaint solution: replace them with pictures. Which also promptly began (gasp!) disappearing. Honestly, neighbors, what did you think would happen?

And in Other News…

… I may have been too hasty recently in branding East Coast transplants as a bunch of whiners. Here’s one who actually has found good things to say about his newly adopted City of Angels.

… Meanwhile, the OC’s Coast magazine has been caught red-handed mimicking (perhaps parodying?) an Easterner publication. Did Coast’s editors think New York is so far away that such blatant copy-catting would go unnoticed?

… Don’t you just love celebrities continually reinforcing La La Land stereotypes? This time it’s Anne Hathaway, star of the new Get Smart movie, placing herself into the gentle, guiding hands of a “psychic masseuse.” Still, she insists she’s just your typical girl next door in every other way.

… I can’t stand Starbucks coffee. And I especially can’t stomach the chain’s snooty baristas who inevitably respond to requests for a simple “small coffee” with a smug, “We don’t have small, medium or large. We have tall, vente and grande.” Apparently I’m not not alone in my disdain. Turns out a whole lot of people are expressing glee in the company’s brewing financial woes.

… Looking for unusual summer vacation destinations that save on gas? Consider Nevada, where you can take advantage of this rather novel pump promotion, courtesy the Shady Lady Ranch, which is offering $50 toward your next fill-up.

… Of course, many are opting to stay at home, fix up the garden, and maybe even add that new deck they’ve been contemplating for summer entertaining. Not a bad idea, as long as you don’t wake the dead…

Well, the blog (and the world) survived the weekend as Dateline>City of Angels began some remodeling to update its look and feel. For now, most of the work is taking place in the background, so regular visitors will notice only minor changes.

• First off, I’ve added a detailed archive page that supports expanded views of post titles, dates and comment stats. (Take a browse… Even I’d forgotten some of the interesting stuff that’s been filed away and lost to time.)

• Regular visitors will also notice a new “Tag Index” to the right. Bloggers like to use tags in different ways, but here the plan is to complement my Categories. Think of the Categories as big file drawers and the tags as flags to help zero in on specific types of content within those drawers. As the week goes forward, I’ll be refining and expanding the index while adding visible tag coding to posts.

• The blogroll will also soon relocate from the sidebar to a page of its own. This will leave the right column looking a little barren in the short term, but will free it up for new items to be added down the line.

All these changes are the first steps in making Dateline>City of Angels content and navigation more accessible (and intelligible) from the homepage. This in turn will support new features and a broader redesign planned for later this year. In the meantime, thanks for your patience with any quirks and annoyances that pop up during the “construction phase.”

The 4th of July holiday just isn’t the same when the Dodgers are on the road. It’s not that I enjoy taking in a good ol’ fashion American ballgame on the 4th — I never do. Rather, unlike some of my Echo Park neighbors, I can’t get enough of the stadium’s post-game aerial bombardments exploding practically right over my rooftop.

With Team Blue in San Francisco this holiday — and their 50th Birthday pyrotechnics being relegated to the Hollywood Bowl — I’m left searching for substitutes. In past years, there were some impressive illegal (I prefer the term “undocumented”) fireworks in the surrounding canyon that rivaled the official displays, but with gentrification and LAFD crackdowns, I’m not counting on any home-grown “shock and awe” to wow my backyard BBQ guests this time around.

So where to go? While living in Silver Lake, my annual tradition was to join a small but intrepid band of hikers to the Mt. Hollywood peak above the Griffith Observatory. That vista offered birds-eye views of practically every aerial display in the L.A. basin. However, since the 2007 fire (which, I should again point out had nothing to do with BBQs or fireworks), access and hours have been greatly curtailed.

Of course, there are similar sights to be had from certain stretches of Mulholland Drive, but the crowd factor can make finding the perfect vantage point tough.

And then there’s always this extensive list of official fireworks shows around the Southland.

Decisions, decisions.

One thing I do know… You won’t be finding me anywhere near a display like this.

Happy 4th!

Just a housekeeping note to advise readers that Dateline>City of Angels will take a short hiatus over this week’s 4th of July holiday while I attempt several upgrades to the PHP code. Considering my feeble tech skills, this is always dangerous. For all I know, I could either crash my entire blog or, in a worse-case scenario, create an artificial singularity that swallows the planet. Either way, try to ignore any strange blips here over the weekend. Hopefully, we’ll all be safe and the blog will be up and running again by Monday.

According to Angelenic and other downtown blogs, the denizens at the heart of L.A. are growing restless. They want Hail-a-Cab, and they want it now.

The plan, which would allow taxis to pull over and pick up fares outside of currently specified zones, sounds like a good idea on paper — and downtowners are probably justified in their impatience to see it implemented. Still, I don’t begrudge city leaders for taking their time to fully consider the plan’s longterm effects on safety and congestion.

No matter how much urban boosters may wish for it, L.A. is not like any other city, nor can we merely snap our fingers and make it so. Taxis and public transportation may reign supreme in Chicago, New York, Boston or even San Francisco, but those cities have always been more geographically compact and were never built for and around the automobile as this place was. (Freeways, “Miracle Miles,” big, street-front department store windows and backlot parking malls were, after all, Angeleno innovations.)

Rushing to copy other metropolitan templates isn’t necessarily “farsighted.” Our region’s transit woes call for distinct, imaginative solutions that honor our unique character — not to mention the creativity and “out of the box” thinking that have traditionally demarcated the Angeleno “sense of place.”

That said, I’m not against the plan, except that judging from most of the comments on the local blogosphere, its biggest proponents seem to be: (a) cabbies who stand to make a profit, (b) tourism officials, and (c) transplants who come to L.A. to live its dream and then do nothing but complain about how it’s not the place they escaped from.

The cabbies and visitor bureaus I can get behind. The transplant whining is just getting old.

Question: Ask someone where you’ll find California’s steepest streets and they’ll likely guess San Francisco, where roadways like Filbert and 22nd sport a 31.5-percent grade. Hilly as the City by the Bay may be, however, it’s got nothing on the City of Angels, which actually lays claim to not one, but five of the state’s meanest climbs. Can you name them and the neighborhoods in which they’re found? Hit the “Read More” link to jump to the answer. And no fair peeking or Googling for hints… Read more

I’d like to say it was a desire to live to be 100 that drove me to spend more time in the garden, but really it was a nasty case of writer’s block.

After gleefully telling the world I’ve finally entered the drafting stage of my book on the Feliz Curse, I got exactly 3,225 words into the prologue, when the real curse — the dreaded Blank Page Syndrome — suddenly struck.

There’s nothing more common (or more insidious) for a writer than those painful periods when the muses fall silent. Go to any writer’s blog, chat group or forum, and you’ll find us idling for hours on the topic as we commiserate and offer each other tips for restarting our engines, all the while ironically avoiding doing just that.

My surefire solution has always been to force myself to jot a single phrase — any phrase, no matter how nonsensical. Most writers find that once they put something down on paper, they can’t stop tinkering with it, and soon one sentence sparks a second, then a third, and so on. (We’re fairly compulsive that way.)

This time the strategy failed. Hitting a difficult transition in the chapter, I just found myself editing and re-editing the same few pages I’d already spewed out and feeling about as productive as a hamster on a wheel… Read more

Amid all the usual tips for weekend getaways, this season’s hottest succulents and making your cramped living spaces look bigger, the latest issue of Sunset Magazine includes a curiously uncharacteristic fluff piece on “How to Live to 100.”

Announcing that “One hundred is the new 70,” the article purports to “uncover the secret to why people are living longer in the West, particularly in California, which has more centenarians that any other state.” Then, employing a rather unscientific methodology to answer this weighty question, the “Magazine of Western Living” interviews three Extreme Senior women, ages 99-102, about their lifestyles and interests. (Apparently no coherent men in that age bracket could be found.)

The conclusion? Westerners live longer, healthier lives because we enjoy the sun and relaxation, eat fresh-picked fruits and vegetables, do a lot of hiking and visiting day spas, and quaff plenty of Pinot Noir.

Oh yeah… and we garden, too.

Really.

Let’s take a moment for a shameless, PBS-style subscription pitch. (Imagine a phone bank ringing busily in the background as you read this post…)

Are you one of the many cultured people who enjoy the type of quality, free, community-oriented blogging that we strive to offer here at Dateline>City of Angels?

Want to keep abreast of all the latest — if somewhat sporadic — posts that deliver you both a sense of history and sense of place?

Want to feel more a part of our Dateline>City of Angels family?

Well, if you haven’t already done so, why not become a free subscribing member of this blog? That’s right: Unlike PBS, it won’t cost you a thing.

Simply go to the right-hand column, click on the RSS link, and add this site to your favorite feed reader. That way, you’ll never miss a thing, and you’ll be helping us to build the steady, regular readership that we so earnestly crave — a win-win for everyone!

Dateline>City of Angels: Made possible by the generous reading habits of visitors like you. And thanks! We now return you to our regular programming…

According to Italian officials, one of the mythical creatures is presently wandering about a nature preserve just outside Rome. Well, actually, it’s more of a Bambicorn, but you get the idea. It certainly makes more sense that a forest mammal like this may have inspired the legend, as opposed to the sea-dwelling narwhal.

In search of lost architecture? Metblog L.A.’s Jason Burns serves up a quick retrospective on the once stately Philharmonic Auditorium that formerly stood at 5th and Hill, a site that’s now… you guessed it… a parking lot.

With so much of the area’s past lost to development over the years, it’s nice to see a few architectural wonders rediscovered every now and then. Over on 6th Street, workers removing a rather non-historic 1960s facade from the Hayward Hotel have revealed a timely reminder of the building’s glory days. Blogdowntown’s Eric Richardson has the scoop.

Meanwhile, just north of downtown, Echo Park residents are concerned about the future of their historic lake, which is about to be drained and refilled to improve water quality. (Silver Lake and the Elysian reservoir had their turns first.) Jenny Burman reports on an upcoming meeting for locals to address the issues of the rehabilitation and its effects on wildlife, not to mention the lake’s famous Lotus plants, which are mysteriously dying.

Finally, a housekeeping note: Reviewing this blog’s RSS feed, I see that YouTube embeds are making it through to feed readers, but LiveVideos aren’t. If you’re a Dateline>City of Angels RSS subscriber, my apologies. Until I figure out a fix, you’ll have to click over to the actual blog posts to see the video clips.

Imagine reading lots of other people’s stuff each week, writing up sly observations about what you read, and getting paid enough for it that you can eventually retire.

Yes, friends, before the citizen-journalism craze known as blogging, newspapers actually offered such jobs, and the people who held them were called columnists.

For more than a decade Peter Carlson had such a career at the Washington Post, reviewing all the pop culture and hype served up by our nation’s magazines. This week he retired, but not without a few parting shots. As a former magazine editor myself, I found his farewell summary of the bizarre trends he witnessed in my (now-troubled) industry well worth reading.