L.A. WeeklyWow
Thanks to Paul Ciotti for an amazingly written, fascinating and
of course disturbing and tragic story (“Beheading
on Mount Baldy,” May 13 — 19). All I can say is wow — now that's storytelling.
— Jason Mandell
Los Angeles
One Thumb Down
Only congratulations were printed in your last two issues about
readers' delight with the redesign of L.A. Weekly. However, my puzzled
question resulting from the redesign is: Who decided to hide completely Alan
Rich's precious music reviews under Stage instead of leaving them easily findable
under Music?
— Hendrik C. Stooker
Los Angeles
Blowback on Blog Wars
“Arianna's Blog Blows” [Deadline
Hollywood, May 13 — 19] is an amazing piece of work! Nikki Finke can pronounce
a brand-new Web site — only hours old — a total failure, a flop, an embarassment.
How can that be? How could she possibly know? Can we give Arianna Huffington
a few more days — a week, even — to prove her stuff? After all, Drudge took
two or three years to become widely read. Please! Use some reason. Don't be
absurd.
— Hattie Falin
Kingsport, Tennessee
Embrace Urbanity
Your special
issue on apartment living in L.A. was right on target [April 29— May 5].
You covered the topic with analysis, experience and humor and provided historical
and environmental perspectives. This approach is long overdue in Los Angeles,
since the majority of housing in the city has been multi-family since 1970.
The Los Angeles urbanized area is the densest in the country. The fabled “collection
of suburbs” need no longer search for a city — it is all around them.
To me, one of the chief attractions of L.A. is the urban vitality
of neighborhoods like Hollywood, Pasadena and Santa Monica (among others). You
want to be in these places, real places made possible by their thousands of
apartment-dwelling residents. But Angelenos — perhaps still caught up in the
bucolic myth that Robert Greene wrote about — have often seemed slow to recognize
and embrace their city as a vital urban place. This has generated an inordinate
amount of moaning about L.A. as a fallen paradise, a vast literature that looks
back to an idealized suburban past. Meanwhile urbanists elsewhere in the country
look enviously at L.A.'s urban possibilities. I hope L.A. Weekly can
continue to highlight and support those possibilities.
— Nathan Landau
Berkeley
Two Old Dames? For Shame!
Dames Judi Dench and Maggie Smith are possibly our two greatest
living actresses, and film reviewer Scott Foundas should be ashamed of himself
for referring to them as “two old dames” and “hammy actresses”
with “brittle bones” (see his review of Ladies in Lavender in your
April 29 — May 5 issue). He even insults older moviegoers by referring to them
as “the Geritol set.” A good film reviewer can write a negative review
without stooping to cruel (and juvenile) remarks such as these.
— Dale Booth
Los Angeles
Good as Gold
Where do I begin? In “Stiffed
and Miffed” [April 22— 28], Steve Mikulan is wrong on so many points.
First off, “union representatives weren't impressed with [99 Cent Stores
founder Dave] Gold's rags-to-riches sermon” at the Los Angeles Athletic
Club recently.
Really.
So, Mikulan and union reps in attendance weren't impressed with
Gold? What a shame that your left-wing, workers-as-victims-like mantra so completely
clouded your own thinking in preparing to write this article that you completely
lost your ability to take in one of the best rags-to-riches stories ever told.
That's right. This rags-to-riches story is true and truly awesome.
I should know. My family knows the Gold family personally and has for over 30
years. Most of those years, before the 1990s, when the 99 Cent Store concept
finally took off, consisted of Dave Gold and the rest of the Gold clan toiling
away seven days a week, 12 hours a day, in just one retail store here in Los
Angeles, just trying to earn a decent living.
My family did the exact same thing here in Southern California
from 1949 until 1983, right alongside the Golds and all the other mom-'n'-pop
discount store operators, seven days a week, 12 hours a day, through good times
and bad ones.
I tell all poor, hardworking immigrants today to follow in the
footsteps of past immigrants coming here for a better life in the post-agrarian
American era! Work hard, stay focused and work a little harder! You are capable
of earning your own little piece of the American dream. We did it. You can too!
And throw away your L.A. Weekly. Trade it in for a free read of Forbes at your
local Barnes and Noble.
[
You will be glad you did.
— Hye Larson
Calabasas
The Apartment As Object of Debate
Re: “The
L.A. Dream Revisited: Beyond the House and the Yard, the Apartment as Object
of Desire” [April 28–May 5]: This excellent issue profiling apartment living
(slumming) and high rents in Los Angeles should have been titled “The Plague
Revisits L.A.: Non-affordable Housing’s Nightmare.”
Loft apartments in downtown L.A. for a “mere” $1,295.00–$3,000+??!!! On the
outside, it would appear the good ol’ boys and girls downtown gave some people
an opportunity of a lifetime and helped make them rich while teaching them that
the very place that they were supposedly helping is killing itself slowly.
Come on, people, wake up! Every time we have affordable housing, it’s about
living with drug dealers in some nice area out there, somewhere
away from the “good people.” There are hundreds of apartments I wish
I could “afford” to move into as more buildings shoot up, all at New York prices.
As my friend Hubert Selby, Jr., the late American novelist, humanist
and ahead-of-his-time thinker, said, “In my lifetime, there hasn’t been one
single bloodthirsty, murdering head of state that we haven’t helped for the
most part” (December 2002). Whom are we helping now?
Would someone please help us raise our children in an atmosphere with some human
values attached? I can barely afford what I pay now as a single parent. Would
just ONE person who is racing off to another country to help “those poor people
in need” take a good look around before getting on their private jet? Your country
NEEDS you! This IS what Selby wrote about for decades: the moral decay and decline
of the American culture.
—E.M. Fredric
Studio City . . . on the edge, not “in”
As a small Venice property investor for over 30 years, I am appalled to know
that the complexion of this wonderful community continues to be assaulted by
developers who simply want to make big bucks near the ocean. As a European immigrant
who values the retention of older edifices as well as the history of a city,
I find those sensibilities are continuously defiled by the American way of building,
destroying and building again — particularly in Southern California, where it
was only about 20 years ago that someone had an epiphany about preservation.
The Lincoln Place apartments is a location where such a history needs to be
preserved, and I was disheartened to learn that in your current issue on L.A.’s
housing shortage, it wasn’t even mentioned as a place that had afforded housing
for working people. It is putting up the fight of its life now with the remaining
200 residences (formerly accommodating 790 families) against the latest owner.
We need the city, the state and all people to take pride in our city or it will
truly become lost Angeles.
—Miriam Meyer
Pacific Palisades
Safran Foer, Illuminated
If Jonathan Safran Foer were completely oblivious of realism in his writings
[“Some Stuff
Illuminated,” April 22], he would write that Oskar Schell, the hero of his
second novel, has an Italian name, wears shorts the whole year in New York City,
believes that the Big Apple has as many ancient building as Rome, says that
he never met a Jewish person in a city that has a large concentration of Jews
and a Jewish mayor, and does not know that many firefighters died trying to
save his father and other people trapped in the World Trade Center on September
11, 2001. Such an image of the hero of Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
would be as believable as the Ukrainian hero of Everything is
Illuminated, who has a Russian- or Bulgarian-sounding last name;
wears a fur hat all year in the main resort city in Ukraine; says that he never
met a Jew in Odessa, which has a Jewish mayor and one of the largest Jewish
populations in Ukraine; and states that Lviv, whose architecture is similar
to the architecture of Vienna, is like New York.
Furthermore, this best-selling book and an upcoming movie, which portray the
search for a possible rescuer of Foer’s grandfather in Ukraine, fail to mention
his real rescuers. During the course of my research project examining the politics
of mass terror in Ukraine and dealing with the area depicted by Foer, I discovered
that less than 200 people survived the mass execution of Jews in Trochimbrod
in the Volyn Region in 1942. Ukrainian partisans from a neighboring village
provided protection and food to more than 150 survivors of the Nazi massacre.
It is extremely likely that Jonathan Foer’s grandfather was rescued by these
partisans. In a reprisal for their actions, the Nazis executed 137 residents
of the village. It is difficult to understand why Foer and his incarnation in
the movie are never questioned about this aspect of his story.
[
—Ivan Katchanovski
Ukraine
It’s All Relativity
David Ehrenstein has it wrong [A Considerable Town, “David
Ehrenstein, Meet David Ehrenstein,” April 22–28]. Einstein’s special (not
“first”) theory of relativity concerned the relative measurement of space and
time by different observers moving at constant though different velocities,
necessary so that the laws of physics and the speed of light would not vary
from one reference frame to another. E=mc² appeared in a different and later
paper in the same year (1905), and was a consequence of but not the main point
of the special theory.
Also, he was not a “janitor” but a technical clerk with a college diploma reviewing
patent applications in the Swiss Patent Office.
—Jeffrey S. Lee
Newport Beach
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