The Life and Death of the Working Class
Whatever happened to the working class? From appearances they are all around us, working in everything from the dozen manufacturing plants still remaining in the United States to the auto and truck mechanic bays and doughnut shops across this fair land of ours. There are carpenters, plumbers, electricians, truck drivers, butchers, bakers, cab drivers, bartenders, [...]
Los Angeles is the Hollywood Sign
Los Angeles has always been a city of contradictions. For one thing, most of its citizens share a love hate relationship with the city. It is a Western City, populated at first by New Yorkers and Mid-Westerners, and now with people from every part of the globe. It is an American city [...]
Old Buildings and the Age of Raze
There is a famous line in the film, Chinatown. John Houston’s Noah Cross character, proclaims, “I’m old. Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.” I am not sure about politicians anymore, and the whores of today may not be as respectable overtime as the prostitutes of legend. But we [...]
The Enduring Easter Bunny Fetish
I was going to write something more serious when my eye caught a photo on the Sunday Los Angeles Times where two security guards were trying to wrest a large plastic trash bag from the hands of one of the prodigious street vendors working the downtown area. The large plastic trash bag was filled with [...]
The Vintage Whine of Academia
Some years ago when asked his opinion about campus politics, Henry Kissinger said, “University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.” This was an interesting response and one that has endured with me for quite some time. Nevertheless, when confronting academia, socially or otherwise, it isn’t long before Kissinger’s explanation of the [...]