Lost Angeles, CA

photography by Vicky Moon, Atlantic Cities

by David Lenson (The Massachusetts Review 36. 1 (Spring 1995): 43.)

IT IS SO MUCH A PART of the fabric of Western life that it has come an element of the landscape. In the density of cities or the isolation of dirt roads at the edge of town, the neon iconography of beer and spirits illuminates every corner of the American universe. Bar and lounge find their place in every architectural gesture, from corporate obelisks to side porches of bayou lean-tos to blocks of converted factories. On billboards above town and country, images of bottles and their venerable marks appear: Old Grand-Dad, Old Crow, Hiram Walker, Johnny Walker, Jim Beam, Jack Daniels. These are images of patriarchal comfort: the warmth and greeting of a tavern as a better home; the bottle opened in leisure after a laborious day; the jingle of ice or reassuring pop of a cork or metal cap. Wherever one goes in the West, alcohol is offered like the grasp of a hand—or in place of it. And yet beneath alcohol’s icons and institutions lie its familiar wastes: its broken glass, a body stretched out in the gutter, an angry shout in the street, the wreckage of cars, promises, families and dreams.

As alcohol affects every cell in the body, so it touches every moment of our history from Homer and Plato to the beery homecomings from a dry Iraqi war. Wherever the cultivation of grapes, hops or grain is known, the transmutation of those nutrients into that alternative diet has also been practiced. How deeply alcohol is woven into our history can be seen most clearly in those moments of the drug’s negation, when its afterimage proves as strong as its presence. In those times of its denial, alcohol merely vacates the surface of the landscape and crawls into the secretive holds of those same buildings and streets: the fluorescent church basement of an AA meeting; bootleggers building and tending stills in dry counties of the South; or the obsessive reassertion of the socially metamorphosed drug under Prohibition.

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by Jonathan Peterson, Los Angeles Times, December 29th, 1991

Back in the Great Depression, in the days when communism was a gleaming red star that beckoned working-class dreamers from across the sea, 24-year-old Rose Kostyuk packed her bags and moved to Russia.

It was an exciting adventure for a spunky young social worker from Philadelphia. Thousands of miles away, the first real socialist state was being hammered together. Idealists everywhere felt a magnetic pull toward this utopian land of Lenin. All the possibilities of a lifetime lay ahead. The year was 1932.

And then came reality. Kostyuk fell in love with a Russian Communist and left her American husband. She married the Russian and had children. But all around, the workers’ paradise was sinking into a world of terror and paranoia. Finally, there was no escape.

America-safe, familiar, rich America-drifted as far away as a childhood memory.

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Hemophilia, Rights, and AIDS 

by David L. Kirp, Dissent Magazine, Summer 1997

On a warm afternoon in the autumn of 1996, a limousine pulled up at the gates of the Bayer AG plant in Berkeley, California, and a handful of young men piled out of the car, megaphones to the ready. “We are here to take your name away!” they shouted. “I.G. Farben, I.G. Farben, Zyklon B, Zyklon B”-an unsubtle reference to the lethal gas manufactured by the German pharmaceutical house and used to chilling effect in the Holocaust-“four thousand dead, four thousand dead, four thousand dead.” A cameraman recorded the scene, preparing “great source tape” for television stations to air.

During the late 1980s and early 1990s, similar “zaps” were regularly launched by AIDS activists against drug companies. Then, the demonstrators were mainly young gay men, members of ACT-UP, protesting the pricing practices of pharmaceutical houses that made AZT and other drugs unaffordable to many people with AIDS. Though the focus of the 1996 protest remained AIDS, the protesters were hemophiliacs, not homosexuals. A few years earlier, they would have praised the drug company for manufacturing Factor VIII, the blood-clotting concentrate that enabled them to lead normal lives, but this lifeline had proved to be the source of HIV contamination. Consequently, more than half of those with severe or moderate hemophilia were infected with the deadly virus; and, since many nations relied on U.S. suppliers for blood-clotting products, similar calamities were reported not just in the United States but across the globe.

A tragic accident, the pharmaceutical houses called it, but to many hemophilia activists these casualties were the inevitable result of decisions driven by corporate greed.

Out of the nightmare of AIDS a new social movement has emerged. Not only in the United States but in scores of nations, people with hemophilia, historically quiescent, became a vocal group with an identity, an animus and a strategy. Their anger has been directed at firms like Bayer, which manufactured Factor VIII, as well as at governments, for their supposed failure to warn of the danger; at their doctors, who, they asserted, misled them; and even at their own organizations, which allegedly minimized the risk of exposure to HIV. This newly energized movement has demanded compensation from drug companies and governments, as well as apologies for wrong-doing and justice in the criminal courts.

In the midst of the AIDS devastation, people with hemophilia have claimed a degree of control over their own lives, and in so doing, they have obliged governments and transnational corporations to take them very seriously. While this is good news, there is also another, less noticed and less happy, tale to be told-about the fissioning of the AIDS-infected universe along the fault line of the deserving and the undeserving, the innocent and the guilty.

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by Anna Deavere Smith, Los Angeles Times, April 28th, 2002

Summer 1992.

Gordon Davidson, artistic director of the Mark Taper Forum, took me out to breakfast in New York City after seeing my play “Fires in the Mirror,” about riots in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in August 1991. Those riots were the consequence of a buildup of tensions between blacks and Jews, sparked by the death of a young black boy, Gavin Cato, and the murder of a young Hasidic scholar, Yankel Rosenbaum.

Some would call the death of Cato a murder; others would call it an accident. Some would call it a reckless accident. Most people would consent that Rosenbaum was murdered. Some people would call what happened in Crown Heights a riot, others would say it was an occupied territory. There were Jews who called the events a pogrom.

How do you even begin to have a conversation when the terms themselves are a cause for dispute? And so they should be. After all, history is made by the way the stories are told, and particularly by whoever has the power to put the words in print, or some other form of dissemination. Being a student of language, I was intrigued to come to Los Angeles, and to work with Davidson and his theater to create a play about the riots in LA.

“Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992” was to be based on interviews, of which I would perform excerpts in a one-woman show. I was already aware that I could not start an interview by using the word “riot.” I would ask first to see how the interviewee labeled the “events.” It was variously called, at the time, a “riot,” “a “rebellion,” an “uprising,” a “revolution.” In political circles, where language tends to be most calculated, it was called the “events of April 29.”

Soon after my arrival, two Korean American graduate students at UCLA contacted me. My heart raced when the conversation began. “We heard what you are doing, and we are afraid you’re going to get it wrong.” Here we go again, I thought to myself.

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One of my favorite pieces of writing to emerge from the 1992 Los Angeles riots is a poem by a writer named Nicole Sampogna, called “Another L.A.” In it, the poet traces the odd dislocation of living on the Westside while so much of the city burns. “They send us home early, again,” she begins, “supposedly for curfew sake, / but I know it’s to beat the traffic.” And then: “over there the smoke rises, / horns blare, streets scream, / shoot, loot, / bash windows, bash heads, / lights out / knocked out / by a black & white with a baton. / but, here / will the pizza man deliver after sunset?”

There it is, the dislocation that so often marks Los Angeles, and never more profoundly than when the not-guilty verdicts in the LAPD beating of Rodney King came down 20 years ago. Depending on where you lived or the part of town in which you found yourself, the atmosphere was static or chaotic, suspended or engaged. I remember, on the second afternoon of the conflagration, watching as a Fairfax district neighbor sunned herself on her small front lawn, while in the distance, sirens screamed. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere, perhaps in the way it reflects Sampogna’s sense of the city as disoriented, in which we connect (or don’t) “to the other LA with the flip of a switch.” How in such a place do we evoke the larger story? How do we find common ground?

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This four-part series went deep inside a Brooklyn shooting gallery to explore addiction and the AIDS epidemic. The reporting is masterful and provides a deeply nuanced account of a very specific moment in history. The pieces were written by journalist Barry Bearak and appeared in the Los Angeles Times during the last week of September, 1992. Bearak won a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for the series, in the category of editorial writing. Bearak has also written for The New York Times and The Miami Herald. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his accounts of poverty and war in Afghanistan, and currently teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism. 

Not only does it serve as an example of extraordinary journalism, but it is also a reminder that newspapers truly are the first draft of history.

Read it for the writing, which is as lyrical as it is evocative. Read it for the narrative, which will draw you in and seize your heart. Read it as an artifact of history, a haunting snapshot of what it was like to be alive and addicted and possibly HIV-positive in 1992. Read it because it is a reminder of what happens when societies don’t act fast enough, and when we willfully ignore the people who live in the dark shadows of our great cities.  But mainly you should just read it, because it is important, and it is powerful, and it is true. This is what happened:

Part One: “In a dank, burned-out building, addicts engage in a microbiological roulette, sharing contaminated needles. Here, America’s drug war meets failure and AIDS is spread.” 

Part Two: “In War on Drugs, the Battle Against AIDS Falls Behind Remedies: As crackdown on users busts up ‘safer’ routines, addicts increasingly grab for dirty needs.”

Part Three: “Life, Death, Birth and Love, Twisted by Heroin’s Power: A pregnant hooker frets over an HIV test. It’s the only thought that competes with the call of dope.” 

Part Four: “Road to Detox, Do Not Enter: With a will for redemption set to expire within hours, junkies finally seeking drug treatment face a road filled with holes and barriers.”

Part 4 of 4.

[Georgie Vega] rarely ventured into Manhattan. He seemed a yokel amid the great hum. [Nelson Martinez] sensed this. He began to make fun of Georgie’s rumpled cutoffs. “If we’re going to be dope fiends, let’s at least be clean dope fiends,” he said, steering his pal to a store and treating him to a pair of new jeans.

It was almost 4:30 by then, but Nelson and Georgie set aside a few moments to shoot up their drugs in the men’s room. Georgie removed his shirt so he could use it as a tourniquet. He wrapped it around his left arm, holding one end with his hand, the other with his teeth. He found a plump vein.

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Part 2 of 4.

“For heroin addicts, the nation’s switch to a war footing had some odd and unintended effects. A drug habit is a brutal taskmaster; addicts look for stable routines. They need reliable ways to get cash and drugs. And they covet dependable spots to inject, sheltered places with a stash of needles, where other addicts are nearby to share a shot or help them “hit” an ornery vein.

Instead, needles have remained a mainstay of the black markets. Georgie Vega, who last summer ran the gallery on Melrose, partially kept up his own dope habit by selling them at $2 apiece. Georgie, 38, was a 25-year veteran of the hustles of heroin addiction. He understood the cat-and-mouse games between junkies and cops-and appreciated the fact that the addicts of Bushwick were harassed but seldom arrested. Their safety was in their own insignificance.”

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Third of Four Parts

“[Lips] had a partner at the gallery, Georgie Vega. For use of their place, they charged people $2 or a taste of drugs. It was strictly a business arrangement. Lips did not like Georgie and vice versa, especially with him letting [Lourdes Pabon] hang around there to share in the heroin and cocaine.

Lips was dope sick too. He was taking all the tastes for himself, and it was a few hours before he was willing to share any with Lourdes. Then they sent someone to call 911 on the pay phone at the corner. An ambulance came 90 minutes later, and Lourdes was carried away on a stretcher.”

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This is the first  of a four-part series of articles that went deep inside a Brooklyn shooting gallery to explore addiction and the AIDS epidemic. The reporting is masterful and provides a deeply nuanced account of a very specific moment in history. The pieces were written by journalist Barry Bearak and appeared in the Los Angeles Times during the last week of September, 1992. Bearak won a Sigma Delta Chi award from the Society of Professional Journalists for the series, in the category of editorial writing. Bearak has also written for The New York Times and The Miami Herald. He won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting for his accounts of poverty and war in Afghanistan, and currently teaches at the Columbia School of Journalism.

“America has long had a malign attitude toward its heroin addicts, alarmed by their crimes and intent on their punishments. In the age of AIDS, this sternness bears the heavy weight of self-destruction. The nation has an estimated 1 million injecting drug users, and in recent years they have not only been responsible for 34% of all newly reported AIDS cases, they have also been the main cause of the epidemic’s spread to the heterosexual population.

HIV eventually becomes the full-blown syndrome. The CDC has recorded 24,323 cases of AIDS among adult women. Of those, 71% are considered IDU-related (50% are drug injectors themselves and 21% are women who had sex with IDUs). By the same token, 57% of 3,898 pediatric AIDS cases have been tied to IDUs (40% were children of IDU mothers and 17% were born to women who had drug injectors as sex partners).”

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1. The Plagiarism Hunter:  “Former student Tom Matrka has made a hobby of uncovering plagiarism in masters’ theses at Ohio University, and thus far has found thirty examples. The university was slow to act on his discoveries, and a scandal has erupted over the plagiarism.”
2. Cheating Goes Global As Essay Mills Multiply: ”Everyone knows essay mills exist. What’s surprising is how sophisticated and international they’ve become, not to mention profitable. In a previous era, you might have found an essay mill near a college bookstore, staffed by former students. Now you’ll find them online, and the actual writing is likely to be done by someone in Manila or Mumbai.”
3. The Shadow Scholar: Looking at essay mills from another angle, or “how an academic ghostwriter for hire produced thousands of pages for undergraduates as well as master’s and doctoral candidates.”
4. Something Borrowed: Annals of Culture: An article Malcolm Gladwell wrote in 1996 was used as inspiration for a play, but without permission. He discusses the experience.

The Chronicle of Higher Education 52. 49 (Aug 11, 2006): A8-A11.

by  Paula Wasley

Former student Tom Matrka has made a hobby of uncovering plagiarism in masters’ theses at Ohio University, and thus far has found thirty examples. The university was slow to act on his discoveries, and a scandal has erupted over the plagiarism.

Full text:

In a conference room in Ohio University’s Vernon R. Alden Library, Thomas A. Matrka takes just 15 minutes to hit pay dirt.

Scattered before him on a table are 16 chemical-engineering master’s theses on “multiphase flow.” He examines them in pairs. With a hand on each manuscript, eyes darting back and forth, he quickly scans the pages.

Identical diagrams in two theses from 1997 and 1998 strike him as suspicious. Turning a few more pages, he confirms what he suspected.

“This one needs to be turned in,” he says, pointing to an introductory chapter that not only mirrors the structure and content of the earlier one, but also includes whole paragraphs that are virtually identical. “This guy didn’t do a literature review,” he says. “His literature review was opening this guy’s and copying it.”

He reaches for another thesis. “Give me time,” he says. “I’ll find some more.”

Over the past two years, ferreting out plagiarism has become Tom Matrka’s hobby, maybe even his obsession. And he’s gotten very good at it. So adept, in fact, that the former graduate student at Ohio University — now a project engineer at a nearby explosives factory - - has single-handedly blown the lid off a hugeplagiarism scandal at his alma mater. Dozens of former students are now caught up in the investigation, several professors have been reprimanded, and the university is wrestling with how one department fostered a culture of academic cheating.

Regardless of whether Mr. Matrka was driven by revenge or ethics, this much is certain: The scandal would never have erupted without one graduate student’s doggedness.

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By Ed Dante, The Chronicle of Higher Education, 2010

Editor’s note: Ed Dante is a pseudonym for a writer who lives on the East Coast. Through a literary agent, he approached The Chronicle wanting to tell the story of how he makes a living writing papers for a custom-essay company and to describe the extent of student cheating he has observed. In the course of editing his article, The Chronicle reviewed correspondence Dante had with clients and some of the papers he had been paid to write. In the article published here, some details of the assignment he describes have been altered to protect the identity of the student.

The request came in by e-mail around 2 in the afternoon. It was from a previous customer, and she had urgent business. I quote her message here verbatim (if I had to put up with it, so should you): “You did me business ethics propsal for me I need propsal got approved pls can you will write me paper?”

I’ve gotten pretty good at interpreting this kind of correspondence. The client had attached a document from her professor with details about the paper. She needed the first section in a week. Seventy-five pages.

I told her no problem.

It truly was no problem. In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

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by Thomas Bartlett, The Chronicle of Higher Education 55. 28 (Mar 20, 2009): A1,A22+.

The orders keep piling up. A philosophy student needs a paper on Martin Heidegger. A nursing student needs a paper on dying with dignity. An engineering student needs a paper on electric cars.

Screen after screen, assignment after assignment — hundreds at a time, thousands each semester. The students come from all disciplines and all parts of the country. They go to community colleges and Ivy League universities. Some want a 10-page paper; others request an entire dissertation.

This is what an essay mill looks like from the inside. Over the past six months, with the help of current and former essay-mill writers, The Chronicle looked closely at one company, tracking its orders, examining its records, contacting its customers. The company, known as Essay Writers, sells so-called customessays, meaning that its employees will write a paper to a student’s specifications for a per-page fee. These papers, unlike those plucked from online databases, are invisible to plagiarism-detection software.

Everyone knows essay mills exist. What’s surprising is how sophisticated and international they’ve become, not to mention profitable.

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By Malcolm Gladwell

One day this spring, a psychiatrist named Dorothy Lewis got a call from her friend Betty, who works in New York City. Betty had just seen a Broadway play called “Frozen,” written by the British playwright Bryony Lavery. “She said, ‘Somehow it reminded me of you. You really ought to see it,’ ” Lewis recalled. Lewis asked Betty what the play was about, and Betty said that one of the characters was a psychiatrist who studied serial killers. “And I told her, ‘I need to see that as much as I need to go to the moon.’ “

Lewis has studied serial killers for the past twenty-five years. With her collaborator, the neurologist Jonathan Pincus, she has published a great many research papers, showing that serial killers tend to suffer from predictable patterns of psychological, physical, and neurological dysfunction: that they were almost all the victims of harrowing physical and sexual abuse as children, and that almost all of them have suffered some kind of brain injury or mental illness. In 1998, she published a memoir of her life and work entitled “Guilty by Reason of Insanity.” She was the last person to visit Ted Bundy before he went to the electric chair. Few people in the world have spent as much time thinking about serial killers as Dorothy Lewis, so when her friend Betty told her that she needed to see “Frozen” it struck her as a busman’s holiday.

But the calls kept coming. “Frozen” was winning raves on Broadway, and it had been nominated for a Tony. Whenever someone who knew Dorothy Lewis saw it, they would tell her that she really ought to see it, too. In June, she got a call from a woman at the theatre where “Frozen” was playing. “She said she’d heard that I work in this field, and that I see murderers, and she was wondering if I would do a talk-back after the show,” Lewis said. “I had done that once before, and it was a delight, so I said sure. And I said, would you please send me the script, because I wanted to read the play.”

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By Michele Willens, LA Times 2004

In the ’60s, beach-roaming kids discovered the Byrds playing at Jane Fonda and Roger Vadim’s open beach bash. A decade later, Cher’s son Elijah Allman’s first birthday party featured elephants and an Army tank. More recently, a lemonade stand served Tom Hanks, Kevin Kline and Tori Spelling, and every year, kids watch Fourth of July fireworks shot off from a private barge.

Los Angeles has no shortage of wealthy private enclaves, but none has quite the allure of the Malibu Colony, a mile of about 115 densely packed houses, off Pacific Coast Highway, mostly on 30-foot- wide lots, half of them on the “land side” (where prices have reached $6 million), half on the more desired beach side (where a home sold for $15 million this summer). Every house behind the simple wood guard shack and gate has a number (30, for instance) and many of them a celebrity provenance (No. 38 passed from Timothy Hutton to Bette Midler to Woody Harrelson.)

But the Colony is also a place where families have lived since it was established, and where thousands of kids (including this writer and later, her children) grew up, at least part of the year. Memories of the colony’s beauty, close-knit community, its storied residents and sun-drenched privilege drew about 150 people to the Littlejohn family’s tennis court recently for a first-ever Malibu Colony reunion. Ranging in age from 7 to 77, the group was ebullient but well aware of the obvious seductions and potential liabilities of growing up in the Colony.

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GHOSTS OF DOWNTOWN: How You Get From $1.75 Lunches to $2,000- a-Month Lofts Depends on Many Things, Such as the Death of Urban Self-Loathing

By Carol Lynn Mithers

Publication info: Los Angeles Times [Los Angeles, Calif] 22 Sep 2002: I.14.

Photo from Skellum on Flickr

The windows are the same, though I never realized how grand they are, how high and wide. Maybe that’s because back then they were masked by cheesy drapes. I probably never saw them this clean either. When no one in the tour group was looking, I rested my hand on one, for connection. Each night when my father and I left the office, we’d open these windows for fresh air; in the morning, I’d flip on the AC and pull them down to shut out the street’s noise and stink. Even so, a smell lingered, stale and depressing. The walls were dirty beige, the carpet oatmeal, the furniture a utilitarian mix of file cabinets, water cooler, battered wood desks. All gone now. Everything from those days is gone, everything but the windows.

From 1970 to 1984, the northwest corner of the seventh floor of the Continental Building at 4th and Spring was my late father’s bankruptcy law office. It was the epitome of old downtown, a bleak two-room suite in a seedy building just a block from the skid row missions.

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by Janet Fitch, Los Angeles Times,  22 Apr 2012

To write about this city is in some essential way to create it. Not in cement and steel, but in the imagination of its citizens, as well as in the minds of people who will never come here but who nevertheless carry an image of it in their heads. An image that is, in its way, as important as the concrete place where people live and sleep and look for places to park.

Is it that they lack curiosity? Or is it that curiosity requires a nub of knowledge, as a pearl requires that first grain of sand to irritate the oyster? All they feel is that vague dissatisfaction that the Los Angeles they came here for must be somewhere else, and if only they had enough money or success, they could find it. Meanwhile, they live in a sad vacuum of car and home and freeway.

My project in writing about Los Angeles is to introduce the city to itself. I grew up here, my mother grew up here, my grandmother came here in 1922, at age 15, married to a wardrobe man. I’ve seen Culver City go from a quiet nowheresville where you visited the Helms Bakery on a field trip and got a small loaf of bread, a place so anonymous Patty Hearst hid there before being discovered by the FBI, to a flourishing biosystem of galleries and restaurants.

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Check-in at the Cecil Hotel had to wait a few minutes because Kerri Torrance, the clerk working the graveyard shift one night in November, had to deal with a heist.

A man staying on the 10th floor had called down to report that a woman had grabbed his money and bolted.

After the woman dashed through the lobby and burst out the front doors onto Main Street, Torrance called police while a handful of guests waited.

“She’s right out there … you see … well … he said they were doing drugs, cocaine or something,” Torrance told police officers.

Then she cupped the receiver and mouthed, “I’m sorry, just a minute.”

This was not the type of greeting the new owners of the Cecil desire as they try to “re-brand” the 80-year-old hotel between 6th and 7th streets. “We are not a missionary, we are not a halfway house, we are a tourist’s hotel,” Torrance explained.

In its early years, the Cecil and hotels such as the Million Dollar, the Alexandria and the Rosslyn catered to the city’s elite out-of-town visitors, and lavish parties were held in their grand ballrooms.

When the wealthy abandoned downtown during the Depression, the Cecil and others like it became residential hotels that for generations housed those who were one step above homelessness.

But downtown is becoming a hip destination again, and these hotels are sought by developers who say they can turn a profit by luring university students, working professionals and tourists.

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Welcome to the Hotel Californian. There are no mirrors on the ceilings or pink champagne on ice. Still, like the near-namesake hotel immortalized in the 1977 Eagles hit, this could be heaven. But it seems more like hell. In this five-story, single-room-occupancy building in the middle of cacophonous Westlake, gaping holes in ceilings, trash-strewn hallways and roach-infested rooms welcome tenants.

Conditions like these at the Hotel Californian beset a host of dwellings in Central Los Angeles creating a legion of substandard housing, or slums as they are commonly called. The problem is especially acute in the Westlake and Pico-Union areas, home to some of the city’s oldest buildings. Scores of those neighborhoods’ deteriorating 1920s and ’30s apartment buildings and hotels are rife with fire and safety hazards and unsanitary living conditions.

About 7% of Los Angeles 780,271 multiple-dwelling units are considered substandard, according to the city’s Department of Housing. Local regulatory agencies do not find scads of earth-shattering violations-such as an open elevator shaft or a collapsed roof. But violations are cumulative, in some cases adding up to 20 or more for a single building.

And small problems can grow.

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