Rodger Jacobs, a wonderfully erudite, warm and funny California writer, author and documentary producer is teetering on the edge of homelessness and is frightened of what life will hold if he falls off that edge—a possibility that, at the moment, is looking all but inevitable.

At the request of editors at the Las Vegas Sun who know him , Jacobs wrote an account of his situation, which the Sun printed on Sunday.

I knew Rodger had moved to Las Vegas and was having financial trouble because of a worsening physical condition. But I didn’t know things had gotten this fiscally perilous until Rodger dropped me a note Sunday night to alert me to the story in the Sun.

Below you’ll find the editor’s note and the beginning of Rodger’s piece. It is worth taking the time to read the whole thing—and then to take an extra moment to send him whatever good wishes you can. (However, if you have some freelance writing assignments to spare, send those instead.)

Editor’s note: Think “homeless” and most minds turn to scenes of disheveled men and women living in makeshift tents along Foremaster Lane near downtown Las Vegas. Many of them have adopted homelessness as their lifestyle. But the Great Recession has created the new homeless, people with good work histories who are victims of unemployment and foreclosures. We won’t necessarily find them sleeping on a downtown sidewalk. We asked Rodger Jacobs to tell his story, in his own words.

As I write this, taking a brief late night respite from packing books into boxes, I am just days away from an uncertain future, a Black Tuesday when the Sword of Damocles will, under legal edict, fall upon my head; and, as the ancient Greek and Roman tale of Dionysius and Damocles urges, I invite you to walk a mile in my shoes for a few brief moments.

Within a matter of days I am going to become one of the more than 13,000 homeless people living in Clark County and, frankly, I am frightened.

I am a 51-year-old professional writer; throughout my 20-year career I have been an award-winning feature documentary producer (“Wadd: The Life and Times of John C. Holmes” and multiple educational documentaries), a trade and arts magazine journalist, a successful playwright (“Go Irish: The Purgatory Diaries of Jason Miller”), a true crime author and a literary event producer. For the past two years, I have enjoyed my role as a book and literature columnist for Pop Matters, a popular online journal of cultural criticism.

But in the larger scheme of things, my credentials are utterly meaningless. In less than two weeks, my girlfriend and I will be without a home in a town where we have no friends, no family, and apparently no safety net to catch us when we fall.

I have been medically disabled for the past eight years; my primary source of income is my monthly Social Security disability payment of $926 and whatever supplemental income I can earn within the $1,000 monthly limit, but with jobs in the freelance market few and far between in the new economy, several months often pass without additional income.

My girlfriend, Lela, and I relocated to Las Vegas in 2007 from San Francisco to care for my terminally ill mother; the plan at the time was to liquidate my mother’s meager estate upon her passing, see to her funeral arrangements and return to California. But by the time my mother succumbed to her illness two years ago this week, the recession had hit, jobs for myself and Lela — a freelance editor — were scarce, my health was worsening, and we found ourselves effectively stuck in Southern Nevada. We were living a hand-to-mouth existence, with no savings and uncertain where the next month’s rent was coming from — let alone money for groceries, transportation, prescription and doctor co-pays and medical supplies not covered by Medicare…..

Read the rest.

The photo, by Sam Morris of the Las Vegas Sun, was taken as Rodger talked to one of his editors to see if he could expedite a check he is owed. Reportedly, the editor wasn’t able to do anything about speeding up payment.

UPATE: Commenter sbl pointed out that the blog Griffith Park Wayist has information as to how someone can help Rodger if anyone has a mind to do so. They’ve also posted the video that the Sun made of Rodger and his circumstance, which is assuredly worth watching.

We first met Nina Montoya when she was a senior at Venice High School where, in English teacher Dennis Danziger’s class, she began to discover her talent for writing.

During the year, Nina began a series of essays about her experiences in foster care, two of which WLA posted here.

The first of the essays described the day when Nina and her then nine-year-old sister were taken away from their home and plunged into the foster care world. (Nina was seven-years old at the time.)

Her next essay was about her struggle to make sense out of her feelings of love for her abusive dad and her abandoning mother:

….In the past I have been physically and mentally abused by my father. He has told me many times that I am stupid, that I should just give up, quit. When I would speak of college he told me that I shouldn’t bother, that they don’t care if you are smart or stupid, the only reason why they want you is to take your money. He has threatened me, put me in many unnecessary dangers, even threatened my friends as well. Inexplicably, I still love him. I always will love him, for he is my father and though he makes not the best decisions, I know in the end he loves me too. That he is proud of me, I have heard him brag to his friends. I just wish that I could hear the compliments myself, that he would tell me to my face that he is proud.

Even my mother who abandoned me I love her. She left me when I was merely a toddler. She even attempted to do drugs while she was pregnant with me, but I still love her. Though I wish not to speak to her, when she does contact me I tolerate it. This is because as much as I hate her, my love is stronger….

In each case, Nina explored the internal landscape of her experience—an experience that is, by the way, shared by 20,000 LA County kids in any given month—with courage, clarity and grace.

Today, we have a third essay. This one continues her foster care narrative and talks about the kind of a choice a kid should not have to make.

The Decision

One of the most intense, passionate and heartbreaking moments in my life happened when I was seven. The court asked my sister and me to decide who we wanted to live with and raise us for the rest of our lives. An extreme question for any child.

We had three choices, my dad, my mom or Jennifer Cooper. Jennifer was one of the sweetest people I knew. I loved Jennifer, who was a mother figure to me. I considered Jennifer, who was the mother of my dad’s previous girl friend, Jackie, to be family.

My dad remained good friends with Jackie after their break up and was still good friends with her family as well. Jennifer owned a large house and my dad paid rent to her to live there. There were six rooms, if I can remember correctly, maybe even more. Two of the three bed rooms upstairs belonged to my dad and my sister and I shared the third bedroom.

During the time we lived in Jennifer’s house, along with Jessica, another of Jennifer’s daughters, we all grew close. Jennifer loved my sister and me deeply and wanted the best for us. In my mind when the judge asked us to pick I knew my decision. I wanted Jennifer even though it meant choosing her over my own blood.

My sister, who was few years older than me, was close to my father. Not that I wasn’t and not that I didn’t love him. I did. But deep down I knew that my father wasn’t comfortable playing the dad role and life would be easier, simpler and more relaxed with Jennifer as my guardian.

So when I asked my sister her decision and she named dad, I was shocked, because I knew she could see the unhappiness that would lay ahead. I told her I decided to live with Jennifer which upset her. My sister, in tears, rushed to my father to tell him the news. As he listened I could tell from the expression on his face and his body language the moment he understood my decision. I had broken his heart .

My heart dropped as I watched the two people that have always been apart of me, my life, sitting on the floor and crying. I couldn’t take the pain and joined in sobbing alongside them.

I begged my father for forgiveness and promised I wouldn’t tear apart our small family and when the court asked who I wanted to live with I said only one word, “dad”.

Nina Montoya graduated from Venice High School in June 2010 and will attend Cal State Northridge this fall.

DAVE EGGERS’ PRIZES AND QUIRKS ON LAT BOOK PRIZE NIGHT

As most of you know, the LA Times Book Awards were this past Friday night, and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books took place on Saturday and Sunday at UCLA. 125,000 people were expected at the LATFOB and judging from the crowds I saw both days, it is likely that the book fest hit its mark or more.

But first the awards: the full list of the winners may be found here. (For those of you looking for a good reading list, the lists of winners and finalists are a great place to start. I’ve already downloaded on to my iPod the audible version of the First Fiction winner, Phillipp Meyer’s American Rust)

I was a judge for the category of Current Interest—along with my wonderful and wise colleagues Henry Weinstein and Bill Boyarsky, The three of us read a preposterous number of books, many of which were very deserving. (A few, not so much.)

We finally narrowed it down to the five below, all of which featured excellent writing and reporting and dealt topics of consequence.

“Columbine” by Dave Cullen
“Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers
“Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder
“Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sharon WuDunn
“The Healing of America: The Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Healthcare” by T.R. Reid

The winner was Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun-–my personal favorite and a book I can recommend unhesitatingly to any of you. It’s a great story, meticulously reported, and possessed of the grace and velocity of a good novel.

Eggers also got a newly created Innovator’s Award–which “recognizes the people and institutions that are doing cutting edge work to bring books, publishing and storytelling into the future, whether in terms of new business models, new technologies or new applications of narrative art.”

(For the details go here.)

However, while assuredly very deserving of the latter honor, Eggers turned out not be be your average techno nerd/writer. In the course of accepting the two awards, Eggers blurted that the only way he got any reading done was to completely unplug the Internet at his house. “I only go online twice a day,” he said. Even then, in order to get a WiFi signal, he takes his laptop and drives to the parking lot of a local carpet store, and steals their WiFi.

When he and I spoke later on in the evening, we talked about the unplugging issue and I mentioned in passing that, unplugging aside, I thought that the iPhone app for his magazine “McSweeney’s was particularly good.

Eggers winced. “I’ve never seen it,” (said Mr. Innovation).

Me: “What?! You’re kidding.”

Eggers: (apologetically) I saw the drawing. I mean, I thought the drawing was good.

Me: No really, that’s bad.

Eggers: Probably.

[Here's a demo of the app.]

Yet as a writer, a publisher, and as an innovative promoter of the written word-–from basic literacy to literature— Eggers is very, very good. As LA Times Book Review editor David Ulin said to me after he interviewed Dave Eggers on Saturday at the Book Festival—he’s the real deal.

South Park’s creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone have receive death threats based on references to the prophet Muhammad who, in the cartoon, was dressed in a bear costume. (Well, actually the Muhammad was thought to be in the bear outfit. However, it turns out it is actually Santa. So Muhammad is never pictured on the series—disguised or otherwise. But no matter.)

The LA Times (among others) has the story:

In its 200 shows, the irreverent animated program “South Park” has mercilessly satirized Christianity, Buddhism, Scientology, the blind and disabled, gay people, Hollywood celebrities and politicians of all persuasions, weathering the resulting protests and threats of boycotts.

But this week, after an ominous threat from a radical Muslim website, the network that airs the program bleeped out all references to the prophet Muhammad in the second of two episodes set to feature the holy figure dressed in a bear costume. The incident provides the latest example that media conglomerates are still struggling to balance free speech with safety concerns and religious sensitivities, six years after Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was slain for making a film critical of Islamic society.

Comedy Central declined to comment on the latest incident. But “South Park” creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone clearly disagreed with their bosses’ handling of the situation. A statement posted on their website said that executives “made a determination to alter the episode” without their approval and that the usual wrap-up speech from one character didn’t mention Muhammad “but it got bleeped too.”

The network may have thought it had no choice after revolutionmuslim.com, the website of a fringe group, delivered a grim warning about last week’s episode, which depicted Muhammad dressed as a bear….

(Again, it turns out not to be Muhammad at all.)

On the site Matt and Tray were warned that “what they are doing is stupid and they will probably wind up like Theo Van Gogh for airing this show.” A photo of Van Gogh’s body was posted along with the written threat.

May Trey and Matt—and their gross and glorious comedy work—stay safe from any kind of harm. And may those who would make such threats find tolerance.

Here is what Aziz Poonawalla, blogger and Muslim, said about the controversy, and the threats, on Beliefnet.

Some Poonawalla clips:

Most other blogs and news sites are not providing a link to RevolutionMuslim.com - which appears to have been hacked, possibly by angry fans of the show – but I think it’s important to let these idiots know that they are being critiqued. And my critique of them is much the same as my critique of Anwar al-Awlaki: they are cowards, who seek to gain publicity for themselves.

[SNIP]

In fact, it is precisely the over-reaction of extremist muslims who wave around threats of violence that leads to more depictions and insults to the Prophet, not less. The right way to inculcate respect for the Prophet among non-muslims is not to act like a barbarian but to simply express ourselves and explain our beliefs – and then excercise our own right, to walk away. It is by their own actions, supposedly in “defense” of the Prophet, that these extremists actually cause greater offense to the Prophet’s legacy than any mere cartoon…

UPDATE:

This was not posted last night, but here is what Jon Stewart had to say about the situation:

PS: For the record, I would appreciate it if CNN-–which has been bordering on the provocative and overly sensational in its coverage of this loathsome incident—would focus an equally harsh eye on those who suggest and provoke violence in the direction of political figures with whom they disagree.

PPS: Also, for the record: I love South Park.

As you know, Father Greg Boyle’s wonderful first book “Tattoos on the Heart,” has just been published. This means that, in addition to his quarter century of work with gangs, LA’s most famous priest is now officially a writer.

Those who attend authors’ panels at the LA Times Book Festival always seem to want to know how each writer writes. What is his/ her routine? How long does it take them to writes something? Do they ever get writer’s block? You know, that sort of thing.

Because all writers do have their quirky methods, and all have their ways of jump starting their resistance to the blank page.

So it was for Greg Boyle as well.

My story about Father Greg and his new memoir appears in Wednesday’s LA Times. It deals with, among other things, the lengthy and sometimes circuitous route the tales that wound up in Greg’s book took en route to printed form.

Here are some clips:

For the last 20 years, Father Gregory Boyle has been writing — and not writing – the book that is his newly released memoir, “Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion” (Free Press: 220 pp., $25). The difficulty was never a lack of material. For as long as I’ve known him, Boyle has been amassing a stupendously rich cache of stories about the homeboys and homegirls who one way or another found their way to his doorstep.

Boyle was already not writing his book when I met him in the fall of 1990. I’d heard that a Jesuit priest operated some sort of gang ministry out of a small Catholic church located east of the Los Angeles River between the public housing projects of Pico Gardens and Aliso Village.

In the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, when Boyle’s gang work was hitting full-throttle, Pico-Aliso was the home to eight active street gangs and, according to LAPD statistics, had the highest level of gang activity in all of Los Angeles. Since the city was, at the time (and arguably still is), the gang capital of the world, this meant that the mile-square parish where Greg Boyle was pastor had within its borders the most intense level of gang activity on the planet.

Finding work that is a true calling is as mysterious a process as falling in love. There were elements in Boyle’s Irish Catholic background that suggested the priesthood. He’d had, after all, a beloved Jesuit priest uncle. And he went to Jesuit-run Loyola High School during a time when, for idealistic adolescents like Boyle, activist priests such as Daniel Berrigan were beacons of authenticity.

Yet there was nothing particular to suggest that the smart, Hancock Park-raised boy with the triple master’s degrees (masters of divinity, of sacred theology and of English) would find himself radicalized by a year among the poor of Bolivia and come home to run the nation’s best-known gang intervention program, surrogate-fathering the kids whom most of the rest of the culture wanted to lock up and forget.

I was curious about what kind of person would embrace such a maelstrom and got myself assigned a profile of Boyle for the Los Angeles Times Magazine, and spent the next six months bungee-corded to his ankle, trying to figure out this priest guy who thought he could make a difference with gangsters.

About halfway through my reporting in 1991, I noticed that what I was witnessing had sprawled beyond what a 10,000-word story could contain. I wanted to write a book. But I needed Boyle’s consent, which was problematic since he’d mentioned that he was working on his own manuscript.

I screwed up my courage and blurted my request. He stared curiously at my distress. “Oh,” he said, “I was really hoping you would ask.” I did not realize until much later that in proposing my book, I had unwittingly given Boyle the excuse he needed to keep not writing his.

Yet, he continued to gather his funny, quirky, redemptive, heartbreaking stories. He told them in homily form in the dozens of jails, camps and juvenile halls where he celebrated mass on Saturday, embedded them in the speeches he gave to raise money for the jobs program that was the precursor for Homeboy Industries (which provides work experience, therapy and the opportunity for once-rival gang members to work side-by-side), unfurled them at panels, hearings and conferences where he tried to convince lawmakers and anyone else who’d listen that the young men and women whom his tales featured were worth much more than the worst things they had ever done and that they should never, ever be thrown away……

Read the rest.

And then, when he’s back in town, do yourself a favor and go to hear him read and speak. (And get the book, of course.)

My good pal, Marc Cooper, has had the excellent idea of weaving the war stories of his younger years as a reporter into a chapter by chapter series of blog posts.

The site where these stories live is called, logically enough, Reporter War Stories.

And the tales contained make for intriguing reading.

The first is a tale of Chile in 1971: The Day Fidel Arrived. But you should begin here at the prologue.

I particularly like the next entry Chile 1973 My .22 And Me Parts I & II It opens like this:

Lest you think ill of me, I had some legit reasons to carry. After all I worked for a Socialist president at a time of great social unrest. And there were literally armed fascist gangs running in the streets. And being a good citizen and all, I had legally registered the gun with the Ministry of Defense as required. I did not, however, have a permit to carry. And I can’t imagine I would have ever used the gun except to maybe throw it at somebody.

On a night in late May, the evening before Allende was to deliver that year’s equivalent of the State of the Union speech, the fascists had blown up a major oil pipeline. Allende declared a state of emergency, putting more militarized carabinero police and some army units out on the street.

It really wasn’t that big of a deal. I had finished translating an advance copy of the speech that afternoon and I spent the evening with friends at a very good French restaurant called La Cascade. On the way home, around midnight, our taxi driver spotted a police roadblock and check point. No sweat he said. No sweat, as ling as nobody in the car had a gun.

My girlfriend at that time told me not be stupid and give her the gun. She would put it in her panty stockings crotch and the polite Chilean cops would never check there.

I did my on-the-spot risk assessment and decided against the crotch option. I figured there was little chance the police would pat down a car full of happy gringos. And if they did, it would be easier to talk my way out of it all rather than tick them off by hiding it on a girl.

That didn’t work out quite so well.

Read the rest.

HBO has a new movie for television debuting this weekend. It is a bio pic of sorts based on the life and memoirs of writer/biologist Temple Grandin.

If you’re not familiar with Grandin, she is an autistic woman who is considered to be one of the nation’s top animal biologists. She credits her exceptional facility for understanding animals’ fears and needs and actions to the perceptual lens her own autistic condition has—for better and for worse— uniquely provided.

Her 2004 book, Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior, was easily my favorite book I read that year.

Terry Gross has interviewed Grandin three different times on Fresh Air (once for the release of each one of Grandin’s books). This past Friday, Fresh Air played a compilation of the interviews to coincide with the launching of the HBO movie.

The movie, which would have been all to simple to wreck, is thankfully reported to be excellent. Mary McNamera at the LA Times said it was:

Utterly and gorgeously unsentimental, “Temple Grandin,” arriving Saturday, clomps across the screen with all the wild-eyed grace of its main character, chronicling the life of a woman who not only overcame a host of physical, mental and social obstacles but actually used her autism to create a career for herself in animal husbandry.

The film stars, of all people, Claire Danes, who in the clips that I have heard, is stunningly good.. The Huffington Post says of Danes:

Finally, she has a found a role where she is beyond great, she is stupendous. Claire Danes is revelatory as Temple Grandin animal behaviorist, best-selling author, autistic and expert in autism. This is a fascinating movie and I learned so much about this woman and about autism. Temple did not speak until she was four and if not for her mother would have probably ended up spending her life in an institution. What a loss that would have been.

I’ve got it TiVOed and plan to watch it tonight.. (It is playing off and on during much of the week.)

But, whether or not you watch the movie, at the very least, if you don’t know about Temple Grandin, do yourself a favor listen to the interview mash-up. Her unique and entirely unsentimental ability to feel into an animal’s perspective tells us a great deal about our fellow creatures and also, frankly, about ourselves.

UPDATE:

I saw the film late last night, and it’s so, so incredibly good. Claire Danes is spectacular. She utterly vanishes into being Grandin.

Please, just see it. You’ll thank me. If you don’t have HBO, wait until it’s on DVD and go for it then. But if you miss it, you’ll be missing out. So don’t.

I was reading Lit, Mary Karr’s alcohol-soaked but sequin-bright third memoir, when I received this second essay from Venice High School senior Nina Montoya. Nina, if you’ll remember, is one of English teacher Dennis Danziger’s students and part of a PEN-in-the Classroom workshop run by author Amy Friedman., who is also Danziger’s wife.

Due to her age, Nina is pretty new to this matter of writing. But as you can see from the earlier essay posted here (which you should read along with this one, if you haven’t), she has a knack for the work, however nascent. I bring up Mary Karr because, although when The Liars club, the memoir that forever put Karr on the literary map, was published in 1995, Karr was 40 and had behind her one marriage, the birth of her son, an MFA with a famous writer as mentor, and a whole lot of therapeutic hours logged talking about her spirit-gouging and deeply abusive childhood, there is thread of similarity linking Karr’s books and Nina’s newly-minted efforts.

By contrast, Nina has not yet graduated high school. Yet she has a budding writer’s voice and the willingness to wrestle with the hard stuff—both of which merit nurturing.

Scattered across Los Angeles, there are other talented kids like Nina who also have important stories to tell, and voices that merit nurture. With any luck, some of those LA stories—along with more of Nina’s—will find their way to WitnessLA.

Here’s Nina:

Inexplicable Love

by Nina Montoya

I believe that the love you have for your family is incredibly strong. Your family member can do something so horrible that it makes you want to hate them and never speak to them again, but in the end you will still love them, still end up contacting them in some way. Even if you claim to not love that person or state that you disown them. Deep down you know in your heart as much as you want to deny it, it’s there, that unexplainable love.

In the past I have been physically and mentally abused by my father. He has told me many times that I am stupid, that I should just give up, quit. When I would speak of college he told me that I shouldn’t bother, that they don’t care if you are smart or stupid, the only reason why they want you is to take your money. He has threatened me, put me in many unnecessary dangers, even threatened my friends as well. Inexplicably, I still love him. I always will love him, for he is my father and though he makes not the best decisions, I know in the end he loves me too. That he is proud of me, I have heard him brag to his friends. I just wish that I could hear the compliments myself, that he would tell me to my face that he is proud.
Even my mother who abandoned me I love her. She left me when I was merely a toddler. She even attempted to do drugs while she was pregnant with me, but I still love her. Though I wish not to speak to her, when she does contact me I tolerate it. This is because as much as I hate her, my love is stronger. Of all the times I have yelled and screamed that I never want anything to do with her, it is false. I do wish to be around her, I do wish to show my love towards her, but she has lost the opportunity. As much as I wish for this communication it cannot happen, she has chosen the needle over her own children, so for that she will not be able to experience that love.
As much as there is something wrong with each of my parents I still love them, no matter how much pain each of them has put me through, I do. That’s the thing, a love like the one you have for your family is not like any other love. I believe that this familial love is almost indestructible, can never disintegrate. There have been so many times I have felt that deep fiery anger of hate toward both of my parents but, the love that I have for each of them is stronger, especially for my father. He raised my sister and me and that is something I will always be thankful for. I have seen him break down, cry even and he has seen the same from me. In those times of need we are always there for each other, in the end we will always have one another.

NOTE: More news stories a bit later this morning, so check back.

Nina Montoya is a student in writer/teacher Dennis Danziger’s English class at Venice High School.

She is also part of PEN in the Classroom, a program that sends professional writers into their classrooms for creative writing residencies. In Danziger’s class the kids worked on personal essays, and the professional writer also happened to be Danzinger’s wife, Amy Friedman.

Ten of those students will be performing the essays that resulted in a spoken word setting on Monday, March 8, at the Powerhouse Theater in Santa Monica. (I’ll remind you again when the date is closer.)

But in meantime, I thought you would enjoy reading the biographical essay that the talented Nina has written.

It is a called: Never to be Seen Again.

Keep in mind as you read it that Nina, a senior, is an honor student, a cheerleader, on staff of the yearbook and has been accepted by Cal State, Northridge for Fall 2010.

Ten years ago I was sitting in my third grade classroom at Noise Elementary School picking up my school things, shoveling them into my Lion King backpack. Before I whisked out the classroom door my teacher caught my eye. I can hardly remember what she looked like, all I can remember was thinking she looked pretty and her hair was a dark brunette. She had just received a phone call and ordered me to accompany her to the office.

I cannot recall when I first remember seeing my older sister Kirin. Kirin, age nine, was either already in the police car or we stepped into the cruiser together. We were not allowed to go home and pack our things; it was straight off to foster care again, except this time I was seven, old enough to remember. I had been there once before, but did not remember anything about that place. My only knowledge of having been there before was from what my sister had told me.

My memory is foggy as to what exactly happened. I do not remember my sister’s reaction to any of this. We knew we would not go home anytime soon and that upset us. Home was in Pasadena, California and to me always seemed prefect. With warm weekends and seemingly endless sunny days. Most of those sunny days we spent on the perfectly manicured, bright green lawn, running crazy and wild through the sprinklers in the front yard.

While we were being driven away, I was trying to recognize something, anything, grasping for some kind of hint, but I never did figure out where we were headed. The vehicle slowly pulled up in front of a small one-story house with an attached garage on the left side of our unwanted new home.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, December 20, a very interesting benefit performance is taking place at the Roxy Theater.

It starts at 8 p.m. and is titled BABIES BEHIND BARS-–because the $15 a person proceeds will benefit a group of organizations that work to keep kids out of the juvenile justice system: A Place Called Home, Tia Chucha’s Centro Cultural, Youth Justice Coalition, and Youth Mentoring Connection.

The show is part of a series of educational events scheduled this weekend that aim to “bring awareness of the impact of the juvenile justice system on children and families across the country. ”

In addition to its charitable and activist ambitions, the concert features an intriguing line up of artists. There is Grammy nominated writer, musician and producer, John Forte, whose story I’ll get back to in a minute.

The night will also included musical performances by such groups and artists as Freddie Gibbs (who was the subject of LA Weekly’s cover story two weeks ago), Terra Incognita, the Bricks, and Broken Ornaments—which was co-created by Mike de la Rocha, musician, poet, activist—and the main legislative deputy when it comes to gangs and juvenile justice for City Councilman Tony Cardenas. (Who knew de la Rocha was also a rocker?)

Oh, yes, and about John Forte.

Forte knows a little something about being behind bars. He started life as a bright, musical kid who won a full scholarship to Phillips Exeter Academy, and graduated in 1993. Two years later, he co-wrote and produced two songs on the Fugee’s multi-platinum and Grammy-winning 1996 album. Three years after that, he found himself in a financial jam and made a colossally stupid decision that landed him a conviction for drug possession and a fourteen-year prison sentence. (It was his first offense, but there was quite a bit of cocaine involved.)

Seven years into his prison time, John Forte became one of the 14 people pardoned by President George W. Bush at the end of Bush’s last term.

Now Forte is back to music (obviously), and spends much of his time helping kids with programs like such as this one, and with the concert on Sunday.

Bottom line, if you’re looking for a way to celebrate the holidays with good music—for a good cause—try The Roxy on Sunday Night.