In case you missed Steve Lopez’s column yesterday, it’s a good one. Here’s how it began:

“What is it?” Kelly Charles asked as he walked to his job as a custodian in downtown Los Angeles and gazed up at a rather odd construction project. “A roller coaster?”

As I wandered the neighborhood, other guesses were:

A ski jump.

A toboggan run.

A water slide.

What’s got everyone talking is the odd-looking tower that rises 140 feet above the 101 Freeway, directly across from the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels. The futuristic metallic edifice, with a wraparound spiral Dr. Seuss would love, is not part of a theme park. It is the signature adornment on a new arts-oriented public high school that will cost roughly $230 million.

(Most everyone I know guessed an escaped ride from Six Flags Magic Mountain.)

Evidently the high school was going to be an ordinary campus until Eli Broad decided it should be a state of the art design monument, as the Times and the Daily News reported in 2003. To that end, Broad hooked the district up with his friend the $800,000 designer. And pretty soon the water slide wonder tower (or whatever) was in the works.

All of this would have been fine if Eli was footing some of the bill. But he wasn’t. (He offered to loan the district some money, which is not exactly the help that was needed.)

Still, way back then the Superintendent Roy Romer said that the school would still just cost the approved $73.2 million.

And then the cost ballooned to $230 million.

The tower rises from a 950-seat performing arts theater, and this part of the project alone is priced at $49 million, writes Lopez.

Soooo-o-o-o-o-o. in an era when neighborhood schools are badly in need of repair, classes are catastrophically overcrowded, and the state is planning to slash 10 percent out of public education across the board, the district is spending an extra $100 million for this fancy design?

This is not giving us confidence in the Sup and the LAUSD board. Priorities, people!

As Lopez points out, the toboggan run school design boondoggle is not David Brewer’s doing. But he has done nothing to fix or ameliorate the situation.


Calling Ray Cortines. We are ready for some sane and sensible leadership.

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OKAY, FIRST THE BOOKS:

The LA Times Festival of Books takes over the UCLA campus this weekend. All day Saturday and Sunday seventy or eighty thousand people will show up at UCLA to attend author panels and readings scheduled every hour from 10 am until 4 pm on eighteen different stage and lecture halls.

It’s all free. And it’s exceptionally cool, I promise you.

I’m on a Saturday panel at 10 am called “Nonfiction from the Streets” moderated by Jill Leovy (the Homicide Blog) with Miles Corwin (The Killing Season and And Still We Rise) and a new author named DaShaun Morris who has written a memoir about his time as a Blood gangster.

But ours is only one of many panels that are worth checking out.

At noon you can see famous LA mystery novelist, Michael Connelly, interview legendary LA police procedural novelist, Joe Wambaugh. (Damn. I’m going to that!)

At 3 PM LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick moderates an intriguing line up of writers for a panel called, “California, the Great Experiment.”

Come on down and see us on Saturday. Or failing that, just come on down. Whatever else the LA Times does or does not do right, it gives the residents of LA this fabulous gift once a year when the book fair rolls around.

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RADIO
Saturday at noon, Miles and I will be on KPFK’s Deadline LA (90.7 FM)—talking about the panel and the book fair.

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LA Times columnist Steve Lopez has been apologizing a lot in the last 48 hours.

Here’s what happened.

With homicides in LA spiking and the internecine war raging downtown about who should control the city’s gang programs, Lopez decided to dig up his own anecdotal story about the issue to remind the rest of us what’s at stake here.

In his Wednesday column Lopez writes about his trip to the San Fernando Valley to talk to the valley’s best known gang intervention guy, Blinky Rodriguez.

After visiting Blinky, Lopez goes on to check out a tiny but reputedly successful alternative charter school for at risk kids called the West Valley Leadership Academy. The school is located in Canoga Park and run by a fellow named Paul White. It is here that Lopez starts to go off course.

White has a reputation for running a tight ship. The 25 or so students at the academy have to toe the line or they’re out. But for the kids who stay in, according to the school’s supporters, it can be a life saver.

Unfortunately, along with his good points, White has a bit of a quirk: He doesn’t play well with others and has a habit of railing about how everybody working in gang intervention but….well…. him is doing it wrong. In fact, says White to anyone who will listen, all those other folks are gangster supporters who create “greater menaces to society.”

The gang intervention person who rates highest on White’s menace list? Father Greg Boyle and Homeboy Industries. According to White, Homeboy promotes “racial exclusiveness and ultra-leftist/anti-law enforcement philosophy.”

And that’s one of the nicer things White says.

A few months back, White managed to post a mouth-frothing diatribe at the Huffington Post, that stopped just short of labeling Father Greg evil.

Nevermind that as far as anyone at Homeboy knows, White has never set foot at the place. Where he lacked knowledge, White simply made things up.

During Lopez’ visit, Paul White evidently began dishing out his usual claptrap. And what did veteran columnist Steve Lopez do? Question White on his scurrilous and relentlessly self-promoting statements? (Naturally, White has a book that he’s promoting.) Nope, he just printed ‘em. Without qualification. Without fact checking. Without any mitigation.

Here’s the section in question:

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My extremely smart and funny fiction-writer friend, Tod Goldberg has a thing he does every year on his blog called 12 days of lists. I’ve decided to shamelessly steal this idea and tweak it for WLA. From now until New Year’s eve I’ll be posting lists—a new one every day or so. (I urge you to check out Tod’s lists too.

Some of the lists will be political and social justice-y. Some will be far, far more frivolous. Some will be liberal- leaning (like the one below), some not. Okay, here’s the first one:
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This past Saturday night I was at the LA writer-clogged party for Red Hen Press and decided to ask a bunch of novelists and poets (and one composer) which of the presidential candidates they thought would make the best fictional characters. Here’s what they said:

1. MIKE HUCKABEE by Kate Gale

Kate is the editor of Red Hen Press, and The Los Angeles Review. She’s also the author of five books of poetry, the editor of four anthologies and she is now writing operatic librettos that have been performed at such venues as Disney Hall, and the New York City Opera.

Okay, as a fictional character I’d choose Huckabee because he’s the most ridiculous. So many of his beliefs are so completely out of touch with the majority of the American people. I’d use him in a libretto because librettos are all about extremes. In opera people are going to die, they’re going cheat on their wives, do the wrong thing, and generally behave badly. Huckabee would be a great character in an opera libretto.

2. RUDY GIULIANI by Don Davis

Don is a notable film composer best known for the landmark avant-garde scoring of the three Matrix films. Most recently, Don has been composing operas with Kate Gale (above).

Giuliani is the obvious choice. Rudy would be perfect for a James Elroy hard-boiled type of noir novel because he’d be the Mafiosi head of the police department who kicks the shit out of everyone

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Okay, one can not possibly live and blog in Los Angeles and completely resist commenting on the WGA strike.

But, hey, I’ve been on the phone to Pakistan for most of the evening, and I’m ready for a diversion. (Long story. I’ll be able to tell you more about it midweek, next week.)

With that in mind, I did a little web-cruising and have located the perfect videos for those of you who:

1. Don’t know what the writers’ problem is, already.

2. Do know, but don’t get why you should give a good goddamn.

3. Don’t know, and don’t particularly care except for the fact that the Daily Show is in reruns for the foreseeable future, which really sucks

To help inform you, I have embedded below a couple of videos that explain exactly why the writers are striking….and why you should take care:

This one features the writers/actors/producers from The Office.

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Today’s excellent LA Times Column One story by Erika Hayasaki is about my friend, novelist Leslie Schwartz, and the writing class that she first began as part of the PEN USA-sponsored Homeboy Stories Project that I originally posted about here and here last spring.

The story focuses on two of the class members—one a talented and troubled ten-year old named Freddy, the other an ex-con, ex-homeboy in his early 30’s named Hector Verdugo who, with Leslie’s help, has discovered he has real promise as a writer.

If you can make the time to read the story (and look at Annie Wells’ wonderful photos), I promise, you won’t be sorry.

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Today the LA Times has a story about an LAUSD teacher who got so fed up with the district that she……

….turned the details of her maddening experience into a one woman show called “Dance of the Lemons”—named for the lousy district administrators who, when they failed at one school, simply got rotated to another one.

When Karen Kay Woods started teaching music in the Los Angeles Unified School District, it was as if she were Alice in Wonderland, falling down the rabbit hole. She was given 14 flutes; one worked. She had 56 students — and 48 chairs. When she took her class on a field trip, she had to return hours early because the school buses hadn’t been reserved for the day.

Only unlike Alice, Woods didn’t wind up in Wonderland, she wound up in the not-so-wonderful world of school district red tape…

A very cute, and slighty horrifying tale that will nonetheless cheer up your day.

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Yes, you read right. This is a blog post, about reporters reporting on their reporting. And I think that reporting on the reporting is worth….well….reporting to you.

(Clearly I’m in need of more sleep. ) (Or coffee.) (Or both.)

FishBowl LA has just run a post in which LA Weekly’s Kate Coe and the LA Times’, Chris Lee talk about issues surrounding reporting on the ongoing Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake tragedy. (Coe would want me to tell you that she doesn’t work for the Weekly, she freelances for them, but does work for FishbowlLA, among other places.)

For those of you who are completely FED UP with this sad, bad story, just hum to yourself and skip on to something else. I’ll understand.

Lee said he’s never had more people talk off the record on any other story.

Coe told me that she worried she was too hard on Theresa.

Lee and Coe both have heard that multiple big MSM outlets are working on longer Duncan-Hunt stories.

LEE: I heard Vanity Fair, the New Yorker, New York mag and you were working on pieces too. When a producer from Anderson Cooper 360 called me up asking for the phone number of one of my sources I realized a kind of critical mass had been achieved.

Okay, back to our regularly scheduled programming. Thank you for your patience.

Meanwhile, strange bloggers out there have concluded that Coe and Lee are CIA operatives—or at least that Kate is. (If so, I think Kate’s working far too many jobs. I personally don’t see where she’d find the necessary hours to fit in the CIA mind-control thingy.)

Happy Friday.

photos, left to right, by Joshua Jordan and Donald Graham (Happy now? Sheesh.)

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Photo by Yo Venice

If this isn’t the definitive news story on the Theresa Duncan tragedy, it’s getting mighty close.

Just as she promised on WLA’s comment pages, Kate Coe, who knew Duncan, has written an extremely well-reported story for the LA Weekly on the last years and months of Duncan’s life.

Certainly there’s more to report and write, as it doesn’t answer all of the questions. But it answers quite a lot.

Warning: The article isn’t cheery reading.

Here are a few excerpts:

Things looked incredibly promising in New York. Duncan was tapped to write and direct Closet Cases, an animated TV series for Oxygen Media, and a pilot for Left of the Dial, a TV series for VH1. She was awarded a grant for a new film called You Got the Look that would explore “popular myths of the outlaw, sex, glamour, and danger, while engaging notions of femininity and class.” In 2001, Variety announced that Duncan had sold a pitch to Fox Searchlight — Alice Underground — and would “pen the script” about teenage girls who kidnap a rock star. A month later, Variety reported Duncan was in talks with Fox to direct a feature based on Francesca Lia Block’s cult novels, the Weetzie Bat series.

But the reality was not nearly as glamorous as the image. Block’s agent, Lucy Stille at Paradigm, told the Weekly that Duncan was never formally attached to a Block project — the Weetzie Bat “talks” were just that. You Got the Look exists only as a proposal. And Alice Underground failed to materialize at Fox….

Art dealer and gallery owner Christine Nichols, who had known the couple for years, told the Weekly that Duncan sometimes found it hard to see Blake working with anyone but her. Their relationship was so intertwined, Nichols says, “You were either in complete agreement with everything they said or you were an enemy.”

According to Nichols and other friends who spoke to the Weekly only off record, Duncan began blaming her lack of success on the Church of Scientology, saying that the church was influencing “the studios.” Duncan accused her skeptical friends of stealing hair from her hairbrush to send to the Scientology Center, Nichols says, and confided to Nichols, “I really don’t have any friends.”

On her blog on May 20, she wrote that author and USC research scholar Reza Aslan was a “Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent,” and blamed Scientologists for graffiti and a dead cat in her old Venice neighborhood.

Aslan told the Weekly that whenever he appeared on TV, she contacted him with strange rants. He gave Duncan’s threatening messages to his lawyer because “I wanted someone else to know about this.” Aslan knew her for years, and “she had always said kind of crazy, paranoid things,” but “it just got worse and worse.

(For the record, Reza Aslan is the nicest of men.)

And there’s a lot more....

I had a very close friend in college who was one of the most beautiful, and—in certain ways—brilliant people I’ve ever met. Creative, original, wildly funny …..and empathic to an almost eerie degree. She eventually had a full on psychotic break. Reading Theresa’s writing, and some of Coe’s account, reminds me of my friend when she was going off the rails— but none of us really understood how serious her distress truly was.

She’s dead now too.

What heartbreak. What waste.

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UPDATE: The LA Times’ Chris Lee has just now put up another very good piece on the couple that, in many ways, serves as a second bookend to Coe’s, by illuminating more about Jeremy. It will appear in tomorrow’s paper.

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The AP has reported this afternoon that, the NYPD has now confirmed that the body found by a New Jersey fisherman a week ago, was indeed that of Theresa Duncan’s long-time lover, artist Jeremy Blake.

Like most people tracking this emotionally-fractured and dispiriting story, I wish it were otherwise.

And here, for those of you who have not already run across it, is a link to one of the more interesting, but quite reality-challenged web theories now running rife through the cyber countryside, about how Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake’s deaths were part of some elaborate postmodern hoax or ARG—alternate reality game. (Note to Mr. Dream’s End, one of the prime theorizers: Nice work, dude, but time to leave the keyboard and get yourself some fresh air. Trust me on this one.)

I’ll have a fuller post on Friday or Monday, after I’m deadline free.

In the meantime, I appreciate the tips and comments that some of you have sent my way. While it won’t change the underlying sad reality,somehow we’d all feel better if we understood the “why” of it a little better.

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UPDATE: IN THIS MORNING’S LA TIMES…writer Swati Pandey talks about Theresa Duncan fandom. It’s a sweet, sad, respectful but emotionally honest little piece, and worth reading for the obsessed among us.

SECOND UPDATE: IN TODAY’S WASHINGTON POST David Segal has written what is, far-and-away, the most comprehensive and best researched piece on the couple to date.

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