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With a few minutes to kill I logged into my long-dormant account at Zazzle.com and did as I’d said I would a couple days ago: turned the 1932 Los Angeles Summer Olympics badge image captured at a car show by my friend Frazgo into a tee (click it for the bigger picture):

Then I ordered one for me and one for him — no charge Frazmatazz, since I couldn’t have done it without you!

Want one? Didn’t think so, but you can check out its Zazzle page here.

In these years of fading memory I can’t seem to recall the specfix of how I came to have this image below that I rediscovered this weekend whilst stumbling around my archives. My best recollection is that I found it via my fellow LA Metblogger Frazgo, either via a post he made on the find somewhere or from his Flickr photostream.

What is it? Well, I’m a little fuzzy on that as well. Obviously it’s a weathered treasure from the 1932 summer Olympic games here in L.A., but specifically I’m thinking that in the original image the badge was attached as an ornament  that adorned either the grille or the hood of a car from that time, and that the end result you see above is from my efforts in Photoshop to separate it out and stand it alone, maybe to put it on a shirt or a —.

[Sound of tires screeching]

Mystery solved! Instead of sitting here writing about scratching my head about it, I zipped over to Frazgo’s Flickr photostream and found the original image. Yep, it’s just as I’d thought.

Next stop: shirt creation!

I heard the news via an unlikely source on January 28, 1986. I was in my Mazda GLC going from my apartment in Van Nuys to my job in the small business complex behind the gas station Barham Boulevard deadends into in the Cahuenga Pass. I was traveling on the gridlocked southbound 170 Freeway approaching the 134 interchange it passes under to become the 101. I was probably late.

I was listening to Rick Dees on KIIS-FM as I usually did, and coming back from a commercial break instead of launching into more of his usual shenanigans he spoke in a tone that was part solemn and part disbelieving in telling his listeners that the Challenger space shuttle had apparently exploded shortly after lift-off a few minutes earlier, reportedly killing all seven astronauts on-board.

To this day I’m not sure why the news hit me so hard, but I felt as if I’d been punched in the stomach by it. Overcome with sorrow I burst into tears, and sobbed as I crept my car along with the slow flow of vehicles while Dees and his on-air cohorts discussed what they knew and what they didn’t.

Eventually they ran out of things to say and put on a melancholy, reflective song that was a hit back then. It was “Life In A Northern Town,” by The Dream Academy. And just as my waterworks started to dry up, the song got to the last stanza of lyrics that close like this:

And though he never would wave goodbye,
You could see it written in his eyes,
As the train rolled out of sight,
Bye-bye.

I didn’t know who or what the song had been written about. All I knew was that those last few lines spoke of someone’s death, and for me from that point on they became about the Challenger crew never getting a chance to wave goodbye, of the space shuttle rolling out of sight and the sad and slow byyyyyyyyyyyyye byyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyye reflecting mine and the country’s heartbreak and loss.

I can hear this song today without so much as choking up, but it never fails to transport me back to that moment of profound tragedy.

Later that evening President Ronald Reagan was to give his State of the Union address, but postponed it and instead spoke to the nation about the disaster, closing with:

“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and ’slipped the surly bonds of Earth’ to ‘touch the face of God.’”

They were: Michael J. Smith, Dick Scobee, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, Judith Resnik.

Chicken Boy on Broadway 1974

Originally uploaded by mr. rollers

My friend and fellow walking and biking and Los Angeles history enthusiast Walt has posted on his 90042 Blog the picture at right taken by my friend, awesome photographer and urban cyclist extraordinaire Stephen “Mr. Rollers” Roullier.

Beyond being awesome, it reminds me I don’t do enough to chronicle and document my city. My biggest internal struggle as someone who always has some sort of camera with him when he ventures out and about, is one of apathy and procrastination pitted against a latent desire to document street scenes such as this one.

In the immediate they might be dubbed mundane, worth little more than a glance, but in a city as ever-evolving as Los Angeles, they have value as they age, demanding closer examination of what was and what’s changed.

As a teen, when my friends were blowing their allowances or minimum wage money on video games and cigarettes and clothes and drugs and music, I spent a few months saving up the $120 needed to step me away from the Kodak Instamatic of my childhood and up to my first “real” camera, a simple SLR outfit from Sears, back in 1980-81. Little did I realize that the initial cash outlay for the hardware would be the least of one’s expenses. The package deal even came with a couple 12-exposure rolls of film and I burned through those. Then came the need for money for more film and money for developing. And more film, and more developing. Having so little of the former, subsequently I often went long times without being able to acquire the latter.

And as an obvious result I did a lot more not taking pictures than taking them. I was pretty strict in what I snapped — even as I got older and had more disposable income. It was a simple matter of economics. Of making resources count.

Today, powered by a rechargeable battery, my digital camera can take thousands of pix stored on its memory card. As such, you’d think I’d have pixelized my city like mad, but I have not. One might presume that’s because old habits die hard, but I think it’s primarily laziness coupled with an attitude of “Agh, it’ll be there tomorrow.”

But that’s the point. Just like Chickenboy, and that RTD bus (and the RTD!) and that sapling tree, and Cisco’s in Stephen’s photo: it might not be there tomorrow.

I often wistfully imagine what long lost people, places and things and events of my youth and early adulthood might be contained in my archives had digital cameras been born 20 years earlier than they were, and I’d been able to snap away with a greater degree of reckless abandon.  I envy and respect people like Stephen who’ve done what I couldn’t or wouldn’t, as well as those who’ve grown up with the technology. To them I say don’t under-appreciate it. Exploit it for what it can do to capture the past in the present. For the future.

I had my biannual visit to the dentist this morning, his Miracle Mile office of which is conveniently located only a couple blocks from a freshly installed exhibit featuring sections of the Berlin Wall and commemorating the 20th anniversary of its fall.

So of course afterwards I deviated from my normal home-dentist-work route to go back over and check it out, and joy of joys you can walk right up to the panels and touch ‘em and everything. You can even get all touristy and strike a pose with or without your bike in front of eight of what will eventually be 10 panels, spanning some 40 feet — reportedly the world’s largest stretch of the wall outside its hometown.

It will be up on Wilshire Boulevard across from LACMA until November 14 when the order will come to “tear down this wall” and install it permanently at the Wende Museum in Culver City.

My Flickr photoset is here.

The Hancock Park-adjacent neighborhood bordered by Larchmont and Van Ness to the west and east, and Melrose and Beverly to the north and south is really a gem. Quiet, tree-lined streets front well-kept single-family homes in a variety of styles, along with duplexes, quads, and a smattering of larger multi-unit apartment buildings.

As a student attending Hollywood’s Le Conte Junior High I lived some of my 7th and all of my 8th and 9th grade years on Wilton Place just one block further east of Van Ness and I would regularly bike or skateboard through there for the welcome respite and change of scenery it provided. See, Wilton was something of a dividing line.  East of it to Western and beyond there was much more intrusion in the way of boxy 1950s and ’60s era apartments, and the residences that remained just seemed a bit shabbier and wearier than those standing a bit more confidently behind the much greener lawns west of Wilton where time seemed to march much more slowly.

In all my explorations past though I never found The Vivian — or let’s just say it never registered. But it did after getting ticketed on my bike this summer and as a result diverting my course to avoid the stop sign at Larchmont and Clinton where it happened. Now, as I make my way north up Larchmont from Beverly I turn right at the light at Rosewood, a block south of Clinton, and take that east over to Bronson and there’s The Vivian on my left before I get to Melrose and head further east.

Besides being an old-style apartment building with an absolutely unique name, its most charming feature is its simple still-working neon sign that I’ve long wanted to snap, but didn’t until I forced myself to pull over on my way home Friday night.

Being that neon’s as beloved by me as it is a difficult thing to capture with a handheld camera it took several exposure adjustments and snaps until I got one that did it justice (click the image for the bigger picture). If any tenants chanced glances out their windows they would have seen me somewhat self-consciously trying and failing not to look suspicious. Soon I was on my way toward home and the weekend that awaited.

With its stone’s-throw proximity to the hallowed fortress of Paramount Studios to the north, if The Vivian’s sign could talk I’d bet it could no doubt tell of shining down upon the joys and sorrows of a procession of would-be stars living there while trying to storm that castle and make their Hollywood dreams come true.

I may sigh in general fatigue knowing there’s no winning this war on ignorance, but that doesn’t mean I drop my armor and surrender from defending the true Eastside as well as my part of town against those blythe hoards ever-intent on conveniently jumping on the bandwagon with those who’ve come before them to dismissively mislabel its civic geography.

The far more forgiving Franklin Avenue Blog introduced me to my latest foe: the no-doubt fine folks at the Your Daily Thread website, who’ve recently released “The Official Eastside Green Guide.” But instead of being about Boyle Heights and surroundings where it should be, of course it’s that never-gets-tired westside-stoked POV of what’s eastside: namely Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Atwater Village, with perhaps a little Virgil Village and East Hollywood along with a sprinkling of Historic Filipinotown and Angeleno Heights.

Basically as they see it pretty much anything east of Western Avenue qualifies because after all, it’s east of Western Avenue, duh! Nevermind that Western Avenue was so named because it represented the westernmost boundary of an expanding late-19th century Los Angeles (Westlake, anyone?), making everything between it and downtown the ORIGINAL WESTSIDE way back when today’s westside wasn’t much more than swamps and ranchos and oil fields.

But good westies don’t let facts like that get in the way of co-opting this part of town as their “eastside.” Because it’s east of them, get it? Because they’re the city’s true center.

I really should forgive such endless elitist entitlement for they simply know not what they do — and I probably might have until I got to the comments to the post on YTD.com announcing the guide and found a response to someone who dared ask, “…why are you calling it the eastside? It isn’t.”

Tracy Hepler wrote back: “Thanks for the comment. The communities we mentioned are considered part of the east side of Los Angeles. There are many communities even more East but as L.A. that does not mean that the communities mentioned aren’t a part of the Eastside.”

I became particularly fixated with that first broad stroke she presented as some sort of acknowledged fact. “Considered part of the east side of Los Angeles,” by whom I wondered. Maybe the three people in the office that day when it was time to title the guide? Sure, there are those who consider L.A.to be a desert or dinosaurs to have existed 4,000 years ago or the world to be flat or the Holocaust to be fiction, or President Obama not to be a U.S. citizen, but just because an ignorant or biased segment of the population agrees with what you believe doesn’t make it true.

It’s nice that Tracy saw fit to give an unnamed shout-out to the “many communities even more East” (like Pasadena and Las Vegas and New York and London perhaps?), but then she slams the door with her final rebuttal” “that does not mean that the communities mentioned aren’t a part of the Eastside.”

Of course I au contraire’d mademoiselle Hepler with the following comment:

You lead with: “In L.A. it often feels as if the Westside is leading the charge when it comes to being consciously green.”

To which I respond: “In L.A. it often feels as if the Westside is leading the charge when it comes to being consciously obstinate in perpetuating the misnomer of Silver Lake/Echo Park/Los Feliz as “Eastside.”

Tracy Hepler’s rationalization that it’s east of the westside and therefore is the east side of L.A. is typically dismissive and woefully narrow. Google maps may provide little in the way of clues, but history does. Western Avenue wasn’t named because of what’s east of it. It was named because it represented an approximation of the original western boundary as the city expanded beyond downtown. From that perspective anything between it and downtown is the original westside.

Sad thing is I know that doesn’t mean diddly to Tracy or anyone else who decided to misname the guide. I’m sure it’s great and full of excellent info, but just know that there are those of us who live in those communities and frequent the establishments there that take umbrage with your title and know and respect where the true Eastside is, geographically, culturally, politically and socially.

Do I know what this diverse section should properly be labeled? Well, I’m still sticking by my favorite informal name of choice: the Upside.

The floor-level outlet that has provided the power to our entertainment unit has long needed upgrading. It’s old two-pronger (as evidenced by  the interesting decorative detail around the plugs, as shown above) that has been an overloaded trooper in steadily supplying the needed juice through an eight-outlet powerstrip to all our audio/visual stuff. But it wasn’t until I was back there this weekend trying to make heads and tails of the massive tangle of cables and cords coming and going from the stereo, Playstation, VCR, TV, turntable, DVD, speakers, TiVo and satellite receiver  in order to get the DVD player and TiVo working with the TV and the TiVo working with our new DirecTV receiver that I found out how old when I opted to replace it for a more modern three-prong plug — and one without a metal faceplate.

After removing it, I looked on the back and found a series of patent numbers listed, the first being the top one in this pic:

Using Google to put the pieces together I eventually found a series of websites that told me this particular outlet had been in service in the house going back as long ago as 94 years, maybe a year or two less. One can only imagine the variety of things it powered over all those years.

U.S. Patent No. 1, 146,938 for an Attachment Plug Receptacle was applied for by inventor Harvey Hubbell on July 23, 1914 and approved July 20, 1915.  Hubbell’s most famous creations were the pull chain electrical socket and his original 1904 plug, which eliminated the need to hardwire devices directly to their power source. This plug adapted any of the past attachment plugs to now standard or knife blade plugs common to that era.

This is how I handled the horror.

So I got on a plane yesterday morning and flew to Dallas for a trade show I have to work pretty much nonstop until Saturday when I come home. At my first opportunity, which proved to be at 10:30 p.m. last night, instead of heading back to my hotel after a pre-convention event at the Hyatt Regency, I walked  to a place I’ve known about pretty much all my life. And while I can’t say it’s a location I’ve longed to visit, I knew that one day I would inevitably and somberly pace about Dealey Plaza and stand near where Abraham Zapruder made the world’s most infamous home movie, looking back and forth from the 6th Floor of what was the Texas School Book Depository out along Elm Street where President John F. Kennedy was assassinated 45 years ago this past November 22.

So I did.

At the steps of the ungainly named John Neely Bryan north pergola concrete structure.

Looking across Elm from the Neely pergola at the grassy knoll and the rear of  Dealey Plaza.

Looking up at the sixth floor window of what was the Texas School Book Depository Building.

The plaque on the corner of the book depository. I was impressed the description included the word “allegedly” in refering to Lee Harvey Oswald as the killer, and not surprised the word had been underscarred over the years by those who believe he was indeed the patsy he said he was.

Anyway, I can’t bore you with much more than my dim photographs at the present as I’ve got to get ready for another big and long day. I’ll probably pay the site another visit before I leave Dallas, preferably during the daytime. Rumor is there’s an event in conjunction with this convention that’s taking place in the Sixth Floor Museum, so hopefully I’ll be able to attend that, too.