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So, while I was up on the roof last night getting this shot to the west of the Moon, Saturn, Mars and Venus all gathered together in the western sky, before I came down I also pointed the camera to the northwest and got this shot of that view (click it for the bigger picture):

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The towers on the left, visited this past weekend, put the spire in inspire. Whereas I’ve long put the dis in disdain whenever regarding the tower on the right, visited late Monday afternoon — in surprise at how almost beautiful it looked illuminated in the last rays of that day’s sun.

Both are markedly incongruous to their surroundings. The ones on the left rise from a wedge of backyard surrounded by inner-city blight, the vision and arduous 30-plus-year creation of an untrained but entirely skilled loner who “set out to do something big, and did it.” The one on the right dominates an easily mocked revision to the city’s oldest public park from an architect no doubt well trained and skilled but who set out to do… something.

From my jaded point of view that “something” was to reject any connection to the city’s downtown core and garishly set the open space apart with a color scheme that pays all its tribute to the superficial 1980s and none to the historic 1880s when its first design as a park was realized.

At one point early on in the history of the towers on the left, the city tried to reject them. With little in the way of proof, civic officials dismissed the monumental achievement as unsafe, little more than a worthless and poorly built hazard whose demolition they unconscionably ordered.

It was spared the wrecking ball thanks only to the dedicated efforts of a few citizen heroes who, realizing its immeasurable cultural value,  first purchased the site and then engineered a stress test to prove its structural integrity. Convincing the reluctant bureaucrats to allow the test to be conducted,  it ultimately proved the towers were completely safe, sound and thus saved.

Dear Verlyn Klinkenborg,

I just read your May 8 column about your ongoing failquest to find the “real” Los Angeles on nytimes.com today, and if I wasn’t so enamored with your entirely awesome name, I’d have sworn at you three times already, because normally when I read something like what follows, I just want to cuss like a sailor:

Something escapes me about Los Angeles. Wherever I go, I always imagine I’m finally going to grasp its essence. I try to feel its harmonics in my bones.

I watch the edges of the freeway to see if there is a clue in the debris the traffic sweeps to the sides. I wonder if there would be room for all these cars if they decided to find parking spots at once.

The iconic glimpses don’t help me in my quest — not the sudden view of the Hollywood sign I get from the Hollywood Freeway, not the view of downtown almost floating in the sunset from Pasadena. Every now and then, I turn a corner and think that something essential is about to be revealed. The feeling intensifies all the way up Venice Boulevard into Culver City, and then I’m on National taking one of those curious hidden freeway entrances and suddenly the feeling vanishes.

I’m new to you so I have no knowledge of how long you’ve been in Los Angeles and writing about it. Maybe you’re fresh and fully assimilated into the prevalent car culture. Or maybe you’ve been out here awhile and this is just more of what you’ve been writing. Gawd, I hope not. But either way, as someone who’s a native as well as a perpetual tourist in my own town, I’m the first one to admit your job ain’t easy. I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to feel the city’s harmonics in my bones and it don’t come simple. Having said that I can only wonder if you’re kidding or if you indeed really think you’ll find what you’re looking for strapped in behind the wheel of a vehicle, seemingly addicted to our freeways and one of the more soulless stretches of Venice Boulevard. As such, if you’re at all legitimately interested in ending your deadend game of seek and hide with this wonderful city, I’m going to tender you the following heartfelt advice.

1. Get off the 101 or the 10 or the 134 or the 405 — and stay off!
2. Get out of your goddam car — and stay out!
3. Get somewhere. On foot, on a bike, on a bus or a train — but for gawd sakes as much as you might want to don’t go to City Walk, or LA Live or the Grove. Go to a Dodger game. Go to Boyle Heights. Go to Union Station. The LA River. Go to Leimert Park. MacArthur Park. Go to the Watts. West Adams. San Fernando Mission. Venice.

Of course if you sincerely think that eye-spying shoulder trash and stalking onramps is the way to go about grasping at any of this city’s essence then my advice will be lost on you. And if so, tell you what: get out. Because it’s never going to happen. You’re just going to pound out more banal columns bemoaning Los Angeles as always being beyond the reach of your vestigial intellect.

So either get your boots on the ground and get busy or do yourself and L.A. a favor and order yourself up a window seat back to NYC. and as the jetbird swings back over land after its LAX take off over the ocean, look down. You’ll have just as good a chance of harmonizing with our lost city from that removed and encapsulated a vantage point as you would from a car stuck in traffic on the 110. And when that fails to happen you should have no trouble picking out the 10 and the 101 and the 405 and the 134 from the grid below and remembering all the good times you had on them.

A long time ago in response to the latest in a seemingly relentless if occasional parade of Curbed LA posts focus-mocking on the theme of “What Is/Is Not The Eastside” and the frustration it generates to those of us who know and give a damn, I  submitted a comment that offered what I consider to be the perfect alternative title to supplant the imperial ignorance of those Westside-influenced apathetics who can’t help but disrespect the significance and relevance of what is the True Eastside of Los Angeles by lazily and hipsterly and even sometimes indignantly and belligerently lumping the general region encompassing the neighborhoods of Atwater Village, Echo Park, Los Feliz Village, East Hollywood, Elysian Park/Valley, Historic Filipinotown, and Angeleno Heights as their kneejerk version of “eastside.”

To those edge-seeking dullards who are too busy growing ironic facial hair and shopping for ironic clothing to waste time considering the ironic error of their “if it’s east of the westside than it’s the eastside” ways, I offered something of the following comment:

Simple. Call it: The Upside. Problem Solved.

It had flavor. It had style. Being “up” from downtown it was not geographically incorrect. And it was certainly more compact and catchy than something compass-like such as Northwestcentraltownville. But of course, with the exception of a fellow commenter or two chiming in with an appreciation for my suggestion, nothing came of it.

At least not until a  couple weeks ago when sure enough Curbed LA decides to resurrect the issue once again — only this time with a surprising twist. Acquiescing that my surrounding area is indeed the “Not Eastside,” the good folks at Curbed made a call for nominations for a poll/contest that will result in what that new name should be. So of course re-submitted my original suggestion, but with no campaigning and little hope that it would make the cut.

Well the contest began this week and guess what?

Not a shocker: currently The Upside is losing badly to gimmicky stuff like “Hipster Heights” and “Griffith Triangle.” Right now the totally boring “North Central” is kicking ass. And as much as I’m biasedly partial to my creation, I gotta admit I voted for “The West Bank,” in part because I’m kicking myself for not suggesting something even better than The Upside: The Left Bank. Doh!

I do these walks amazed that people actually join me. Still, when it got a couple minutes to 10 a.m. and I was the only one standing by the fountain at the corner of Hoover and Jefferson, I endured a mix of disppointment and relief. The former because no one loves to throw a party that no one comes to, and the latter because it meant my Saturday was free to take care of too much business that I’d otherwise have to cram into Sunday.

There was the backyard to weedwhack, and the Costco to visit — and let’s not forget preparations for next weekend’s Death Valley trip which is going to be extra special because my cousin’s son Nathan is coming out from Tennessee to come along with Susan and me.

I was ticking these duties off in my head as the clock ticked that much closer to 10 when a voice from behind me asked if I was the guy doing the walk.

Guilty as charged.

And that’s how I met Perry and instantly shoved all those things I was looking forward to going home and doing aside in favor of going for a loooong walk with her. Then, as we were getting acquainted,  up come a couple of USC students — Adam and Laura — asking about the walk and we welcomed them and introduced ourselves.

Not long after that we were off heading west on Jefferson to the top of Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook State Park and back east on Adams, and a great time was had by me and my three generation gap-closing co-hikers less than half my age.

I didn’t go crazy tweeting our progress or snapping shots with the camera but my Flickr photoset of the 15-mile 6.5-hour trek  is viewable here.

With the return to service of the Angel’s Flight train this week, LA Observed has been great in posting various existences of the fascinating funicular in art and popular culture, such as this favorite of mine below, the cover of an issue from last year of Black Clock magazine. I’m subscribing.

With the woman’s look, the light, and of course the dark, there’s plenty of mood and tension inside the apartment to love in this illustration by Jeff Bridges (no, not the Academy Award-winning one). But by far my favorite aspect of the image has to be the Angel’s Flight car in the background slicing across the window like a guillotine blade. Genius.

Yep, Los Angeles got shook out of sleep this morning with a preliminary-estimated  4.4-magnitude quake reportedly striking the Whittier fault beneath Pico Rivera at approximately 4:04 a.m. I immediately started tweeting:

Nah, that headline ain’t some sorta code. Just the general compass points I was facing when I snapped the following images in the vicinity of Dante’s View while on our way up to the top of Mt. Hollywood Saturday morning.

What I’m taken most with is the fact that though the two shots were taken literally steps away from one another, they look like they could be hundreds of miles apart. Such is the grand topographical diversity of my city.

Click for the bigger pictures, but be warned: For the sake of my own personal enjoyment, they have both been somewhat rigorously run through my fauxtography filter cycle in Photoshop (click each for the bigger pictures):

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 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.