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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.

The headline caught my eye because it specifies the murder occured downtown. Then the first paragraph identifies the neighborhood as Jefferson Park and the second pinpoints it in the 3700 block of South Normandie near 37th Street, which as the crow flies is about as downtown as Koreatown or Boyle Heights — except even farther than those two communities.

Having the good fortune to be one of 8,750 out of the million-plus who requested tix, I just got back from biking over to Dodger Stadium to pick up the necessary ornamentation and documentation to permit me enter the Kingdom of Jackopalooza tomorrow.

Well, me going cold turkey in canceling my subscription with the L.A. Times lasted all of two weeks. No, I’m not going back. Not yet at least. But being that my newsprint addiction is lifelong and irreversible, I can’t go any longer without a fix — and sorry, but all the internet news out there does not replace the literal and tactile and olfactory joy of holding and perusing an actual paper.

That’s right, I even love the smell of ‘em.

The words told me by George Lucas, the Herald Examiner distributor who gave me my first job, still ring true.

“Don’t even think about looking at the porn in my briefcase!”

No, that’s not it. Before he told me that he told me something else back in 1977 as he smoked filterless Camels and drove me around in a beat up Ford F150 truck showing me what would be my paper route. “People may not know where their next meal is coming from,” he said. “Or their next pair of shoes. They may not even know whether they’ll be sleeping in a bed or on a bus bench. But people will always want their newspaper.”

Champions of the online news revolution may scoff at such sentiment as quaint at best and extinct at worst. But I know it isn’t. It’s alive and well in me today. I want my newspaper.

So first I thought about keeping my source local and going with the Daily News — and I probably would’ve had someone over there thought to put a subscription page on their website. But instead the only sign-up option I was given online was a tollfree number to call and good grief but I imagined getting connected to a call center in Manila or Mumbai with someone wrestling to subdue a marked accent with painfully perfect grammar whose name was not Eddie or Nan or Brendan even though that’s what they’d say it was.

Instead I went to the big dawg. The New York Times. I have never before subscribed to the New York Times, mainly because it is hella expensive. My L.A. Times rate was an awesome $99 a year, which works out to about 27 cents an issue. The New York Times “special introductory” offer is $6.70 a week for 12 weeks — or about $1 an issue — and after that it’ll double!

That’s a lotta paper for a paper.

But this morning when I looked out on the front steps and saw today’s issue sitting there waiting for me I didn’t doubt its worth, nor my willingness to pay such a premium. I was just happy to see it, and will be at least for the next four months. I can’t say at this stage if I’ll pony up $2 an issue after that, but maybe I will. Or maybe I’ll give the Los Angeles Times another look. By then, the changes that resulted in my breaking things off will be implemented and maybe at that time I’ll find my first love better for it.

I doubt it. But we’ll see.

Among the  variety of people, things and events the L.A. Times gave thanks for in its lead editorial in today’s paper they made sure to appreciate me too:

We also thank those who can drive but don’t, who bike and carpool and make good use of their EZ transit passes on two dozen public transit systems from Lancaster to Long Beach. Whether they’re motivated by gasoline prices or the health of the planet or the chance to just look at the city, block by block, we thank them for leaving their cars at home.

Right backatcha LAT.

Thanks to Illuminate LA’s posting of a complete audio recording of the landmark City Council Transportation Committee’s bike-themed meeting last Friday, I was able to catch up on all that transpired. While it sounds as if forward progress is being made on the whole there was also a share of bureaucratic laterals launched in the form of 60-day continuances to investigate and produce feasibility studies on various topics.

It’s a seemingly never-ending process that’s a necessary aspect of government, but it’s one that rarely fails to wear me out.

Speaking of wearing me out, I was particularly miffed by the LADOT’s Michelle Mowry when commenting on the Cyclists’ Bill of Rights (CBOR) created by members of the Bike Writers Collective, and already endorsed by several neighborhood councils.

Here’s a transcription of what Mowry first had to say about the document (which I might add the representative city attorney’s office present at the meeting demeaned as “a rather long laundry list of matters”):

“All the rights included in the twelve items listed in the Bicyclists’ [sic] Bill of Rights are protected in some way, shape or form already. Some of them are federally protected. Some are state protected.”

Now I know Mowry is a proponent of cycling. I know in her otherwise bureaucratic heart she wants cycling issues in Los Angeles addressed and advanced. But I can’t help but take issue with her first comment that essentially dismisses the rights as being redundant because of certain existing protections. The thing is, her waving of uncited federal and state statutes in such a “been there, done that” way, not only misses the point of the CBOR, it belittles what I believe the Cyclists’ Bill of Rights hopes to achieve.

Mowry may understand there’s legal repetition in the words, but what she isn’t getting is that it’s more than being about the vowels and consonants. It’s about the need in this bike-unfriendly place to assert our rights and have them recognized in a document that is as affirmative as it is symbolic.

It’s not that I don’t care that the United States or California constitutions — or the Ten Commandments for that matter –  might have my rights as a cylist covered under some overarching umbrella. It’s that I care more and can be greater vested in action that can be taken on a local level and that will have a direct impact on an increase of awareness and safety on the streets where I ride.

There’s a relatively new blog in my environs — a good, informative and readable one that’s been around a few months. Based out of Echo Park its creator Jesus Sanchez opted to call it The Eastsider LA. I wasn’t so much perturbed by that at first, but I am now. And though I know there are a lot more important things worth being perturbed about at this moment, this trivial thing bothers me because I’ve finally realized why I can’t stand it when my area of the city — Silver Lake, Echo Park, Angelino Heights — is referred to as the “eastside.”

Never mind that the argument ender is simply the historical and geographical fact that the true eastside of the city is comprised of those richly entrenched neighborhoods and communities east of the L.A. River beginning with the likes of Boyle Heights. Lincoln Heights. Then there’s East Los Angeles to consider.

But none of that matters in the slightest to those intent on such flippant misrepresentation.

In fairness, Sanchez does not fall into that category and his coverage radius extends well to the east. He even recognizes that area’s claim to the term in an historical context. Having been born in Boyle Heights and having grown up in East LA Sanchez sees his long-standing residence of Echo Park as an extension or expansion of where he grew up. Hence the name.

But then he trips himself up in closing a defense last month to critics of the naming decision with: “But I have no interest in setting up an Eastside Boundary Task Force to decide who can or can’t call themselves an Eastsider, who does and does not belong, who is in or out. That’s so westside.”

That may be “so westside” Jesuz, but what’s even more westside is to call where you and I live eastside, and that’s where my resentment lies. It just doesn’t get more blithely elitist westside-centric than that.

See, where I live in a house built on a plot of land not long after it was first deeded 102 years ago — that was the westside. And long before that In the late 1800s, Angelino Heights was one of the first residential sections of the city established west of downtown. And Western Avenue wasn’t arbitrarily named. It marked the city’s western boundary. On the other side of it was not much more than swamp and tar that would have to wait a whole bunch of years before some westsider would look disinterestedly inland and imagine everything  on the other side of Western proprietarily as the eastside.

Ultimately it’s a winless argument — and a tired one, too. But no one will ever convince me it’s one without meaning. Especially since people are always going to hold the city’s true cultural history with such little regard, respect or consideration..

And that’s so very L.A.

UPDATE (10.29): Call it kismet. The morning after posting this I found LA Observed’s YouTube vid reporting on the 3rd Annual L.A. Archives Bazaar, which featured discussions on that topic not only in regards to East Los Angeles but also the denizens of Central Avenue who in that street’s heyday called themselves “The Eastsiders.”