Kings Hockey

For the second time ever I went to a Minnesota Wild hockey game. The last time was in St. Paul at the Xcel energy stadium, and this time it was in Los Angeles at the Staples Center, home of the L.A. Kings, the Lakers, the Clippers, and a WNBA team. Although the first two periods were relatively slow-paced, the game ended in the most dramatic fashion possible...an overtime shootout that is essentially a test to see which goalie makes a mistake first (see above photo). The Wild won the night, and even though the crowd was disappointed, they lacked the ferocity that Minnesota hockey fans would have exhibited. Being there was less like being at a hockey game and more like being at a restaurant, with audible cheers happening only when someone scored or got checked really hard. It was clear that, unlike the Wild crowd, less than 95% of the people played hockey. There was another bit of Minnesota in the Staples center that I didn't expect to see: The Minneapolis Lakers championship banners were hanging in the rafters next to the L.A. Lakers'.

One of the most potent aspects of the Kings/Wild game experience was getting there and back. One of the things that makes living here so bifurcated is that once you're "there" (wherever there is), it's almost always an incredible experience. As someone else in the geography department told me, life in L.A. happens behind closed doors. But getting there is not easily shrugged off, and can often wholly dictate whether or not you do something. In this case, my friend Tristan and I took the bus to the Staples center and back. It worked out about as expected...a 20 minute walk, a 20 minute wait for the bus, then a 50 minute bus ride...each way. It was worth the effort, but reaffirmed for me the obvious, that it's an atrocity that there is not better public transportation. I and everyone else have of course realized this for a long time, so in an effort to understand the nuts and bolts of the problem, I joined the Bus Rider's Union (BRU), a leading national civil rights organization whose mission is to improve public transportation for the transit dependent. Being transit dependent in the USA, and especially L.A., is a racialized phenomenon. In a full bus I am almost always the only white person, sometimes one of 2 or 3. On the Santa Monica lines the ratio is a little higher, but any bus that goes south or east, away from the swanky hills of UCLA, Bel Air, and the beautiful mountains, carries not white collar, but the bule collar black, Mexican, and Korean workers that make the clean, landscaped hills so pretty. I feel much more comfortable riding with these people that being surrounded by BMWs, Audis, Navigators, and Jags on the freeway because I feel more like a citizen of the city and part of a society rather than part of a competition to be the most independent and well-off. I had heard about the BRU from friends in Madison, so I decided to go to one of the meetings. They took me and the other first timers into a mini training session wehre we learned about the history and goals of the organization. Right away I liked their mission statement and agenda, which is to increase the number and quality of busses and bus routes in the city. Their vision is to increase the quality of lives for everyone in the city by making movement in the city easy, and by decreasing the number of cars on the road that make the daily layer of smog. Right now the main problem as identified by the BRU is that the Metro Transit Authority of Los Angeles is spending all their money on finishing a rail line that would connect the west side to downtown. As of now there is no such rail, but there are bus lines instead. The BRU says this is a disgrace that the east and south and central parts of town should not be improved in lieu of the money being spent on a uber expensive rail system that would connect "choice" riders (read: white people with cars) to the rail system. The BRU says (and I generally agree) that the billions of dollars should first be spent on improving the existing bus system for people without cars who actually need it. For as much as people say the L.A. bus system is bad, it's ironic that they have the largest fleet of "green" busses (low emissions) of any city in the world, and were named the best public transportation system in the USA for 2006. It's easy to recognize this experientially if you're riding during business hours, but in the evening and weekends it all falls apart, making going out at night, or coming home from work, nearly impossible if you're on bus. Here's a whole bunch of whopping statistics about the Metro system that are amazing.

Fathergirl XXX

The title of this post refers to an episode of the TV show Arrested Development, which I watched this Thanksgiving weekend with my friends Dave and Sarah Sandpiper in San Francisco. It was a welcomed slow-paced break from my life in L.A. - a life that had beheath my nose become increasingly hectic and pressing. It took a few days with the Sandpipers and thier 2-month old baby girl, Lily, to recalm my nerves before the end of the quarter at UCLA. The above photo is the view from the guest room where I stayed for the weekend. It reminded my a lot of Lecce, Italy, with the wires and whitewashed houses and the ocean (see below).



I learned a lot about "babiness" this weekend - how consuming and hard it is to basically keep a newborn alive and happy. If you're doing the first you're doing pretty well. If you're doing both you're rock stars. Dave and Sarah were definitely rock stars...Lily was attended to 24/7 with the utmost attention. It was my first glimpse into taking care of such a young person and the amount of energy and work it takes to recreate the womb experience for the baby. Previously I had always meshed together ideas of what it is to be a child. My meshings were so vague that before this weekend I really didn't know the difference between raising a 2-month old and a 2-year old. Now I know that the difference has a lot to do with how much down time the parents get. "Don't disturb a sleeping baby" is a maxim that has a whole new meaning to me now - those moments are invaluable to the sanity and peace of the parents!


Here's Dave and Lily...Fathergirl.


View of SF from the Marin headlands where we hiked around a bit and watched the hang gliders.

Fuck the UCPD

The Univ of California Police Department used sick, cruel, and excessive force to torture an Iranian-American student in the UCLA library two nights ago who apparently did not have his student ID with him while reading a book in the library, and who appartently refused to leave the library. This is the scariest and most disgusting live footage (you have to turn your sound on) I have seen, captured by someone's cell camera. Fair warning: it's not for the faint of heart. There are lots of convulsions and screams and pleas by the victim and the 50+ students surrounding him for the 5 officers to stop tazing him. There are tons of issues to discuss about this. Two of the most important ones I think are the political awareness demonstrated by the victim and those around him (they cite the patriot act), and the role of technology (cell cameras and YouTube) in outing the offenders. Here's an early news article on the issue.

Here's the latest news article from the L.A. Times. The student is filing a brutality lawsuit with a high profile civil rights lawyer. There is absolutely no excuse for the violence used by these police officers.

The offending officer is identified in this article. He has a long history of brutality, but is fearless of the law and is protected by the corrupt LAPD.

Emerge

In the process of moving anywhere new it is expected to go through some kind of a difficult period of adjustment. Lonliness, homesickness, depression, anxiety - these are all conditions that I have experienced in the past few weeks. I knew this would happen at some point, but I was not prepared for the reality or the severity of the feelings, the complete loss of the objective whisper that tells you it's only temporary. Last week I emerged from the moderately debilitating sadness after I pinpointed two elements of my life here that I'm not happy about. One is housing and the second is transportation. Both of these are perennial issues for everyone in Los Angeles, and I'm sure they'll occur again for me. My response to these frustrations is two-pronged: acceptance and action. It reminds me of the phrase used in Christianity, have the peace to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference. I'll most likely be moving to Santa Cruz at the end of March to spend a term at UCSC with some excellent food and technology scholars, so that will be a perfect excuse to end my contract in the graduate student housing complex. As for transportation, acceptance, plurality, and flexibility are the keywords. Don't expect anything, and realize that the "city" of L.A. is not so much a city as a collection of far-away places. Getting there, wherever there is, is the number one question you must ask yourself when you want to do something. As a geographer I like this "where" question because it encourages constant exploration and newness. In addition to acceptance, I've enrolled for the next available motorcycle training class - it will take place in January. A motorcycle will be a practical and useful tool, and just the thought of increased and independent mobility puts my mind at ease. Last weekend I rented a car for a couple days...here are some of the results.



This is the Griffith Observatory as seen from a cloudy day hiking trail in Griffith park north of downtown. It is L.A.'s equivalent to Central park in New York, or Golden Gate park in San Francisco, except like everything else in L.A. it's about 5x bigger. The hiking trails go through the mountains and it offers great views of the hybrid expanse.


At the Huntington botanical gardens. At this compound in Pasedena there is also a fine art museum, a library, and an historical archive. Awesome place!


I went to the Huntington to attend the L.A. archives bazaar, an event that brought together aroudn 25 museums, libraries, and archives from around the city with reference librarians on hand to answer questions. It was a great place to figure out where I need to go to find materials for my dissertation. This Black Panther poster is from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics not too far from my place in L.A.


A perfect pear tree in the Japanese house at the Huntington.