Smog makes it hard to see the Los Angeles Civic Center on Jan. 5, 1948. Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive/UCLA Library
 
In this age of climate-change consciousness, we’ve been thinking of pollution in epic-scale terms for so many decades that it’s become difficult to perceive it locally or episodically. On Wired.com’s This Day in Tech blog, Jess McNally notes  that on this day 67 years ago, residents of Los Angeles initially suspected that the unseasonable eye-stinging haze descending on their city was a Japanese chemical attack:

As residents would later find out, the fog was not from an outside attacker, but from their own vehicles and factories. Massive wartime immigration to a city built for cars had made L.A. the largest car market the industry had ever seen. But the influx of cars and industry, combined with a geography that traps fumes like a big bowl, had caught up with Angelenos.

 

Susan Morrow (left) and Linda Hawkins wipe tears from their eyes on a downtown street during a smoggy day in October 1964. Photo: Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive/UCLA Library
 
It took Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, a Dutch scientist working at the California Institute of Technology, to point that out, but that wasn’t until the early ‘50s. Although the term smog—a portmanteau of smoke and fog—was coined in the early 20th century, L.A. made it truly famous.

Check out Wired’s fascinating selection of photos from the UCLA Library depicting the Southland’s struggle against smog from the 1940s through the 1960s.

(above image: Van Nuys Police Station 1951 via Valley Relics)
 
As our fair city continues to scramble to find more jobs and programs to cut due to massive budget shortfalls it strikes me as more than a little counter-productive to shutter hundreds of thriving, law-abiding small businesses. It’s amazing to me that in 2010 there are those who still fear the demon weed as if it’s anything more than a simple plant capable of providing relief to the ill and inspiration and tranquility to the healthy. People are dumb.
 

Los Angeles has lost over 150,000 jobs in the past year, is on the brink of bankruptcy, and experienced an unexpected 16 percent decline in sales tax revenue last year. And it’s located in a state with its own dire fiscal situation that is also facing unexpected gaps in tax revenue. Yet this week the Los Angeles City Attorney’s office made a move that’s certain to make things worse for its citizens: forcing over 400 functioning businesses to close shop, under threat of jail time.

Don’t worry, though. It’s no big deal. Those businesses are only selling medicine.

Medical marijuana, that is. As detailed in my May Reason magazine cover story, Los Angeles struggled for years with regulating medical marijuana storefronts—which thrived in L.A. as in no other city. In January the city finally came down with an ordinance imposing a variety of new restrictions, including how the businesses handled cash, provided security and lighting, and paid their employees, as well as insisting that the shops were not technically allowed to make a profit.

But the ordinance’s most important effect will be to reduce the 500-plus functioning storefronts serving the city’s medical marijuana community to a mere 70 (with some possible grandfathering that might bring the eventual total higher).

 
Reason.com: Los Angeles Destroys Functioning Businesses in a Recession
 
thx Giga Granada Hills !

 
Sadness in the streets! The Bodhi Tree, one of the best bookstores, period, and THEE very best New Age and Spirituality bookstore anywhere on the planet is closing. Although in recent years I’ve not gone there nearly as much as I used to, in the mid-90s, I went to the Bodhi Tree every single Saturday morning without fail and poured over the shelves of the used books annex. There I found Leary first editions, tons of rare Crowley and even signed firsts of Terence McKenna’s The Invisible Landscape and True Hallucinations. I’d comb through this store sometimes twice a week. For book hounds into the occult and weirdo culture in general, the Bodhi Tree was like an intellectual candy shop. I felt great pride to see my own books and DVDs for sale there. But sadly, those days have passed. With Amazon and Barnes & Noble taking massive bites out of the profits of niche booksellers—Shirley MacLaine probably shops on Amazon—it’s hard to run a business on fumes. Even storied operations like the Bodhi Tree, in the end have their life cycles. I wonder what it will reincarnate as?

From the LA Weekly:

Owners Phil Thompson and Stan Madson informed their staff last Wednesday that the cozy Melrose Avenue shop, a nationally renowned and much beloved spiritual center, will be shutting its doors in a year’s time.

After some eight months of discussion, Thompson and Madson decided to sell the property to a local business owner who leases space to several other nearby retailers. The Bodhi Tree opened in 1970. Land values in the area have risen dramatically since then. Meanwhile, the business of selling print books has been on a steady decline. For years, real estate agents had been circling the Bodhi Tree like vultures. In the end, selling the property became a much more profitable option than continuing to sell books.

Thompson and Madson started the bookstore when they were in their 30’s. They are now both in their early 70’s. They were aerospace engineers who left a life of science for one of contemplation and meditation.

“Twenty years ago we felt like it was an expanding situation,” says Madson. “We were concerned the store was getting too big. We had a staff of 100. Publishing was expanding. Spirituality was expanding. But what changed was that the market became widely dispersed.”

 
It’s considered by some to be a controversial appointment, but the news of New York gallerist Jeffrey Deitch taking over the top spot at the embattled Museum of Contemporary Art comes off as a stroke of genius to us.

Speaking myself as a longtime New Yorker—before I finally wised up and put down roots in Los Angeles— I’ve long regarded the rise of Deitch and his Soho galleries to be the best—as in the single best—thing to happen to Gotham’s art world since, well, Andy Warhol died. That’s saying a lot, obviously. Deitch’s shows and opening-night parties were always the highlight of art-world socializing, mixing the highbrow and lowbrow crowds in way that only someone with Deitch’s Rolodex and social connections could deliver. His championing of emerging stars such as Ryan McGinness, Kembra Pfahler and E.V. Day was never short of visionary, and the art scene of Los Angeles gained much with Eli Broad and the MOCA board’s unanimous vote of confidence in Deitch’s hiring.

A great deal of the brouhaha seems to revolve around the fact that Deitch is an actual businessman, and a successful one at that, when it’s customary for museum directors to be cherry-picked from other museums or academic posts. Why this might prove detrimental to his performance in the job—Deitch is a Harvard MBA, a good business head is something MOCA desperately needs—is a complete mystery to us, but there have been calls for Deitch to divest himself of what must be a fairly substantial (to say nothing of quite valuable)  collection of Modern art. Why? Should Eli Broad and David Geffen be required to do the same? Because Deitch has proved himself to be a shrewd operator in his chosen field of endeavor, he should therefore be penalized? Makes no sense. It’s hardly like the guy is a corporate lobbyist. This is the art world, after all. This is the way it’s supposed to work…

I, for one, welcome the arrival of Jeffery Deitch to the best coast with open arms. Smart move, MOCA, just make sure you spell my name right on the guest list.

Cross posting this from Brand X

Los Angeles is the strangest city in the world. I swear it as a true and faithful relation.

Every cult in the world has an outpost in Los Angeles. I suppose it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s always been that way. Paramhansa Yogananda once called Los Angeles the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìBenares of America,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù the most holy city in the country. He also said it had the perfect climate to practice yoga in, likely why he established his Self-Realization Fellowship centers up and down the coast of Southern California. Manly P. Hall set up his mission to humanity here, the Philosophical Research Society, and tirelessly lectured on the Ancient Mysteries to common people and heads of state alike.

Then there?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s the dark side. Jack Parsons and a certain somebody summoning Babalon in the Mojave Desert. The Solar Lodge of the OTO. Charles Manson. Roman Polanski. Rumors of Jim Morrison having his soul stolen by voodoo acolytes.

And somewhere in between those two extremes, the endless, slack-jawed landscape of We?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ll Believe Anything: the health food stores, the diet crazes, the life-transformation-seminarians, the UFO cargo cults, the ?¢‚Ǩ?ìlightworkers,?¢‚Ǩ¬ù the Theosophists, the disappearing preachers. The faith healers, the distance healers, the healers of healers. The crystal gazers, the crystal huggers, the crystal smokers. My friend Shaun Frent?ɬ© has a name for it all: ?¢‚Ǩ?ìAncient Californian Wisdom.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù

What is it about this city that attracts it all? William Faulkner called Los Angeles ?¢‚Ǩ?ìan endless, sun-bleached Hell?¢‚Ǩ¬ù (or something to that effect); there is a profound meaningless here that goes beyond the common stereotype of the city. It is almost as if, without the benefit of darkness and shadows, nothing seems sinister. If the sun always shines, then nothing can hide?¢‚Ǩ¬¶ or everything can hide, in plain sight. Los Angeles executes its Grand Unification Theory of All Cults: If everything is equally meaningless, any meaning is acceptable. If nothing is true, everything is permitted. It all means Less Than Zero.

Perhaps it is that, since this city’s primary export is Illusion, that all illusions can thrive here, from Magick in Theory and Practice to the Magic Castle. Los Angeles is the Great Magician, hypnotizing the whole world into the self-image it chooses. Here, we are all the man behind the curtain. Here, we are all a trick of the light.

Unlike the occult scene of that other City of High Weirdness, London?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùwhich is moribund and necrophilic, still bound up in its shamefully stained public schoolboy uniform and still hiding under the long shadows of Crowley, Spare and Constantine?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthe occult landscape of Los Angeles wears a smile and a tan. It is perhaps the strangest city I have ever lived in. I?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢m still not sure how I ended up here.

Driving down Los Angeles?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢ endless freeways, the architecture looks Sumerian, Mesopotamian. The palm trees, Egyptian. In fact, the climate here is exactly the same as that of Ancient Egypt. If people can reincarnate, might, also, cities? Could Rome have resurfaced as New York? Heliopolis, Los Angeles? Or maybe it is a composite?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùThebes, Nineveh, Tyre, Babylon, Memphis. Perhaps they just recycled the whole ancient fertile crescent and renamed it Los Angeles, City of Angels, angels long fallen, waiting on hold for their agents to get back to them and offer them their Big Comeback Role.

The sun is going down now, over the palm trees of Echo Park, on the territorial border of the Egyptian empire and the Aztec one. Just another day in paradise. Heaven, or just south of it.

 
As a proud Angeleno since 1991, of course I’ve noticed the various small oil rigs along La Cienega Boulevard and elsewhere, but I didn’t realize there was one in… the Beverly Center? Would you believe there are several under the Farmer’s Market too? Am I pulling your leg? Nope! There are oil wells all around the city—particularly in Beverly Hills—disguised as buildings, islands and even palm trees. Before L.A. was firmly established as a movie and TV town it was an oil town. In fact, Los Angeles is part of a region that is third largest oil producer in America with over 20 billion barrels of oil yet to be extracted under our feet! Who knew?

Nate Harrington, a local DJ and publisher of the “Constantly Pregnant” zine filed this video report for Vice Media’s new online series “Uneven Terrain,” peeking behind the scenes to uncover LA’s hidden oil rigs residing within hollow office buildings, the camouflaged rigs standing right next to high schools, and the ones concealed within popular shopping malls. Fascinating!

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
Limelight-loving L.A. City Atty. Carmen Trutanich has been making headlines and television appearances in recent weeks with his all-out legal assault on medical marijuana dispensaries. Unfortunately for Trutanich, U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric Holder feels that prosecution of medical marijuana patients should be a low priority for law enforcement officials and said so in a memo released Monday. Ouch. Trutanich and L.A. County Dist. Atty. Steve Cooley got another setback on Monday as well when a circuit judge ruled that the city’s moratorium on medical marijuana dispensaries was illegally extended. Double ouch.

But what might be the most compelling reason of all for Trutanich and Cooley to back off the cannabis biz is the overwhelming support for medical marijuana of the voters who elected them both in the first place.

As John Hoeffel reports from the L.A. Times local desk, over three-quarters of eligible voters are strongly pro-medical marijuana and would prefer to see the dispensaries regulated and taxed, not forced to close:

The poll, completed Monday and Tuesday, also found that 74% support the state’s medical marijuana law, while 54% want to see marijuana legalized, regulated and taxed.

The Marijuana Policy Project, based in Washington, D.C., commissioned the poll by an independent firm, Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, after Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley threatened all dispensaries in the county with prosecution.

—snip—

The poll of 625 voters found that 77% of voters want to regulate dispensaries, while 14% want them closed. Both Democrats (83%-7%) and Republicans (62%-30%) support regulation over prosecution. The Los Angeles City Council is on the verge of adopting regulations after two years of debate and almost 13 years after voters passed Proposition 215, the Compassionate Use Act.

Even with the stated 4% give-or-take margin of error of the Mason-Dixon poll, this is a uniquely compelling report for Trutanich and Cooley to pay close attention to, especially since it will be these very same voters who’ll be determining their reelection prospects in the future.

Medical marijuana poll: Most L.A. voters support dispensaries by John Hoeffel

Cross posting this at Brand X

Cannabis Orbs by Sookie Sooker

?¢‚Ǩ?ìThe problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another, and no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished. A whole god-damned nation of assholes driving automobiles, eating, having babies, doing everything in the worst way possible, like voting for the presidential candidates who reminded them most of themselves. I had no interests. I had no interest in anything. I had no idea how I was going to escape. At least the others had some taste for life. They seemed to understand something that I didn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior. I just wanted to get away from them. But there was no place to go.?¢‚Ǩ¬ù ?¢‚Ǩ‚ÄùHam on Rye, 1982

You have to love that the LA City Council declared the humble bungalow at 5124 De Longpre Ave where Charles Bukowski lived and wrote from 1963 to 1972 a historical landmark. It’s just one more reason why I love this city so much.

It’s amusing to consider that a hundred years from now when we’re all gone, this crappy little house will still defiantly be there, smack dab in the middle of all the futuristic 300 floor skyscrapers of 2100 AD, flipping them the bird…

Thanks Gavin Smith!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

Charles Bukowski Los Angeles Tour (Hollywood and Western)

Nothing to add to this. See the entire photo essay at the Los Angeles Times.

Bump… Swoon Magazine, the awesome Los Angeles / New York underground fashion mag that I covered previously on Dangerous Minds is now shipping.

This issue features on the current Los Angeles and New York music scenes (and this stuff is actually GOOD. I hate most music and especially indie crap but editor Kelly McKay is an adept at finding and publicizing Truly New and Exciting and Interesting bands that people haven’t heard of and really should. This stuff WILL expand your cultural knowledge base about 17 chess moves past the party line.)

Bands featured in this issue:

From LA: We Are The World, Weave, Rainbow Arabia, Marfa and Ne-af, Fancy Space People, Hard Place, Hecuba, Jer Ber Jones.

From NYC: Preacher and the Knife, Bellmer Dolls, Lights, New York Night Train, Golden Triangle, Patrick Cleandenim, Rebecca Cherry, The Nasties, Electric Tickle Machine, The Beets, Light Asylum, Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, White Diamonds, Class Actress, Bunny Rabbit.

Get yours here before they’re gone!

My very good friend Kelly McKay’s fashion magazine Swoon is launching its latest issue, a split publication devoted to the New York and Los Angeles music scenes. Issue five, arriving immanently, is available for pre-order?¢‚Ǩ‚Äùthey sell out quick, so always a good idea.

Along with John Cameron Mitchell’s Shortbus, I consider the five issues of Swoon Magazine to be the defining document of what was occurring in the New York underground in this decade. They’re all essential. (Also check out the site for good streaming audio of NY and LA artists.)

Bonus!: Check out this awesome photoset of polaroids taken at the Swoon 4 release party and hilariously captioned by Genesis Breyer P-Orridge.