Public Eye

Staff Photographer Walt Mancini took this shot of the 20 acres of Annandale Canyon in the Linda Vista Hills in far west Pasadena that last week were formally dedicated in perpetuity to open space.

He'd been having a hard time getting a shot that truly showed the whole, wild canyon, and as he was leaving the ceremony he was visiting with a nearby homeowner who lives above the canyon and who offered his house as the best place to get the definitive shot.

The news photo that ended up running in the paper showed the electeds and activists who had gathered at the classic ribbon-cutting ceremony, which took place on the open graded area in the middle distance of the photo. (It's a lot owned by former John Muir and now NBA basketball player Stacey Augmon; wonder if he'll build there to retire to a view after this, his 15th year in the league?) Newspaper photos are biased toward, and properly so, shots with people in them; but it's nice to see exactly what is being saved in the deal worked out with the former owner, who was going to build a bunch of luxury homes there. Pretty steep territory, but a trail will go down the steep canyon bottom someday ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

When I went to my polling place, the Linda Vista fire station, this morning at 8:20 to vote, the combined precincts there were staffed by eight election workers.

But after the polls had been opened already for an hour and 20 minutes, poll worker Bill Denzell informed me that I was the sixth person to have shown up.

More poll workers than actual voters.

Admittedly, there is just one race on the ballot -- the PCC Board of Trustees Area 1 contest between incumbent Geoff Baum and PCC student Steven Gibson.

Not exactly Obama-Palin, er, McCain.

Still and all -- Pasadenans are always going on about their love for their city college. What could be more important than deciding on a crucial leadership issue at the college?
Where is the love, people? Where are the votes?

Polls stay open until 8. Take those election officials away from their novels and newsapers and give them something democratic to do.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Some o' Whittier, says the National Football League's study of players' head injuries as they might relate to dementia and other medical problems is fraught with conflicts of interest.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The city of Pasadena limits snake way up into Eaton Canyon for the water rights. Once you step off the Altadena curb from Pinecrest into the canyon to hike up to Mt. Wilson or just to Henninger or Idlehour on the old Toll Road, you're in Pas for at least a little while ... if you can get through, that is.

The key to the hiking highway has long been given to Pinecrest neighbors irate at the noise non-Sierra Club types -- the kids who party and sometimes graffiti the rocks at the Eaton falls -- can make down in the canyon.

The sometimes persnickety neighbors can close down that gate pretty early. I remember leaving my hiking party behind to run down the trail for half a mile to force them to keep it open well before sunset so we could get out of there without having to hike all the way down to the Nature Center.

Attorney and hiking activist Paul Ayers, whose son is pictured above at the gate in question, asks these questions:

On Friday, my fourth grader James had the day off so we decided to go hiking. After finding that Pasadena had closed the lower Arroyo Seco we wandered over to Eaton because James wanted a walk by "a stream". Out of habit I swung by the Pinecrest gate and... found it opened; hikers were parking and walking down to the falls, up the Toll Road, etc. James and I went down the road and up to the falls and had a fine time; I have attached a photo of James at the gate. That's the good news.

The bad news is that no one, including a county fire fighter I met at the gate, had any rational explanation as to when the gate openings began, what the open hours were, etc. Most troubling was the fire fighter's statement that the gate was "unlocked by a neighbor who has a key". And the signage on the gates still says the City of Pasadena has no responsibility for the gate and if it is locked when you're inside, tough luck.

Pasadena Water & Power owns the land at the access point. That entity according to letters I have seen signed by Mayor Bogaard, was responsible for the closure. The closure was in many ways irrational. There was nothing particularly unsafe in Eaton after the rains stopped in 2005 and if safety was the issue [which Mayor Bogaard stated it was] why did access to the "unsafe area" from the Nature Center and other Eaton Canyon access points remain unfettered? Given the lack of logic of the City's position it is no wonder that the trail community came to believe that safety was not the issue, but rather that the Pinecrest "neighbors" simply didn't like the great unwashed in their neighborhood. This may not be the case but when a government spreads bullsh*t all kinds of plants grow.

Be that as it may, now that the repairs are completed and the Toll Road is passable and safe it seems reasonable that some kind of rational approach to access through the Pinecrest gate be established. In my opinion this would involve some accountable governmental entity controlling and scheduling gate openings, not the "neighbors".

Posted by Larry Wilson at 12:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Most of the nearly 100,000 people in the Rose Bowl last night seemed to enjoy the U2 concert.

So did most of the people in the neighborhoods surrounding the Arroyo Seco, with some having outdoor parties to take in the show's audio at least.

It was indeed very, very loud, very far away.

At least one homeowner wrote the Rose Bowl and the mayor and copied me and didn't like it at all. In fact, he's demanding retribution. His letter, taking out his name and a few identifying details, follows:

My wife and I have lived (near the Rose Bowl) since 1982. This is about 1/2 mile from the stadium. We value the Rose Bowl and appreciate that it often makes good efforts to keep the operations of various sporting and entertainment events as unobtrusive as possible. Something went terribly, terribly wrong last evening (10/25/09) however. Even though we had our double-glazed windows and doors shut, the sound from the U-2 concert reverberated within our home making it hard to talk, impossible to ignore and impossible to sleep. We called the police, the Rose Bowl operating company, the local councilmember, and the mayor' office to request help -- all to no avail.

It is my opinion that allowing the speakers to be placed up so high and operated at full volume was the origin of the problem. The sound was not confined to the interior of the stadium as is usually the case but went off to the surrounding homes. Although your company wrote that a "sound check" would be done, we did not hear one and so were totally unprepared for the awful and truly frightening level of sound that intruded into our home from about 7:15 p.m. to about 11:45 p.m last evening.

This was about 4 hours of painful and frightening noise which scared us and upset us.

As a result of your negligence and nuisance my wife and I demand four things:
1. A written explanation and apology for the noise;
2. A promise that this high positioning of speakers such that the sound can escape will not be repeated;
3. A payment of $400 for the emotional distress caused by your nuisance and negligence; and
4. This payment may be made as a donation to the Pasadena Humane Society in our name if you notify us that it has been made.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 6:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (18)

The word that a longtime newspaper guy -- P. Scott McKibben, the former publisher of our sister papers in the East Bay, the Alameda Newspaper Group -- has been named the new chief executive of the Pasadena Tournament of Roses might seem odd.

Actually, it's the reverse -- it's par for the course.

The Rose Bowl stadium was so-named by a Star-News sports reporter after its completion in the early 1920s. We used for many years to do the official parade program -- the covers were high camp and sometimes also approached high (commercial) art. There's a framed copy in the foyer of Tournament House of the best one from the early '20s, in which a bi-plane with the Star-News logo is flying over the Arroyo Seco and the Colorado Street Bridge, its pilot strewing roses on the town.

And before the retiring Mitch Dorger, the two most prominent parade bosses came out of Pasadena newspapers as well.

Jack French, still a big part of Pasadena -- he and his wife Patti produce the annual 4th of July event in the Rose Bowl -- was, before he became head of the Pasadena Red Cross and then for decades the top tournament guy, an advertising executive at the Star-News.

And Max Colwell, the former Pasadena Post City Hall reporter, went from being a White Suiter TofR volunteer to become the first full-time general manager of the parade and game when he was hired in 1952, a post he held into the 1970s.

Newspapers and parades just go together -- ephemeral, colorful, daily miracles with tight deadlines.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Up in Big Sur the first weekend of the month, the one-day-past full moon came over the Santa Lucias through the clouds that Sunday night.

The hand-crafted fence above the Pacific on the Esalen cliffs.

Down the coast above Cambria on Monday, it was elephant seal nap time.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Hiker Ken Farley went up the Sam Merrill trail at the top of Lake Avenue -- way up -- last weekend and took a bunch of photos that depict both the devastation of the Station Fire and the remarkable landscapes that were saved.

The above shot is from Upper Millard Canyon looking to the east toward Mt. Disappointment and Mt. Wilson. You can see the burned out areas down below, and the beautiful greenery that remains.

Ken has more insight than your average bear into our mountains. He's a geophysicist and chair of the division of geological and planetary sciences at Caltech. I believe he was accompanied on the hike by his wife, fellow geologist Kristen Farley, a former academic herself who is the big boss of Pasadena Up & Moving, the exercise advocates who plan the monthly walks with the mayor around the Rose Bowl.

Both hikers are ultra-marathoners who know the mountains as well as anyone. Today and for the next coupla, no one is supposed to know the mountains as we stay out of them because of the intense danger of debris flows in this rain.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

OK, so the best way to win a Nobel Peace Prize is clearly to be an American president -- the surprised fellow in the Rose Garden today; or an ex-president building a legacy -- the Georgian negotiator; or an almost-president -- the king of cap 'n' trade; or a reluctant presidential fighter of the war to end all wars, which didn't work out so well -- the namesake of yours truly.

Whereas the way to win a Nobel Prize in Literature is NOT to be an American novelist working at the top of your game, or anybody's game, for many decades, as in the late John Updike, whose failure to get the prize is a crime. And as in Philip Roth, who, yoo hoo Stockholm, is still with us and still eligible. Or Thomas Pynchon or Don DeLillo, whose politics are presumably more to European tastes.

The way to get the writing award is to be a European leftist with an interesting personal story as opposed to pure novelistic chops, as the selection of Herta Muller shows -- not that I've read anything she's written, and only a couple thousand Americans can say they have, before this week at least.

No good just to be European -- otherwise the late great Tory novelist Anthony Powell, my favorite writer ever, would have won simply on the massive strengths of "A Dance to the Music of Time."

It's all diminishing the prestige of the Nobel in the end. Then again, the failure to award the prize to any of the trio who were the greatest writers of the late 19th and early 20th century -- James Joyce, Leo Tolstoy and Marcel Proust -- went a long way toward diminishing it, too.

Sure, they get sensible sometimes. No discounting the pure poetry that is Seamus Heaney.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'd driven by the Streamline Moderne Coca-Cola bottling plant on South Central Avenue (from 1937 by architect Robert V. Derrah) in downtown L.A. many times -- always doing a double-take. It's an ocean liner on the city streets. Today I got to go inside to speak on a panel on the state of the SoCal economy. Danged if I didn't take my camera in, not expecting anything visual in there -- but the execs' offices are like captains' quarters; you have to step over a bulkhead to get in. Asked someone else to take a picture of that coolness and will post when I get it ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

There's not a painter in our time who deserves to be, and perhaps is, more beloved by anyone with eyes -- by the forward-looking, the traditionalist, the academic, the pop-ist, the longer for an art that takes massive graphic talent and the picture-looker who just wants to have fun -- than Wayne Thiebaud.

Fortunately for Pasadenans, his "70 Years of Painting" is opening Sunday (through Jan. 31) at the ever-better Pasadena Museum of California on Union Street in the Playhouse District. Ninety years old next year, Thiebaud, who grew up in Long Beach and has long lived in Sacramento and taught at UC Davis, will be feted at a gala museum rooftop dinner Friday night. He has the happy circumstance of his luscious but formal iconic cake-on-display paintings being lumped in with Pop, which gives those who look for such a place in which to put his work, while declaiming all the while that his style has nothing to do with any school.

And his assocation with Pasadena is a long one, too. From his Wikipedia entry: "In 1962 Thiebaud's work was included, along with Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, Jim Dine, Phillip Hefferton, Joe Goode, Edward Ruscha, and Robert Dowd, in the historically important and ground-breaking "New Painting of Common Objects," curated by Walter Hopps at the Pasadena Art Museum. This exhibition is historically considered one of the first Pop Art exhibitions in America. These painters were part of a new movement, in a time of social unrest, which shocked America and the art world and changed art forever."

I took this snapshot of his paint cans today while getting a tour from the museum's Emma Jacobson-Sive. As we entered that gallery, I saw Pasadenan Susan Futterman being photographed by our Sarah Reingewirtz. Emma said, "Janette (Williams) is here, too. I didn't want to tell you guys in case one of you decided not to show up." I had seen Janette walk out of the office a few minutes before I did. She was there to write about another show opening Sunday, being co-curated by Susan: "Behold the Day: The Color Block Prints of Frances Gearhart," an astounding series of watercolors and wood blocks that will remake the name of the great Pasadena Arts and Crafts artist of the West who lived with her sisters at Fair Oaks and California.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My step-brother Bart Hibbs has worked for Monrovia-based AeroVironment since the day he graduated from Caltech with a degree in aeronautical engineering in 1977. Bart is a genius -- a font of many forms of knowledge, an inventor, a person with a big heart. He is also one of the world's leading experts on the troubling issue of getting more out of batteries in order to solve our energy and global-warming problems. But he has never been one to treat himself to many luxuries. Finally, he did -- he got in line and put the money down to get a Tesla, the fantastic electric sports car that not only gets over 200 miles on a charge -- it goes zero to 60 in 3.9 seconds. He took delivery a few weeks ago, and invited my nephew Drew Cortrite and me up to his Simi Valley home last weekend to drive it. It's a luxury Bart deserves. If anyone is going to solve the battery problem -- getting them cheaper, better, longer-lasting -- it may well be him. Meanwhile, he's got the best and hottest electric going, gorgeous in its Lotus Elise body. Floor that baby and, yowza, that gas-guzzling Corvette you just blew by has got absolutely nothing on you.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

Brookside Park south of the Rose Bowl was a favored spring training location for baseball teams before they migrated to duller climes such as those of Arizona and Florida.

The Chicago White Sox did the spring thing in Pasadena in 1938, and the Pasadena Library is planning an Art Night exhibit Oct. 9 featuring negatives from the collection of the Pasadena Star-News and an old sister paper, as described by reference librarian Dan Mclaughlin:

"The library has had in its possession for at least 20 years a box inside of which are a few hundred envelopes with such titles as 'Pasadena 1938 Baseball White Sox Train Brookside Park' or 'Pasadena 1942 Dog Show Junior League Advance.' Inside each envelope was a collection of negatives that had fused together because of water damage.

"We have had a photo restoration intern separate the negatives and preserve as best she could the documentation that went with the negatives. Based on the notes and the contents of the photos we are guessing that these were photos taken for various photo essays in both the Pasadena Star News and the Pasadena Post from about 1938-1942.

"The library is participating in Art Night this October 9, 2009 with baseball as its theme and more specifically we would like to do a display that features the photographs showing Spring Training, 1938. In addition to being very interesting photos of professional baseball in Pasadena, there are two additional items of interest about the 1938 White Sox here in Pasadena. One is that a team consisting of local ball players, including Jackie Robinson, played the White Sox and did very well. The manager of the White Sox was overheard saying something to the effect of, 'If that kid was white I'd sign him up right now.' The other story out of that spring training camp is that of Monty Stratton, a rising pitching star who the following winter shot himself in a hunting accident and attempted to come back as a one legged pitcher. His story is told in the 1949 move 'The Stratton Story' starring Jimmy Stewart and June Allison."

I think I saw that flick on TV in the '60s. Is Jimmy Stewart not the perfect man for the role?

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

La Canada filmmaker John Kent Harrison was in Gdansk the week before last for a screening of his "The Courageous Heart of Irena Sendler," the Anna Paquin-starring flick about the woman who saved thousands of kids in the Warsaw ghetto in the war. Shown on CBS here last spring, it's been turned into a feature for Polish theaters, and Harrison was presented with a commendation from the Polish president at a ceremony marking the German invasion of 60 years ago this month.

He returned home this week to find that the Station Fire had just spared his Alta Canyada neighborhood, and hiked up into the hills to take this shot.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 11:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)