Public Eye

Walking up Citrus Avenue in Covina Friday after a first visit to The Book Shop -- an antiquarian store that gives anything in Pasadena or Berkeley a run for its money, and is owned by former Pasadena Star-News City Hall reporter Jennifer (Burry) Johnson and her husband, Bradley -- I came upon this.

Or, rather, I saw the sign from down the block, and, recognizing the heinous work of freak-show anti-Semite convicted felon tax evader and former Trotskyite Lyndon LaRouche, I pulled out my camera.

You should have seen the folks scatter. Who would want to be seen pictured as associating with a political movement that would stoop to that most infantile of insults, comparing (Any and Every Politician's Name Here) to Adolph Hitler?

No one.

Except the young couple who were setting up the card table. I crossed the street and harangued them, as any ethical person would. As I did -- asking the woman if she didn't think she would be sorry when she grew up to have spent time associated with a group that believes the Queen of England and the Rothschilds are behind the world opium trade -- an African-American stroller came up behind me. She looked appalled.

I walked her away from the little moustache people, and, as she seemed genuinely upset, I spoke with her for a bit. "I don't even support all that much, politically, that President Obama does," she said. "But this is too much. This is about his race, isn't it? I just feel sick." I got her away from the freaks and we walked up the block to her destination, the fine little bakery Joslin's, at which point she had calmed down.

What makes LaRouchies tick?

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Monday morning Lawren Markle of the Arroyo & Foothills Conservancy board and I took our dogs for a hike above Millard Canyon along Sunset Ridge.

We were going to go up Rubio Canyon in celebration of the conservancy's recent option to buy another 21 acres of open space at the canyon mouth, keeping yet more untouched (and ridiculously steep) mountain land free from development.

But my collie Charlie got too many ticks last time we went cross-country in Rubio, so I opted for a wide-open walk away from the chaparral.

Not that there's much underbrush in some of the burnt-out foothills one year on from the Station Fire. But the area is recovering, as it always does, and the Forest Service should open more of the semi-permanently closed trails.

To look down into the bottom of Millard, with its many cabins, is to recall how campground caretaker Lonnie Fehr literally saved it last fall by pleading with the Forest Service for aerial tankers to make some crucial drops along the north ridge. It worked. Not a historic wee bideaway cabin or a campsite was lost.

To find out how to help save Rubio, go to www.altadenafoothills.org.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 10:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Thanks to our friends Gillian and Rick Gough, we sat in a box at the Tchaikovsky whatnot at the Hollywood Bowl Saturday night -- the annual T-athon that climaxes with the real fireworks at the end of the "1812 Overture."

The company was great, the food and drink really good and I never fell asleep during the stripped-down, white-jacketed, summertime version of the LA Phil's performance. Oh, closed my eyes a few times. The better to appreciate the classical fare, you know.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 3:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last weekend Phoebe and I drove up to the Lake Tahoe area the back way: 395 up past Bridgeport and into Nevada, then a left at Carson City: to attend her niece Mariana's wedding.

Mariana was a flower girl in our own wedding 25 years ago this month, so it was pretty sweet symmetry.

We also had blossoms: lowly oleandars, as it happens: down the 'aisle' at our own outdoor ceremony beneath redwood trees.

Mariana beautifully one-upped us with these rose petals. I heard they were freeze-dried for protection against the elements. I picked one up and they seemed soft and fresh to me ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 12:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We spread the ashes of my mother, Marka Ann Oliver Wilson Hibbs, last week off this point at Ha'ena, right around the corner from the northernmost part of Kauai and thus of all the Hawaiian Islands. She had a place there for 20 years, and it was her favorite on Earth.

After paddling out on surfboards, family friend Tommy and I performed the ritual -- as another friend wrote afterwards, "Nice place to be for eternity" -- and then we tossed plumerias after her into the blue, both strung as leis and loose.

The blooms were carried back up to the beach on the waves, and lined the sand for hundreds of feet.

That's my niece Michelle in the photo above, among her grandmother's flowers.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 1:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

These dresses by Jill Giordano and Brian Scheyer are on view at the California Design Biennial at the Pasadena Museum of California Art. It's a color shot -- everything is just so black and white.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A reader was worried and so was I about the current state and the future of the California plein-aire-style paintings on panels by Frank Moore, painted in 1922 and then left out in ... the plain air, though under the covered Picture Bridge at the Huntington Hotel -- all this after I wrote about coming changes to the hotel under its current Langham ownership.

I went on a tour of the bridge with General Manager Martin Nicholson and PR Director Elsa Schelin the other day, and, considering how old the panels are and that they've seen some weather, the more than a dozen paintings are in remarkably good shape.

Even those facing the west, which seem to have got more rain down the decades, are not looking disastrous. They could use a certain amount of restoration -- but none are beyond repair.

The panel above depicts the Old Mill -- El Molino Viejo, if you prefer -- a very early San Gabriel Valley grain mill that was later owned by Henry Huntington, served as a clubhouse for the hotel's now-disappeared golf course and was even later lived in by Huntington's grand-daughter Harriet Doerr and her family.

The bridge is still very much in the plans for the new version of the hotel, which will lose tennis courts and gain lots of spa buildings.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

When my daughter and I went Jeeping very early last Sunday morning in the Palo Duro Canyon outside of Amarillo, Texas, this horse came over to greet us.

We had neither apple nor carrot so we weren't very interesting.

But it became all too interesting once we stopped to pat its nose seeing as it was covered in literally thousands of mosquitos -- all too glad to jump off some tough horseflesh and onto relatively tender us.

We hightailed it toward the boathouse.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Regarding this photo by Mario Miralles taken in Millard Canyon above Altadena, local wildlife biologist Lori Paul gave the play by play Wednesday as their breeding grounds were endangered by a shutoff of canyon water by the Lincoln Avenue Water Company:

California newts in "amplexus," a newt "orgy" in which mating and egg laying occurs. Amplexus is currently occurring late in the season in Millard Creek and directly under Millard Falls in the gravel margins of the pool that is drying because LAWC has taken water from above the waterfall. Eggs and gilled larval newts that require water for their survival are being killed by LAWC's "temporary" water diversions that have turned the creek to a pencil thin trickle or drying pools of mud. These endemic newts were killed by the Station Fire in other burned canyons; therefore, the Millard Canyon population is important for repopulating the region.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 2:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Downtown Los Angeles is finally beginning to look and feel urban in that way that the world's big cities do: People living and working and eating and shopping in tallish, Gotham City-like, handsome buildings.

But outside the hot Cal-French restaurant Church & State on Industrial Street last night, I saw this indication posted on a utility pole that at least one downtown denizen still longs for the genuine Manhattan.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

That's my great-uncle Johnny O'Brien on his 93rd birthday Saturday at a family cabin in Palo Duro Canyon outside of Amarillo, Texas -- with his great-grandaughter Exie Manahan and the chocolate cake.

Johnny is the patriarch of our large O'Brien clan. Some 60 or so relatives gathered Thursday (beef), Friday (gumbo) and Saturday (more beef) nights to celebrate. His mother -- my great-grandmother -- Exie Eagan O'Brien came to the Panhandle by covered wagon as a newlywed with her husband Will O'Brien, who became a cowhand on the massive XIT Ranch. Will saved 11 out of 12 monthly paychecks -- cowboys got room and board -- and bought his first quarter-section of land and first cattle. He eventually brokered the largest cattle deal in U.S. history to the time -- 10,000 head -- and went on to become a Panhandle legend. As has Johnny, revered in the Amarillo business community -- and by all of us in his family -- for his smarts and his heart.

We stayed up late that same night at that same porch table smoking cigars and listening to Johnny tell stories of ranching and whiskey and whatnot.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 10:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Gazing at this fragment of a map of the intersection of Lake and Loma Alta and the Angeles National Forest above was an excercise in nostalgia for me for several reasons, including:

That obscured reference to Camp Chiquita on the left middle -- it was the old Camp Fire Girls overnight hangout on Fair Oaks just below the Zorthian Ranch.

The fact that a house I used to own, on Alpine Villa Drive, the last street up Lake, is included within its margins.

Its general aura of c. 1958 carefree mountaineering. It was a different age in Altatuna. I was a 3-year-old playing in the dirt just off the map's right edge on Sunny Oaks Circle as the map was drawn.

It came in an e-mail courtesy of mountain man Paul Ayers about an upcoming presentation of his, the text of which follows:

Next Tuesday, July 13, 2010, at 7 p.m. , I will be presenting a PowerPoint slideshow on the Camp Sierra Trail which runs from the Cobb Estate up the west ridge above Las Flores Canyon and then to Camp Sierra. The presentation will be made at the monthly Altadena Crest Trail Restoration Working Group ("ACTRWG") meeting which is held at the Altadena Community Center located at 730 E. Altadena Drive.

The show was originally put together for a May 2010 presentation to the Forest Service as part of a pitch to have the trail restored. It is my hope that restoration of the trail will be part of the master plan for the Cobb Estate. It is also possible that a restored Camp Sierra Trail may serve to close the "Skylane Gap" in the Altadena Crest Trail.

This is a nice trail with strong historical documentation in the form of maps, aerial photographs, newspaper articles and trail site artifacts [see examples attached]. A restored trail would complete a nice loop from Cobb Estate up to Camp Sierra, over to Echo Mountain and down the Sam Merrill.

This will be the first in a series of presentations I plan to do on the major "Forgotten Trails of Altadena". These will not be nostalgia shows though history will play a role. Rather it is my hope to see all these trails restored.

Hope to see you there

Posted by Larry Wilson at 4:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Jay Belloli, the longtime gallery director at Pasadena's Armory for the Arts -- two decades there, and before that, at Baxter Art Gallery at Caltech -- was feted by a crowd of some 800 people Saturday night at the Armory as he steps down from his post. Surrounded by art -- much of it postcard art, sent in by artists in his honor. And by friends -- he is truly beloved by the Southern California community of artists and collectors. What a testament to that the size of the crowd was. Much fun was had.

Posted by Larry Wilson at 5:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (27)

So I'm eating my strip-mall Korean restaurant sushi lunch today, alone, finally catching up on the New York Times Book Review's annual Summer Reading issue from early June, when a relative's name catches my eye.

Amarillo rancher Bill O'Brien is a first cousin, once removed -- my Panhandle-native mother's first cousin -- and both a famous cattleman, like his family namesake, my great-grandfather Will O'Brien, and famously outspoken. He was a leader in the effort to get nuclear bomb maker (now dismantler) Pantex out of the Panhandle, and has long been in arguments with food writers who say that it's not healthy to eat corn-fed beef.

But Bill, on his LIT and other ranches, practices a combo, as I understand it -- his cattle are grass-fed and free-range roamers at first, and then are corn-fed in feed lots.

But here's the quote, in a review by James Oliver Cury of "Steak: One Man's Search for the World's Tastiest Piece of Beef" by Mark Schatsker: "After Schatzker meets Bill O'Brien, who keeps 50,000 cows in Texas and champions the use of corn-based feed, he spends the rest of 'Steak' railing against such a diet."

Well, with a caveat, apparently: "Bad grass," Schatzker writes, "equals bad steaks."

I've dropped a note to Bill, who, if he has an iPhone on horseback while he's gettin' the dogies along, will give his side ...

Posted by Larry Wilson at 2:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (14)