I don’t remember if it was Anna or Melle who remarked on our booming voices and boisterous laughter last night, but the statement was true. We sat around an oval-shaped table eating lumpia and pancit and garlic rice and Menudo and donuts at Robinson Space in the middle of the Historic Filipinotown neighborhood of Los Angeles. The room was decorated for Christmas and revolution, and we were having a grand old time.
These old friends hadn’t been together in this configuration since before the early days of the pandemic. It had been two years without our usual round of March birthday brunches and drinks. Two years without quick get-togethers or whatever we used to do when a plan could come together without worrying about our mortal safety and that of those we love just by breathing the same air with people we like for a while.
And yet there we were, drinking white claws and seltzer water and making small talk with new acquaintances.
It was a family dinner. It was a celebration. It was recognition of the work one of us had been doing during these desperate times. While most of us had been in our own homes protecting our butts, Melle had been in the streets of our city making sure our neighbors didn’t go hungry. Her organization, Polo’s Pantry, was in its infancy when the needs of those she intended to serve increased exponentially. At the same time, many of the government services they may have depended on became unavailable.
Melle and the community coalitions she is a part of sprung into action to meet those needs. They did so from nearly the moment stay-at-home orders began at the time when we didn’t fully understand the risks, the safety protocols, or how long we’d be living this way.
“I say ‘I love you’ through food,” she said as she spoke to the attendees last night. Food is a love language. It had brought all of us together on a Saturday night to laugh, cry, learn, and share.
I’m now accepting invitations. In just a few days, I will be two weeks beyond my covid vaccination and open for socializing. If you are similarly inoculated, please extend and accept invites for in-person hangouts inside and outside of doors for varying lengths of time. We might stand closer to each other than six feet apart and remove our masks for a bit. Hugs are appreciated but not required.
Are we enjoying a little outdoor dining? How many times will we remark, “it’s so good to see your face!”? I’ve been slowly stepping out into the world these last few days. I sat outside a coffee shop for 15 minutes people watching and, you know what, “It’s so good to see your faces,” even if I’ve never seen them before. Maybe we can do that at Republique or Black Market or splurge at Vespertine. Perhaps we’re lining up for Ditroit or La Autentica Birrieiria or daybird?
How will we get to this meat space meet-up? Will we carpool? Maybe. Will I take the bus? Maybe, yes. Will I take the metro? Maybe, no.
Want to go to a game? LAFC and the Sparks should be accepting an increasing number of fans this summer.
I don’t think I’m yet ready for a concert, but I’ll go to the movies with ya.
Are there momentous events of the last year that should be acknowledged, celebrated, or mourned? Let’s do that.
Maybe we’re just taking a walk or sitting in a park or hanging out at your house or mine. I didn’t do nearly enough outdoor hangs as I should or could have over the past 13 months. Still, I would like to take our seeming collective increased appreciation for our habitat with me into what comes next.
“Shit, I didn’t take a break I broke. Broke my heart, broke my soul, don’t cry for me, though.”
— Big Sean, Overtime
There are few things I love more than Los Angeles and basketball. It’s been exactly seven days since those two things, and much of the world-at-large has been in shock and mourning of the deaths of Kobe Bryant, his basketball prodigy daughter, Gigi, and seven other people in a senseless helicopter crash.
The earth kept spinning, and meaningful events have happened in news and politics since but my mind, my conversations, my dreams have found only this thing to be of consequence in the last week.
From the moment it happened, it has been a constant topic in my work. We’ve covered the story, and it’s aftermath exhaustively and effectively on etonline.com. It ran through the GRAMMYs ceremony that night. Audiences have come to us in large numbers looking for news and context. Some were hoping we’ll help them make sense of it all. Others were wishing we’d turn away from it. Most, I imagine, knowing we can’t and shouldn’t. That it’s our responsibility to write and report and produce our way through it.
My job is to lead teams that report on how these things are performing. What are the numbers behind it all? What do those numbers mean? The numbers have stirred emotion. How to acknowledge record-breaking performance that is in response to tragedy? We want to celebrate our effectiveness and the quality of the work, but this is not something to which you raise your glasses. Every celebrity death or tragic event is like this, but somehow, this feels different.
A few hours after it happened, I got up from my computer and walked to the store needing a break from the rumors and crazy in the hours after the news broke. The city was already beginning to fill with melancholy. The neighborhood felt eerily quiet. The usual din of Trader Joe’s was muted. My cashier asked me if I’d heard the news and then told me that she had been getting some shots up at the park right before coming into work. On her last shot, she yelled, “KOBE!” and it went in. Then she got to the store, and a colleague told her the news.
Another of her co-workers had been sent home early after it was clear he wasn’t going to be able to stop sobbing any time soon.
I haven’t been able to watch any basketball since the crash, not even highlights. I’ve kept up with some NBA scores, but does this season even matter any more? In a season where the Lakers have finally returned to glory and, for the first time, had a legit in-town rival in the Clippers, there was an energy around men’s basketball we hadn’t seen in a while. Now, do we care? The primary storyline of this NBA season has been derailed. Now, the only real question is how will the league, it’s players, and the culture around basketball honor one of it’s most beloved and influential stars, gone too soon?
The Lakers are the center of the NBA universe, and Kobe had become the essence of what it meant to be a Laker. Of course, there’s Magic and Jerry and Kareem, but for most of the last twenty years, the face of the franchise was employee number 8. I didn’t love or even really like Kobe the player or the person he was during most of his playing career. He was well on his way to winning me over in his retirement, though. The grim discipline and determination that marked his NBA years had shifted to joy and vitality and passion for being a great parent, a good neighbor, and a lover of the game in all its forms—especially the women’s game.
These are all things I respect and appreciate in others. Bryant and his daughter had so integrated themselves into the fabric and rhythms of the culture of basketball that matters most to me that they had become constants.
Aside: as I write this with music on shuffle, RJ & Choice’s Get Rich is playing. Choice raps
“And we never going back, so I know it’s clear Call the teller every night, so I know it’s there Only find truth in your account and in your mirror Counting checks cause I’m deaf n—-a Kobe stare”
We attended several of the same games in the last twelve months. They had recently become a meme popular among women’s basketball fans. Gigi was a regular in basketball highlights. They were vibrant. They were alive.
And then they weren’t.
As my barber cut my hair yesterday, she told me that she had been at a hair show in Long Beach when the news started to spread. It was just a few moments before a barber battle. Rob Ferrel, an incredible hair artist, changed his plans on the spot and whipped out this winning piece.
My trainer and I spent most of our lone session this week reminiscing about Kobe’s basketball legacy and discussing how we’ve been coping. He bleeds Lakers purple and gold. Kobe’s final game still sits on his DVR. We didn’t cry together, but I wouldn’t have been surprised or ashamed if we had.
I’ve read RIP KOBE on every city bus I’ve seen this week. I haven’t made a trip outside of the house where I didn’t see a jersey or cap or a face that didn’t express the anguish running through this town.
Shaquille O’neal is crying on my television. A co-worker is weeping in my office. A dream version of me screams out in anguish.
A helicopter just flew overhead. It’s seven days later, and it’s a beautiful morning in this city I adore. There’s no fog to obscure its path. It will reach its destination, and those aboard will keep going.
So will you. So will I. So will we.
To Los Angeles and basketball, we’re bruised but not broken.
We were standing in the non-fiction, cultural studies aisle of Book Star on Ventura Boulevard when a woman came around the corner and sternly said, “No laughing!” We blushed and then, she smiled.
“Sometimes when I do that, it’s to teenage couples that are smooching in the stacks,” she explained. I revealed that just before we had been looking at “adult books” like 101 Sex Positions and, yes, laughing like school children that were getting away with something.
“Oh, I work in the children’s section so I can’t help you if you want more of those kinds of books but remember, ‘No Laughing!”
It was the first of a few random conversations with Angelenos on our Saturday roaming the Valley. We chatted with an older real estate agent who took advantage of us slowly perusing the listings on her agency window to give us a card and inform us of the merits of buying in Burbank.
A homeless man interrupted our conversation on his way to Starbucks—probably for some complimentary AC, water, and electricity—to tell her that her expressive hands meant she was probably brilliant, just like him. It wasn’t lost on me the irony of us discussing nearly million dollar listings while so many of our fellow citizens are living on the streets.
But, this is Los Angeles.
We got back in our car and drove around debating where to eat. Cascabel or Sushi Yuzu? Was the Hungry Crowd open? Did Take a Bao still exist (no)? We settled on Forman’s Tavern after surveying our options in Toluca Lake, and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality and care of the bar food and cocktails at this spot not likely on anyone’s “Best of LA” lists. But, Forman’s reflects the city’s food culture sensibilities: if you’re going to make it, make it well, and make it your own.
Back at home, we learned of Jonathan Gold’s unexpected death while an unrelated car chase—the California staple—was happening at the same time. The chase ended with a hostage situation in a grocery store frequented by friends and acquaintances and three women injured or dead at the hands of a young man with a gun. The chase and violence make no sense. The death of Mr. Gold, a man whose entire purpose seemed to be in explaining and translating LA through its food and the people who make and consume it, is a bitter pill to swallow at such a moment in time.
We decided right then to watch City of Gold, the award-winning documentary about the Pulitzer-prize winning restaurant critic and this beautiful city that made him. Released in 2015, in some ways it feels like a loving eulogy to him three years before his passing. It’s filled with people we know: ambassadors and emissaries of this place we call home, and it feels like how I think of LA and that Gold sought to convey with everything he wrote.
LA is physically enormous, spread out across miles and miles of land, but we’re mostly just a bunch of neighborhoods stitched together, ethnically diverse and often moving to the same rhythm. It feels frictionless to know many of the people that make the city go but hard to feel like you ever truly know the city at all. Know and love your neighborhood and then leave it. There are so many cultures, so many hopes and dreams, so many transplants, and so much change that you’ll never even get close to wrapping your hands around this city unless you go out and explore.
Today, I don’t want to wrap my hands around Los Angeles; I want to hug it.
This image showed up several times on twitter a few days ago.
I disagree.
I don’t know what I think the percentages might be but I do know that on most days, I see more acts of kindness than I do cruelty.
I’m splitting time between two offices until the new year, one of which is downtown. This has allowed me the opportunity to make metro my primary way of commuting and that allows me to spend more time in close contact with a much larger and more varied collection of the humans of LA.
Despite what you’ve heard, LA’s public transit system is well used. The Orange Line and Red Line are packed to the gills during commuting hours filled with all kinds of folks.
Yesterday, there was the guy with the incredibly well behaved service dog. The tall kid mean mugging who seemed to think everyone walking past him was intentionally bumping him. The high fashion young italian tourists who had little sense of US norms for personal space and who truly embodied “talking with your hands.” The mom with the precocious toddler who could only be calmed (sort of) by the glowing screen of the smart phone. The other toddler strapped tightly into her stroller who couldn’t help but swing back and forth wildly, smiling at everyone who happened to give her a glance.
At least once a ride, I see someone go out of their way to clear a seat for an elderly or disabled person or weary mom. Yesterday morning’s commute featured a battle for graciousness between an older gentleman and a slightly younger than him lady over who should take a recently available seat. People help each other with directions. Regular commuters nod and smile at each other across a train with common understanding. People, for the most part, leave our homeless and mentally ill, who frequent the trains, be. And sometimes, they offer a few dollars and/or a little dignity.
We’re all just humans of Los Angeles.
So, no, three out of every four Americans don’t got me fucked up.
Three out of every four Americans got me wanting to do better.
“And every day I’m learning about you. The things that no one else sees.” – The xx, Angels
The xx, along with The Chromatics and Austra (who we didn’t make it in time to see), played at The Hollywood Bowl this past Sunday. We got to our pretty solid seats in the terrace section right before The Chromatics went on. The Chromatics are very enjoyable but the Bowl is an odd place to hear shoegaze-y, head-noddy, synthpop. Should we all be swaying back and forth in our seats or eating our fried chicken and drinking wine from our picnic baskets?
I said as much before The xx hit the stage. I might have even suggested this was my last time coming to the bowl for this kind of non-orchestral, non-spectacle show. And then Romy, Oliver, and Jamie came out and amazed for over an hour. Pretty spectacular what two kids on guitars and an electronic music guru can do to make great use of an enormous stage and entertain with the power of their performance.
And then the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra joined them and took it higher.
Anyway, I took terrible pictures that I didn’t post to instagram but other people took much better pics. Here are some of them:
This year, though, Tiffany and I have been even more basketball obsessed. We watched as much basketball during the Summer Olympics as we could. We picked up NBA League Pass and went to several Clippers games. Both the men’s and women’s NCAA tournaments were outstanding this year and the NBA Playoffs were fan-tastic as the tagline used to say.
We also attended Sparks games. Initially, the goal was to catch The 3 to See and maybe catch Angel McCoughtry (one of my favorite players) and our friend’s beloved Lynx but after the first game, we were hooked and Tiffany got a half-season package on the spot.
Being in the arena for these games is infectious. You’re close to the action. The Sparks play great music. You see passionate fans and newbies surprised by how fun it is. The crowd is an interesting mix of folks, many of whom, I’m sure appreciate being able to attend a professional sports game at a reasonable price and not be in the nosebleeds.
It’s one of the only entertainment experiences I’ve ever been to where women aren’t sexualized. There’s no sense of “the male gaze” at a WNBA game. This is about strength and skill and competition. Winning is what matters. Passion.
I have friends that snark on the Sparks as “Team Ponytail” but nobody is trying to look cute on the court. The players are stunning as athletes tend to be but I remark on pretty shots and killer crossovers not faces and outfits.
We ended up seeing almost all of The Sparks home games live and watched several on TV. TWC Sportsnet does a wonderful job of covering the team with respect for the sport and it’s players. They get the same treatment the Lakers do.
But, there’s always next year. And while the Sparks didn’t win that game, they won us over. I’ve got shirts and schwag and a 2014 season ticket right behind the team bench.
Welcome to Sparkle City. Thank you for a great season.
I’ve seen Quadron, and Coco O. specifically, perform live several times now. Three times in the last 12 months, in fact. I’m enamored with Coco’s voice, her delightful energy, her style, and this sense that she’s still amazed that she’s on stage performing for people even after two albums of some acclaim and becoming a staple in the best music circles around Los Angeles.
The standout from this week’s performance at The Troubador was their cover of Baby Be Mine but, this past December, I was in the venue for this:
“I always thought it was a shame the way we have to play these games.” – The xx, Sunset
By the end of Social Media Week Los Angeles, I had seen some interesting talks from big players in the space. MWW Group hosted a panel of brand advocates from Uber and Subaru and Vitamin A that dug in a bit on the most pressing question I think all brands have as they navigate social networks: how do you maintain an authentic voice when a PR flap takes place, when customers have legitimate complaints, when you make a misstep in one of your postings?
But, ultimately, I was left most impressed with the folks still really trying to figure it all out — the local hospitality and travel folks, the food writers and business people, and the more civic-minded people I mentioned last week.
Their audiences featured people furiously scribbling down notes and asking really nuts and bolts tactical questions. It was a reminder that no matter how fast it feels like we’re moving, these technologies and services and ways of communicating are still in their infancy. Things I might take for granted as being well-known or understood, really aren’t.
They still require the conversation. Like the one I had at lunch of really smart industry folks on my last day at the conference as we discussed the future of television or the one we had last night at my parents’ house as my mother revealed her strategy for posting on facebook and how she’s on twitter but doesn’t use it because she doesn’t “get it.”
We’ll have to talk about that more, I thought. And not online.
If anything, the biggest takeaway I got from Social Media Week is that “social” is the most important word in “social media.”
We can discuss strategies and tactics and messaging and blah blah blah but this is what is true: humans interact. They relate to each other, or not. We try to use all the tools available to us to better be heard or to better listen.
And, for all my love of twitter and tumblr, it hasn’t replaced the power of people breaking bread together, talking, growing closer, and, occasionally really figuring some things out.
