It’s not easy to live in LA.  You’ve got to have a certain toughness.  Especially if you are struggling to make ends meet… and who isn’t these days?

Certainly our fair city is having a hard time.  And it seems that one of the answers the people who run this place have is raising the fine on just about everything having to do with driving.  Forget about the impact on the populace.  There’s a new attitude and it seems to be…  let’s make new laws to take as much money as we can from the people of this city.

Now I’m not an advocate of scofflaws who drive like maniacs and endanger peoples lives by their bad driving.  Those losers should be off the road… but I can’t help but wonder what kind of message politicians are sending to us folks when they raise the parking rates to outrageous sums, slap $50 parking fines on expired meters, boot and tow cars after three unpaid parking tickets … it used to be 5 (lots of money in getting a car out of hock) and now are suggesting that putting more cameras at intersections can raise millions for the city.

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It’s not often I get to feel glad that I’m not a (reported) billionaire, but I’m glad I am not 49-year-old private equity investor and newly fledged Deputy Mayor Austin Beutner.

Beutner was last week appointed the mayor’s new deputy  and chief executive for economic and business policy. The media title is “Job Czar.”  He will also have, quoting the Times, “a new line of direct authority over the Department of Water and Power, the Port of Los Angeles and the economic and business policies at Los Angeles World Airports.”

Columnists at the Times and the Daily News acclaimed the appointment of Mr B, of whom almost no one had ever heard. Local unemployment stands at over 12 percent. It’s much higher in the neighborhoods where the major current career opportunities are with the Crips and Salvator Maratrucha. Clearly, jobs are a huge priority. Said the mayor, “Austin has a real vision for economic development and job creation.”

First and foremost, Beutner said he’d try to make LA  (the Times said) “a friendlier place for the sort of businesses that create well-paying jobs.”  Excuse me, but this is where I came in. For 30 years and four mayoral administrations, mayors and deputy mayors have promised exactly the same thing. As a result, tax structures have been gently shuffled, regulatory bureaucracies have received many a mild tweak and national campaigns have been launched to sell the world on LA’s commerce-friendly attractions.

No one has claimed these measures turned LA into a business paradise. But during this period, two utterly contradictory business developments did take place…

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Yes, the City Council is STILL (I won’t say “hashing out”) working on the Medical Marijuana ordinance, and there’s an important vote tomorrow.

If you care about making a good law that supports the good dispensaries and gets rid of the creepy drug fronts, how about checking out the sample letter you can send, and the list of all the Council contact info? It’s right here after the jump.

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Harold at the Château de Vincennes on the east side of Paris.

Over the holidays I left the warmth of sunny LA to visit mon homme, Harold in Paris and decided to reveal my comparative observations between these two great cities. Also, I can’t think of anything else to blog about this week.

Weather – I don’t even know why I am bothering to comment on this, as LA is the obvious winner. Visiting France in the winter didn’t help Paris here, but come on, no matter what the season, not many cities are going to beat LA when it comes to our average weather year round, which is quite spectacular.

Public Transportation – As a frequent rider of LA’s Metro system, I feel qualified to declare Paris the winner here. The City of Lights boasts many more trains per hour (like one train every 5 minutes) and is much more accessible than LA’s Metro system. You can get within a few blocks of just about anywhere you need to go. The one drawback is that it can be quite crowded, even during off peak hours.

Cost of Living – LA may not be the cheapest big city, but it sure beats Paris when it comes to housing and food values. Harold’s apartment is a good example. His place is smaller than mine, in a more suburban (more…)

Yet another example of (borrowing from the estimable Mr Jalopy) Going Out Of Business In LA:   The Santa Monica Food Truck Debacle of 2010.

It was only a matter of time before someone came up with the idea of “hosting” a few of the popular gourmet food trucks (PLEASE don’t call them Roach Coaches!), creating a rotating hub of deliciousness.

The corner of Santa Monica and 14^th was just such a hub, and the magic lasted all of about one day before the City showed up wanting their piece of the pie (or bite of a grilled cheese, or taco, or brisket, or whatever).   The location had its soft open on Monday (Yay, Pete, getting in there!) with India jones, Barbie Q’s, Fishlips, and the Grilled Cheese Truck, and was closed down on Tuesday.

Barely one whole day of operations.

Tuesday’s lineup was supposed to be FrySmith, Barbies Q, India Jones and Dainty Cakes.   The City claims the property owner doesn’t have the right food service paperwork on file. Nevermind all the individual trucks have it – Hey the whole state’s broke – Let’s tax the hell out of small businesses trying to get new ideas off the ground, even if it puts them out of business in the process.

I get it – local brick-and-mortar restaurants are feeling the threat from these trucks. To which I respond, “Free Market, Baby!”  Let the market be free already.

Pissed off? Hungry?

Email the Santa Monica City Council at council@smgov.net and codecompliance@smgov.net. Don’t forget to CC the food truck lot guy at smfoodtrucklot@gmail.com.

Follow the food truck lot guy via Twitter, all you Twitterers –

See you at Santa Monica and 14th — I hope!

I’ve written about my frustration with our fine city’s parking control and the overpriced, frequently broken meters in Hollywood before.  But now, after my experience two mornings ago on Hollywood Blvd, I’m beginning to think that there is something more sinister going on.  Is it possible that parking control officers are giving tickets to cars parked legally, with the required amount of money in the meter for the time, figuring that people will just pay the $50 fine?  Is this a new fund-raising racket that’s on the down low in City Hall?

Because as we all know, paying a ticket is way easier than contesting a ticket.  It takes far far more time in frustration, just getting someone on the phone and sometimes going to a courthouse to physically contest it, than forking over your credit card.  It’s a no win situation and after one try at it, most people will just give up and pay the damn fifty bucks.  I know I did last time. After several fruitless tries, too much time on the phone, I gave up and paid.

But then, it happened again.  Monday, I stopped on Hollywood Blvd around 11:20 am.  I put in 8 quarters for 20 minutes… giving myself an extra 40 minutes.  I was gone 17 minutes.  When I returned I had a ticket.  Fifty bucks.  The ticket was issued seven minutes after I put in my money.  When I checked the meter, I still had lots of time left.  You can imagine my frustration.  It’s as if the city just wants to milk the public, good will be damned.  They know good and well that most people will just pay.  I immediately started down the road of thinking about how much time I was going to have to devote to this.

This time I don’t want to just give up and pay.  Yes, I will contact my council person (Thanks Eric Garcetti, for your offer last time to get in touch, I was working on a show and slammed, so after a phone call to parking control, I just paid).

But really.  What the hell is going on here?  Do these guys get bonuses for volume?  Do they check the meter at all before issuing tickets?  But most of all I was just disappointed.  What kind of city has LA turned into?   Grrrrrrr.

Dear LAX Cop Who Threatened To Write My Girlfriend A Ticket Last Monday:

I know you have kind of a thankless job. Really, I can only imagine the absolute nonsense you’re forced to deal with on a daily basis: People wanting to cross streets, people wanting to drive their cars on those same streets, people asking for directions to terminals — many of whom probably don’t display a fraction of the deference you’d like them to, given your position of relative authority. And probably less than .0000001 percent of them are terrorists, which doesn’t afford you much to write about in your weekly letters to Jack Bauer. The headaches you face must be tremendous.

So I can kind of understand why you started to write my girlfriend a ticket when she picked me up from the airport last week. You asked me where I was going, I told you I was quickly hopping into her stopped-in-traffic car, and then you ordered me, apparently under your breath, to get into the car via a different curb, one reserved for passenger pick-ups. When I didn’t obey, you showed me you meant business by threatening a woman who had no role in our prior interaction. And when I asked why you were writing a ticket, you were rightly annoyed with me, and said that you had already told me that I could only get into the car in the designated pick-up area. I’m so sorry I didn’t hear your mush-mouthed order over the echoing din of honking horns and revving engines. These stupid ears of mine! I really should have listened to you more closely, just in case you were commanding me to do something totally inefficient and pointless.

Sure, she was waiting in a line of cars that wasn’t moving at all, and sure, I didn’t have to walk into the street or disrupt traffic in any way to get into her car. Sure, her passenger side opened onto an empty curb, and sure, it took me all of three seconds to get into the car, during which traffic didn’t move at all. And sure, if you had just let us go on our way, it would have actually alleviated traffic overall, since we wouldn’t have needed to merge or change lanes. Sure, it would have saved everyone, including yourself, time and frustration. But you have authority to maintain, oh LAX Cop Who Threatened To Write My Girlfriend A Ticket Last Monday. And you can’t just have people flouting your rules and getting into cars willy-nilly. In a properly functioning society, the letter of the law always supersedes the spirit, and the stripes on your arm are all the proof of this anyone should need.

Thank you, oh LAX Cop Who Threatened To Write My Girlfriend A Ticket Last Monday. Thank you for showing me that order is only maintained through a healthy respect for authority, and that the best way to communicate with a recalcitrant citizen is to threaten a woman until he complies.

Dear Los Angeles Police Department, Antiterrorist Stationary Street Patrol Unit Placement (ASSPUP) Division:

Since December 28, I’ve been biking morning and evening by this empty patrol unit (pictured at right), parked in the red in front of the palatial residence of some unknown country’s diplomats on the northwest corner of 4th Street and Hudson in Hancock Park. When I saw it still there in the same place on the second day I first thought maybe the officers had gotten lost. On the third day I considered calling 911 in case you guys might be short one car and were wondering where it went.

But then on the fourth day it finally dawned on me that you sharp crime-stopping cookies knew about this all along, and I’ve really got to hand it to whoever the forward thinkers are that came up with this wholly effective and unique decoy. Some might say it’s bullshit, but I say in the wake of the failed underpants bomber Christmas Day, such desperate measures call for desperate countermeasures to protect our foreign officials. And the fact is: it’s an unqualified success. So far, this empty unattended and entirely useless black-and-white has been 100% effective in keeping any criminal shit whatsover from happening around it (not counting famed musician neighbor Beck dumping his Christmas tree in front of his nearby house December 29).

With the vehicle still there this morning in the exact same place you left it last year and finding everything else along that cozy and affluent intersection calm and quiet and not blown up or overrun by jihadists (even Beck’s tree was gone!), I realized the time was ripe to broaden this pilot program and expand it away from foreign dignitaries, and instead into other less-wealthy communities like mine, for example, full of actual citizens like me, for example, whose taxes pay for your protection and service. So in the hopes you’re looking to grow this program into the city-wide success I know it can be, allow me to formally volunteer use of the space directly in front of my house. Hell, if it’ll help, I’ll even paint the curb red to add that much-needed sense of we-can-park-where-we-want-to urgency that won’t get old even after a week. Or a decade.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

Love,
Will

So, one of the things I love about living in L.A., about having some of my family here in L.A., about spending the Holidays in L.A., is the Soothing Peace of there being an almost complete lack of Traffic over the Christmas Holiday.

Now that the Holidays are behind us, I thought it might be a good time to reflect upon how that was completely fucked up this year and totally not the case. Thanks 2009, there’s another thing you couldn’t get right.

And in keeping with the spirit of the times, in a effort to flow with the popular zeitgeist, much as many of our politicians and mainstream news figures and media outlets do, I fully intend to blame something that pisses me off on the economy.

However, unlike most talking heads and pundits, I not only know that I have no real idea what I’m talking about, but I’m fully copping to it. Right here in front of folks.

I have no formal training in economics. The closest I’ve come to a college education is having driven through Westwood. Most of what I know about String Theory comes from reading XKCD, but I intend to share my theory that Christmas Traffic in L.A. is an indicator of the general economic state of our fine city, as much or more than sales receipts on Black Friday.

If that sounds like fun to you, if that’s your kind of Train Wreck, follow me over the Jump: (more…)

I’m actually quite pleasantly surprised that it took a full four days before finding my first curbside Christmas tree carcass. But I’m even more surprised that the inaugural corpse pictured above has a celebrity connection seeing as it’s pronated where it was pitched on the  parkway outside none other than Beck’s Hancock Park residence.

Go crazy with the Cheeze Whiz, but first: remember to recycle your tree!