“I usually smoke me about two to three inhalations of weed in the morning with my morning cup of coffee. I medicate probably about every two to three hours during the day.

I had surgery on my left foot and I’ve also had ADHD. I’ve been using it a lot for pain relief. I prefer it to Ritalin or amphetamines for ADHD. The treatment is worse than the disease in modern medicine.

Weed, it seems to help you focus. And it doesn’t affect my appetite. I’m not itching. I don’t have cast-iron gut rot. You know, I’m not backing up narcotics to my system, inviting death down the road. I would say that a lot of pharmaceutical drugs have those effects, whether they are amphetamines or anti-depressants or sleeping pills. Even alcohol. But I could sit here with a bushel of marijuana and ranch dressing and you know… might have too much fiber, but that’s about it.

You can’t kill someone with marijuana. There is a saying among Stoners that says you can actually smoke yourself straight. There’s a point where you just can’t get any higher. I don’t know of any drug that has an effect like that. The body usually screams for more.

One thing that you could do that would just totally upset Wall Street right now - just one magic bullet in the dark - is you legalize cannabis tomorrow and put it on the New York stock exchange. I don’t see what the problem is with legalizing something that for over 200 years has been a foundation stone of our nation.

A lot of people think that if you legalize marijuana you are saying drugs are OK to their kids, this, that, the other - but these are the same people that pump their kids full of Ritalin; they want to deny you something that just grows out of the ground.

Weed is, to a degree, a negative influence, but the reason being is because it’s already been demonized. It’s like - what’s our government really doing nowadays? Are they interested in controlling people, or are they interested in changing people?

There has never been a recorded overdose or death in the history of mankind from marijuana. It needs to be decriminalized so that police and society can concentrate on the real evils of the black market.”

This interview was produced for KPCC’s Town Hall Journal: Marijuana: Economic Wonder Drug?

But it turns out to be one of the most peaceful bus rides of my life. Not only is everyone half dozing, but they’re quiet too. No one is on their cell phone. There aren’t even any screaming children. There is very little rowdiness at all. None, in fact.

We sail down Venice Boulevard in a sort of pre-morning-coffee stupor, and by the time we reach Mid City a brilliant streak of red has appeared on the horizon. The darkness is starting to recede. Slowly, slowly, one pixel row at a time, the city comes into view. And my, what a beautiful city it is.

The buildings in Los Angeles were designed for dawns and sunsets; cream-colored walls reflect the scarlet rays with mesmerizing perfection. Sometimes it makes me feel like the world is about to end, but that it’s OK. Because we all understand. We all see. We’re all safely enveloped by this wondrous glow.

I like to think that even I look good in this light. It’s early, my eyes are puffy, my make-up is struggling to hide the imperfections of blotchy morning-face, but I’m refreshingly homogenized by the purest light of the day. Renewed, again, like the city itself; this is a day that could take me anywhere.

I’ve already found myself somewhere unexpected: at peace on a bus in Los Angeles.

At Venice and Grandview, two women boarded the bus and sat behind him.

“I got $4,000 to find the eggs,” he said loudly to the window.

The two women began to chatter in Spanish. He turned around and listened for a while, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide, like a child staring up at adults in wonder. Then he burst into laughter. He gave the two women a big, toothy grin - his teeth gleaming white and thick as bone.

The women sat in silence, looking back and forth from the strange man to one another. Then the woman on the right said simply, “you’re crazy.”

To the rest of the bus, and the world outside the window, he didn’t look crazy. He was a well-dressed, clean-shaven Black man with a diamond earring. He was wearing a gray, woven suit. He had a diamond and emerald bracelet, a diamond ring, and a choker made of green and clear beads around his neck.

But inside his head, the world was out of sync.

He sat forward for a while and seemed to quiet down. Then he reached below his seat and grabbed something from his bag. He put it on his head - something black and green, made of material, like a beanie hat. Then he pulled it down over his face.

He turned back to the women with his arms casually resting on the back of the seat. Instead of his face: a green Halloween mask with a wide smile and rows of large plastic teeth, an orange “$5.95″ sticker on its chin.

“You got any coin candy?” he said.

“Oh my God,” said the woman on the right, with her hand on her chest in surprise. The green face gazed back, unmoving.

After a while, the women continued chatting and the man put the mask back in his bag. He pulled on the cord and got up, wobbling slowly. Before he left the bus, he stood alongside the two women, listening intently to their Spanish. Then he laughed - a sweet giggle with closed eyes - and almost fell. He gave them an instruction in gibberish: “Before I get there you tell them [something - something],” pointing in the direction he was headed. Then he left the bus, and one stop later the women did too. The bus was quiet all the way to downtown.

But what makes this battle so interesting isn’t the contenders themselves. It’s the rallying of the troops. Every year the “commercial” hit is pitted against a niche, cooler underdog. The tidal wave of music consumers are more-often-than-not barely slowed down by “real” music lovers who, unfortunately for their much-loved bands, are more inclined to swap, create, or “acquire” than flock to the shops. This time, however, a neat little Internet gimmick known as “social networking” has allowed the conventional greasy-haired, black-shirted unconventionalists to band together in the virtual realm and take on the beast of popular music (even though, it might be said, Rage Against the Machine isn’t exactly obscure or unpopular…)

The campaign to oust Simon Cowell’s pop machine has been steadily growing on Facebook since December 13th, thanks to the group “RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE FOR CHRISTMAS NO.1“. “Fed up with Simon Cowell’s latest karaoke act being Christmas No.1?” asks the group. Then buy “Killing in the Name” as a “protest to the X-Factor monotony”. The group has attracted more than 400,000 members (2 percent of the U.K. Facebook population) in the two weeks of its existence.

If Rage Against the Machine, do, in fact, get the Christmas No.1 spot, a salute is owed to Facebook for its ability to organize the disorganized. Simon Cowell and his music manufacturing machine will be reminded of the fact that no one man decides the fate of the music industry. It is a democratic process. At least, that’s the idea, right?

However, like most attempts to stick-it-to-the-man, the effort is futile in the long run. Cowell will not be cowering if his grand scheme is undone. As one Facebook RATM group member points out, “Rage Against the Machine is under Simon’s Sony deal anyways, so no matter what, he’ll still be getting money.” Come to think about it… bringing another Sony band under the radar at Christmas time is an excellent idea for the record label. No matter who wins this battle of music ideology, the profits are mounting. For Sony, and Cowell, and Rage Against the Machine (who, let’s face it, originally only got to number 25 in the charts with “Killing in the Name” and will find an ever-appreciated popularity boost in their stocking this year) Christmas has come early. Thanks Facebook!

Today is the last day for Brits to buy their way to victory. By midnight GMT, that’s 4pm PST and only a few hours from now, the votes will all have been cast. At this point, it could go either way… the RATM group states that “some indications are putting us BEHIND by 10,000 copies”. Others claim the opposite. Tom Morello told the Sun newspaper: “This really does seem like the biggest ‘which side are you on?’ moment in the history of UK music.”

A nice idea, Tom. But in the end… we’re all on the same side. Perhaps ebony and ivory, “cool” and “cushy”, live together in perfect harmony after all.

LISTEN to the audio montage here:

“It’s not easy to remove them - it does hurt,” says Gus, a former gang member who now works at the clinic. “Personally I describe it like when you cook bacon and it splatters on your skin. That’s kinda like the feeling.”

“It’s more painful than putting them on,” says Fabian, who is on his eighth session to remove the large “LA” written across his neck. He was in and out of jail for most of his gang life, and now works for Homeboy Industries as a substance abuse drug counselor.

“It hurt a lot,” says a 20-year-old former gang member who requested to remain anonymous. He got his first gang tattoo at 11 years old. “It hurt so much… but no pain no gain so I took it like a G.”

Rapper Xzibit: Photo courtesy of crewsaderz.com

Photo courtesy of hellasound.com

I love reading about Los Angeles, almost as much as I love writing about it. The city is so sprawling and diverse; every block has its own personality, it’s own voice, it’s own story to tell. So when I found Writing Los Angeles: a Literary Anthology on Amazon.com, I was overjoyed. What could be better than a collection of stories about my favorite city by some of the best writers in America? Raymond Chandler evokes the spine-tingling creepiness of a Santa Ana wind, Jack Kerouac reveals the raw wound behind LA’s forever-young complexion, and John Fante musters the beautiful mayhem of a bustling downtown. From Hollywood to Olvera Street, from the Pasadena mountains to the San Fernando Valley, from sunrise to sunset and through the darkest of nights, these writers capture what is written on the inside of every Angeleno’s heart.

But where, I began to wonder among the crisp, white pages of my new book, is South Los Angeles? Where are the streets, the history and the people in this vibrant part of the city? Why are their voices missing from this attempt to capture LA? What I started to see was a shallow, one-sided adventure in the City of Angels, with huge pieces of the story unaccounted for. Without the sights and sounds of places like Inglewood, Crenshaw, Watts, Leimert Park, Pico-Union, Jefferson Park and Baldwin Hills, the atmosphere was incomplete. The tone was all wrong.

And so a new adventure begins: seeking creative writing about South LA. This is part one.

It was hard to find contenders - not because South LA literature doesn’t exist, but because it’s hidden. But what I eventually found, tucked away in the crevices of the Internet, was enough to convince me that the Writing Los Angeles anthology should be re-written. Take, for example, the poetic works of a group of 13-year-old writers from a summer workshop in 2005, aptly entitled: “Often Ignored/Never Silent.”

Here’s the first stanza from Julian’s poem, “Letter 2 Mr. President:”

Dear Mr. President
how it goin on in the white house
But let me tell you how its goin on in my house.
Cold water with the roof collapsing
I turn on my T.V.
and there’s terrorist attackin
Should I be scared I don’t think so
I have seen what you haven’t liven in the ghetto
How does it feel with maids and cooks
Not think about crooks
while reading your books.
Have you ever been drivin at night in the stars
And the police pulled you over and out of your car
I see crips I see bloods I see thugz
I have even seen my best friend selliun drugs
What do you see except money and whites
Have you seen a person get shot or beat up in a fight
Maybe one day you can see what I see
So I can help you and you can help me
When will you end the war when you do write back
So our friends and family can get out of Iraq
I have 2 go now but I’ll write you back everyday
From everybody living in South L.A.

Then there’s the creative non-fiction piece I stumbled upon in The Best American Non-Required Reading 2003 (which, ironically, was sitting right on my bookshelf). The story by Daniel Voll is titled “Riot Baby” and was originally published in Esquire. It’s centered around the character of Jelani, a 10-year-old boy who was born during the LA Riots of 1992. “Ten years later, the people are still poor, there’s not enough work, and the gang violence is bad and getting worse,” writes Voll in his introduction. “One other thing hasn’t changed in South Central: little boys are still growing up there.”

Unlike the “typical” South LA narrative - the one we’ve been encouraged to accept by violence-hungry news organizations, hip hop and dark patches in history - the story of Jelani and his family isn’t about tragedy. In fact, it might be perceived as a story about forgiveness: learning how to balance forgiveness with integrity, and fear with the courage to start all over again. In one scene, Jelani is at his church youth group, pondering the meaning of “forgiveness” in a world defined by the good and the bad, with no in between:

In karate class, the teacher says, your body is your house, your arms are your gates, don’t let anybody in your house. Protect your house! Nothing about forgiveness there. And there was that time last year when the bully was all over him. What was he supposed to do, forgive the kid, who was twice his size? Uh-uh. He got somebody twice the bully’s size. Bo went and had a serious talk with him, and poof, no more bully. Isn’t that the way the world works?

The narrative is compelling and the characters are deep. But what makes “Riot Baby” an important piece of South LA literature is the evocation of the area’s physical presence. For example:

There are palm trees on both sides of Jelani’s street. They are very tall and skinny palm trees. The sky is pale blue overhead, the air very still. Most front lawns are well kept. Most windows have burglar bars. There are no high-rises here, nothing more than a couple stories. Even in the neighborhood known as the Jungle, off Crenshaw Boulevard, they’ve got lawns.

South LA is, in itself, a character, and needs to be treated as such in order for that character to make an impact. In all the mainstream writing about Los Angeles, the experience of the city is tangible: the smell of hot concrete, the static hum of traffic, the color of the buildings at sunset - the way those deep pinks and oranges melt into the skyline like the end of the world is nigh. In order for South LA to take its place in the collective consciousness of the literary world, we have to be able to feel it. In that sense, Voll does a great job of bringing life to South LA.

Until next time… are you a writer or can suggest any creative writing about South LA? Submit your work and ideas to southla@usc.edu

Further reading:
“The Weakness of L.A. Literature” by Adam Kirsch, Slate Magazine
“The Literary History of Los Angeles” at discoverlosangeles.com.

I spent a Saturday night in Marina Del Rey asking date-night movie-goers to explain the magic of the cinema.

LISTEN:

This audio piece was produced for KPCC’s Town Hall Journal with Judy Muller.

Castillo has been documenting Chicano society since he moved to Los Angeles with his family from El Paso, Texas when he was 16 years old. It was tumultuous time. The city’s demographics were shifting rapidly, and the Chicano Civil Rights Movement was erupting in an energetic rush. Castillo witnessed the “High School Blowouts” in 1968, snapping the pictures “Down with Brutality” and “A Free School Not-A-Jail” during a student protest at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights.

A few years later, while studying at California State University, Northridge, Castillo was inspired by the struggle of farm workers in California’s Central Valley and began following the fledgling Farm Workers Union as it started to organize. His photographs of Cesar Chavez reveal personal admiration for the Chicano Civil Rights leader. The shots are reverent; Chavez is surrounded by inspired workers and awed children, or silhouetted against the darkness as he addresses a crowd.

The collection is now being exhibited at the Latino Museum of History, Art and Culture, housed downtown on Gallery Row at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. At an opening reception, Castillo said that he hoped his work would inspire people to “look at their own community and family, and the beauty around you.” Castillo added that strong, positive images of the Chicano Civil Rights Movement are necessary to help purge negative stereotypes persistent in the city, from the past to the present day.

The images are naturally iconic, evocative of the sepia-toned sentiment that accompanies historical art work. But clustered together in the basement room of the Theatre Center building, Castillo’s work risks becoming reminiscent, rather than present. The exhibit is composed of faces and scenery now long familiar, and rests heavily on the symbolism of a revolutionary era, rather than seeking to break new ground. Among the powerful depictions, the simpler images stood out. The subtlely of a mother walking with a young child beside a graffited brick wall, or two young women, one holding a baby, waiting for a bus beside an extravagant mural, seemed more resonant than the rallies, speeches and politics.

And yet, the youthful crowd at the reception proved that these iconic photographs hadn’t lost their poignancy. A group of Latino teenagers mingled around the images of the 1968 Roosevelt High School protest, perhaps recalling some recent experience fighting the LAUSD’s budget cuts. A young woman stood beside Cesar Chavez, reading the history of the United Farm Workers Union on an accompanying placard. Later, an African-American man, dressed in multi-colored, tie-dye pants and a customized leather jacket, leaned in and adjusted his glasses to get a closer look at four similarly-clad Latino men inside one of the frames. “Los Four,” taken in 1974, shows artist-friends of Castillo’s smiling happily beside their bright, spray-painted mural, designed to promote graffiti as art, not vandalism.

Castillo himself manned the sidelines with a camera around his neck, the shy and natural observer he claims to have always been. Meanwhile, his shared perspective took on new resonance for the viewers wandering the room. It may have been a different year and a different fight, said Castillo, but the social atmosphere remains the same. “From Vietnam to Iraq,” he said, “history repeats itself.”

This story was also published on Intersections: the South Los Angeles Report