Protecting Privacy by Outlawing Street Photography.

Henri Cartier-Bresson
FRANCE. Paris. Avenue du Maine. 1932.

The New York Times writes today about a growing movement, especially in France, to limit public photography of strangers by so-called street photographers. In the land of Henri Cartier-Bresson, who used the term “Decisive Moment” , to describe that flash of life’s movements captured by lens, the art of unposed and candid snapshots may be restricted.

I find this trend odious and unwarranted.

The role of the photographer, capturing people out in the open, in public spaces, doing anything, must be a sacrosanct and protected part of a free society.

In response to the NYT article I wrote this letter:

As a photographer in the US, my observation is that the once clear lines between public and private presentation, where you put on a hat and gloves before leaving the house, where you didn’t use swear words in public, and people presumed that others were decent and honorable, well that whole world was upended by the 1960s.

Throw in the internet, which opens the whole private life of a person up for public display, and people are, naturally, feeling invaded by strangers. The easiest way to express their anger is by acting hostile towards the man on the street with a camera.

Is it rational? No. Is it legal to prevent street photography? No. Can children in a playground, a person being arrested, a woman sitting alone in a cafe be photographed? Yes.

We are ironically freer and more liberated in acting out our vulgarities and misbehaviors, our decadence and eccentricities, yet we are going back to that question of honor, privacy and human dignity that every culture struggles with.

Will we allow free and lawful street photography? Or will France and other Western countries cover the collective lens with a legal burqa?

A Community Meeting.

Dan Stroncak

Not often is Van Nuys convinced it is a community, but last night, about 40 of us pretended it was, and gathered in the Columbus Avenue School to hear LAPD’s Senior Lead Office Vince DiMauro talk about the crimes that are a trademark of our district: prostitution, gangs, tagging, noise, and vacant properties.

Two political candidates for the special City Council District #6 Election (May 21, 2013) showed up: Derek Waleko and Dan Stroncak.

We were in a well-ordered academic hall, which I had last seen at my elementary school, Lincoln Hall in Lincolnwood, IL some four decades ago.

An upright piano, lunch tables stacked into the walls like Murphy beds, a state and a national flag on either side of the stage, a cop speaking kindly to attentive citizens, present among us were these venerable elements of American civic life and values.

And then Donna from the Mary Magdalene Foundation got up to present her plea for the prostitute as victim, which set off some incendiary cerebral explosion in one of the candidates, who found her characterization of whore as human indefensible. His outburst provoked some other outbursts, but the uproar lasted only briefly, and back into good manners we went.

Middle-aged and older women provided, as they usually do, the moral backbone of the meeting. Voices, articulate, erudite, educated, spoke of grating and gross indecencies in the hood: thumping boom-box music parties, tagging, pot smoking derelicts, trash, litter, burglaries. Looking around at the room, at some of the carefully lip-sticked pale faces, nice tailored burgundy jackets and lovely little pink cardigans, one temporarily forgot that outside these school doors life was grosser, poorer and coarser.

Some of the attendees last night came out and admitted to being long-time residents of Van Nuys. One man moved here in 1958, others had been here since 1965, 1973, 1979. They had stayed here, lived and loved it, every bit as much as Sandra Tsing-Loh hated it. And it was those lovers of Van Nuys who go to community meetings. And dare to imagine that life can lawful and orderly, clean and respectful, decent and courageous.

Optimism, inserted into despondency, can be revolutionary.

Noah Gillet

Noah Gillet, a photo by Here in Van Nuys on Flickr.

Actor Noah Gillet
in Van Nuys, CA

photo by Andy Hurvitz

The Hollywood Advisor.

Entrance., a photo by Here in Van Nuys on Flickr.

The Hollywood Advisor called yesterday as he usually does, four times a year, from his car, stuck in traffic, on the 101.

I am on his speaker phone and he, I imagine, is exiting at Cahuenga trying to merge into traffic, as he tells me the latest promising development on the next show that he might sell.

He is a font of upbeat news, always pushing forward, always going to the next meeting, always sure that the suits will green light his latest pilot.

He tells me there is a job I would be perfect for on the next show that hasn’t been sold. My talents and my interests would fit in just right. The last person he told that to was hired, turned out to be a disaster and they are no longer speaking.

The Hollywood Advisor, eager to get me going, into paying work, productively outputting something prosperous, told me I should do a travel blog of the San Fernando Valley because he knows some American women in Italy who write about Tuscany and he thinks it can be done for Reseda too.

He is a smart guy, quick as a whip, always ready with a pitch, and a self-taught expert on fine dining, child rearing, network broadcasting, international travel, women and their needs, investment strategies, elder care and where to find to find the best food truck on Abbot Kinney.

I have no pitch to sell, just a vaguely formed idea about a cinema verite web series on the characters who live on Hamlin Street in Van Nuys.

In the past few months I’ve read “How to Be Gay”, “Hemingway’s Boat”, “Selected Poems of Carl Sandburg” and “Touched With Fire” about manic depression and artists. I write a blog, I take photographs, I wander the San Fernando Valley and ride the train down to Silver Lake always recording, in words and images, what I see.

What have these books done for me? They expanded my mind and left me penniless.

The Hollywood Advisor advises that he doesn’t know who would buy my Hamlin St. show should it ever be produced. He has to run. He is late for a meeting. We will talk again sometime in late summer.

LAPD/ Kester Ridge/Van Nuys Community Meeting Reminder!

April 17, 2013

Red Scare at Bevmo

Down the street there is a place where they are stocking beer and wine on shelves, checking people out, entering telephone numbers and emails into the database, loading boxes off trucks, unpacking and unloading shipments of spirits, and other liquors.

(Sounds like entry-level work except this company is as competitive and selective as Yale University)

They wear red jackets and they pass out red cards to customers and when you come here on some afternoons there is an extremely loud and jovial fat man making jokes and entertaining himself at the register, thrilled at his own wit and eager to laugh it up for everyone.

(Seems crass but the crowds love him)

A few times a year the wine goes on sale and you can buy two bottles for the price of one plus five cents.

On Fridays it gets crazy here when the customers who shop here get off work. They pour in like madmen and run like hell to get to the cold beer and warm tequila.

I had once worked in retail and I vowed to not work in it again. That was at Ralph Lauren in New York, at the flagship store, back in the early 90s, where I waited on such nobodies as Tom Selleck, Audrey Hepburn, Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Montgomery, four of the five of whom are now dead, but hardly forgotten.

Ralph Lauren and his brother Jerry would come in and chat me up and ask me about business. Mrs. Auchincloss, Mrs. Scribner, Mrs. Radziwill, Mr. Bernie Madoff, Ms. Michelle Klier, all my billionaires, all my customers, all were satisfied.

I’m not bragging. Just telling it the way it was.

So now I live in Van Nuys. I’m not young. I think I can work in a big box beverage store, so I fill out the 30-minute online job application.

And there is one, big, fat, irritating part where they ask you multiple choice questions and ask you to check each one such as:

When I work I:
1. talk cheerfully to people I meet
2. speak to people in a direct and candid manner

Don’t both seem admirable? Isn’t cheerfulness as important as candor?

Which attitude best describes you at work:
1. positive
2. careful

If a customer comes in and asks me a question about wine I will try to be positive, but I sure will be careful when loading glass bottles of beer.

These are just a few of the hundred multiple-choice questions that are used by Bevmo to separate the wheat from the chaff or perhaps the wheat from the hops. The application is tedious and time-consuming.

Days later, I call Olivia, the Van Nuys Bevmo Store Manager to ask her if she has received my online application.

“Hmm…what’s your last name? Ok. Here it is. Oh I’m sorry. You are a RED. I’m not allowed to proceed to interview you. YELLOWS and GREENS are good. You can take it again if you like. Looks like you did not pass the multiple choice assessment questions.”

She offers no explanation.

I have merely been defeated by a color, stopped by stoplight as unknowable as God herself.

Bevmo, Bevmo, Bevmo…..

You are continuing Senator Joseph McCarthy’s red baiting. Only now the reds are applying for work.

And they won’t get hired until they turn green.

Boston.

50 ft. Intervals, Corner of Boylston and Dartmouth Streets, Looking Across Street to Trinity Church and Copley Square, a photo by MIT-Libraries on Flickr.

Youth, athleticism, joy, freedom; the thrill of running and competing, a multi-ethnic spectacle participated in by all ages, by men and women, going by, past the great buildings of old Boston, the Trinity Church and the Old South Church and the magnificent front of McKim, Mead and White’s BPL; down Boylston Street, hearts beating, blood pumping, legs moving; eyes, hearts, brains in the tens of thousands, taking it all in, the wonderment of urbanity and the ancient tradition of the marathon, transported to modernity, in the Athens of America.

And then death and dismemberment in a garbage can.

Smoke and darkness, blood and limbs, broken glass and fallen people and screams of horror.

In tears, with heavy hearts, we mourn this senseless act of violence.

The Last Old Places

You think you know Van Nuys.

And then some small remnant of old property appears. And you are pulled back into a long lost world: unguarded, spacious, verdant, shaded, open and expansive.

It happened a few days ago, when I was traveling on Sherman Way and turned up Katherine Avenue, west of Hazeltine, to avoid late afternoon traffic.

As I approached Valerio, I saw the old San Fernando Valley in an apparition: a few large parcels of land, shaded by large trees, a ranch house set back from the street, unenclosed by fences, iron, brick, or barking dogs.

I returned last night with Andreas from Up in the Valley to explore the neighborhood.

At 14203 Valerio, we found a long driveway, headed with a sign of a family name: “The Schaefers”, and beyond, in the distance, many rose bushes, the long exterior eaved porch; all the indicators of normalcy and domestic tranquility that once presented itself in abundance around these parts.

I was surprised that some industrious Armenian had not bought up the land, torn down the houses and erected a cul-de-sac of concrete and columns, but there it was, a lone sweet house, a place that seemed welcoming, not hostile, unafraid and hopeful, a residence of grace and generosity, without violent defenses, grotesque proportions and malingering meanness.

There were no large SUVs, pit bulls, cinderblock or steel window bars. This was Van Nuys as it once was, up until perhaps 1975, a lovely place to live.

There was a large unpicked grapefruit tree in the yard, an old tree, another symbol of the post WWII days when organic was the only type of eating, and unselfconscious Californians ate well in their own backyards.

This house and this land will probably not survive in its present incarnation much longer. If there were a Van Nuys Historical Society it might honor this home with a citation. But for now only the camera can capture what was and what still is.

Miss Van Nuys: 1960

Back in 1960, the population of the fast growing state of California was 13,465,000. The US Census Bureau estimates that 38,000,000 live here now.

Back in 1960, this woman might have actually lived in Van Nuys, a type now practically extinct with her hips, curvaceous waist, blonde hair and no tattoos.

We’ve come a long way baby and civilization is much more progressed and civilized in the San Fernando Valley than it was back then.

Take a walk around Vanowen and Van Nuys Boulevard if you doubt my word.

Photo courtesy of Water and Power Associates.

Street Treats.

One of the delights of living near Van Nuys High School is watching a car full of kids park nearby, hang out for a while, and then deposit bottles and drug paraphernalia curbside before driving off.