Biography
Patt Morrison, who pens the weekly "Patt Morrison Asks" column, is a writer and columnist for The Times, for which her work has spanned ...
Activist Dolores Huerta: 50 years of fighting for human rights
May 23, 2012
Dolores Huerta runs on righteous ferocity the way cars run on gasoline. The woman who co-founded the United Farm Workers union 50 years ago with Cesar Chavez has harried, prodded, hectored, rallied and protested. She's been arrested more than a score of times, and once, picketing in San Francisco, she was beaten so badly by a police officer that her spleen was ruptured. You'd be hard-pressed to tell, the way she bounces around the Central Valley, a woman on many missions. So, can she stand still next week in Washington long enough for President Obama to present her with the Medal of Freedom, along with honorees such as Toni Morrison, John Glenn and Bob Dylan? Sí, se puede.
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The National Teacher of the Year on what makes a great teacher
May 16, 2012
The class clown from Mr. Gadberry's high school art class has made good — and how. Rebecca Mieliwocki teaches seventh-grade English at Luther Burbank Middle School in Burbank — but not next year. Instead, she'll be on the road as the National Teacher of the Year. It took her a long time to get to the classroom — she once worked as a floral designer, doing the flowers for Elizabeth Taylor's private jet — and eventually to the White House, where a fellow teacher, President Obama, crowned her as a national teaching treasure. Before she takes off, Mieliwocki is speaking at commencement at her teaching alma mater, Cal State Northridge — and right here.
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Nathan Fletcher, San Diego's renegade ex-Republican
April 28, 2012
A computer programmed to design a promising young Republican politician would probably spit out Nathan Fletcher. Marine; Iraq combat veteran in Iraq; smart; athletic; married to a well-situated Republican; two little boys, adopted; two dogs, ditto. Perfect — except now there's no "R" after his name. Fletcher was elected to the state Assembly from San Diego County in 2008, and he is running for San Diego mayor in a nonpartisan race that is nonetheless drawing partisan lightning. Since Fletcher changed his party registration to "decline to state," which got national coverage, polls have him second in the June 5 primary, just behind openly gay Republican council member Carl DeMaio, who won the GOP endorsement over Fletcher. His critics say his party switch is politically calculated; Fletcher says it's just about getting the job done.
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Reading, no batteries required
April 22, 2012
Tenderly, the lover caressed his beloved. So pale, so smooth. He tilted his head forward, the better to inhale that scent — rich and enticing. Fingertip to spine, feeling every contour, he pressed his face closer — and turned a page.
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Rodney King, 20 years after L.A.'s riots
April 21, 2012
In 21 years, his name has appeared in the Los Angeles Times on more than 7,000 occasions. Sometimes it's as himself, Rodney King, the victim of now-fabled LAPD abuse the world got to see, the plaintiff in a civil lawsuit, the hapless guy getting stopped yet again on some speeding or DUI beef, the man on the celebrity rehab show. And sometimes it's as "Rodney King," the accidental symbol and the rallying cry on police abuse issues. Some of the biggest institutions in Southern California — the Los Angeles Police Department, the city itself — were changed because of the beating King took in 1991 and the beating the city took in 1992 in the riots that followed the acquittal of the officers charged in his beating. Has the man himself changed? On the 20th anniversary of the riots, his book, "The Riot Within,"' written with Lawrence J. Spagnola, is letting us, and King himself, find out.
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Patt Morrison Asks: James Cameron, a man overboard
April 14, 2012
The Challenger Deep, a fissure in the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean, lies farther below the Earth's surface than Mt. Everest reaches above it. And James Cameron, the science-enthralled director and underwater explorer, made it his Lindbergh moment, soloing humankind's deepest-ever plunge last month in a purpose-made submarine fitted out — natch — with 3D cameras. One hundred years ago today, the world's most famous accidental deep dive took the ocean liner Titanic to the bottom of the Atlantic. Cameron made that story into the film "Titanic." I spoke with him just before his epic descent, and asked him to ruminate on the ship that disappeared in 1912 and his own disappearing act into the ocean depths. You know what they say — whatever floats your boat.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Blue blood, Peter O'Malley
April 7, 2012
In 1938, after voters recalled L.A.'s crooked mayor, Frank Shaw, it's said that someone planted a sign on the City Hall lawn: "Under new management." The new ownership of the Dodgers needs no sign. The purchase, by a Chicago financial service company at a record price, has been heralded in every way but skywriting.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Jonah Lehrer, brain teaser
April 1, 2012
Zombies in movie theaters, zombies on television — a whole lot of us have brains on the brain. And so, in a substantially different way, does Jonah Lehrer. He's put himself at the crossroads of neuroscience and the humanities with books like his first, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," and other volumes delving into the neuro-mysteries of the way the brain makes decisions and the way creativity works. Here in his native Los Angeles, the second-largest neural mass in the nation, Lehrer applies himself to sorting out the hard-wiring and the software that make up the stuff between our ears.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar -- still hooked
March 24, 2012
Only his number is retired — 33, in the Lakers' purple and gold that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wore to glory on the basketball court. The rest of him is still working away, most recently on his latest book. At UCLA, in blue and gold, Abdul-Jabbar was a standout, an All American and player of the year — and a history major, which has served him well in his literary career. Some of his books have made it to the bestseller list, and this one, "What Color Is My World? The Lost History of African-American Inventors," is a children's volume with adult appeal. But in the midst of March Madness, he's still watching the game he mastered, though two of his favorites are already out: Lehigh and Long Beach.
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Patt Morrison Asks: E. Randol Schoenberg -- for the gold Klimt
March 17, 2012
The riches and treasures of Europe vacuumed up by Hitler's Third Reich are still turning up, including some paintings Hitler bought for himself that were just found in a Czech monastery. But most of the Fuhrer's loot was just that: looted. Once in a while, it gets returned to its rightful owners. Los Angeles lawyer E. Randol Schoenberg joined forces with Maria Altmann in a legal battle to reclaim her family's collection of paintings, seized by the Nazis in 1938. The artworks, by Gustav Klimt, included a famous portrait of Altmann's aunt, Adele Bloch-Bauer, that was hanging in plain sight in an Austrian state museum.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Carl Guardino, Silicon Valley's big wheel
March 10, 2012
The last time I saw Carl Guardino, the head of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, he was in a wheelchair after a biking accident encounter with some skateboarders. The wheelchair is probably the only form of transportation Guardino doesn't like. He was appointed to the state transportation commission by a Republican governor and reappointed by a Democratic one. That pretty much sums up the way SVLG works: It's about policy, not politics, and the issues are broad: from math education to affordable housing to opening a patent office in Santa Clara County. He commutes 32 miles a day by bike — good training for the marathon work of making life more livable for everyone, from waiters to millionaires, in what was once called "the Valley of Heart's Delight."
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Patt Morrison Asks: Hollywood's pol, Chris Dodd
February 25, 2012
Hollywood loves comeback stories. Will SOPA/PIPA be one of them? The anti-piracy bills that were working their way through Congress with Hollywood's blessing got tanked by a massive online campaign — petitions, website blackouts, even T-shirts. From 1981 until 2010, Christopher J. Dodd was a Democratic senator from Connecticut. A year later, as head of the Motion Picture Assn. of America, he was dealing with SOPA/PIPA fallout. Showing up at the Oscars — which he will do — is just the tip of the MPAA job. Dodd has arranged matinees for veterans at MPAA's theater in D.C., worked on film trade matters, and postelection, he'll try out an anti-piracy law sequel. Will it be boffo for all sides?
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Patt Morrison Asks: Dodgers dugout doc Sue Falsone
February 18, 2012
The Dodgers' pitchers and catchers will show up at Camelback Ranch in Arizona in a few days for spring training. And so will Sue Falsone. She won't be in the stands; she'll be in the dugout and the clubhouse, with the guys. She's the Dodgers' new head athletic trainer and physical therapist — and she is the first woman to become head trainer in any of the four major professional sports.
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Westminster: Malibu's wire fox terrier Eira goes for the double-crown
February 13, 2012
I’m a mutt fancier myself -- or "multicultural canines," as my dogs prefer -- but like millions of other lovers of canines of all kinds, I’ll be tuning in Monday to watch the Westminster Kennel Club dog show, the 136th.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Hard lessons with Michelle Rhee
February 11, 2012
No one, it seems, is lukewarm about Michelle Rhee; she's a pass-fail figure, inspiring or polarizing.
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Queen Elizabeth II's diamond jubilee, and all that
February 5, 2012
The first Queen Elizabeth was standing under an English oak tree when she learned that she had become queen.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Pocho pundit Lalo Alcaraz
February 4, 2012
Every presidential campaign turns out to be a quadrennial godsend for editorial cartoonists, but for Lalo Alcaraz, 2012 is a jubilee year. Herman Cain, chowing down at a Miami restaurant, asks, “How do you say ‘delicious' in Cuban?” Newt Gingrich uses “bilingual education” and “language of living in a ghetto” in the same sentence. And then there's Mitt Romney, son of a Mexican-born Mormon who also ran for president of the United States. Or the “United Estates,” according to Romney's mysterious alter-Tweeter, @MexicanMitt, who's muy simpatico with his staunch “supporter” Alcaraz.
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Patt Morrison Asks: The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle
January 28, 2012
Brewster Kahle has the gleeful air of a man who has just found something wonderful and wants to tell his friends all about it. And his friends are the 2 billion people, and counting, who are on the Internet every day.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Alice Waters
January 21, 2012
Little bistro, huge impact. Like a different sort of miracle of the five loaves and two fishes, Chez Panisse, the landmark Berkeley restaurant, and its founder and guiding spirit, Alice Waters, have leveraged a small temple of slow, local and organic food into a massive force in the culinary world. Now that appetite for a new/old food culture has begun to register on the public's consciousness, if not always on its plate. Waters is clearing her table of most everything but the Edible Schoolyard Project: If we are what we eat, she wants children in class, on the playground and in the cafeteria kitchen to change their identities by the forkful.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Diane Keaton
January 14, 2012
If you're lazily inclined to define Diane Keaton by the crossword-puzzle-sized word "actor," you need to get out more. Add to that her work as director and producer, photographer, restorer of venerable houses, board member of the Los Angeles Conservancy and, perhaps above all, as a daughter -- as revealed by her daughter-mother memoir "Then Again." Little Diane once sat in a neighborhood theater on North Figueroa and watched her mother being crowned Mrs. Highland Park, and wished it were her up on stage instead. In time, she stood on the world stage as a winner of an Academy Award. Her strong connections to her late mother -- like her mother's dreams of art and beauty -- inform Keaton's own identity in the here and now.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Doris Day
January 7, 2012
Add it all up, and Doris Day's singular singing voice has spent more than 11 years on the Billboard charts. Her three dozen-plus films made millions of fans and dollars. And now, after nearly two decades of living below the radar in Carmel, Doris Day is back on the charts. "My Heart" is a baker's dozen of songs from the vaults, many produced by her late son, Terry Melcher, who worked with the Byrds and who co-wrote and sang "Happy Endings" on the CD, and sang a second song on it with his mother. The proceeds from "My Heart" go to the Doris Day Animal Foundation, which supports her work protecting animals (that's a rescue dog in the 1993 photo). For that, she's broken a long silence, with a little catch in her voice when she speaks of her departed loved ones -- and, now and again, with that unmistakable throaty Doris Day laugh.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Two from the 'typosphere'
December 31, 2011
There'll be a pair of Pasadena institutions along Colorado Boulevard for New Year's -- the Rose Parade, and a company marking 100 years in business. Anderson Business Technology, nee Anderson Typewriter Co., has bucked two trends: It's been a one-family operation all along, and it's managed to leap from the age of slammed return levers and carbon paper to ctrl.alt.delete. Don Anderson and his son, David, are chairman and president, the second and third generations in the firm. Change has been crucial to their century of success, and yet a romantic roll call of anachronistic mechanical brands -- Royal, Underwood, Smith Corona, Olivetti, Sholes and Glidden, Hermes -- still connects the Andersons to the "typosphere," where poet Charles Bukowski's manual Olympia stars on a mouse pad, and composer Leroy Anderson's whimsical "The Typewriter" stars on YouTube.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Connie Rice
December 24, 2011
Connie Rice was 13 and her father was a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base when the family drove from the high desert to church at First AME in L.A. She saw the city's ghastly gray air and said to herself, "Well, I'll never live here." Not only has she lived here for more than two decades, her work is about making "here" livable -- survivable -- for those in what she calls L.A.'s "kill zones." Her efforts at healing the wounded heart of L.A.'s civic life, mending the broken ties among police and power structure and the public, as well as her long journey here -- Harvard, death row cases, a passion for tae kwon do -- are laid out in her book, "Power Concedes Nothing." The title, from a Frederick Douglass quote, is an insight into her role in the story of the city where she never thought she'd be.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Robert Reich, Pre-Occupied
December 17, 2011
Robert Reich has worked in a lot of big white buildings -- in the Senate, as an intern to Robert F. Kennedy; in the office of then-Solicitor General Robert Bork; in the Ford and Carter administrations; and as labor secretary to President Clinton. Now the political economist works in another set of big white buildings, teaching at UC Berkeley, where his "Wealth and Poverty" class is as overbooked as a bargain flight to Paris, and where he dotes on his 3-year-old granddaughter, to whom he dedicated his latest book, "Aftershock": "To Ella Reich-Sharpe, and her generation."
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Patt Morrison Asks: James Cuno, guiding Getty
December 3, 2011
Along the 405 is L.A.'s version of a shining city on the hill -- a castle of culture in all its incarnations. The Getty Trust is more than its collections and museums; it's about worldwide research, preservation and philanthropy. Its new chief, James Cuno, blew in four months ago from the Windy City, where he headed the Art Institute of Chicago and, before that, Harvard's art museums. Cuno regards himself as something of a California kid, spending his teen years at Travis Air Force Base and later heading the Grunwald Center at UCLA. Now he's got a world-class arts complex, the world's biggest arts budget and big hangovers from the Getty's time of troubles.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Tiffany Shlain, wired in
November 26, 2011
Like one of those faster-than-light particles that's gone before you can see it, filmmaker and tech innovator Tiffany Shlain zips from the virtual to the real and back again. The Bay Area native whom Newsweek named one of the women shaping the 21st century has been into technology since she and Silicon Valley were both kids. Fifteen years ago, she founded the Webby Awards; well before Twitter, no acceptance speech could be longer than five words. She delivered more than that last year in a commencement speech at her alma mater UC Berkeley, exhorting students to embrace the quality that she claims as her own guiding light: "moxie" -- a long-ago patent medicine turned soft drink whose name has become synonymous with the human recipe for being "bold ... and a little outrageous."
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Patt Morrison Asks: 1st prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo
November 19, 2011
Luis Moreno-Ocampo has more than a billion clients. He is the first prosecutor for the International Criminal Court, whose authority to prosecute those who commit crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide is acknowledged by more than 110 nations. (But not the United States -- the U.S. signed the treaty, and then "unsigned" it.) Before he joined the ICC, he was famous for prosecuting politicians and generals for mass murder in his native Argentina. With his nine-year ICC term nearly finished, the first of the international cases he's filed -- against Congolese warlord Thomas Lubanga -- still awaits a verdict. In Argentina, he had his own reality show; now, he's the subject of a new Canadian documentary, and his role is the subject of worldwide interest.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Well versed, Dana Gioia
November 5, 2011
In 2003, Dana Gioia walked onto the battlefield that was the National Endowment for the Arts and brokered a peace. He chaired the NEA for six years, longer than the Civil War. The George W. Bush appointee increased the agency's budget and worked to broaden its mission and demographic reach. Gioia is a widely published poet and essayist, a Stanford MBA and a Southern Californian who's come home, as professor of poetry and public culture at USC, whence all of California is a stage.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Canon lawyer, Bert Fields
October 29, 2011
Who wrote Shakespeare? Sounds like "Who's buried in Grant's tomb?" Yet about 150 years ago, people on both sides of the Atlantic began asking how an otherwise obscure William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon could have crafted the most brilliant works in the English language. Most scholars regard this as an annoying sideshow; and only more annoying now that the film "Anonymous" has been released, purporting that Shakespeare was just a front for the pen and brain of the Earl of Oxford.
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Patt Morrison Asks: George Regas, keeping faith
October 22, 2011
Yep, that was George Regas in that photo — the man in the purple ecclesiastical robe and handcuffs. The rector emeritus of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena chose to get busted this month outside the downtown federal building protesting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. A few days earlier, scores of mostly conservative ministers across the country had deliberately defied the IRS ban on candidate endorsements by tax-exempt churches. Regas had tripped that wire inadvertently seven years ago, with a sermon that caught the IRS' ear and could have cost All Saints its tax exemption. He's retired from the pulpit, but time has not staled nor circumstance withered Regas' appetite for engagement.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Benefit buster Lanny Ebenstein
October 15, 2011
Lanny Ebenstein wants you to vote to kneecap the state's public workers unions by banning their right to collective bargaining. Other measures scrambling to qualify for the November 2012 ballot would drop the hammer specifically on public employees' pensions or increase their retirement age, but Ebenstein's may be the most uncompromising. Ebenstein, a lecturer in economics at UC Santa Barbara, believes that it's too cozy for unions to be bargaining with bosses they've likely campaigned to elect -- and the state's economic doldrums are one result. An eight-year veteran of the Santa Barbara school board and the author of volumes about conservative economists Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, he's now got a metaphorical book he wants to throw at public employee unions.
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Patt Morrison Asks: The brain, Alfredo Quinones-Hinojosa
October 1, 2011
Here's a Hollywood pitch for you: Leading U.S. neurosurgeon started life as a struggling Mexican boy who made it from illegal-immigrant California farmworker to Harvard Med. Not buying it? You should. Dr. Alfredo Quiรฑones-Hinojosa was that kid and is that man -- associate prof, surgeon and head of the brain tumor stem cell lab at Johns Hopkins. His work puts him, passionately, on the cutting-edge of brain cancer research, and his life wedges him, reluctantly, into the immigration quarrel. He tells his story -- his traumas and triumphs, and his patients' -- in an autobiography, "Becoming Dr. Q," and here, now.
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Patt Morrison Asks: New master Ed Ruscha
September 24, 2011
Most of the dozens of art spaces now showing off Southern California art history weren't even around when Ed Ruscha set up his easel and his style in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Ruscha's classic, defining works are keystones in Pacific Standard Time, a series of exhibitions whose 1945-to-1980 range takes a stab at framing two of the biggest and most elusive concepts around: "art" and "Los Angeles." Ruscha's vision has had a defining hand in both.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Balloteer Kim Alexander
September 17, 2011
The first California election that Kim Alexander cast a ballot in was a pip; voters decided 16 state propositions -- on creating a state lottery, capping welfare, limiting campaign contributions -- and gave their former governor, Ronald Reagan, a second term in the White House.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Memorial man Peter Walker
September 10, 2011
Berkeley landscape architect Peter Walker has designed bigger projects than the 9/11 memorial in New York, but probably none has carried more weight. The opening of the eight-acre plaza Sunday marks 10 years since the terrorist attacks, and almost as many years since Walker joined with architect Michael Arad to finalize a monument for ground zero. The design -- down to plaza lights like the model Walker is holding -- demanded as much attention to emotion as to aesthetics and engineering. With work on One World Trade Center and the museum still in progress, it is the memorial that will first meet the public eye and, if it succeeds, affix in the public heart the harrowing sorrow and transcendent memory of 9/11 for as long as such monuments endure.
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Patt Morrison Asks: U.S. Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis
September 3, 2011
Ahigh school counselor in La Puente once told Hilda Solis' mother that the girl really ought to forget about college and become a secretary. Well, so she has. Hilda Solis is the U.S. secretary of Labor. The daughter of factory workers and ardent union members became the first in her family to get a college education. She brought to D.C. a no-bones-about-it track record from the California Legislature, where she raised the minimum wage, raised the bar for worker protections and raised some hell for environmental laws.
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Patt Morrison Asks: The poet, W.S. Merwin
August 27, 2011
An Idaho resort hotel's verdure is not the wild tumble around W.S. Merwin's beloved Hawaiian home, but disciplined grass and orderly stands of trees. Not, perhaps, the sort of trees Merwin had in mind when he wrote, "On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree." But the Sun Valley Writers' Conference bears an annual crop of words and ideas, and Merwin is here as a master gardener of that. He just ended a year's term as the nation's poet laureate. He has to his name two Pulitzer Prizes and more than 30 books of poetry and prose, and a hand-planted forest at home of rare and endangered palms. The Merwin Conservancy is dedicated to keeping his works green -- the ones he created with words, and the natural ones that exist before and beyond them.
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Patt Morrison Asks: The Possibilian, Kevin Kelly
August 13, 2011
This is a Klein bottle, a kind of Mobius strip rendered in glass. The man holding it has a brain not unlike these confounding items, possessed of unusual twists and multidimensional turns that can be challenging for lesser mortals to get their own heads around. Kevin Kelly began reflecting on the techno-Internet world before most people even knew it existed. A co-founder of Wired magazine, and still its "senior maverick," his brainstorming writings influenced the films "Minority Report" and "The Matrix," but that's the stuff he has already done. It's the stuff Kelly still wants to do -- and to take the world along him -- that boots him up.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Inside guy, Buck Henry
August 6, 2011
Buck Henry arguably made his showbiz debut at the age of 2, when his mother, the silent film star Ruth Taylor, took him to the Paramount lot to show him off. She denied then that she wanted him to go into movies. Sorry, Mom. Henry has become a polymath of directing, acting, and for my money, especially writing -- "The Graduate"; "Catch-22"; that fine dark comedy of manners, "To Die For"; TV's "Get Smart," with Mel Brooks; and a generation later, the seminal "Saturday Night Live" -- which he hosted for a then-record-setting 10 times. He beavers away on screenplays, plays and sundry prose; I pestered him into a lunch interview in West Hollywood. It was engagingly packed, with talk of the pleasures of "Hamlet" in German and a Hollywood/not Hollywood commentary on passing paraders, delivered with spare humor as dry as the natron used to stuff mummies. Hey -- isn't there a script in there somewhere?
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Patt Morrison Asks: Breakup artist Laura Wasser
July 30, 2011
Seriously? Someone in L.A. who doesn't want to show up on TV?
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Patt Morrison Asks: Janice Hahn, born to run
July 23, 2011
The last time there was nobody by the name of Hahn in L.A. politics, there was a man by the name of Truman in the White House. Now Janice Hahn moves her political game from the Los Angeles City Council to a place down the road from the executive mansion: Congress. Daughter of legendary county Supervisor Kenneth Hahn, sister of former Mayor James Hahn, the Democrat won the special election to replace Jane Harman in the coastal/South Bay 36th Congressional District. I talked to her en route from the airport into Washington, less than 48 hours before her swearing-in. She's been to Washington before, but she was seeing it with different eyes: "Mr. Smith" eyes. At one point, she exclaimed, "I'm looking at the Washington Monument right this second; oh, there's the White House! Oh very cool!" Can she keep her cool in the overheated climate of Capitol Hill -- and keep her seat next year?
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Patt Morrison Asks: Donald Heller, death-penalty advocate no more
July 16, 2011
'Remanded" -- taken into custody. In his career as a New York prosecutor and a federal prosecutor in California, Donald Heller has asked the court to remand guilty defendants countless times. He helped put away Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, who tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford, and a big-time heroin dealer, a man Heller believed destroyed many lives. At the dealer's sentencing hearing, the prosecutor remarked that were the death penalty an option, he would volunteer to "throw the switch." After that, a law clerk called him "Mad Dog," and the nickname stuck. Heller left the U.S. attorney's office in 1977 -- the "remanded'' sign was a farewell gift -- but he didn't give up his law-and-order cred. He's the author of the Briggs initiative, a 1978 ballot measure (named for its sponsor, state Sen. John Briggs) that broadly expanded the kinds of murders eligible for capital punishment. It helped make California's the most populous and expensive death row in the nation. But for more than a decade, Heller has been saying it's time to stop. Now a defense attorney with a mostly white-collar clientele, he testified recently at the state Capitol about the need to undo his legal handiwork, which has changed so many lives -- and ended some.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Spirit guide Kenny Kingston
July 9, 2011
Everybody knows that newlyweds William and Kate are in town this weekend. But Kenny Kingston says he knows how that royal marriage will work out. The self-styled Psychic to the Stars who has hosted lucrative infomercials, TV shows and hotlines says he consulted with the likes of Lucille Ball and John Wayne on this side of life, heard from Elvis and James Dean on the other side, and knows Marilyn Monroe from both sides -- she gave him the table and chairs where we sat and talked in his Studio City home. He learned his craft from his grandmother, his mother and his mother's friend, psychic devotee Mae West. And Los Angeles' wide embrace of every branch of spiritual endeavor made Kingston his own kind of celebrity. With collaborator Valerie Porter, he's still writing books and is about to launch an Internet radio show into a world, seen and unseen, that has changed substantially since he first offered it his psychic insights. I'll quote the usual fine print: It's for entertainment purposes.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Albert Carnesale, Professor Nuclear
July 2, 2011
As a matter of fact, he is a nuclear engineer. And through all of the titles Albert Carnesale has taken on in the upper reaches of academia -- professor and provost of Harvard and dean of its Kennedy School, chancellor of UCLA, where he is still a professor -- one thread has been a constant: his work on the science and the political science of matters nuclear, both peaceable and belligerent. He now serves on the Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, which presents its draft report to President Obama at the end of this month. Its task is to make recommendations on just about everything touching nuclear power and fuel in this country. And he recently wrapped up work on the Committee on America's Climate Choices, analyzing the options in a climate-changing world. His joke bomb clock freaked out more than one Secret Service agent scoping out his Harvard office in advance of visits from various dignitaries. It's also a reminder of how our clock -- the nation's clock, humanity's clock -- is ticking away.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Rosetta man Ahmed Zewail
June 25, 2011
It's as if he has a superhero secret identity: On the Caltech campus, Ahmed Zewail is a mild-mannered Egyptian American professor of chemistry and physics who won the Nobel Prize for cracking the secrets of molecules with femtosecond spectroscopy (a femtosecond is to a second what one second is to 32 million years). In his other identity, he is Egypt's only Nobel laureate in science, a national hero and the inspiration for Egypt's new technical and academic complex, the Zewail City of Science and Technology. And he is one of a council of elders guiding the transition to democracy in his native Egypt -- a novel experience in a nation with millenniums of history.
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Patt Morrison Asks: Comics genius Stan Lee
June 11, 2011
My comic book tastes ran to Classics Illustrated. Seriously, what's scarier than the graphic images of "Crime and Punishment" and Raskolnikov -- the existential "superman," not the caped one -- whacking the pawnbroker with an ax? Can I, then, hold my own with Spider-Man's spiritual father, Stan Lee, a genius of comics for 70 years? The progenitor of scores of graphic heroes and villains, "starred" on the Hollywood Walk of Fame this year, he's huge at the summer box office, with "Thor," then "X-Men: First Class" and, due out in July, "Captain America: The First Avenger." Twentysomethings may be kings of entertainment, but Lee is the emperor. He's chairman emeritus of Marvel, the venerable comics company that's grown multimedia and merchandising wings; he works with Disney through his POW (Purveyors of Wonder) Entertainment company. He's crafting a Chinese feature-film superhero, and he searches for real people with superhero powers on the History Channel. Biff! Bam! Boom! "I don't want anyone to think I'm retired," Lee says.
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Writing home: Brando Skyhorse
June 4, 2011
Bookshelves real and virtual are stocked with volumes about Los Angeles and Southern California written by people who parachute into a Westside guest house for a few weeks, hit the hot spots and high spots, then write with voice-of-God authority for audiences who wouldn't know the Grapevine from grape juice.
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The go-to guy: Peter Ueberroth
May 21, 2011
So here's Peter Ueberroth, L.A.'s Olympic champion, chairman of the Newport Beach investor company the Contrarian Group, sharing his office with someone else -- his border collie, Koot, for Kootenai, the Idaho county where Ueberroth found him abandoned. Koot can be regarded as a small-scale version of the rescues that Ueberroth has been called on to make in his career. Besides formidably managing the 1984 Games, he has ridden to the help of South Los Angeles after the 1992 riots, run Major League Baseball and arranged the buyback of the Pebble Beach golf course from the Japanese. Ueberroth's a Californian by choice, not by birth, like another eminent Californian, John Wooden, whose name is on an award Ueberroth receives next week, one he regards more as encouragement than reward.
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Lender 2.0: Kiva's Premal Shah
May 14, 2011
I could just see the eyebrows rising around the room. I was moderating a panel on philanthropy not long ago, and on my left, Premal Shah, the president of Kiva.org, was talking animatedly about how much fun Kiva donors had, competing with each other, in teams, to see who could do the most good. Fun? This is not your father's philanthropy. Shah"s online matchmaking philanthro-banking site lets people in the donor door for as little as $25. Kiva posts loan appeals from thousands of worldwide "entrepreneurs" on the site -- Shah doesn't call them "the needy" or any other such term. Prospective lenders log on, pick their favorites and a match, in the form of a loan, is made. Shah himself is among Silicon Valley's "PayPal mafia," young men and women who took know-how from working at PayPal to their own pursuits. In his case it was Kiva, a Swahili word meaning "unity" or "agreement" -- $25 at a time.
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Joe's Joe: Joe Coulombe
May 7, 2011
I was traveling to Washington early in the George W. Bush administration and asked a friend who was working in the White House whether I could bring her something from L.A. Was there anything she really, really missed? Yes, she said: Trader Joe's Mt. Baldy trail mix.
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The survivor: Oscar winner Branko Lustig
April 30, 2011
Mazel tov to the bar mitzvah boy -- 65 years late. Branko Lustig has two Oscars and a slew of film and television production credits, among them "Schindler's List" and "Gladiator" and "Black Hawk Down" and the TV miniseries "War and Remembrance." He also has a number, A3317, from his years as a young Croatian Jew imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps.
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Book smart: Ken Brecher
April 23, 2011
For Ken Brecher to say that being the president of the Library Foundation of Los Angeles is the best job he's ever had -- well, that speaks volumes. Consider that he's run the Sundance Institute, the Boston Children's Museum and a major Philadelphia philanthropy; that he's an anthropologist with a Rhodes scholarship and two research tours in the Amazon on his resume. The British playwright Christopher Hampton used Brecher's field notes for his play "Savages." He landed in Los Angeles as a theatrical "anthropologist in residence" -- a.k.a. associate artistic director -- at the Mark Taper Forum, exploring the then-uncharted territory of local subjects and underserved audiences.
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Rodarte's Kate and Laura Mulleavy: Fabricators
April 16, 2011
Their story is like a "once upon a time," but envision Cinderella in a lace gown that's been painted on by Caravaggio and then run through a paper shredder. There are actually two Cinderellas, Kate (with bangs) and Laura Mulleavy, sisters who don't yet have 60 birthdays between them. They famously still live with their parents in Pasadena, and in half a dozen years, the exquisite, subversive couture of their Rodarte label, created and produced in their downtown L.A. studios, has taxed the style cliches of critics and fashion lovers alike (see the fashions at latimes.com/rodarte). This year, they've been invited to Florence for the women's branch of the influential Pitti Uomo trade show in June. A forthcoming book, "Rodarte, Catherine Opie, Alec Soth," displays some of the California images that have inspired them. And almost anything, from a lapidary dessert display in a downtown bakery to the menacing light of a Tornado Alley wheat field, can fire the imaginations of the young ladies from Pasadena.
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Jane Harman: Out of the fray
April 9, 2011
Jane Harman has a new address -- on Pennsylvania Avenue. No, not that address. She's the new honcho at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Starting in 1992, she won nine elections in Southern California's coastal 36th Congressional District -- some of them squeakers, the last one a blowout -- before she quit. In those years, the moderate Democrat carved her way through the clashing waves of the political surf: pro-choice, pro-gun restrictions for her Venice constituents, pro "smart" defense programs and a flag-burning ban for more conservative voters in towns like Torrance. She's been quoted as saying she was the best Republican in the Democratic Party. Harman has left a pretty safe Democratic district for the candidates running in the May 17 primary to replace her. In spite of that D.C. office, she'll be voting in the 36th -- but she won't say for whom.
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Timothy Naftali: Nixon's checker
April 2, 2011
Timothy Naftali is the kind of learned guy you'd want on your team when you play "Trivial Pursuit" -- a game that, like Naftali, originated in Canada. But for years, his home and his career have been in and about the United States -- books and studies on espionage, counter-terrorism, the Cuban missile crisis, U.S. intelligence. And now he is director of the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. That would be the new Nixon library, the one operated under the auspices of the National Archives. The old, private Nixon library's spin on the president, especially about the Watergate episode, prompted the feds to refuse to transfer control of tapes and documents -- until Naftali and the National Archives took over to make the library a nonpartisan scholarly and educational resource. The post he accepted five years ago requires some of the same diplomatic and historical skills he's studied, and others. The exhibit that must demonstrate all of this transparency opened this week -- the Watergate gallery, symbolized by what Naftali's holding, one of the Watergate wiretapping "bugs."
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Jeff Gordon: Big wheel
March 26, 2011
Any sport is ultimately all about the numbers, right? Here's Jeff Gordon -- four-time winner of what's now called the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series, three-time Daytona 500 winner, first driver to reach $100 million in series winnings -- and all I really want to say to him is, ''Wow! 190 miles an hour! Wow!''
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Henry Segerstrom: Arts centric
March 19, 2011
That guy Jack, of beanstalk fame? He was small potatoes. If you want real magic from beans, look no further than what has become of the lima bean and dairy empire of Orange County's Segerstrom family. It morphed into the gold of commercial real estate, and at its 24-karat center is South Coast Plaza. In an age when people list shopping as a pastime, the high-end mall attracts almost as many people a year as the non-shopping National Mall in Washington.
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Jamie Oliver: Food fighter
February 26, 2011
Jamie Oliver presses a "happy cow" veggie burger on me with the fervor of a believer handing out religious pamphlets. He asks me whether I love it, but his smile is pure certainty that I will -- and even love him for making it. He's stepped out from the kitchen at Patra's, a Glassell Park drive-through where his crew is taping footage for "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution," a TV show that's not just about healthy food but also about converting skeptics and unbelievers. The chef who's been made a Member of the Order of the British Empire has an empire of his own -- TV shows in several dozen countries, foundations and charities, restaurants and books. His crusade for quality food in schools and homes has changed British food-itudes and menus. He's brought himself, his cameras and his good-food ardor to L.A., with an emphasis on kids. But the LAUSD has closed its cafeteria doors to him, so far. Characteristically, he's found other projects and causes, like his offerings at Patra's; as the man from Essex asks anxiously, "How's that slaw salad with your burger, luv?"
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University of California President Mark Yudof: The BMOC
January 15, 2011
Mark Yudof became president of the University of California in 2008. Some timing. Since then, the university has seen its state funding, which accounts for about 13% of its operating budget, cut again and again.
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Salam Al-Marayati: The translator
May 22, 2010
Salam Al-Marayati began working at the Muslim Public Affairs Council more than 20 years ago, and his is a job that only seems to get more demanding
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Richard Riordan, unleashed
May 8, 2010
Richard Riordan spent eight years as mayor of Los Angeles, but he didn't start his civic engagement with L.A. when he was sworn in, and he didn't end it after he was termed out. Since then, he's become part tribal elder, part fun uncle, but just now the City Council isn't sending any love his way. It's pretty irked by Riordan's warnings that the city may have to resort to bankruptcy to save itself.
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Landon Donovan: Goal oriented
April 17, 2010
I've read that some people call Landon Donovan the Kobe Bryant of soccer; I wonder if the day will come when people call Bryant the Landon Donovan of basketball?
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Father Gregory Boyle: Life among the homies
April 10, 2010
I should have known better than to try to interview Father Gregory Boyle on his home turf, at the Homegirl Café in the Homeboy Industries building on the edge of Chinatown. It was like trying to interview Elvis in the lobby of the Flamingo Hotel.
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Stewart Brand: Earth man
April 3, 2010
I almost started this conversation by asking Stewart Brand, "So . . . what's on your mind?" But who's got that kind of time?
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Ralph Fertig: Cog of justice
March 20, 2010
Since he was in elementary school more than seven decades ago, Ralph Fertig has been, by history's long calculus, one of the good guys -- a civil rights Freedom Rider, a fighter for the down-and-out and disenfranchised from Washington to Los Angeles, and more recently on behalf of the Kurdish minority in Turkey.
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A.J. Duffy: Teachers' choice
March 13, 2010
It tells you a lot about what A.J. Duffy brings to the game that he got his job as president of United Teachers Los Angeles by trouncing the incumbent, which had never before happened at the union.
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Gloria Steinem: The founder
March 6, 2010
You know what they say about March -- comes in like a lion, goes out like a lamb.
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Sheldon Epps: Play it again
February 26, 2010
The Pasadena Playhouse has had more close calls than Pearl White, more farewells (and miraculous recoveries) than Sarah Bernhardt. And here we go again.
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Steve Cooley: L.A.'s D.A.
February 20, 2010
Steve Cooley's isn't a face that's all over YouTube or the nightly news, and he's fine with that. In spite of the celeb cases that have come through the county district attorney's office -- the decades-long case against Roman Polanski and murder cases like Phil Spector's (convicted) and Robert Blake's (acquitted, which prompted Cooley to declare him nonetheless "guilty as sin" and the jury "incredibly stupid") -- Cooley is more in Hollywood than of it.
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Bill Patzert: SoCal's weatherman
February 13, 2010
I'm always telling the skeptics that Los Angeles does too have four seasons: They're called fire, flood, drought and quake.
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Michael A. Barbour: The roadie
February 6, 2010
Maybe the last time a San Diego Freeway construction project got this much attention was back in the 1950s, when a man named L. Ewing Scott was convicted of murdering his socialite wife. According to urban legend, he hid her body in the newly poured concrete of the Sunset Boulevard offramp (northbound) of the San Diego Freeway.
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Mark Ridley-Thomas: Gospel of Mark
January 30, 2010
I've really never known a Los Angeles without Mark Ridley-Thomas around and running something.
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Ed Begley Jr.: Big green man
January 23, 2010
I once tried to pick up Ed Begley Jr.
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Robbie Conal: Political animal
January 16, 2010
I'm always flabbergasted by the foaming fury with which some people regard the painter and guerrilla poster artist Robbie Conal. Over the years, letters-to-the-editor writers have said, "Conal is a cancer on society" and, "He should be behind bars, not in an art gallery."
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Rick J. Caruso: A work in progress
January 9, 2010
Los Angeles is full of a lot of private moguls and a lot fewer public moguls, and Rick J. Caruso is one of the latter -- an immaculate, slightly Italianate master of his universe, with a bit of a retro vibe. The retail superstar conceived and built the Grove, the Americana at Brand and the Commons at Calabasas and is laboring on projects in Montecito and near the Santa Anita racetrack. But he has also thrown himself into civic life, as head of two of the city's most powerful boards, the DWP and the Police Commission, as a charitable force and as a man in the political mix as a possible candidate for mayor. The Grove and its ilk may not be your cup of tea. Caruso has been slammed for creating a cleaned-up alternative retail reality, but millions disagree with you. In 2006, according to Los Angeles magazine, more people hit the Grove than went to Disneyland.
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Warren Christopher: Mr. Secretary
December 5, 2009
Warren Christopher sounds so, well, diplomatic. The former secretary of State sometimes prefaces his observations with "it seems" and "I think" -- as considerations rather than pronouncements.
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Sheila Schuller Coleman: The reverend daughter
November 7, 2009
Iwas 7 or 8 years old, reading my way through my kiddie encyclopedias, when I infuriated my Sunday school teacher by suggesting that the miraculous parting of the Red Sea was simply low tide. At that age, Sheila Schuller was working for her father's fledgling church. On Sunday mornings, she thumbtacked the Sunday school lessons to the wooden picnic tables at the Garden Grove drive-in theater where the Rev. Robert H. Schuller preached sermons from atop the snack stand.
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Michael Jackson: Sir radio
October 31, 2009
You have only to hear the voice to recognize who owns those pipes: talk-show host Michael Jackson, the original issue, with more than half a century on the radio. During the BL era -- Before Limbaugh -- he reached millions of ears on several continents and was, for about three decades, the monarch of Los Angeles' AM talk radio. Jackson wears a coat and tie on the radio, in perfect keeping with the urbane, civil, informed discourse that earned him a place in the Radio Hall of Fame, an honor from the queen of England and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. That star was smothered in flowers this summer by music fans who mistook it for the other Michael Jackson's.
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Leonard Kleinrock: Mr. Internet
October 25, 2009
The Internet, like victory, has many fathers. One of the best known is Leonard Kleinrock, a computer science professor at UCLA. He was in the campus computer lab 40 years ago, on Wednesday, Oct. 29, 1969. At 10:30 p.m., he and his colleagues were working on a computer the size of an old-fashioned phone booth when they sent the first computer message. It was launched via a packet-switching mathematical theory Kleinrock had conceived for transmitting data. The message traveled from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute on a system set up through a Defense Department program. It was a Sistine-ceiling moment, a lightning spark of the Computer Age. Today, Kleinrock is still at UCLA, and so is that computer, the IMP, the Interface Message Processor. It will be the centerpiece of the forthcoming Kleinrock Internet Museum and Reading Room, not far from Kleinrock's office. As the now widely Webbed world marks its 40th anniversary, here's a bit of what it means to Kleinrock.
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Ayaan Hirsi Ali: Feminism's freedom fighter
October 17, 2009
For five years she's lived under the threat of death from Islamic radicals, and in those five years, she has become an acclaimed and provocative author on matters about Islam and the West. Ayaan Hirsi Ali was born into a Somali Muslim family and eventually made her way to the Netherlands as a refugee.
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Jerrianne Hayslett: Trials and errors
October 3, 2009
Fourteen years ago today -- shock and awe. After 16 tawdry months of the Simpson case wallpapering the public square, a Los Angeles criminal court jury found O.J. Simpson not guilty of the hideous murders of his ex-wife, Nicole, and her friend, Ron Goldman.
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Ken Burns: The public's filmmaker
September 26, 2009
Ken Burns is a matchmaker with a camera. He has introduced Americans to themselves, to their history, with documentaries such as "The Civil War." He also used the "pan and scan" camera technique to make still images of the long-dead seem alive on the television screen.
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Susan Feniger: Spice girl
September 19, 2009
Restaurant years are like dog years. If a restaurant survives one year, it's like seven in the real world. So when two women chefs make a go of it for nearly 30 years -- not only one restaurant but several, and TV and radio cooking shows, cookbooks, merchandise, catering and a heavy schedule of fundraisers for their favorite charities -- it's nigh on miraculous. Susan Feniger is one-half of the Too Hot Tamales; with her business partner and friend, Mary Sue Milliken, she's entered the pantheon of L.A. รผberรผber-chefs, with Mexican-inspired restaurants Border Grill and Ciudad. Knowing when to hold 'em and also when to fold 'em is a mysterious skill even among restaurateurs, and both Feniger and Milliken possess it (though many Angelenos still mourn the end of their first hole-in-the-wall effort on Melrose, City Cafe). As of this spring, Feniger has also struck out on her own with Susan Feniger's Street, serving her versions of street food. She makes a daily loop among her restaurants, new and old, and the Brentwood house she shares with her life partner, filmmaker Liz Lachman, and alights at Street to talk shop.
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Phil Angelides: The Columbo of Wall Street
September 12, 2009
One very scary year ago this week, we were tipping headfirst into an economic black hole that threatened to suck down the global economy. How did it happen? Congress has created a 10-member citizens commission to find out. At its head is Phil Angelides, Democrat and millionaire businessman who served as California's state treasurer for eight years and then lost his bid for governor in 2006. Lately he's been working with Magic Johnson to create a fund to fix up and "green up" affordable rental housing for working families. Now he'll be spending a couple of weeks a month in a rented office on Pennsylvania Avenue between the International Monetary Fund and the White House. It's called the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, but in the ways of Washington, these things can end up bearing the names of their chairmen -- the Pecora Commission, the Warren Commission. So by Dec. 15, 2010, we'll have the full report from what will surely be known as the Angelides Commission.
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Maria Elena Durazo: Labor of love
September 5, 2009
With about 92% of private-sector jobs non-unionized, the old "union movement" has become the new "labor movement," one of outreach as much as contract negotiating. In Los Angeles, some of that work falls to Maria Elena Durazo. She succeeded her husband as head of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, a year after he died, at 53, in 2005. On Labor Day weekend, she considers the state of the labor movement and her role in it.
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Gloria Molina: L.A.'s 'first Latina'
August 29, 2009
Gloria Molina's life has been one of contradictions: the famous feminist politician from East L.A., the career policymaker/politician who still feels like an outsider. She can claim many "firsts," a lot of admirers and a lot of political foes. The first Latina elected to the Legislature, to the Los Angeles City Council, and the first woman and Latina elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, where she'll likely be until she is termed out in 2014. Her reputation is one of picking fights, but she also picks her fights -- killing a proposed prison in East L.A. in the 1980s, watchdogging cushy government pensions and perks and budget practices, and looking out for Los Angeles' poor, of which she was once one herself, the eldest of 10 kids of a poor Mexican immigrant. You may see her only in TV news clips, jabbing a finger on some point. There's more, and some slow-mo, to GloMo.
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Vincent Bugliosi: Taking on Charles Manson
August 8, 2009
Vincent Bugliosi has moved on, but the world hasn't. Forty years after the impossibly grisly Tate-LaBianca murders, he is still "the Manson prosecutor." This, in spite of his many books since, arguing with magisterial fury about the JFK assassination, the O.J. Simpson trial, the Bush vs. Gore case and now the Iraq war.
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Theodore B. Olson: Legal eagle
July 25, 2009
When you've pleaded a case before the United States Supreme Court, your memento, your trophy, is a white quill. Some lawyers get one and treasure it forever. Ted Olson has enough to fletch an eagle, and he hopes to add one more -- legalizing same-sex marriage. During the Republican glory years in Washington, Olson was a GOP pillar: at the first meeting of the Federalist Society, on the board of directors of American Spectator magazine, stalwart of the Reagan administration. It was Olson who argued George W. Bush's case to the Supreme Court in Bush vs. Gore in 2000, securing the presidency. He grew up and was educated in California, elementary school through law school, and lived on the Palos Verdes peninsula before going all Beltway on us. And now he's back at his old law firm and working with an old adversary, David Boies, who argued Al Gore's side of the 2000 election. They've launched a challenge to Proposition 8 that could find them together again before the high court -- but on the same side, arguing that same-sex marriage should be part of mainstream America. Who'da thunk it?
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Jane Goodall: Chimp change
July 18, 2009
Chimpanzees and humans share about 95% of their DNA. If affinity and awareness count, Jane Goodall may have a smidge more. As the world's most renowned primatologist, her work has changed what we think of our primate brethren as thinking and feeling creatures, toolmakers, peacemakers and warmongers.
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Kevin Starr: Making history
July 11, 2009
I made the acquaintance of Kevin Starr's books long before I made the acquaintance of Kevin Starr. "Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963," the eighth volume in his serial love letter to California, is arriving in bookstores this weekend.
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Mavis Leno: More than just talk
July 4, 2009
For my money, the funny Leno is the one who's not on TV. Mavis Nicholson Leno is swift with the wisecrack, and she has this big, hearty, irresistible laugh that you suspect makes her her husband's best audience. But there's a fierce focus in her that I first saw about 10 years ago, after she'd begun working with the Feminist Majority on behalf of women in Afghanistan. That was well before most Americans could place Afghanistan on a map, much less knew what vileness the Taliban was up to. Leno may be the most ardent American champion Afghan women have, taking her crusade for literacy and healthcare to the news media and to Capitol Hill. When she spoke to me at the Feminist Majority offices in Beverly Hills, she was preaching to the choir. What she wants is a lot bigger choir.
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Karen Bass: Madame Speaker
June 27, 2009
Since California added term limits to the political rule book in 1990, the piece of furniture occupied by the speaker of the California Assembly has become both a musical chair and an ejector seat. We've had nine speakers in 14 years. Karen Bass is the latest, a Los Angeles Democrat and the first black woman in the job. She was elected to the Assembly in 2004. She became speaker a year ago, and she'll have to pack up and be gone next year. When I first met her, she was a physician's assistant and a community organizer, crusading for foster care and against the myriad liquor stores in South Los Angeles. Sure, today she sits next to the governor in the "big five" meetings -- but with the ticking clock of term limits and the most hellacious budget in decades, I think of the speaker's job now as much like the Woody Allen joke about two women chatting at a resort: "The food here is so awful." "Yes, and such small portions." Bass dishes it out, and takes it.
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Benjamin Jealous: Mr. Rights
June 20, 2009
Benjamin Jealous hears it so often that I'm sure he just lets it slide off by now: "You weren't even born when ... " Fill in the blank with your favorite milestone of recent racial history in this country -- when Rosa Parks sat down on the bus, when the Civil Rights Act passed, when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. But at age 36, the California native and the youngest president of the NAACP was certainly present for the biggest milestone of all -- Barack Obama's election. In a few weeks, Jealous will preside over the NAACP's 100th anniversary convention. He's a Rhodes scholar who went to work for a scrappy Mississippi black newspaper that was firebombed for its exposes. He has organized voter registration drives, run a human rights program at Amnesty International -- and, when he had time, used to run marathons.
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Jean-Lou Chameau: Cooking up ideas
June 13, 2009
I hope Jean-Lou Chameau gets to sleep late this morning. Friday, at his third graduation ceremony as president of Caltech, he also announced $30 million in gifts to that singular institution, where Albert Einstein and Richard Feynman worked their mighty brains. Caltech has raked in oodles of Nobel Prizes. Its operation of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has sent its renown beyond Earth. And its students have pulled off both brilliant research and inspired pranks. The long-ago dismantling of a Model T and the reassembling of it in a student's room, where it was discovered with the motor running, is so well known that President George H.W. Bush kidded around in his 1991 Caltech commencement speech about students reassembling Air Force One in the lobby of his hotel. The school's eighth president is a civil engineer with an interest in earthquakes from a village in Normandy. It had fewer residents than Caltech's undergraduate population of about 900. Now he works at the roll-top desk that belonged to Caltech's first president, the Nobel-winning physicist Robert A. Millikan. It is, says Chameau, "humbling."
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Laffit Pincay Jr.: Horse sense
May 30, 2009
I am laying one finger on the Kentucky Derby trophy. It is small, smaller and far less flashy than a lot of the other trophies on Laffit Pincay Jr.'s shelves -- much less gaudy than any of my parents' bowling trophies. It doesn't need to be flashy: Hello, it's the Kentucky Derby. Pincay won it in 1984. The little horse on top is broken, and he sets the cup aside to have it fixed. Then his cellphone starts ringing: The ringtone is an old song with the line, "No more love on the run," which strikes me as sad because Pincay, 62, has been out of the running since 2003, when he injured his neck in what turned out to be his last race. For seven years, he was the world's winningest jockey; now, he'd rather sing the praises of his son, broadcaster Laffit Pincay III, who talks about the ponies on TV instead of riding them. Next Saturday's Belmont Stakes, the last jewel in the Triple Crown, is raking in bets and headlines for the sport of kings. But in Southern California, Hollywood Park may be bulldozed, Santa Anita is on the block and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is talking about cashing in on Del Mar racetrack's seaside real estate. It's a good time to hear one of racing's most renowned jockeys on life in a sport that's having problems in the far turn.
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Daryl F. Gates: Clear blue
May 23, 2009
At 82, Daryl F. Gates still looks as if he could pass the training physical for the Los Angeles Police Department, which he joined as a rookie 60 years ago and ran as chief for 14 years. When he says that his name was on the front page of The Times more than any other Californian during those years, he's probably right. Gates made headlines because he made waves. His legendary set-tos with politicians and the Police Commission were combustible theater. His tenure as chief overlapped Tom Bradley's as mayor, and there was no love lost between the two; by the 1992 riots, they weren't on speaking terms. Gates' LAPD career carried him from driver for Chief William H. Parker to Parker's right- hand man and heir. He was the last chief to earn the job through the civil service system; since Gates, chiefs have been appointed, with term limits. Now there's talk of lifting those term limits so the current chief, William J. Bratton, could stay on for five more years -- making his tenure one year longer than Gates'. When we met, he brought me a cup of Starbucks, and before I asked the first question, he referred to a 1982 Times story about his plan to ban one of two LAPD chokeholds. In seven years, 16 people had died in police chokeholds, 12 of them African American. Gates told The Times then he suspected some blacks had a medical condition that made them more susceptible than -- and this stirred an outcry for his resignation that never disappeared -- "normal people."
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Eli Broad: A Broad view
May 16, 2009
I'm enough of a workaholic to recognize another one, even if I have to do it from a long way off and by the back of his head. That's Eli Broad up ahead. The man who hates the b-word -- "billionaire" -- prefers the p-word, "philanthropist." With his wife, Edythe, he plays on a bigger board than a hundred average workaholics: in education, science, the arts and L.A.'s civic life. His foundation writes checks to charter schools, Teach for America, a zealous arts program that lends the Broads' collections to museums around the world. The lifted-eyebrow crowd finds fault with his unapologetic big-checkbook activism, but nobody can doubt that the Broads help circle L.A. on the cultural map. Around town, he's Eli, maybe because, like Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, some people aren't sure how to pronounce his surname (it rhymes with "road"), and maybe because he's joined that exalted one-name pantheon. And, for a guy with so much on his plate, he's a pretty fair dancer. I know: I won a bet asking him to dance at the City Hall rededication seven years ago. (And hey, you guys still haven't paid up; you know who you are.)
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Hugh Hefner: The Bunny man
May 9, 2009
I've been in this room in the Playboy Mansion before. As I recall, the painting on the wall was a topless portrait of his wife, Kimberley, mother of his two teenage sons, from whom he is now separated. Now it's just Hefner, painted in Tudor robes, in the style of Holbein. In person, he wears his singular uniform of pajamas and slippers. The girls cavorting outside have changed, but he has not. At 83, he is part of the 20th century cultural pantheon, the subject of " Hugh Hefner: Playboy Activist and Rebel," an in-the-works documentary by an Oscar-winning filmmaker. He remains "creative director" of the family business, Playboy Enterprises (his daughter, Christie, stepped down as chief executive in December). A cable TV show about life with his trio of blondined girlfriends has made him more famous now than he was as the renowned and sometimes notorious founder of Playboy, which, compared with some 21st century smut, is practically decorous. The man who put the "he" in "hedonism" says he's proud of liberating women as well as men from the sexual cage of the 1950s.
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Laura Chick: California's eagle eye
May 2, 2009
If I were writing her business card, it would read, "Kicking butt in sensible shoes since 1993." Laura Chick has enemies. I am not one of them. The woman who's leaving Los Angeles City Hall after two terms on the City Council and two as city controller is stepping up to the appointed job of inspector general of California's $48-billion share of federal stimulus money. Editorial writers have praised her as an eagle eye in a green eyeshade, a grandma turned pit bull. A Toronto newspaper column said Canada needs its own Laura Chick. From her City Hall office, where her unsparing audits have left few stones unturned or uncast, she's just moving into her new quarters near the state Capitol. There, she's arranged "Morgan shelves" for pictures of her 6-year-old granddaughter and, arriving soon, her voodoo doll collection.
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Identity theft hits close to home
March 12, 2009
Now it's my turn to be a statistic.
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I'd like my CEO well-done, thanks
February 5, 2009
Oh, I want it. I want it bad.
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Villaraigosa's next race
January 22, 2009
Whoa, there. Don't let the inauguration lull you into a false sense of ease. You're not finished with voting yet.
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Capping off the inauguration
January 18, 2009
It's the closest thing to a crown that America's small-r republican first ladies get -- the simultaneously regal and egalitarian Inauguration Day hat.
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California's budget breaking point
January 15, 2009
If what it takes to fix California -- to fix everything about the way it raises money and spends it -- is to let it wreck itself first, then maybe we have to let that happen.
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Is public access TV dead?
January 8, 2009
Your remote control isn't screwed up. As of now, there really is nothing on some cable channels.
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L.A.'s 'Hail a Cab' experiment
January 1, 2009
If there's a peak mating season between those oddly matched species, the Angeleno and the taxicab, it surely came at about 2 o'clock this morning, New Year's Day, when "Auld Lang Syne" almost rhymed with "DUI."
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California has no room for good Samaritans
December 25, 2008
Uh, gentlemen? You three wise men? As your lawyer, I'm advising you not to go there.
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Should we tax pot?
December 4, 2008
Barack Obama is probably getting more letters than Santa Claus this year.
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Cherie Blair gets personal in 'Speaking for Myself'
November 5, 2008
If you believed half the snarky descriptions the British press has slung at Cherie Blair, you'd have expected her to arrive in Southern California astride a broomstick, accompanied by flying monkeys.
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A case of elective compulsive disorder
October 30, 2008
At last, the end of crazy is in sight. Come Tuesday night, maybe we can all ... just ... stop.
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Disney's California Adventure redo
October 23, 2008
Fake? We've got nothing against it here. California practically took out the patent on fake. The ingenious faked fantasy world of movies, the virtual technological reality of Silicon Valley and the virtual human reality of the Silicone Valley of the Dolls -- we own fake, baby.
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3 no-good propositions
October 16, 2008
Here's how difficult it is to put something in the U.S. Constitution: You need the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. This is why the Constitution only has 27 amendments, and nearly half of those came with the original Constitution.
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Is two more hours of Dubya two too many?
October 9, 2008
Here's your Stetson, what's your hurry? Americans can't wait to see the back of George W. Bush. Will they feel the same about him at the box office?
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The 'Bradley effect' in 2008
October 2, 2008
If I had a nickel for every time some pundit has opined about Barack Obama and the dreaded "Bradley effect," I could rescue Wall Street.
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Kicking our addiction to O.J.
September 25, 2008
If O.J. Simpson whined in the Mojave Desert (Nevada side), and no one was around to hear him, would he still make a noise? Do we care?
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Californians are far away at this convention
September 4, 2008
The sage of St. Paul, the radio storyteller Garrison Keillor, has a tender spot for California -- so tender that perhaps one day he'll launch "A Coastal Home Companion" as a winter replacement series for his "A Prairie Home Companion."
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Between 'crazy' and 'committed'
February 14, 2008
It's Valentine's Day, and one family is showing its love by showing up in court. Britney Spears' parents plan to ask a judge to keep her under their care and supervision. Try finding a hearts-and-flowers card for that -- "To our daughter, we love you, please go back into the hospital."
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If Hillary taps Antonio
February 7, 2008
Los Angeles, I've always got your back, don't I? So here's how I see this election going down for us:
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Early birds miss the point
January 31, 2008
Now aren't you sorry?
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After Johnny Grant
January 17, 2008
The last time I talked to Johnny Grant was just before Halloween. A couple of venerable actors had been perplexed that our friend Norman Corwin, the founding father of radio drama and subject of an Oscar-winning documentary, did not have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. I called up Johnny in his Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel penthouse. Hollywood's honorary mayor for life professed astonishment that Corwin was a man without a star. Get me the paperwork, he said, and I'll take his name to the committee personally, immediately.
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Britney's Law? Not so crazy
January 10, 2008
Wouldn't it be something if the giants of mental healthcare reform in California turned out to be three men named Lanterman, Petris and Short -- and a pop singer by the name of Britney Spears?
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Ready for their close-ups?
January 3, 2008
This can't be a joke because there's a writers strike on and jokes are out for the duration. So in all unscripted seriousness, I ask, could Hollywood really be smarter than Washington? Is it possible that movie people are savvier than political people?
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Rooting for trees
December 20, 2007
What a lousy time to be harping about how there aren't enough trees in the world.
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In a drought, who you gonna call?
November 22, 2007
For starters, the name's all wrong.
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Who needs writers?
November 8, 2007
It's Day Four of the Writers Guild strike, and here's how to tell that the striking writers haven't so much as picked up a Bic: Their picket-line chants are crappy.
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Blackwater: Not in our backyards
October 4, 2007
If you turned on C-SPAN on Tuesday and thought for a moment that you'd punched in some all-action-movie channel by mistake, I can't blame you.
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The GOP's fairness fakery
September 27, 2007
A show of hands: What words do you associate with Americans? No, not "no money down." Name one quality we like to think matters most to us.
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Mitochondrial politics
September 20, 2007
Here's what to watch for at next week's GOP minority-issues presidential debate at a historically black college in Baltimore: empty chairs. All four top Republicans have "scheduling conflicts."
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His story won't die
August 23, 2007
Daniel Pearl's name you know. Chauncey Bailey's, you probably don't. Both men were murdered presumably because of what they did for a living.
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Taken for a ride on Air Arnold
July 19, 2007
HOW SELFISH of me not to have noticed. I had absolutely no idea that Arnold Schwarzenegger was so hard up. He's practically the Oliver Twist of governors. He's so needy that there's a charity devoted almost exclusively to helping him out.
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A law for bad humans
July 5, 2007
HONESTLY, PEOPLE. Here it is, the day after Independence Day, and some "independent" citizens you all are, still expecting someone else to clean up after you.
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Ho-ney, I'm ho-ome ...
June 28, 2007
AND NOW IT'S time for another episode of "I Love Chelly," about that wacky, lovable brunette who's married to a handsome, up-and-coming city attorney who wants to make it big in politics.
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I don't care about Antonio's breakup
June 14, 2007
MAYBE I NEED to call a doctor. It might be a virus. Or an allergy.
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Green guilt trip
June 7, 2007
DON'T YOU LOVE IT when the auto industry starts talking in corporate tongues? The most astonishing idiocies come out of its collective mouth: No, no, no, we couldn't possibly put in seat belts. Air bags? Who'd want to pay for air bags?
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The $3-a-day diet
May 24, 2007
LOSE WEIGHT on $3 a day! Ask me how!
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Drought, the sequel, is here
May 17, 2007
HEY, ALL YOU sequel fans! Last week, it was "Spider-Man"; tomorrow "Shrek" and next week another "Pirates of the Caribbean." And I'm sure you'll be lining up for the most spectacular sequel of all, "Drought III: The Thirst."
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Let them eat Dodger Dogs!
April 12, 2007
OPENING DAY at Dodger Stadium. Out on the fresh, emerald field, it was all about the RBIs and the ERAs.
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The $1 federal budget
March 22, 2007
I WAS WORKING on my taxes at the time, so I was probably already hysterical, but something on the 1040 form got me giggling: the $3 checkoff for the presidential election campaign fund.
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Does L.A. need another downtown?
March 1, 2007
DON'T HATE ME, Eli Broad. I'm just asking the question here: Do we really need a new downtown?
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Patt Morrison for president!
February 15, 2007
MY FELLOW Americans: Today I am announcing that I am not testing the waters. I am not forming an exploratory committee. I am not studying the possibility. I am not embarking on a listening tour.
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No case, no justice
January 25, 2007
BY NOW, Charupha Wongwisetsiri has been cremated and her mom has moved out of the Craftsman condo in Angelino Heights where 9-year-old Charupha was shot as she stood in the kitchen.
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Who wants a deep-dish Olympics?
January 18, 2007
THE LAST TIME L.A. landed the Olympics, it was because nobody else wanted them.
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Insurance is enough to make you sick
January 4, 2007
IT'S A GOOD thing I have health insurance, because I thought my ticker was going to give out when I read this: Health insurance companies will not sell policies, at any price, to hale and healthy people who have, or had, some pretty trifling ailments. Hemorrhoids. Varicose veins.
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Adopt a homeless Angeleno
December 21, 2006
NICE AND WARM? Got enough to eat? Not addled by booze or drugs, or saddled with some mental disorder? Maybe you've even got a house key on your keychain?
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The phantom congresswoman
December 7, 2006
THAT FRESHMAN California congresswoman, Sherri Davis — she does get around, doesn't she?
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Patt Morrison: Vote for Cal!
November 23, 2006
IT'S TAKEN ME all this time to get rid of the disgusting aftertaste of the midterm election TV ads, with their artificial colors and flavors — cloying, bitter, sour, stupid. (Is stupid a flavor? It should be.)
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Patt Morrison: Arnold lacked the guts to oppose Prop. 83
November 16, 2006
I USED TO THINK something was wrong with Iowa. So many Iowans left the Hawkeye State to come here. Maybe it was all that corn. Maybe it was the early presidential caucuses.
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Patt Morrison: PR for the Homeless
October 12, 2006
SUDDENLY, FINALLY, there's some real money finding its way to the homeless.
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Patt Morrison: The Funniest Movie You Can't See
October 5, 2006
SO WHICH will be harder to spot this season — Mark Foley campaign signs or movie ads for "Idiocracy"?
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Patt Morrison: Memo to Congress -- Voting Is a Right
September 28, 2006
EARLY ON election day last June, someone broke into a poll worker's garage in the Central Valley town of Sanger and stole 1,000 blank ballots and two voting machines. Sinister, no? Florida 2000! Ohio 2004!
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Patt Morrison: Border Fence Is Borderline Insanity
September 21, 2006
WHAT, no land mines?
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Patt Morrison: Owning O.J.
September 7, 2006
SWEAR TO DeMille, this is going to be the most frightening story that Hollywood has come across since the news burst upon El Mundo de Movies that a private eye named Tony Pellicano was supposedly eavesdropping on some quite glamorous and private telephones.
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Kill Barbie
June 22, 2006
IT'S TIME to kill off Barbie.
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