Let the Sun Shine In

Ihave just returned from New York, where it was snowing, and Portland, Ore., where it was sleeting, to a day in L.A. that was so bright it glistened.

There was a kind of silver-blue tone to the ocean as I observed it from a hillside in the Pacific Palisades. The air was as soft as silk.

I point this out not to gloat but to neutralize a snickering attitude from afar toward those of us who dwell in our own private paradise.

It was a day made in heaven embracing a panorama that glowed.

I was in the Palisades to begin with at a place called Villa Aurora listening to chamber music performed by the SoLaRe String Trio, part of a series sponsored by the Da Camera Society of Mount St. Mary’s College.

My wife had to talk me into going because I am not the kind of guy who will willingly sit still for a violin. When I complained that it was all too ethereal for me she said, very sweetly, “What’s your preference, dear, a rollicking harmonica version of ‘Roll Me Over in the Clover’?” Maybe.

But even if I did find the music a little stringy the view from the hillside knocked me out. I could gaze at the silvery ocean, bop to the strains of “Mutter Beimlein” and think about the people freezing their aspirations off in Portland and New York City.

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Every time I visit wet and shivery places the natives seem to be waiting for someone from L.A. to laugh at because, I guess, with the kind of weather they get there isn’t much else to amuse them. Call it weather-envy.

I admit that Los Angeles, with its various self-righteous obsessions, can be a funny-silly place, but I get a little tired of hearing about it.

This time it was the Beverly Hills fur initiative that has them rolling in the snow, so to speak. (To them, anything between Fresno and San Diego constitutes L.A., city boundaries be damned.) They thought the initiative the funniest thing they’d ever heard, sticking labels on fur coats that tell how the contributing animal might have died.

These were fur-wearing people I was talking to, hunters in Portland and money flaunters in New York who do not have the same outlook as the more cloistered patricians of Beverly Hills when it comes to animal use.

The initiative, for those who missed it, will be voted on May 11. If it wins, tags on fur coats will say, “. . . This product is made with fur from animals that may have been killed by electrocution, gassing, neck breaking, poisoning, clubbing, stomping and drowning. . . .”

A guy in Portland named Joe said, “What about fish sold in your fancy-ass restaurants? Will there be a tag on each of them saying, ‘This fish died of strangulation with a hook in its mouth flopping about on a pier’?”

In New York Harold said, “What about chickens? They hang them by their feet on conveyor belts to a machine that slices their heads off. You think the chicken likes that?”

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A spokesman for the fur industry, who refers to fur-bearing animals as “a renewable resource,” maintains that at least most of them die peacefully, almost happily, in clouds of stress-free gas. If one or two are dispatched under less pleasurable circumstances, those are the breaks.

The chicken people told me the same thing once, that their renewable resource lives good lives until the end. They dwell in chicken-condos, dine on the chicken equivalent of ecrevisse de mer and saunter off to the guillotine laughing and chatting. We should all be so lucky.

Portland Joe suggested to a group of men howling with laughter that maybe animals ought to be given equal rights with humans in Beverly Hills and be allowed representation on the City Council.

Manhattan Harold, who had just spent an hour in sleet and a bitterly cold wind trying to get a taxi, called our obsession with animals asinine and hinted that our next step would be to save the animals and eat humans. “With a dry red wine,” his wife added sourly.

I felt defenseless because the fur label idea is goofy, a product of minds too narrow to embrace larger ideals. Saving minks is easy. Other crusades require more demanding commitments.

But I was able to put the derision behind me as I gazed out at the ocean on that stunning day, swinging and swaying with Eisler’s “Drei Kinderlieder” into a more forgiving mood. Even if we are a little strange, at least we’re warm.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com