LOS ANGELES PUBLIC LIBRARY CELEBRATES 100 YEARS : 1926 - 2026 : ONE OF MY OLD HAUNTS

Photo of 

LAPL Celebrating a Century of Light and Learning 

Bookmarks by Christine Trzyna C 2026

 

LOS ANGELES HOMELESS STUDENTS : NUMBERS RISE TERRIFYINGLY : RESOURCES

LOS ANGELES HOMELESS STUDENTS NUMBERS RISE TERRIFYINGLY

In recent times I've met some adults at the library who are enrolling at certain community colleges in the county of Los Angeles for the benefits of being a student.  These include:

Being able to park without harassment by police. i.e. a homeless student sleeping in their vehicle.

Free breakfast or other meals.

Free public transportation passes.

Free laptop computers.

Free showers - sometimes limited to those taking an exercise or gym class or using a campus gym.

Classes can include non-credit classes, certificate programs supposedly aimed at available employment; one need not be taking credit classes in order to eventually earn a degree.

This shows that at the community college level, it is understood that students living in poverty need basic-needs support in order to obtain education which may be necessary to compete for work.  However, some of these full grown adults have simply found another means for their survival and do the same enroll and then dump out routine semester after semester. That strikes me as taking advantage of the college - or whomever the funder(s) is.  

Some time ago I got up on my soapbox and ranted about the homeless student situation in Los Angeles and I recently reread what I wrote.  I was stunned by my own expressed anger.  That anger has not gone away, but maybe back then my sense of injustice also revealed an idealism I no longer have.

So this morning, I asked Google, about the Los Angeles homeless student situation. Based on the Los Angeles Times report as of April 2026 (though stats from a couple years ago were used by researchers)

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-04-01/la-county-student-homelessness-study

Excerpt: The number increased by 28%, to 61,249 in the 2023–24 school year from 47,689 in 2022–23, according to the studies.

Key drivers include a shortage of affordable housing, economic hardship, limited federal funding for schools and longstanding inequities affecting people of color and people with disabilities.

https://www.lacoe.edu/services/student-support/engagement/homelessness

This is the link to the Los Angeles County Office of Education, which has links to 'help'.

Excerpt: LACOE HEP works to help districts and charter schools maintain compliance with the McKinney Vento Homeless Assistance Act, an integral part of the Every Student Succeeds Act. 

According the the summation provided by Google AI:

Key Data on LA Homeless Students (2023-24): Surging Numbers: The number of homeless students has seen a sharp, rapid rise, representing the highest rate in the past five years.

Demographics: Latino students are disproportionately affected, accounting for 3 out of every 4 students experiencing homelessness.

Black Students: Approximately 11.5% of homeless students in LA County are Black, which is slightly higher than the state average.

Living Situations: Most students categorized as homeless are in "doubled-up" situations (living with others due to economic hardship), rather than on the streets.

Some years ago I volunteered informally to support a so called Summer Reading Program at a branch of LAPL.  The librarians told me that they were surprised at the huge increase in attendance and also that children's parents or other adult family members where staying and participating with their children rather than awaiting the children.  Activities often included snacks. Students received, at program/summer end, backpacks, shoes, school supplies. (Not much reading was actually going on in the arts and crafts aspect of the program.)

That summer there was also special program to help teen students get job experience. It was considered to be gang membership prevention in the City of Los Angeles. It was held at various parks including a park close to that LAPL branch.

One day they had a little fair during which various local politicians had tables. I went to the fair and saw that families were being given a free evening meal and some basic activities, such as good old-fashioned games. Music was blaring. These feeds were happening at least five evenings a week for about six weeks.

Soon enough I realized what was happening.  The same families were coming to the library for the Summer Reading Program Events.  They were actually spending long hours - days on end - in the parks.  At night some were in their vehicles and some were sleeping on the floors of more fortunate families, often renters in older neighborhood buildings.  

Then the evictions started for building tear downs.  Whole families were coming into the library to ask the librarians where they could find housing.

It's my suspicion that the 2025-2026 statistics, if they were available, would reveal a tripling of the statistics used for this LA Times article.  

C 2026  Christine Trzyna

TALES OF THE AMERICAN (HOTEL IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES - AREA NOW CALLED THE ARTS DISTRICT) : CHRISTINE TRZYNA FILM REVIEW

https://www.talesoftheamerican.com/  A documentary.

I attended a presentation of this film, made a few years ago, of excellent quality, at LAPL - Central. It was made by Stephen Seemayer and Pamela Wilson and they interviewed over 140 once-upon-a-time and current artist residents in the process. The history of the building, built in 1905, which had other names, was that it was the first hotel in the city of Los Angeles to welcome Negro guests - and was then called, interestingly enough, The Canadian. It then became a place where recent Japanese immigrants could live; some were put into camps after the United States entered World War II. Eventually artists, writers, and musicians moved in. The rent was low and the then-Arts District- was vibrant - lawless - but you had a chance of honing your craft and skill because it was affordable. Now the Los Angeles Arts District is becoming too expensive for someone who is, at best, up and coming.

Perhaps the American was the Los Angeles equivalent of New York's Chelsea Hotel? 

I had never heard of it.

It was not my kind of place which is probably why I had not.

Affordable. That is the buzz word these days. The word Affordable should never be used to advertise rooms for rent or apartments for lease or townhomes for sale. It's a joke word.

I was thinking while viewing  the Tales of the American documentary about my experiences being around people who were .... vexations to the spirit. As, apparently, some of the people who made this place - and the in-house Al's Bar - "home" were or would be to me.

I haven't lived a life free of such people.  They are everywhere. I'm just getting better at discernment/avoidance.

Lately, and I'm not the only one saying this, it seems crazy-makers are everywhere, that one cannot find that hidey-hole where one can be alone, think, sleep enough - or work. 

I think there is, overall, the wrong idea that artists of every sort need chaos, that creativity needs chaos.

Actually, what one needs to create first and foremost is the time, which usually means time off, being able to either not be concerned with affording time away from the usual pursuit of self-support, maybe because parents or partner take care of that or you inherit, or because it doesn't bother you too much to hear loud music through your floors every night or have to share a filthy bathtub and toilet with twenty other people.

I'm just the opposite. I like clean. I like quietude and privacy and knowing I'm safe without three bolts on a door. 

C 2026 Christine Trzyna

IT WAS THE LAST TIME I'LL EVER GO TO THE TOURIST TRAP CALLED "THE LAST BOOKSTORE" IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES : THE LAST BOOK STORE SHOULD BE THE LAST PLACE YOU GO LOOKING FOR BOOKS!

IT WASTHE LAST TIME I'LL EVER GO TO THE TOURIST TRAP CALLED "THE LAST BOOKSTORE" IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES : THE LAST BOOK STORE SHOULD BE THE LAST PLACE YOU GO LOOKING FOR BOOKS!

Opinion by Christine Trzyna

Months ago, I and a friend, he with his service dog in a carrier (no questions asked but the carrier looks like a wheeled suitcase and cannot be missed), and me with a big bag full of library books and a manuscript as well as a purse, were allowed into THE LAST BOOKSTORE without a problem.  After encountering the fanciful displays - tunnels and such - made of used books - we sat on an old sofa.  He fell asleep - so did his dog - and I let him as I paged through a couple books and decided to buy one of them. 

The displays - excellent upcycling and creatively designed - were also shabby and dusty. I wondered if the owners had bought up storage units of decaying paper books, as well as the book cases, of many a defunct ma and pa bookstore, especially because only in this environment did so many odd and unmatched book cases look right 

There were a lot of tourists with cell phones taking pictures around us, documenting their visit to this massive space that takes the ground floor of an old building, which also has some boutique businesses within. We quickly looked into these other businesses which must be subleasing. Later we learned that we could have gotten a free cup of coffee if we showed that we had bought a book. (Which would have required going back upstairs.) Because their web site mentioned that they had a ghost, I asked an employee where the ghost was. Ha Ha! In the elevator, a bank robber who got shot by the police in an elevator.  (What marketing!)

So, the other day, I decided to go solo to THE LAST BOOK STORE, in search of a memoir or two and a cup of coffee.  I decided to try and navigate the Metro subway there. Last visit we had walked down the hill past Pershing Square from LAPL - Central. This time, when I went above ground, I realized I was a few blocks from LAPL - Central. I realized later I would have been better off getting off at Pershing Square. 

I was carrying with me a small, clean, light-colored backpack - purse with handles, not one of those huge backpacks that looks like one is going to climb Mount Everest. Also a small clean canvas book bag received at a library event with a library design on it and a small collapsible umbrella. I was wearing clogs that are waterproof but also clean and well designed. I was wearing black slacks, not beat-up jeans with holes, and a classic burgundy sweater, over which I had my cotton jacket which was, unlike most of my clothing, designed by Ralph Lauren. I had a beanie on my head. No cosmetics. No facial tattoos.

I bathe. I did not smell. I am not a suspicious character.

On my way - at least eight city blocks - maybe ten - to THE LAST BOOKSTORE, I grew fatigued.  I stopped in front of a side door of THE BILTMORE HOTEL. I had always wanted to go inside and look around the Biltmore, but was intimidated about going through the front lobby.  If there was any place in downtown Los Angeles that I imagined someone might want to tell me, politely, that I did not belong there and needed to leave right away, it would have been THE BILTMORE HOTEL. The hotel, opened in 1923, is part of Los Angeles - Hollywood history. Instead, an employee outside, sensing my interest, said to me "Go ahead and go in!"  I didn't invade all the rooms - there are restaurants and bars and ballrooms - but I spent about a half hour in there, photographing without a problem, looking around. What I saw was simply majestic. At no time did any employee inside THE BILTMORE HOTEL approach me.

But when I got to THE LAST BOOKSTORE, I quickly realized that I had wasted my day making this place a goal.  I WAS TOLD I COULD NOT GO IN WITH MY BACKPACK, though I told the man with the cheesy smile at the desk, that I had money and electronics with me in it and didn't feel good about leaving it. (If it was stolen, I thought, how would I be compensated, if at all?  Did he go through a background check to get the job?) I WAS TOLD THAT I COULD NOT EVEN TAKE THE CANVAS LIBRARY BAG WITH ME.  Ah, what if I had to travel with a medical kit of some kind like my friend does because he has low blood sugar?

"If I cannot take these in with me, how do you expect me to buy books?"

"Most people only TAKE THEIR WALLET!" he said.  Yes he did. So slick!

So I said "Forget it" and asked for my things back. He turned my things over smoothly without loosing that cheesy smile.  He claimed he hated the store policy too.

Behind him were a dozen BIG BLACK BACKPACKS - OK - I get it - like homeless men take around with them.

To say I was INSULTED would not be right. I was STUPEFIED. As I left, around the bend and into the storefront came a couple with a BABY IN ARMS and A HUGE DIAPER BAG. Good Luck! I thought. I knew I would NEVER EVER BOTHER TO GO BACK TO SUCH A PLACE.  I WAS ONCE CONNED BY THE CHARISMA OF IT; NO MORE!

THE LAST BOOKSTORE IS CLEARLY MAKING TOO MUCH MONEY, SO MUCH THEY DON'T CARE ABOUT A POTENTIALLY GOOD CUSTOMER - THE LIKES OF ME.  They are too busy PROFILING - erroneously.

So let's look at it.  IF YOU ARE STAYING IN A HOTEL OR LIVE IN DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES that is in WALKABLE DISTANCE to THE LAST BOOKSTORE, then you can go in there with your wallet.

IF YOU ARE LIKE MOST ANGELENOS - men and women - ESPECIALLY THOSE WHO GO DOWNTOWN USING THE SUBWAY or BUS - PUBLIC TRANSIT - you take a backpack or bag or bags with you. YOU DO NOT HAVE A TRUNK OR GLOVE COMPARTMENT.  YOU DO NOT PAY HIGH PARKING FEES to go and do downtown.  You take a backback because you are a STUDENT, say.  Maybe you're a student of LITERATURE or CREATIVE WRITING AT USC or UCLA. MAYBE YOU ARE A POET, A WRITER, A PUBLISHED AUTHOR, A PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH AT LA VALLEY COLLEGE.  MAYBE YOU SPEAK AT THE USC LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK FAIR - 

Maybe you are a tourist, and you're staying at a youth hostel.  Maybe - just maybe - you are on the best seller list!

You get me.

At a time when Anti-Amazon sentiment is rising, many of us want to read books that seem to have gone extinct, and so we head for a used book store.

I SUGGEST THAT YOU FIND ANOTHER INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE, and support that bookstore - even if they are in another state. Let them order in the new books that you want too, if you do not find them at your local library, on Project Gutenberg, in Google Books, on Hoopla or another such app, BEFORE YOU TAKE A TRECK TO THE LAST BOOKSTORE!

Another day I will likely post a photo of the entrance of this store, just to prove to you that I actually went there!

C 2026 including photo : Christine Trzyna All Rights Reserved including Internet and International Rights.

Hey, I've been blogging for years.  I don't need to YELP IT!  Do I?

PS. It's not that about me having "class": it's that the Biltmore has it and The Last Bookstore does not!

A FRENCH PERSPECTIVE OF THE SUNSET STRIP MUSIC SCENE

WHY DID THEY FAIL TO PUT THE YEAR = 2025 =

 ON THIS POSTCARD TO ADVERTISE THE EXHIBIT?

GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA NEWSOM GIVES SPEECH ON THE TROOPS SENT BY TRUMP TO LOS ANGELES

BLUE JAY WAY : THE BEATLES

FIREAID LA BENEFIT CONCERT

SORRY THE VIDEO IS DOWN..

Alannis Morrisette,  Anderson Paak and the Free Nationals, Dr. Dre (Sheila E too!)  Joni Mitchell, Dawes, Steven Stills .... six hours of fantastic performances - music!

Once upon a time I hiked Eaton Canyon all the way to the box canyon and waterfall...

The Annenberg Foundation will oversee distribution.

Billy Crystal announced that U2 donated $1 million, while Connie and Steve Ballmer pledged to match donations made during the event.

Viewers were encouraged to contribute online through FireAidLA.org or by text.

Proceeds will support affected families and fire mitigation efforts in Los Angeles County.

MALIBU : MILEY CYRUS

LA WOMAN : THE DOORS

THE WALK : PEPE MARQUEZ

Had so much fun with this one.... Pepe is locally famous.... And if you go to a classic car show, you just might see one he's driven, worked on, or owns. 

WHAT'S REALLY STINKY ABOUT LA?

The smell of skunk marijuana is everywhere, seeping through user's pores, tainting their clothes and backpacks. Everywhere - on the street, on the bus, in buildings, and at events. It's nauseating and alienating.  

So many people who self medicate with pot... on a daily basis... 

As I said to a friend, who has a pot plant growing on his apartment porch, "Remember when you would encounter some person who spoke to you, and you were almost knocked out by the alcohol on their breath - pure dragon's breath.  And you would think badly of them, because here was a true alcoholic who could not make their way through life without it?  Same thing with these people who have the smell of skunk saturating their very being..."

For the record, I was and am all for legal medical grade marijuana. I've met the cancer patients who say it makes all the difference.  I've had the professor who lamented that her mother's eyesight could have been saved. But some people are addicts and I don't think anyone should or can trust street drugs.  My friend who grows his plant says he has chronic pain and smoking makes him forget that pain.  I say to him "Don't you want to rid yourself of the pain so you don't have to forget about it?"  He's with the VA and the VA is federal and the doctors there are not at all comfortable about anyone's use of marijuana, home-grown and legal. I realize pain-killers by prescription can be addictive too... I do... But then we get into what smoke (and second-hand smoke) do to the lungs... Or what prescription pain killers do to the internal organs...

Ugh.  It's all bad.

I hate the smell of skunk.

C 2024  Christine Trzyna

HOMELESS STUDENTS STRUGGLE LA UNIFIED and I GET UP ON MY SOAP BOX

AP : HOMELESS STUDENTS LOS ANGELES : LA UNIFIED 

****

Read this story and weep - if you're human - because it's the story of thousands of LA Unified school students and millions in America.  And I hate to say it because I'm no Republican, but illegal immigrants swarming into our country where our strained resources will help them somewhat - but not enough - will only make it worse.  Shit hole apartments.  Street homeless - mentally ill - room mates. Women sexually exploited.  I have already heard of a situation where a building manager in North Hollywood was expecting immigrant women he rented to, to have sex with him as part of the deal.  Come to America and become a sex slave to keep a roof over your head for you and your children. This is why abortion can be a sacrament.  What if one or all of those women ends up pregnant with this building manager's fetus?  I would rather see him dead.

Excerpt: The majority of students the government considers “homeless” do indeed have a place to sleep, but it’s precarious and often shared with roommates, according to federal statistics. In Los Angeles, more than 13,000 students are homeless and 2,000 of them stay in shelters, the city’s superintendent said last spring.

López says she was assaulted while the family stayed in a shelter after getting evicted three years ago. That’s why she’s determined to find her own housing. The scarcity of affordable housing in Los Angeles has given anyone with an apartment lease in their name the power to take advantage of people like López who don’t have the saved cash, references or savvy to compete for their own place and are desperate to avoid shelters.

****

And the shit hole apartment that is too chaotic for study or true deep sleep - the kind of rest that is needed to recharge and take on the next day - can mean that the person is NOT CONSIDERED HOMELESS.  As one women I met walking dogs told me, No Matter How Many Places You Sofa Surf, You Are Not Considered Homeless.  She had been living going from one friend's place to another for three years and the local homeless services place had done nothing for her. Why not?  Because she is healthy, sane, not pregnant, not addicted, not just out of jail - not a priority.

So besides our corrupt City Hall - especially the Housing Department - that pretty much sucks the cocks of greedy multimillionaire developers - there are the priests and ministers - the churches - that are also pretty much bullshit.  They are just as obsessed with the value of their real estate and rarely help even the most faithful of parishioners.   

I recently met a woman who is legally blind who was a member of her church for seven years - in the choir - the whole bit - when she lost her housing.  As she tells it "They not only knew I was a woman alone but a disabled woman and not one of them helped me in the smallest way."  (That's "Christians" for you, I thought.)  I said, "I hope you aren't having anything to do with that religion any more."

She and a friend scraped together the money to buy a van to live in. And she got herself a boyfriend, one who, like she does, believes that sex has to wait for marriage. When the van broke down and she and her woman friend were unable to repair it or keep it, her boyfriend, now a fiancee, managed to get her into a sober living - even though she has never used or had a problem with booze or drugs - for which she is grateful for. But now he is on the street, using a walker, waiting for housing help offered by so called homeless outreach people who drive around talking to people on the street.  Their wish to marry has been suspended. Every morning during the week she gets out of bed and buses to a senior center where she spends her days.  He, meanwhile, battles for the housing that would allow them a normal life, busing around while on that walker. So here you have two people who are White (and therefore now assumed to have White Privilege) and who have lived decent lives, are now in their sixties, and applying for housing lotteries and wait lists.  

This housing crisis took YEARS to develop and those who allowed it to happen HAD NO INTEREST IN THE FUTURE. By then they would be out of office or dead, and it would be someone else's problem.  That too, goes for our Presidents of the United States - a long story of inheriting the last administration's daring do.

C 2023 Christine Trzyna

LOUIS ADAMIC : EXCERPT FROM LAUGHING IN THE JUNGLE (1932)

LOUIS ADAMIC : LAUGHING IN THE JUNGLE

page 52)

...These men are the high priests of the Chamber of Commerce whose religion is Climate and Profits.  They are - some of them - grim, inhuman individuals with a great terrifying singleness of purpose.  They see a tremendous opportunity to enrich themselves beyond anything they could have hoped for ten or even five year ago, and they mean to make the most of it.... And trailing after the big boys is a mob of lesser fellows, whom the former awe with their superior economic advantages and control through the Chamber of Commerce and other pay-triotic organizations: thousands of minor realtors, boomers, promoters, contractors, agents, salesmen, bunko-men, officeholders, lawyers, and preachers - all driven by the same motives of wealth, power, and personal glory, and a greater Los Angeles.  They exploit the "come-ons" and one another, envy the big boys, live deliriously for business, bigger and better business, while their wives gather in womens' clubs, listen to swamis and yogis and English lecturers, join "love cults" and Coue clubs in Hollywood and Pasadena, and their children - boys and girls in their teens: "Beautiful but dumb" -...drink and rush around in roadsters...."

pages 53 -54)

...Most of the people come here to be sun-kissed and made well, and so healing is one of the big industries in town.  Besides thousands of more or less regular doctors, there are in Los Angeles no end of chiropractors, osteopaths, "drugless physicians," faith healers, health lecturers, and manufacturers and salesmen of all sorts pf heath "Stabilizers" and "normalizers," psychoanalysts, hynotists, mesmerists, the flow-of-life mystics, astro-therapists, miracle men and women - in short, quacks and charlatans of all descriptions.

Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002

Note: Don't you just love it!?

EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : RAIN

The silver lining was rain.  A sudden, mistaken rain that came all at once in the middle of the following Thursday, vanishing after five minutes upon noticing its blunder. No clouds, seventy-five degrees, no reason, but it rained.  It rained on the hot oily asphalt and made it smell rainy.  It rained the fray from the landscape, just like that, with a snap of its wrong turn.

The wild blue yonder came upon us like a drunken zoom lens thundering into focus.  It seemed that God had made up His mind to change the background without telling anyone.

Los Angeles got huge shafts of pure yellow sunlight surging through office windows.  Daffodils came to mind. Violets.  

You could choose any direction and see as far as you wanted.  Past Catalina and on west all the way to the East. In a quick clap of mistaken thunder the look of Southern California had been transformed miraculously and I have seen nothing like it anywhere else or heard of any such thing.

You could pick up mad gladness from bus drivers and studio chiefs and pool cleaners and check-out girls and guys doing their news on the radio.  "Rain!" they cried, and immediately meteorologists were contacted to predict more rain. Rain from Mexico, rain from the San Joaquin Valley, rain from a storm out in the Pacific, rain coming down from Oregon.  Converging rain -- we're bound to have more rain.

"Did you see it, it rained! everyone said to each other, in soft panting voices as though they were in love.

Excerpt pages 92 and 93 published in 1977

EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : FAME AND FRIENDSHIP

 re Janis Joplin in previous paragraphs...

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates.  Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there's at least a precedent.) There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer.  Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were.  Which is only a darker version of the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with.  They'll only give you "everything:" if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.

The kinds of friends you get when you have "everything" (after your old friends have decided to send you all their screenplays, so that you're afraid to run into them lest they wonder why you haven't read them) are either your immediate family or other famous people.  A lot of times your immediate family is what drove you into such excess in the first place.  So that leaves other people with "everything." In Hollywood, there's usually a special grace period when you're allowed to grab a few friends before you're pitched into only meeting other famous people ...

Excerpts pages 60-61 Published 1977

EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : LA AS A CHARACTER

It's well known that for something to be fiction it must move right along and not meander among the bushes gazing into the next county. Unfortunately, with L.A. it's impossible.  You can't write a story about L.A. that doesn't turn around in the middle or get lost. And since it's the custom for people who "like" L.A. to embrace everything wholesale and wallow in Forest Lawn, all the stories you read make you wonder why the writer doesn't just go ahead and jump, get it over with.

I love L.A. The only time I ever go to Forest Lawn is when someone dies.  A kid from New York once said: ""Look. Which would you rather? To spend eternity looking out over these pretty green hills or in some overcrowded ghetto cemetery next to the expressway in Queens?  L.A. didn't invent eternity.  Forest Lawn is just an example of eternity carried to its logical conclusion.  I love L.A because it does things like that.

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles.  People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do  to be able to stand it....    

Eve Babitz : Excerpt page 7  published 1977

EVE BABITZ DIES

LA TIMES EVE BABITZ WHO CAPTURED AND EMBODIED .... the culture of Los Angeles, dies at 78 by Mark Olsen, Staff Writer

EXCERPT : Her writing described a world of decadent glamour with fine-tuned detail but also a sense of open-hearted joy, often shared with the dishy candor of a close friend deep into a soggy late-afternoon lunch.

LAWRENCE CLARK POWELL : OCEAN IN VIEW

Reading around the erosion of the beaches around Malibu, in particular Broad Beach, which was one of my favorites,  I found Powell's descriptions almost romantic.

Powell is the man who the UCLA library is named after, for he was the head librarian there for many years.  He and his wife lived in Westwood and then moved out to the Malibu.

Page 401)

Indians are buried everywhere from Mugu Lagoon to Malibu Creek. Every bulldozing operation brings their bones and artifacts to light, as one did just across Broad Beach Road from us - a dozen huddled skeletons, four or five hundred years old, talking no notice of their noisy resurrection.  Our germanium garden, falling to Encinal Creek, is sure to be a burial ground, the gofers tell us.  Mary Austin writes of the residue of personality that always haunts a place once inhabited by man.  Jeffers' poetry is full of these hauntings.  But I cannot say that I have encountered sprits here on the Malibu.  Perhaps the diesels drive them away.  I have no fear of them however.  The Chumash were a gentle people, living on shell fish, roots, and acorn meal.  We who are carnivorous may leave a different residue.  Sometimes I wonder who will follow us here, and what they will make of our artifacts - books on discs ... and less tangible, though perhaps more lasting, our love for this marine mountainscape this world called the Malibu.

From the book Writing Los Angeles

I'm sorry I failed to write down the year he wrote this and the ... is a couple missing words.

PRIVATE EDUCATION and INDOCTRINATION : OPINION BY CHRISTINE TRZYNA

News is that expensive private schools such as Harvard-Westlake in Los Angeles, and Brearley School in New York have an agenda of indoctrination. The intention is to teach the lie that all White People are superbly advantaged due to the accident of their birth - their skin color - and that deep prejudices exist in all White people - as if this were inborn - so that we don't even know we are racists! Even when we have voted for affirmative action, even when we have intentionally and personally given people of a race or ethnicity or religion other than what we identify with, opportunities, we are supposed to be unconsciously racist. Maybe we should be paranoid that we have this trait, as real as blood, and unseen and unknown - like a virus.

Further we White appearing (after all, it is a presumption) people all must apologize and make up for American history, even if our people immigrated long after slavery was abolished and we were not raised to be prejudiced. That some people are not further along in their cultural situation has nothing to do with their values, it's all us doing them in.

What a steaming pile of manure!

Some parents are taking their children out of these schools, and you know what?  I'm all for it. A parent who is paying tuition of $30,000 - $50,000 a year tuition can afford to hire a teacher to work with their child full time, or several tutors who are experts at their subject. No more discussion about student - teacher ratio. There are teachers out there who would love the work to home school the children of rich people, children who never suffer for experientials, extracurriculars, travel, educational opportunities and sports outside of school, and usually have plenty of social life, learning young how to interact with adults as well as their peers. 

One parent said that he wants his child to LEARN TO THINK rather than be TOLD WHAT TO THINK.

He's right. That used to be the reason one went to a liberal arts college. That used to be the purpose of writing papers, to not only prove you knew the material taught, but to take a position. That used to be why DEBATE was honored because we wanted to know the two (or more) sides to a question, and perhaps become enlightened or persuaded.

What about creativity, originality, individualism, and invention?

I'm wondering just when certain Americans lost the FEAR of THOUGHT INDOCRINATION. Of 1984. Of 1999. Isn't this one of the reasons we as a nation feared and opposed Communism because of the CONFORMITY necessary in Communist Countries?  (We certainly spent enough on military occupations and  lost enough lives to prove that.) Have we invalidated previous "American values" ? 

I think there is DISCUSSION and that's the best way to teach things.

This issue falls into two categories I'm concerned with.  One is parental rights.  The other is parental responsibilities. A parent has the right to pass on their belief system and we can all come up with some worst case scenario with this, but we all have a heritage. How much influence our parents, our childhood religion, and so on has on us as adults is questionable.  In fact, too harsh an indoctrination often becomes a reason for rebellion.  For instance, I meet a lot of people explaining themselves claiming they had "Catholic Damage." (For them, this exists.  For the rest of us, they're just want to do immoral or unethical things and not be responsible or feel guilty.)

And there is this. I personally do not feel responsible for anything any of my ancestors did in their lives, good or bad.  How many people even know much about their ancestors? History has a funny way of both repeating itself and being rewritten. I can only try to imagine what it was for women who had no contraception, for instance. How can I really understand what it was to live in 1848 or 1942? Time travel? I'm aware that I'm different than many of my relations and I don't know how much is nature and how much is nurture. I cannot typecast my family.

Besides what happens in a classroom, there is what we personally experience and how we make sense of it.  As a result of experience, things we are told are true we often decide are not.  In life we change.

Students whose parents cannot afford private schools or home schooling really have to assert themselves to teach their children what they want them to know, what they are not getting in public school, where they are dictated to. That tends to fall into the category of religion and too many parents are letting the school do all the work, even treat teachers as babysitters, rather than spend quality time with their children and teach them these basics at home.

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I had the experience of Anti-White Racism in one class in college where I was downgraded as one of the few White students in a class full of Mexican-Americans and a Mexican-American teacher who basically preached Anti-White in his lectures. For instance, he passed out anti-White poetry by an Angeleno poet of Mexican descent. According to this professor Mexican-Americans were taking over neighborhoods in Los Angeles and would soon dominate - in a sense he was right- eventually, but he was part of the belief system that this was never the United States, that there was no illegal immigration because this really was Mexico. Never mind that the college was a short drive from the historical site where the Treaty was signed, making this part of California, American Territory. And never mind that the early Mexicans had land grants from Spain and chose not to be Spanish or Mexican but called themselves Californios. The Anti-White and Anti-United States belief system expressed in that classroom certainly took rewriting history. I could go on about this so called professor and what he was getting away with in the classroom, but let's just say that the only White students in the class who got an A agreed to volunteer for his political candidate - a Mexican American.  I had no time, thought this was wrong, and wasn't for that candidate.  I got a political B - this with an open book final.  Did the Dean give a rats ass?  Hell no.

I think this college educator was so Anti-White he imagined I had never experienced discrimination or prejudice myself - for being a woman or being of Polish heritage for instance - and thought he'd punish me with a "lesson" in what it feels like - such as when I saw that bullshit grade.

This wasn't the first time I was treated with distain, treated as White Woman - the Heiress of Advantage, by Hispanic people and by Black people, but hey, I know when I'm dealing with an Anti-White bigot and when I'm not. I've also been treated with basic respect by people of these ancestries and have sometime formed friendships that would be impossible if either party were racist.  

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We cannot be afraid to see differences. Different doesn't always mean bad or wrong. So at a time when there are a dozen ways to label our sexuality there is only one way to label White.

We do have to look at how it is a person got to where they are - or are not.

An excellent EDUCATION at a SCHOOL should not the same experience as a RE-EDUCATION CAMP.

We need to see individuals as just that and get to know someone more deeply and decide if we like them or not based on their innards - their character, personality, their values - not their skin color. When schools try to impress upon White students that they should be apologizing for their assumed advantage, embarrassed by a heritage they took no part in, then the school administration, teachers, and educational philosophy is basically Anti-White racist. They are practicing exactly what they claim to be against.

C 2021  Christine Trzyna