All posts by Steve Stern

I Don’t Know What to Say Except Poor LA

January 17, 2025UncategorizedSteve Stern

Los Angeles weather is the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse, and just as the reliably long and bitter winters of New England determine the way life is lived there, so the violence and the unpredictability of Santa Ana affect the entire quality of life in Los Angeles, accentuate its impermanence, its unreliability. The winds shows us how close to the edge we are. Joan Didion in Slouching Towards Bethlehem

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husband’s necks. Anything can happen. Raymond Chandler in Trouble is My Business

…very scary, very stressful, very strange week here in L.A., where we work, where we live, where our kids go to school. Jimmy Kimmel

I looked at IRS data and learned that in 2021 (the most recent year for which there was data) LA County paid more in income taxes than all but four states. Philip Bump‬ on Blue Sky

Poor LA, it is a place of so many disasters, and now three devastating fires at once. It is heartbreaking.

And I think it is part of what makes LA so captivating. Michele and I love Los Angeles; it is so alive and so vibrant. It’s a sprawling wonderfulness that can’t be contained; LA covers the flat desert valley floor and climbs into the mountains that surround it. It is a place with a feeling of impermanence that insists its occupiers take both intellectual and artistic risks because, “What the hell, why not try it? We might not be here tomorrow.”

Living in LA is living on the edge; it is earthquake country, where the San Andres Fault bends east. LA is not even on the North American Plate; it is on the Pacific Plate that, here, is banging into the North American Plate as it grinds by. And – and this is a big and – LA is Santa Ana country.

People I know or meet who have moved here from the East or Midwest complain that there are no actual seasons in California, especially Coastal Southern California. They claim that the climate is blandly warm, blandly almost perfect. That is partially true; the climate doesn’t have the extremes of most of the world, but mixed in with that hospitable weather are weather catastrophes.

When it rains, it is often a torrential subtropical rain that lasts days. Washing out the hills and sending houses sliding toward the valley floor. Then there are the Santa Anas, strong dry winds that dry out the land, making it susceptible to fire that it whips up into firestorms. When I lived in the LA area during the late 50s and early 60s, it seemed like the hills were on fire every year; sometimes, huge fires like Malibu in 1956 and Bel Air in 1961. The fires make the place feel violent and unpredictable.

It is a place that probably should be inhabited by, I don’t know, maybe 50,000 humans, max, living in the canyons and along the river. But Los Angeles has a population of over eighteen million people. Eighteen million people that have dug in to stay. It is one of the most culturally dense places on earth, with 98 symphony orchestras, 200 professional theater companies, and about 780 museums, including the California African American Museum, the US Navy Seabee Museum, the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology – which has the largest collection of bird nests in the world – and LACMA (the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). It has the Finnish Folk Art Museum and the First Original McDonald’s Museum. And, of course, there are the vanity museums founded by local billionaires: The Broad, the Armand Hammer Museum, and the J. Paul Getty Museum (two J.Paul Getty museums).

We love LA because it is so big and so glamorous. When the chairman of Jaguar Cars was asked why they were bringing Jaguar back to the United States when the crash and pollution standards were so strict, and it would be so costly to meet them with a European car. He answered, “Because there are more people in L A County who can afford our cars than people in all of Europe.” What he didn’t say is that LA is full of the kind of people who buy Jaguars.

Michele and I love Los Angeles because of our love for plants. Los Angeles is a city of plants, with lush private gardens and even lusher public botanical gardens. Almost anything grows in Los Angeles; it is a plant paradise. However, this is a paradise that is almost all man-made, just like the millions of flammable buildings that cover the flat valley and steep hills.

Belated Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year

January 5, 2025UncategorizedSteve Stern

Photo by Michele, whose hands are reflected in the heart.

The United States saw an 18.1% increase in homelessness this year. AP

We want our politicians to be transparent, yet we want them to be powerful as well, and power, even in the best of circumstances, means the management of information, and telling the truth is not managing the information. Nathan Heller in The New Yorker.

Last year, the hottest on record, was not a good year for the world, so saying Happy anything seems slightly daft and delusional. The news seems so bleak; I get in the car, turn on the radio to some random NPR news program, and almost immediately get unsettled. Even the good news, “Assad flies to Russia, Syria taken over by repentant Islamic terrorists.” is not Oh, boy! That’s great! good news. The almost everyday anchors of the news cycle are Russia’s brutal attacks on the Ukrainian people and infrastructure and Israel slowly turning into a quasi-Nazi state with Palestinians as the victims. ( Growing up in a family that idealized the fledgling Israel state, acknowledging that reality is difficult and makes me very uncomfortable.)

Then there is soon-to-be President Trump, who is already dominating the National zeitgeist. I hope he does well; I really do. I disagree with a significant percentage of what he says he wants to do, and I hope those plans don’t actually work out, but Trump also says he will keep us out of any new wars. I hope he delivers on that. I just hope he doesn’t fuck up our beautiful, even if flawed, country.

To change the subject, President Jimmy Carter died a couple of days ago. I will miss him. I think the country will miss him, too. I think Carter’s death comes at a good time, at 100, for him and at this troubled National time when we so need his virtues. His honesty and, as importantly to me, at least, his ability to see the world as it is rather than as we want it to be are two needed qualities that are in short supply today.

I first heard of Jimmy Carter and got to know him, so to speak, in my car while in a light snowstorm in the middle of northern Nevada. I turned on the radio, hoping to get a local station with a weather report, and what I got was what I thought was a random Southerner talking about US foreign policy. Surprisingly, the speaker, who had been schooled in the Navy’s nuclear submarine program by taking graduate work in nuclear physics and reactor technology at Union College, was knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful.

That’s how I still think of President Carter: knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful. Although they are not attributes, along with telling the truth, that are as useful as President as I would like. Early in his presidency, a decade before Al Gore, Carter accepted that the Climate crisis was real and acted on it. In June of 1979, he installed 32 solar water heating panels on the roof of the White House (Reagan had them removed in 1986; thinking, I guess, why have solar panels when all a President has to do is say, “It’s morning in America”?).

Being knowledgeable, brilliant, and thoughtful are also the qualities, along with Carter’s deep-seated decency, that contributed to President Carter losing his reelection bid. However, they were not the only reasons that former Georgia Governor Carter lost. He was an outsider in a world where being an insider is essential, and he was unlucky (a very underrated, even, if hard to define, asset).

Theodor White, a Presidential historian who interviewed Carter, wrote in America in Search of Itself that Carter’s chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, spoke about the broad arch of Carter’s presidency while Carter was bogged down in trivialities and minutia. I think this translated into President Carter’s inability to react quickly to attacks, change, or world crises (quickly is the operative word here).

The United States Government itself is being bogged down in trivialities, and minutia is also part of why Vice-president Kamala Harris lost her election. There are several things that Biden did that infuriate me, and there are several that I thought were stupid or self-serving – at best – but, by and large, Biden had a much better-than-average four years, passing some very progressive programs that would help many of the people who voted against Harris. But, the government moves so slowly that most of the results haven’t come to fruition. It has been four years since President Trump tried to lead a failed self-coup, and Attorney General Merrick Garland was still “crossing all the ts and dotting all the is “and was on his way, methodically, to presenting a case. Of course, it’s now 2025; Trump will be President, and too late to go to court.

Speaking of 2025, I don’t want to make any predictions except that 2025 will be hotter than 2024 and President Trump will get richer (or rich, if you think he is not really rich now). I hope the Russian war on Ukraine will end in Ukraine’s favor (and it just might; Russia is not doing well financially or militarily, although Putin will probably have to go for that to happen).

Happy New Year!!!

Why Didn’t We See That Train Coming ?

December 15, 2024Current Affairs, PoliticsSteve Stern

Donald Trump is a stupid man’s idea of a smart person, a poor man’s idea of a rich man, and a weak man’s idea of a strong man. Fran Lebowitz.

I thought Vice President Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz were going to win the last election. I even wrote several posts about it, such as Why Harris & Walz Will Win. Unfortunately, the proverb Seeing is believing is backward. Actually, believing is seeing. I live in a bubble of beliefs that define how I see reality. In my reality, my bubble, not being an asshole is essential, and knowing what the job is and how to do it is important.

However, most people who voted in the last election are not in my bubble, and I didn’t see their discontent that trumped Trump’s assholery and incompetence. I’m still trying to figure out why I didn’t see that anger, but I think I’m starting to understand part of it.

I want to start with a story that is not about politics (well, sort of not about politics, anyway). Years ago, in, I am going to guess, 1967, Sam Berland, my boss – I say “boss” because, even though we were partners, he had been my boss at our previous company, and I still thought of him as my boss – and I agreed to take on a third partner. Sam had met a man, who I’ll call Jim, about the same age as me, who worked for a lumber company that had gotten into the recreational land-for-sale business and was now trying to get out by liquidating their holdings. Sam thought Jim would be perfect as a partner and land expert.

Jim’s boss, who Sam knew, gave Jim an outstanding recommendation, as did a co-worker Sam also knew. We hired Jim with the plan of making him our third partner. We didn’t make him a partner, but, in this case, even an almost partner was a disaster, alienating everybody he interacted with, and it cost us a lot of money to get rid of him.

A couple of years later, I ran into the co-worker who had given Sam the excellent recommendation and asked him why he had done that. His answer surprised me. Jim had blown the whistle on a couple of employees who had been skimming money off of the escrows on the land sales, and consequently, Jim was revered by the company’s top brass. But he was a jerk, and none of his coworkers liked him. Jim disrupted the office, but they couldn’t fire him. All they could do was hope somebody else would hire him, so when we came along, they were thrilled and gave us a very positive recommendation.

Because Jim was a jerk and ostracized by his co-workers, he was, in effect, a permanent outsider. He was in the right place to see the employees skimming, but most of his co-workers and his boss were also in the same place. But unlike his co-workers and boss, his vision wasn’t clouded by friendships or the pressure of conformity, and he could more clearly see what was going on.

Trump is like that. Like most of us, he is in a position to see the growing disparity between the college-educated elite rich* and the rest of the country. But he also saw the monetary and psychic damage done by sending good jobs out of the country and letting in poor, desperate people who would work for less money, thereby taking away more good jobs. I keep thinking, Why did he see that pain and anger, and none of us did? He’s a rich narcissist. How did he see what most of us didn’t and many still don’t?

First, like Jim, Trump was an outsider for most of his life. An ill-mannered guy from Queens, trying to make it in Manhattan society but never fitting in. Like Jim, Donald Trump was not hindered by friendships or the pressure of conformity. He was an outsider and felt mistreated; more importantly, he felt disrespected.

It’s easy to say that Trump projected that feeling of being disrespected onto the people he wanted to attract, and this may be true. But it is also true, and may be hard to admit for most of us, that we college-educated elite rich* don’t respect or value people who aren’t as educated, nor do we consider them worth listening to. I know that all of us do respect some people who aren’t college-educated, but that is only after we get to know them as individuals; as a group, we don’t listen to them or interact with them. Trump did and does.

(Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

*Even though it is buried in a footnote, I want to be clear: we are the elite rich, and while we might not think of ourselves as rich or elite, we are definitely rich compared to people living paycheck to paycheck or afraid of losing their homes if they get sick.

Japan Is Dense…

December 7, 2024Japan, TravelSteve Stern

I think that the Japanese culture is one of the very few cultures left that is its own entity. They’re just so traditional and so specific in their ways. It’s kind of untouched, it’s not Americanized. Toni Collette

In Japanese culture, there is a belief that God is everywhere – in mountains, trees, rocks, even in our sympathy for robots or Hello Kitty toys. Ryuichi Sakamoto

For me, Japan is appealing because, unlike most non-European countries, Japan was never a European colony. The result is a first-world country that is completely unEuropean-based (or unAmerican-based, if you prefer). It is Asian all the way down and, at the same time, first world all the way down. More importantly, Japan works in a non-European way; sort of. Steve Jobs said that Japan is very interesting. Some people think it copies things. I don’t think that anymore. I think what they do is reinvent things. They will get something that’s already been invented and study it until they thoroughly understand it. In some cases, they understand it better than the original inventor. Out of that understanding, they will reinvent it in a more refined second-generation version. By the time we left Japan, I was thinking about that Steve Jobs quote probably three or four times a day.

In Japanese cities, there are lots of overlaps with American and European cities – mostly European cities- but everything seems slightly different. It is the most user-friendly place I have ever been to. Japan is also the densest place I have ever been to. It is about 145,950 square miles, but about 73% is considered mountainous, so Japan really has only about 40,000 square miles where people live and farm. That is about the same as California, which is about 39,000 square miles, when you take away about 50% for mountains and 25% for desert. However, Japan has a population of about 124 million people compared to California, which has a population of only 39 million people (for reference, greater Tokyo alone has a population of around 39M).

Japan isn’t just dense because there are a lot of people jammed in, which there are, but because they have been swimming in the same culture for about twenty centuries. It is as if people were still living in all nine layers of Troy. Japan seems dense because that small area is jammed with the artifacts of its collective history.

One night, Michele and I took a taxi to Shibuya Scramble Square, a shopping center and station complex in an already dense area of Tokyo. We got out at what seemed like a normal street corner in Tokyo and went around the corner to the actual scramble. In Japan, a street crossing where pedestrians can walk across the intersection in any direction is called a scramble. As far as I can tell, this scramble is famous because there are a lot of people here, and the people are here because it is famous.

The scramble, however, was not what most intrigued me. The area around the scramble, the actual Square, the stations, and the structures around the Square are what intrigued me. This is an area where the maps are both horizontal and vertical. The area around the Square is packed because it has six subways and a railroad that come into and through a series of interconnected stations. It is one of the busiest places on earth. More than 1,000,000 people pass through these stations every day.

There are large buildings on both sides of a major street with two pedestrian bridges connecting them, and down below, way below, at ground level, is a creek in a concrete channel.