But while Kerouac’s 1957 countercultural opus was immediately greeted with voice-of-a-generation praise, Rechy’s 1963 debut, City of Night, was met with derision, bigotry and regular placement on banned books lists. An eviscerating takedown from the period in The New York Review of Books began with the derogatory headline “Fruit Salad” and continued like something out of a “Save the Children” literary supplement, full of homophobic epithets and excruciating puns. The critic even cast doubt on the existence of the Mexican American Rechy, who had written the novel on a typewriter in his mother’s house in the El Paso projects. Despite a taboo-shattering six-decade career spanning 18 books and counting, Rechy has been regularly hounded by such misapprehensions.

That’s not to say that posterity won’t enshrine Rechy as a glamorous icon of carnal liberation. The 90-year-old laureate of sex and salvation is L.A.’s greatest living writer. Despite the initial opprobrium, City of Night sold 65,000 copies in hardcover and spent over half a year on The New York Times best-seller list, alongside J.D. Salinger and Pearl S. Buck — who had previously rejected Rechy from her creative writing class at Columbia. (And to be fair, the paper of record immediately hailed City of Night as “a remarkable book.”) In the nearly 60 years since, City of Night has never gone out of print, has been translated into over 20 languages and has entered the same smoky, red-lit corner of the outlaw literary Olympus as On the Road, “Howl” and the best of Jean Genet. 

The list of legends bestowing praise on Rechy doubles as a 20th century pantheon. James Baldwin called him “the most arresting young writer I’ve read in a very long time. His tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own.” Gore Vidal said Rechy was one of the “few original American writers of the last century.” Larry McMurtry declared, “Probably no novel published in this decade is so complete, so well held together, and so important as City of Night.” Christopher Isherwood raved that Rechy had “great comic and tragic talent. He is a truly gifted novelist.”

David Bowie, Mick Jagger, and Bob Dylan have all expressed deep admiration, while Jim Morrison took direct inspiration from Rechy in the doomed refrain of the Doors’ “L.A. Woman.” David Hockney’s painting Building, Pershing Square, Los Angeles draws from Rechy’s portrayal of that same locale. At least one Oscar-nominated director, Gus Van Sant, whose film My Own Private Idaho owes a clear creative debt to Rechy’s hustler narrative, has in fact attempted to produce a City of Night movie. 

None of the praise or devotion is remotely hyperbolic. City of Night remains as relevant as it was the year Kennedy was assassinated. In an era where gender and sexual identity figures centrally within the zeitgeist, Rechy wrote with tender insight, prodigious empathy and Rimbaudian grace about what is now known as the LGBTQ community. His depiction of the “Fabulous Miss Destiny” implicitly framed gay marriage as a human rights issue at a time when it was legally prohibited for same-sex couples to even swing dance together. Over a half-century before OnlyFans, Rechy offered one of the most thoroughly humanizing portrayals of sex workers in the history of (even if he reviles the euphemism “sex worker” because he insists that for him, “it wasn’t work”). 

With startling clarity and seraphic prose, Rechy illuminated a gay subculture, then called “the homosexual underworld,” that flourished despite the repression. His dispatches from New Orleans and Los Angeles rank among the finest fiction to ever capture the sun-damaged moods and mercurial spirits of those infamously complex cities. And as a young gay man facing intense prejudice, physical harm and police brutality, his work powerfully indicts the hysterical madness of the American criminal justice system. As a stylist, he’s violently imaginative and meticulously precise — carefully blurring fact and poetic license in a way that foreshadowed the rise of autofiction. 

For most of the last six decades, the City of Angels has been the City of Night author’s home, but the saga begins in El Paso, where Rechy was the youngest of five, born to two Mexican émigrés who fled the capital during the Revolution in 1910. His father, Roberto, was a composer of Scottish descent, a tormented and abusive philanderer who found himself indigent and unable to sustain his art in his adopted homeland. John’s beautiful mother, Guadalupe Flores, offered profound love and support to her artistic and strikingly handsome son, whose scholastic excellence blazed a path out of the barrios of West Texas. Early in his teenage years, he began a novel about Marie Antoinette and swiftly absorbed a reading diet of the Greek tragedians, Dostoevsky, Emily Brontë, William Faulkner and the popular semihistorical novelists Kathleen Winsor and Margaret Mitchell. Comic books and the luminous movie stars of Hollywood’s golden age factored into the prodigal son’s influences, too. 

The themes that would characterize his later work are endemic in his first 18 years: the conflicts with the sadistic shame and pornographic iconography of the Catholic Church, the splendor of youth and the fear of aging, a desire for filial approval that led him to forge a self-assured and unbreakable façade, the glamour of Hollywood, the rituals and fantastic images of pre-Colombian Mayan lore, the cool carnal lust, the essence of mystery, the fight against racism and withering homophobia and the unshakable desire to transcend the banalities of this earthly oblivion. 

After graduating from Texas Western College (now the University of Texas-El Paso) on a journalism scholarship, Rechy volunteered for the Army. During the Korean War, he was stationed in Kentucky with the 101st Airborne Division. His hustling career began afterward, in the New York of 1954. He was 23. For the next half-decade, he lived a nomadic lifestyle, splitting time between San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Texas. Exhausted by the dual existence, he returned home to El Paso and redoubled himself to writing after being published in the Evergreen Review, the fabled journal then printing work from the Beats, Henry Miller, Genet and Samuel Beckett. Originally written as an unmailed letter to a friend, the short story “Mardi Gras” became a sensation and drew attention from publishers. With every printed piece his star rose, leading to letters of admiration from Isherwood and Norman Mailer and nonfiction assignments from The Nation and the Saturday Review. 

Despite the demeaning NYRB review, City of Night became a phenomenon. Careful to avoid the infernal celebrity machine that consumed Vidal, Truman Capote and Kerouac, Rechy declined the television interview circuit. Purchasing a home for his mother outside of the projects, he settled with her in El Paso, worked on a never-published sequel to City of Night and took occasional trips to California, where he discovered the cruising scene at Griffith Park. This world served as the principal setting for 1967 best-seller Numbers, a tale of a hustler who allays his neuroses about aging by racking up a sexual body count worthy of Lord Byron. A 1966 arrest in Griffith Park for “oral copulation” added to the infamy; an inspired defense at his subsequent trial, chronicled in the 1970 novel This Day’s Death, allowed him to beat the case and avoid up to five years in prison. 

El Paso remained his permanent residence until 1973. Beset with primordial grief over the loss of his mother, Rechy moved back to L.A. to accept a position as a creative writing professor at Occidental College (he would eventually lecture at Harvard, Yale, Duke, UCLA and USC). His students have included Michael Cunningham, Kate Braverman and Sandra Tsing Loh. Hustling remained a perennial nocturnal activity until roughly age 60; perhaps fittingly, it’s how he met his longtime mate (the word Rechy prefers to “partner”), Michael Ewing, with whom he lives in an elegant Encino home at the end of a cul-de-sac. There are bountiful lemon trees in the backyard and blown-up black and white lithographs of Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe and Greta Garbo inside, gorgeously suspended in permanent, pre-war allure. In a classic L.A. twist, the city’s long-reigning laureate lives with the producer of Tommy Boy, the Naked Gun sequels and several Adam Sandler vehicles. 

It’s tempting but misguided to reduce Rechy to The City Of Night and other works. 

With the benefit of time, the sprawling genius of Rechy’s career comes into clear focus. A true American original, he has penned an erotic vampire chronicle in homage to Edgar Allan Poe (The Vampires), a feminist redemption for the fallen women of history (Our Lady of Babylon) and a historical “what if” scenario about the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Robert F. Kennedy (Marilyn’s Daughter). There are multiple collections of essays and journalism, as well as an elegiac memoir (About My Life and the Kept Woman). His most recent new work, 2017’s After the Blue Hour, a subtle psychosexual chronicle of a long-ago love triangle, ranks among his best. At the moment, he’s working on Beautiful People at the End of the Line, a wry satire about a lurid and corrupt woman named the Countess who schemes to turn two virgins into the biggest porn stars in America. As his 10th decade dawns, his mind remains enviably sharp, and his insights are perennially astute. He’s still tanned from the Valley sun and regularly pumps iron in his home gym. 

It’s not that Rechy hasn’t received substantial accolades. In addition to the celebrity testimonials, he’s won lifetime achievement awards from PEN-USA, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Texas Institute of Letters. But it remains a disgrace to American and Angeleno letters that he hasn’t received the Key to the City, White House invitations and all other frivolous pomp that signify authors of his gifts. The reasons for this are obvious.

Over the years, Rechy has endured repeated prejudice and ghettoization, first as a gay writer, then as a Mexican American writer and, lastly, as a West Coast one. As he once famously opined, “It’s been more difficult for me to come out as a Mexican American than come out as gay.” But while most of his peers have died or their work has slipped into the dusty realm of the permanently unread, Rechy remains as vital as ever, proving that it’s never too late for another curtain call. 

What were your first memories of Los Angeles?

They were seized away by a cop who interviewed me right away. I had just taken a Greyhound  bus to the downtown station and gravitated to Pershing Square, with all the queens and hustlers. I’m sitting there, and here comes — he was either Sergeant Shirley or Sergeant Temple. We called him Shirley Temple, and he’s a character in City of Night. So he points a finger at me: 

“You.” 

Me? 

“Come with me.” My god. Unbelievable. Unbeknownst to most people, they had a police station underneath Pershing Square. And he took me down there. I sat down, and he said, “I know who’s here, I know why they’re there, I know why you were there, and I’m going to be looking for you. Keep out of trouble. I know who you are.” I thought, my god, I have been welcomed … in a sense.  

What was Pershing Square like at the time?

The painter David Hockney attributes City of Night as the reason for him coming out here. He has written about how eager he was to see Pershing Square, but he was staying in Santa Monica. So he takes off on a bicycle from Santa Monica to Pershing Square. I don’t know how he got there. But by the time he arrived, it was already gone, and as though they had exhumed the ground. One time, my Japanese publisher came to talk to me after visiting Pershing Square and said sorrowfully, “But it’s not there. It’s not there. They undid it.” It was once entirely other, but now, no longer. In a sense, it’s very sad that it’s gone, but Times Square is gone too. It’s Disneyland now. 

What was your first impression of L.A.? 

The palm trees. I love them. They’re so arrogant. They’re  literally above everything. In fact, in my book The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, Amalia says, “No tree should look as if it’s ignoring you.” Palm trees are indomitable.

The city was technicolor to me. In my memory, I have the peculiar tendency to remember things in technicolor or black and white. Believe it or not, I never could remember New Orleans in color. If you look at the passages in City of Night, you’ll see a plethora of colors. I was trying to saturate it in color, and it just did not work for New Orleans, so that part is written in black and white. New York is in sepia and a bit of technicolor. But Los Angeles immediately sprang forth in technicolor. It was like the opening of a movie. It was not merely as if I had arrived; it was as if it had arrived in my life.  

Did you always feel like an outsider from the literary community in Los Angeles?

Always. There was one brief exception, and I cherish it for what it is. It was my interactions with Christopher Isherwood, who I like very much. What had happened was my story “Mardi Gras” had appeared in the Evergreen Review, and it caused some talk. Then “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny” appeared. Christopher had told me — this was his way of talking — that he had sent his spies to find me. So where would he send the spies? Downtown to Pershing Square. 

Out of nowhere, one of his friends standing in the corner of this bar says, “You’re John.” How did he know? He’d known just from what I’ve written. And he said, “Christopher wants to meet you.” I hadn’t read Christopher but knew who he was. And I quickly tried to brush up because I was going to meet him and a couple of other writers. However, when I turned up, I’m embarrassed to say I made an ass of myself. I’m not very good around writers, unless we’re talking about writing. 

They assume a kind of identity, and a certain language and talk. And if you try to match that, you’re really out of it. Now, this was not so with Christopher. I had not yet finished reading The Berlin Stories, but I knew about “I Am a Camera.” And I actually said to him, “After all, don’t you think we are all cameras?”

Later on, I got to know Isherwood very well until the one time where he just wouldn’t leave me alone; he was literally chasing me around the room. We had just had a wonderful conversation about the literature of the time, and I still hadn’t read that many books really, but it was so great. I was sitting there talking to this very famous, admirable writer. A superb stylist, a superb writer. And then all at once, it all crashes.

Do you feel a bias against West Coast writers who played a role in you not receiving the literary acclaim that you might have received had you stayed in New York? 

I don’t know. One of the reasons that I love Los Angeles is all the things that are pointed out as horrible are true and great. All the clichés about Los Angeles are true. The excess of cults. Yeah, so what? It brings a strangeness to the city. And the obsession with physicality? I love that. I love the appearance. The beach is beautiful and full of beautiful women and beautiful men. Celebrating the body. 

There’s a terrific narcissism that permeates the city. I hate when they describe Trump as a narcissist, because what they really mean is a megalomaniac, and there’s a difference. At its core, narcissism features a love of beauty. For me, it has to have a bit of glamour before it’s true narcissism. Trump? Jesus Christ. Look over there at Marilyn [Monroe], for goodness’ sake. That’s an original lithograph of Marilyn. Narcissism has to have a touch of glamour, a touch of elegance and a touch of arrogance too. And it has to be earned.

You’ve written extensively about the prejudices and stereotypes you faced as a Mexican American writer from El Paso. How do you feel that impact has lingered?

That’s a very, very difficult thing. El Paso was never hard-core, but it was really bad. Because people thought that Mexicans should look one way or talk one way, and I didn’t fit that pattern, I was always an outsider. 

It was a pretty nasty sort of thing to be thrown into a situation where I would hear trashy talk about Mexicans. Honestly, this is another thing that’s never truly addressed: the temptation to pass is enormous. I’m sure that it’s the same for Black people, Asians, any minority that can pass. The situation is irrelevant. It pushes you into an area where there is a new kind of bigotry that you’re now exposed to. This hovered over me. 

I had a dreadful encounter with some of the Mexican writers when they wouldn’t allow me to be a Mexican in other areas. They wouldn’t have me in the anthology of Chicano writers; the man who compiled it knew my work and refused to include me. It’s a nasty sort of thing. 

You’ve repeatedly stressed your aversion to being classified as a Chicano writer and as a gay writer; you just wanted to be seen as a writer. 

I will never call myself a queer. That word is one of the things that I detest that has happened, and it’s almost being forced now. For me, you cannot separate that word from the hatred and violence that once accompanied it. When I read it being used in The New York Times, I think, “It’s their word and they can fucking have it all they want.” I will never use “queer.” It’s an ugly word. 

I always wrestled against “gay” too. Whoever determines these things always choose such tacky names. We could have gotten a better reclamation. I personally would have chosen ‘Trojans.’ You’ve been on the campus of USC. Have you seen Tommy Trojan? Tommy Trojan is a quintessential gay man. He’s worked out a bit here, he’s flexing his muscles, he has his shield, he has his lovely headpiece. He would be a hit in the gay bars; he’d lead the parade. Do you know how easy it would be to tell your father you’re a Trojan? “Oh … What position do you play?”

You’ve also blanched at the standard usage of the phrase “sex worker.”

It drives me mad. A sex worker takes the prostitution out of the thing. I remember when a collection of my essays was being published and they referred to me as an “ex-sex worker” and I said, “No way, no way, please. Call me a whore, a prostitute, anything but sex worker.” It disrespects the proud tradition of whoring. 

How did being raised in the Catholic Church shape you as a writer?

I was raised a Catholic and have had problems with the Catholic Church dating back to my childhood. When I was about 16, I wrote a poem called “The Crazy Fall of Man.” It’s about how on Judgment Day, God is summoning everybody, and the last witness is Jesus. But they’ve come to accuse him and judge him. So that encapsulates my view of Catholicism. 

But it influenced me. Again, the Catholic Church is all technicolor. If you walk into a Catholic church for the first time, you will be dazzled with the colors. The windows, and the beauty of the men and women depicted. The saints are like movie stars. I would go and I would see the Holy Mother in her veil, and she looked like Linda Darnell. And the centurions pushing Jesus? Jesus really knew how to exit. 

It wasn’t Socrates with some hemlock. He’s on the cross shirtless with a six-pack. 

He has great abdominals and everybody kneeling in front of him, almost naked. I lost a student for saying that one time. She walked out, saying, “I’ve never heard anything like that!” Even now, I feel repelled by the homophobia that still comes through in the church. I knew personally some of the priests, and it was all very hypocritical. But I feel that way about virtually every church. 

When you were a young boy, who were the writers that made you want to become one yourself?

I think Faulkner. I actually started to try to read all of him, but it’s impossible. You’d have to dedicate your life; I was just looking through the collection of Faulkner, and there were many things that I didn’t even know he had written — like the short stories contained only in older collections. But he was the big figure for me. 

I never met him, but I saw him one time. This was when I was living in New York. I’d been up all night on one side of the city and was cutting across Central Park in the very early morning; I was a little out of my head for a bit. I looked out at the park, and there on a bench in Central Park sat this man, so I actually thought, “I’ve had a delusion.” But I thought, “My god, that’s got to be William Faulkner.” He was reading on the bench, and I read a couple of days later in the paper that he was in town for the opening of Requiem for a Nun. The article said that he liked to go walk in Central Park and read and be quiet. So it really was him.

You maintained a veil of semi-anonymity for many years. Why was that so crucial to you?

Because I wanted to continue [the hustling] life, and it wouldn’t have been possible. If I had been a known writer, I would have been looked at in a different way. I didn’t want anybody to think that I was exploiting them. I was never doing it as research. In fact, it distressed me very much that anyone would think that. I didn’t intend to write about that world until that letter I wrote that eventually became the first parts of City of Night, which drew interest from Grove Press. 

Grove asked me if it was part of a book, and I said, “yes, it’s half finished,” because I wanted an advance. But it wasn’t. Those two sections were all that existed. 

More than 60 years later, how do you look back on your life at the time and those interactions with the characters depicted in City of Night?

I was a strange little boy who was meeting and discovering things that nobody knew about. It was a world of so much beauty and so much hurt. Miss Destiny, I hurt for her. Years later, I was walking along Hollywood Boulevard, and there comes this voice, “John Rechy, John Rechy!” She stopped traffic and ran into the street. She told me, “I want to thank you, my dear, for making me even more famous.”

A lot of it was fictional, of course. Several years after I saw her in Hollywood, she was interviewed by ONE Magazine and trashed me. It didn’t matter though because she said I was cute. But it’s a very sad sort of thing. At times, I would say that it’s wonderful that every time the book is opened, the characters spring to life again. But that’s not so at all. What springs out is already a character. A representation. And the real people — especially the characters in City of Night — they haunt me. Because… what happened to them?

One of my favorite books is William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, and it has a scene where they discuss about a communal cremation of all the homeless people whose bodies go unclaimed, and all of the religious people come and pray for them. I think about how many of my characters from downtown ended up with nobody even claiming their bodies. The ones that were objects of desire when they were young. I escaped it, but only because of my talent. 

It does offer a sort of posthumous literary immortality.

Only for the selfish writer who plucked their lives out and made them his own. I feel guilty.

James Baldwin was an early champion of yours, right?

A great one.

How did you come into contact with him?

He was at Dial Press when he read sections of City of Night. So he contacted Grove and wrote to me. He would call me frequently to encourage me and gave really beautiful praise for the book. 

How much of the early criticism that you received was merely disguised homophobia?

A lot of it, especially during the first wave of reviews of City of Night. The incredible thing is that some of the worst — including that one from The New York Review of Books  — came from gay men. That was the critic who speculated that I might not even exist. Then there were impostors claiming to be me who I read about in columns. I had allegedly been removed from a bar in New York for being obstreperous. It was said that I was a guest of a man on Fire Island, which was absurd because I had never even been to Fire Island. 

The worst of all was somebody in Rochester — where I’d never been — who claimed that I had given him VD. I was stunned because I was contacted by the health department back in El Paso. They said that I had to take a test and I said, “No, absolutely not.” They said, “We will send officers to arrest you.” They could actually do that. So I got a lawyer, and they agreed to let me go to my own doctor and be tested. But it’s that sort of thing, in addition to articles where someone claimed that I was a Black jazz pianist from New Orleans who had fled to Paris. I mean really, it was hilarious. Although at the time, it didn’t seem hilarious. It was horrifying.

What was your persona more like on the streets?

I met a few when my editor, Don Allen, had a lunch for me in San Francisco with Michael McClure, Robert Creeley and Allen Ginsberg. Allen was one of the funniest people I ever met. I can’t think of him as the great guru; I cannot. I cannot tell you how hilarious that man was; he had a one-track mind and embarrassed the hell out of me. 

I was with a woman friend of mine from Dallas and he was rude and really terrible. He asked me a very blunt question that was none of his business and the whole table reacted. He invited me — he was staying at [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti’s place, so he invited me to have a talk. I didn’t want to go because I didn’t like him like that, but my friend was like, “It’s Allen Ginsberg.” So, I went up with him. I was hardly there for a few seconds when he asked me to take off my clothes. No, I wouldn’t. Then, we got to talk, but then he started singing [William Blake’s] “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” And then [Ginsberg’s longtime partner] Peter Orlovsky called and asked me how many pounds I could lift. I thought it was very funny.

How many pounds could you lift?

At the time, I was pretty good.

What was the allure of hustling for you? 

It probably traces back to psychological origins. I loved the adventure and thrill of it all. It was unique, forbidden, and could have a lot of glamour. I probably looked at it like nobody else did, because they were on the streets and I had developed another persona. People who knew me from the streets would not recognize me otherwise. 

Did you ever have any interactions with the Beat writers?

For one thing, my talk was very — I’ll use a dated word — hip. Michael [Ewing] and I just finished the screenplay for City of Night, and it was odd to go back; but I tried to use some of those words just to give the flavor of the time. However, there were some that I couldn’t use because nobody would have known them. 

You were infamously arrested at Griffith Park and put on trial. 

I was arrested three times, but that’s the one that was really terrifying.

What do you remember about that experience?

The real record of it is in This Day’s Death. I actually used the transcript from the trial. And I know this is standard, but the cops lied about the incident throughout. 

At the time, among gay people, Griffith Park probably ranked with the Statue of Liberty. It was miles of beautiful green park and miles of sex. And it was private sex because nobody but the gay people knew all the hideaways and coves. It was actually very athletic. You had to be in good shape to climb. What happened was this guy and I were in one of the coves, a block from the main road, completely private. Nothing was happening. Everything was about to happen, and two cops had followed us. 

They were so eager to arrest that one came this way and another came this way, and we were charged with what we had intended to do but had not done. So the cop made up this entirely graphic fantasy about what he saw from above, way perched up on a hill. 

There were raids happening at the park all the time. I knew that. A friend of mine had told me to watch it and had given me the name of a bondsman, who I ended up using at the time. One cop arrested me, the other cop arrested the other man, and we got taken to the station. I was fearless then. What could they do? I had just started working out and loved my body. When they had me strip in front of everybody in the office, I flexed for them.  My inspiration was Susan Hayward in I Want to Live.

I got bailed out right away and got them to bail out the guy I’d been with. That’s when I found out that I was facing five years in prison. Both of us were. Five fucking years in prison. And that’s one of the worst periods of my life because my mother was sick, too. I hired an attorney and told him, “Yes, it was about to happen, but it had not happened.” We hired a videographer to make a movie of where the cops claimed to have situated themselves. I got somebody to draw a map with an X where they had arrested us. I had them film me moving down and staying back there to see whether you could possibly see whether anything had gone down. And it was impossible to see what the cops said they had seen. 

The one thing that almost got me fucked — and can you believe my vanity? When they were going to take the movie that day, I didn’t want to take off my shirt. I had worn a tight, flesh-colored shirt, and there I am, on video coming down like it was an audition.

And the judge ordered the jury to go to the scene of the alleged crime like it was a class field trip. 

I couldn’t believe it. The goddamn judge wants to go to see where it happened and where we were. At the end of the trial, the district attorney came to us — and by then knows who I am as a writer — and he congratulates me and my attorney. But despite that, they found us guilty, but only of a misdemeanor. I didn’t get jail time. 

Looking back on all the homophobia of the time, how did it impact you as a human being?

It’s such nonsense. Such stupidity. But again, I blame the mores of religion. That’s where it comes from. It’s ingrained. As long as the pope says we’re sinners and all that BS, people feel that their hate is legitimized. 

A lot of good things happened to get society to this place. There were some very brave people who brought all these cases to light. Michael and I are married now. I don’t like the institution of marriage, but there are benefits that you can get from it, and that was important. A lot of wonderful things have happened over the last quarter-century. But what’s happening now with transgender people is brutal. There are dozens of murders that are happening now in the country, and lawmakers continue to try to legislate against them. 

You’ve said before that the media overemphasizes Stonewall as being the central turning point of the gay rights movement. But even before the famous 1967 Black Cat protests in Silver Lake, you’ve said that there were other equally pivotal gay rights demonstrations, specifically the 1958 Cooper Do-nuts Riot.  

The overemphasis on Stonewall is bullshit. It’s just that there were a lot of writers there that day to cover it. 

There was no riot at Cooper’s. It was actually another donut shop, but at that time, people called every donut shop in the city “Cooper’s” because there were so many. This particular one is gone now. What basically happened was that around 2 AM on Main Street downtown, everyone from the bars would go into the donut shop, and it was a very democratic assembly of drag queens, hustlers and just people staying out late. 

The cops regularly went into the donut shop and picked out people to harass. Then they’d parade them out on the street to make an example out of them. Sometimes they’d let them go; other times they’d book them. At the time, it was illegal to be in drag. They had a law against “masquerading.” One night, the cops picked me and a man named Chuck to go outside — and we weren’t handcuffed, but a drunken man started heckling them to let us go. People started making noise and joining in yelling. The next thing you knew, there was a melee, people throwing things at the cops, rocking the cars. It was a beautiful protest against the harassment. 

Where do you see the vestiges of the outlaw in today’s society?

I very consciously use that word because “outlaw” has a kind of romance to it. Outlaw is far different from a crook. The stories of the Western outlaws always have a tinge of glamour or legend. The phrase has now become quite generalized. But when I published my book The Sexual Outlaw [in 1977], I was doing a signing in the old Brentano’s store in Westwood. It was very formal then. The salesmen all wore suits; it was very formal. One very bespoke gentleman came in and very intimately whispered to me, “You know we’re all sexual outlaws here.” 

How did meeting Michael change your life?

Michael is a miraculous presence in my life. I don’t know what would have become of me without him. I hate this kind of drama, but I never conceived of living this long. I didn’t prepare for it. It was just not a possibility. To age and not be what I was. 

I was getting up in years, and it was all becoming very frightening. Michael is so much younger than I am. When I met him he was only 22, but he’s been such a major force in my life. I hate words that carry romantic things, but to feel honest-to-god love, the union, the caring, means an immense amount. It was difficult at first. When he and I first met, I was Johnny Rio [the character from Numbers]. 

Are you surprised by the tolerance that mostly exists now? 

Yes, great things have happened. But my view is that these were things that we should not have had to overcome. The point that I make all the time is we’re the only minority that is born into the opposing camp. Both parents, at least until recently, were straight. So we were born into a whole world of prejudices. Decades, centuries of them. And we’re born out of a union that represents the whole thing. So any gay person born into that camp is already posed in opposition, no matter how wonderful the parents may be. You still have that world, and I’m not in that world. 

Beyond the overt prejudice, it led to your writing being pigeonholed into the “gay” subgenre.

You have no idea. When Our Lady of Babylon had just come out, I asked for it in a bookstore in Santa Barbara, and they said, “Oh, it’s downstairs in our gay section.” For one thing, it’s not even a gay book. But when it’s by a gay writer, people will push the books as gay fiction.  

What is your new book about? 

It’s called Beautiful People at the End of the Line, and it has three epigraphs. The first one is from Bette Davis in Now, Voyager. The second one is from Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon. And the third is, “mumbling, mumbling, shut the fuck up, I’m trying to find something good here.” And that’s Joaquin Phoenix on the set of Batman. I borrow from comic books, the all caps, “WHAM!” and stuff like that. 

There are very lyrical passages. It’s really quite a book. It’s about these two young men, they’re not gay — or they say they’re not gay. And there’s a lurid, horrifying, corrupt woman, called the Countess that likes to make amusements for unique people who are comfortable and  want to be shocked. She contrives to get a young boy and girl virgin to stage a giant exhibition where they lose their virginity. And it’s about the thought of middle America making two virgins the biggest porn stars in history, because they become idolized across the country.

How far along are you?

A whole first draft is finished. Parts of it occur in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where two women pretend to be the Lady in Black. There are Hollywood scenes throughout. It’s a unique book; I’ve never done anything like it. It’s finally going all the way with this kind of thing. It’s both a satire and very dark at the same time. 

It’s inspired by comic books and celebrity culture. I call it “true fiction.” The Kardashians are characters. There’s a character inspired by [Ohio Republican Congressman] Jim Jordan: a wrestling coach with a peephole into the showers of the young wrestlers.

To me, true fiction is where constantly the reader is made aware that he or she is reading. It’s all an artificial structure, and you are to respect it as such. I love to write a passage, a narrative, and then say, “That’s not good; it didn’t happen like that,” and then write another one that takes its place and leave it up to the reader to decide which is the real truth. 

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Stepping out in the morning and the whole world applauding.

What is your greatest fear?

Growing old, as I am.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?

Academic pomposity. Overt fakery. I mean overt because you can be a very genuine fake. Pomposity.

Which living person do you most admire?

Michael. 

What is your greatest extravagance?

Myself.

What do you find is the most overrated virtue?

Humility. Humility is a detriment, a bad condition, and the most arrogant stance that you can take. 

When and where were you your happiest?

When my books come out, sure. But when Michael and I were traveling in Europe once, and we had a communist lady as our guide. She took us to the Sistine Chapel and got us a pass so we just glided through. And she had already paid all the guards off. And we’re sitting in the Sistine Chapel looking up. It was beautiful. A poor woman came up and tried to sit with us, and the communist guide says, “You can’t sit here! We paid for this!” And it just illuminated the whole thing: the Sistine Chapel, Michael and the communist lady. It was a telling scene. 

What talent would you most like to have?

I have all the ones I want.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Making it through life while living creatively.

What is your most treasured possession?

My body. 

What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

People who have utter contempt for other people’s suffering. 

Who are your favorite writers? 

Dead or alive? Look, I have to go with the clichés: Joyce at his best, and Proust, especially because I would be chastised by my gay brothers, especially at Yale, if I left him out. 

What’s your favorite Joyce?

Portrait of the Artist. Ask me who I think is the most underrated writer in the world? Shakespeare, because you cannot overpraise him. 

Who’s your favorite character of fiction?

Scarlett O’Hara and Molly Bloom. 

Which historical figure do you most admire?

Spartacus and Marie Antoinette. As a kid, I was writing a book that included her. I found out all kinds of fascinating things. She had quite a life.

Why do you think she was so historically maligned?

They were bad times, and they had to have a lot of villains. She was not a villain. She did not say, “Let them eat cake” — yet that remains.

Do you have a motto?

Live.

How would you like to be remembered?

As a great writer.

The post theLAnd Interview: John Rechy appeared first on theLAnd.

But the hyperbole contained a partial truth. As a lifelong resident, my bias is deeply ingrained, but for most of the last decade, it was hard to argue that L.A. didn’t occupy the nation’s psychic center of gravity. If its ‘00s music scene was an afterthought compared to Brooklyn’s, it evolved to become a world capital of both the popular and avant-garde in the ‘10s: encompassing the hip-hop splinter sect that started among Flying Lotus and the Low End Theory producers; YG and Odd Future, Drakeo The Ruler and 03 Greedo; TDE and Dam-Funk’s modern funk renaissance. Straight from the westside of Compton, Kendrick Lamar crowned himself the “King of New York” and wrote “Alright,” the anthem of the modern-day civil rights movement. Once oblivious to the idea that culinary genius could be found in a strip mall, the food media came to hail L.A. as America’s best city for dining. Even Jeffrey Deitch took over the Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art (let’s not talk about that again).

While never cheap, rent was relatively affordable compared to San Francisco and New York, and it helped entice a generation of artists to a city that they might have sneered at and dismissed with tedious freeway clichés a generation ago. But anyone who has spent time on Westside Rentals or Craigslist, knows that, despite the mid-pandemic dip, rent has become increasingly exorbitant. Home ownership, meanwhile, has become an absurd dream to all but software engineers with a cryptocurrency sideline. Gentrification continues to destroy communities and the city’s character. Despite billions of dollars spent to ameliorate the crisis, the number of the unhoused continues to metastasize, a fact exploited by the unholy trinity of the County Sheriff, Fox News, and the Kevins and Karens on the NextDoor app  —  all desperate to brand it a flaw of liberal governance and not a feature endemic to metropolitan life under 21^st century snuff capitalism.

Much like America itself, L.A. is embroiled in a cold civil war. District Attorney’s office revanchists have teamed with billionaire Republicans and Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva to try to recall the DA George Gascón and deprive him of the ability to enact the reforms that voters gave him a mandate to do. The two most progressive members of the City Council, Nithya Raman and Mike Bonin, have faced recall attempts within their own districts. The Sheriff’s Department continues to be rife with criminal gangs under investigation from the feds, while Villanueva defies subpoenas and wages a blood vendetta with the Board of Supervisors. The LAPD very much remains the brutal LAPD, siphoning half of the city budget despite persistent and vocal calls to reapportion some funding. The murder rate is the highest it has been in years (albeit a fraction of what it was in the ’90s). As for the deliriously unpopular mayor, Eric Garcetti, he continues to wait for a confirmation to an ambassadorship to India that may never actually happen. To compound the chaos, three former City Council members have been indicted on corruption charges in the last two years.

If the answers were simple, they already would’ve materialized. It doesn’t help that local media remains in a slow death march, despite the indefatigable attempts of our peers and colleagues. Every issue of theLAnd feels like a miracle unto itself. This one has been no different: only made possible by the 513 donors who funded our Kickstarter, and generously allowed this magazine to reach your hands. The reasons extend beyond mere economics as to why few do print anymore. Each story requires rigorous reporting, editing, photography, and design. We’ve been working on this edition for the entirety of the year and have the bags under our eyes to prove it.

theLAnd exists to chronicle all the contradictions, dysfunction, and oblique genius of this deceptively complicated city. Our third full issue contains tales of shady developers gaming the system, the fight to reclaim abandoned homes in El Sereno, and the unsolved mystery of a bombing at an anti-LGBTQ church in El Monte. There are guides to hiking, cynically conceived celebrity weed strains, and the best new pop-up restaurants. There are interviews with L.A.’s greatest living author, 90-year-old John Rechy (City of Night) and first-person chronicles of what it’s like to be homeless and living on Skid Row. We rank the 110 Greatest L.A. Albums and highlight the new Babylon store in West Adams, the type of DIY sanctuary the city desperately needs.

This is L.A. as it stands in 2021: the best nightmare on earth. All we know is that we need to continue to fight to make it more equitable, humane, and livable — because none of us really want to have to move. — Jeff Weiss, for theLAnd Collective

The post Letter From the Editor, Issue 3 appeared first on theLAnd.

For those in the streets marching for racial justice during the summer of 2020, Gascón has impressively helped upend the “tough on crime” policies that disproportionately devastated Black and Brown neighborhoods in South L.A. In addition to the policies instituted above, he has moved to prosecute police misconduct in ways previously unseen, convened the office’s first Crime Victims Advisory Board (to advise him on best practices to properly aid victims, including those whose family members were killed by law enforcement) and dismissed roughly 60,000 marijuana convictions dating back to the years before California passed Prop. 64, which legalized recreational marijuana use.

But the full story of Gascón’s first year in office reflects a deep tribalization of the electorate.

He isn’t merely grappling with an entrenched bureaucracy — he’s weathering explicit rebellion in his own department, aided and abetted by a well-orchestrated, right-wing propaganda war. With his 300,000-vote victory over the incumbent Democratic DA Jackie Lacey, Gascón boasted a clear mandate to eradicate the draconian policies that had defined local law enforcement. His victory was one of the most directly tangible results of last spring’s protests, which transformed his candidacy from an underdog bid into one in which many of Lacey’s endorsers withdrew their support in his favor. 

Yet for the revanchists of the ancien régime, multi-millionaire Westside homeowners addicted to the NextDoor app, and Fox News junkies, Gascón has become an avatar of liberal chaos, a scapegoat for everything wrong with L.A. Homeless problem? It’s Gascón’s fault. Rising crime? Obviously, Gascón. Problems with the electrical system in your Tesla? Probably the fault of a mechanic that George Soros paid to support Gascón.

In his first 12 months, Gascón has already survived a recall attempt, vociferously joined by the County Sheriff Alex Villanueva (It was one of several recall campaigns against L.A. elected officials, including councilmembers Nithya Raman and Mike Bonin.) Across L.A. County, more than two dozen cities have passed votes of no-confidence against Gascón. Within his first week in office, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson implied that Gascón is a “half-wit” above a chyron that read: “Crime follows Gascón wherever he goes.” The channel’s mewling Smeagol, Steve Hilton, declared that “no elected official in America more clearly represents the disgusting, pro-criminal, ‘defund the police’ madness than George Gascón.” Meanwhile, Laura Ingraham ghoulishly trumpeted an unsubstantiated July poll that claimed that the district attorney had a 25.1 percent approval rating.

The vitriol against Gascón doesn’t end with Rupert Murdoch’s empire; it’s also coming from inside his own office. A particularly incensed prosecutor, Jonathan Hatami, has become a fixture on Fox News for claiming Gascón is “pro-criminal and anti-victim.” After decades of enjoying a wide latitude to charge defendants with often dubiously ethical special circumstances and enhancement charges, local line prosecutors, through their deputy union, the Association of Deputy District Attorneys (ADDA) has sued Gascón over his refusal to keep those policies intact. More recently, they filed suit to block his hiring of former members of the public defender’s office (Gascón resigned from the state’s DA association when they backed the litigation in question.)

From the ADDA’s perspective, Gascón’s orders to dismiss previously filed special enhancement charges and avoid implementing California’s controversial Three Strikes sentencing law are illegal. In February, a judge granted a preliminary injunction in the union’s favor, stopping Gascón’s office from eliminating previous felony strikes in ongoing Three Strikes cases, which carry longer sentencing timelines (the judge ruled that Gascón’s office was allowed to pursue its own directives in new cases).

“It’s a dereliction of duty to follow a man rather than the law. He has a misconception that we owe loyalty to him. We do not. We follow the penal code,” says Eric Siddall, the vice-president of ADDA. “He’s an elected official with limited power, not part of some oligarchy. He himself has to follow the law. There’s no mutiny going on, we just want to follow our obligations to the state and federal constitution.”

Many other legal scholars — which include Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of UC Berkeley’s law school and an advisor on Gascón’s transition committee — hold that the California Supreme Court has already ruled that district attorneys have “complete authority” to enforce state laws within their bailiwick.

Gascón himself downplays the internal discord: “I’m proud of the fact that we’ve gotten to the point where we’re seeing critical mass within the office,” Gascón says in an interview. “Many people are seeing the type of work that we’re trying to do is actually good for our community and we’re increasingly seeing more compliance in this area.”

Gascón cites his administration’s adoption of a more humane policy that diverts those suffering from mental and substance abuse issues towards county programs aimed at curbing recidivism. After generations of county criminal justice policies that amounted to little more than “lock ‘em up and throw away the key,” Gascón maintains that long-term dividends can come from assessing violence as something that can’t be treated by mere arrest and prosecution. He touts a community violence reduction program, COVER, that his office has developed in partnership with the LAPD.

Under the program, DAs are embedded in three LAPD divisions in South L.A.: 77^th , Foothill and Newton. From these locations, the prosecutors work closely with police officers, community-based organizations and clergy members doing violence interruption work in neighborhoods with high crime rates. In some respects, this is a continuation of the Community Law Enforcement and Recovery program (CLEAR) that began in 1997. With the goal of reducing gang crime in targeted communities, it featured cross-agency cooperation from the LAPD, the L.A. County probation department, the L.A. City Attorney, the DA’s office and the California Department of Corrections.

Gascón’s program notably diverges from its predecessor by seeking to partner with members of the actual communities themselves, in order to offer enhanced credibility and a more ground-level approach. The goal is to reach the 17-year old whose brother has been murdered, before he retaliates and perpetuates a cycle which has plagued the city for a half-century. Or ideally, be a part of a broader solution that mitigates gang violence in the first place.

If anything, Gascón’s approach injects more nuance and complexity into the notion of what criminal justice means in L.A. It’s a philosophy informed by his own deep memory of being both a beat cop and a member of the LAPD brass when the battering ram was ubiquitous. Gascón witnessed the effects of the 1988 LAPD destruction of two apartment buildings on 39^th Street and Dalton Ave., a largely fruitless search for drugs that left ten adults and 12 minors homeless, along with causing property damage so great that the Red Cross had to intervene. In the wake of the rampage, officers left behind graffiti that read “LAPD Rules” and “Rollin’ 30s Die.”

In the same way that only a soldier can truly understand the scope and horror of war, Gascón brings an awareness about how common “officer-involved shootings” really are, and how easily they’ve been concealed in the past by pliable DAs. But beyond the sins of the last century, the LAPD remains embroiled in scandals involving falsifying gang data, racial profiling, and the use of brutal force to suppress protests. The Sheriff’s Department is under state investigation for containing nearly as many different gang factions as the Bloods and Crips; Sheriff Alex Villanueva has brazenly flouted subpoenas from the county’s inspector general and remains immersed in recriminations with Gascón and the Board of Supervisors.

Sheriff Villanueva and many other Gascón detractors claim that criminals have been emboldened by the embattled DA, consistently citing the escalating homicide rates of the last two years. By Oct. 18, the city had seen 320 murders, putting it on pace to eclipse the 355 killings of 2020, a decade high (In the ‘80s and ‘90s, at the height of the hyper-aggressive anti-gang CRASH Unit and the notoriously brutal Daryl Gates-era force, L.A. regularly topped 1,000 murders a year.) The skyrocketing rates, however, aren’t unique to L.A. Homicides rose nationally last year, representing the largest one-year increase ever recorded. It’s a trend that almost universally affected both major and medium-sized cities, regardless of the political affiliations or punitive zeal of the county’s top cops.

Many of the loudest voices on the right and center have attributed the violent crime wave to the progressive prosecutor ethos and the “defund the police” movement. But this argument doesn’t hold up: The LAPD saw miniscule cuts, which were almost immediately restored — and the cops billed an extra $47 million in overtime to the city’s “credit card.” The most dramatic spike in murders, in fact, happened last year under Lacey’s watch. Watching conservative cable news or perusing the social media feeds of Gascón’s most rabid critics could leave you convinced that L.A. has lapsed into a dystopian Escape from L.A. meets Blade Runner sinkhole. The so-called “godfather of progressive prosecutors” has been blamed for everything from the homelessness crisis to petty shoplifters, to the slim chance that Robert F. Kennedy killer Sirhan Sirhan will be granted parole.

Several high-profile incidents have helped fuel this narrative. Over the last year, Melrose Avenue has been hit with a string of armed robberies. Two other robberies and subsequent shootings in the luxury shopping districts of Beverly Hills have contributed to increased fear and anxiety among merchants and their wealthy patrons. But these high-profile, headline-grabbing crime sprees don’t paint the whole picture: Overall, crime is down 1.4 percent in the city through September — though violent crime is up 6 percent. According to the LAPD, robbery remains flat compared to this time last year, and Gascón’s office says that sexual assaults and rapes are down.

But there’s another factor contributing to rising homicides that has nothing to do with Gascón: the widespread proliferation of “ghost guns,” which are relatively cheap, easily assembled at home with 3-D printers, and untraceable. In an October report by the LAPD, ghost guns were said to have contributed to more than 100 violent crimes this year alone. During the first six months of 2020, the LAPD confiscated 863 ghost guns, a 300 percent increase from the same period last year. Like most things, this isn’t merely an L.A. problem. In May, the Justice Department responded to President Biden’s desire for tighter gun control by announcing a plan to require retailers to do background checks before selling ghost gun kits, as well as forcing manufacturers to start including serial numbers to aid law enforcement’s ability to trace the weapons.

Even in midnight blue Los Angeles County, where Biden received nearly triple the votes of Donald Trump, a bitter partisanship has taken hold. Like Governor Gavin Newsom and City Council members Raman and Bonin, Gascón, too, has been forced to fend off a recall attempt. In Gascón’s case, it began before any of his policies even had a chance to succeed or be invalidated.

“Their goal was always to undermine and subvert him,” says Adewale Oduye, a former L.A. County Deputy DA, who in a series of Medium posts in 2020, under the pen name Spooky Brown Esq., exposed the corruption, sexual harassment and prosecutorial misconduct in Lacey’s regime.

Sure enough, barely two months after Gascón’s swearing-in ceremony, victim’s rights advocates, prosecutors, ex-law enforcement officials and conservative local politicians launched a bid to unseat him, marking the first DA recall attempt in the 171-year history of the county.

“The mood in the office leading up to Gascón’s election was one of absolute fear and panic,” Oduye says. The son of Nigerian immigrants and a graduate of Northwestern University’s law school, Oduye worked in the L.A. County DA’s office from 2008 until last year — a period encompassing the tenure of Lacey and her predecessor, Steve Cooley, a Republican who loudly endorsed Gascón’s recall. 

“There was this big fear that if Gascón got elected, the prosecutors would have to buy a gun to protect their daughters because there would be people on the streets raping and looting. It’s a fear rooted in racism and classism,” Oduye continues. “It was never about trying to do better. It was about sticking to their guns — doing what they’ve always been doing and [as they would put it] ‘protecting people from these animals and criminals.’”

In September, five weeks before its Oct. 26 deadline, the Recall George Gascón campaign acknowledged that it would fall far short of the 580,000 signatures required to trigger a recall election — they’d barely broken the 200,000 mark. But in a statement, Recall George Gascón spokesperson Tim Lineberger recast the failure as a temporary “reset,” indicating their plans to launch a forever war campaign to unseat the DA.

“This reset will put all [our] work to great use, and it is invaluable to the recall effort moving forward,” Lineberger’s statement read. “Make no mistake, this is not a white flag — it is a double down on our efforts.”

While the recall campaign failed to garner donations from the law enforcement unions who funded Jackie Lacey’s 2020 bid, it did receive six-figure checks from perennial candidate for worst Angeleno, the Trump-supporting developer Geoffrey Palmer, as well as Hyatt heir Anthony Pritzker and septuagenarian Republican oil scion Robert Day. But the campaign’s most visceral surrogate was Desiree Andrade, who regularly guested on Fox News all summer.

Andrade’s son Julian was slain in 2018, allegedly by five suspects who believed that he had stolen their weed. Upon taking office, Gascón dismissed special circumstances charges against the alleged killers that would have required a sentence of life without parole. Under Gascón’s policy, each, if convicted, would face 25 years to life instead.

“He needs to look at each case on a case-by-case basis. There shouldn’t be a blanket policy; every case is different and warrants different punishment,” says Andrade, a Democrat who was raised in Eagle Rock and now resides in Whittier. “My son’s killers planned it out and brutally murdered him. Three separate times, they kept beating my son to try to kill him. I would love Gascón to sit with me and say why he feels they don’t deserve life without parole. Why was he sentenced to death and not them? I don’t want to hear his beliefs about science; that means nothing to someone whose child was murdered.”

In conversations with Gascón and the allies in his office, they bristle most at the accusation that they are pro-crime and anti-victim. They point out that Andrade’s alleged killers may still serve life in prison. Sentencing decisions are ultimately made by judges, and early release can only be granted by a parole board. The playbook used to attack Gascón bears the recurring echo of the same ones used to tar Democrats from the ‘70s up until Bill Clinton signed the 1994 Crime Bill, which found both parties uniting behind the premise that the only way to avoid looking “soft on crime” was tougher sentencing and more police; as a result, their policies created an era of mass incarceration that lawmakers including Clinton himself have only begun to disavow.

In late October, former L.A. DAs Gil Garcetti and Ira Reiner teamed up to pen an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times calling the law-and-order policies of the ‘80s and ‘90s a “reactionary and disastrous social experiment.” The article claimed that “​​proponents of “tough-on-crime” policies continue to sell the public a false promise that more punishment means more safety. But their math doesn’t add up… there is no evidence that the recent increase in certain serious crimes — and in particular homicide — is associated with criminal justice reforms.” Additionally, they noted that Gascón’s policies could save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in incarceration costs that could otherwise be directed to public health, housing, education and violence prevention. The article’s conclusion stressed that those obstructing these criminal justice reforms are actually making us “all less safe.” 

In a political landscape where elected officials obsess over poll numbers and the immediacy of the next election, Gascón emphasizes the long-term vision of his approach, one that he says will yield a positive impact in decades to come. 

“In a few years, we’re going to see the impact on community health out in the streets, and I think it will progress from there; it’s taken decades for us to get to where we are,” Gascón says. “The right wing never talks about the past. All the work that we did —– three strikes and everything —– none of that was based on data; it was all based on fear mongering. There’s a lot of scientific work that supports what we’re doing, and I think you’ll begin to see a noticeable shift within two years. Soon, we’ll begin to have a new mark for how community health can really be achieved.”

One of the most common criticisms of Gascón is that he’s more of a public defender than a DA. The perception has been amplified by several hires from the other side of the aisle, including Tiffiny Blacknell, an executive staff member of Gascón’s team, who grew up in Inglewood and served 18 years as an L.A. County public defender. While Gascón’s naysayers indict this as a fundamental flaw in his approach, it’s difficult to imagine anyone as well-suited as Blacknell is to understand the excesses of the DA’s office.

“In the Cooley administration, they prosecuted 13 and 14-year-old girls for prostitution,” Blacknell says. “These were children clearly being sex trafficked, with a trafficker’s name tattooed on their face or their body. These were traumatized children being kept in custody. It was a dark period; there was rampant prosecution of low-level drug possession charges that sent people to prison for eight or even ten years. We were simply begging people to see the humanity in people addicted to drugs or who were being exploited.”

For the most part, Lacey continued Cooley’s policies. Those with knowledge of the office politics repeatedly described Lacey as a weak and out-of-touch leader presiding over an agency overrun by strong prosecutors with carte blanche to pursue their own interpretations of justice. You didn’t have to dig deep to hear complaints about how prosecutors accused of sexual misconduct wouldn’t be fired, but instead moved to different courtrooms in distant parts of the county. 

“Would you rather have a deputy DA who makes $90,000 a year prosecuting traffic offenses or sex trafficking?” Blacknell continues. “Having personally lost someone to gun violence, I know that nothing done in the courtroom heals that wound. Nothing we do after someone is dead will bring them back. So that’s why we’re putting our resources into supporting folks and preventative work so that the next mother’s son doesn’t die. Before this administration, nothing was being done. They were waiting for the bodies to drop, then go in and prosecute, seek the highest sentence, and move on to the next body.”

To understand the L.A criminal justice system is to understand its incestuous nature. Attorneys familiar with that world say that cops frequently marry prosecutors. For ambitious lawyers, a deputy DA position is seen as a necessary stepping stone to becoming a judge. And the most generous donors to Lacey’s re-election campaign were law enforcement unions. It created an environment where Lacey was reluctant to prosecute any type of police misconduct.

The actual number of police killings during Lacey’s tenure remains under dispute; Melina Abdullah, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, says that there were over 640 fatal officer-involved shootings from 2012 until 2020; law enforcement officials estimate the number to be in the mid-300s. Regardless, Lacey only prosecuted a single case against one of those officers – even when former LAPD chief Charlie Beck recommended otherwise. By contrast, one of Gascón’s first actions was to hire former federal prosecutor Lawrence Middleton to probe allegations of police wrongdoing, beginning with four shootings in which Lacey failed to press charges.

“We didn’t have much faith that a DA could usher in progressive justice reform, but he’s been a pleasant surprise — especially in how he’s begun to charge corrupt officers,” Abdullah says.

“He’s facing organizations and institutions clinging to an old form of policing that was abusive, murderous and hugely problematic. Gascón is laying out a different approach to criminal justice. He’s a prosecutor who actually represents the people and engages in restorative justice. He gives us hope that we can actually work together and alongside people who are part of a system that needs to be fundamentally transformed.”

What’s most obvious is the difficulty of rehabilitating a broken system. Lasting change requires patience, but the social media age demands instant gratification. It’s delusional to believe that by virtue of implementing several much-needed reforms, Gascón could instantly reduce the crime rate, mend internecine gang wars, rid the streets of lethal untraceable weapons and heal generations of inherited trauma. But to begin to improve upon the injustices of the past requires someone willing to risk withering attacks from all corners — whether from those with good intentions and real worries about their safety or from those poisonously cynical and obsessed with preserving their vested power, personal interests and prejudicial hierarchies. It’s a start.

The post The Empire Strikes Back appeared first on theLAnd.

If space ships came equipped with rearview mirrors, we could talk about 36-year-old Steven Ellison’s achievements for eons. When Kendrick Lamar wanted to summon the new cosmic slop for To Pimp a Butterfly, he enlisted Lotus. It netted him two Grammy nominations and stamped his interstellar two-step on the most acclaimed album of the last decade. At the Low End Theory, Flying Lotus became the avatar of the Lincoln Heights beat scene Holy See, helping turn it into the most internationally revered club night of this millennium. As a label boss, his Brainfeeder became more than a mere home for elysian beat and modal symphonies; it’s an essential idea, astral rhythms rooted in the belief that the journey to the future often runs through the past.

A decade ago, jazz was having its last rites read for roughly the thousandth time. But thanks to Lotus and Brainfeeder artists like Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, and the late Austin Peralta, you’re as likely to see it at Coachella (remember when) as in a small dark club with black-and-white framed photos of Duke Ellington on the wall. Lotus has had his own radio station in GTA games and composed film scores (Perfect, Blade Runner Black Out 2022). His own 2017 directorial debut, Kuso, oozed a cracked black mirror brilliance — a sci-fi dystopian comedy somewhere between David Lynch and Beetlejuice, but with better beats and better drugs. You could not unsee it.

RELATED: When The Music’s Over

In the same regard, you cannot unhear Flying Lotus’s music. Every time you listen, you discern new shapes within its sun-damaged fusion, asymmetrical funk, and smoke ring elusiveness. A thousand imitations exist, but there is only one original, posted up in the 818 foothills — taking breaks between mastering the grand piano and memorizing new video game combinations to imagine tricky pockets of rhythm and 29th Century celestial dances. We spoke in the spring around the time of the release of his latest, the instrumentals to last year’s Flamagra, but time and space never really apply to him. Lotus was definitely quarantined at home, but it’s unclear exactly in which galaxy.

Where do you see the future of music going?

It’s in a weird place. When it comes to tunes, I’ve noticed that people are getting more inspired about bands again. They’re excited to see people play instruments and show off crazy musicianship. That aspect is coming back in a dope way. Judging from the stuff that I’ve been watching on Instagram, the next generation of musicians will really care about their playing. All the dope young producers are great finger drummers too. It’s not just kids making beats anymore; it’s kids saying this is how they’re getting down and this is what’s to be expected. It’s important to care about the technology, but it’s about the musicianship too. People just playing beats on the 404 was dope for a while, but personally I wouldn’t sign someone to Brainfeeder who can’t play anymore. It’s also going to be more about what the live show is like. I can’t speak for everyone, but I know that I’m continually striving to take those performances to the next level. And I want that to inspire the kids and to be a part of it myself. I’m listening to that shit. I want to hear the new shit right now.

What about the future of electronic music?

I’ve been curious myself. As far as the underground is concerned, people are making a lot of house and realizing that people want to dance. But in terms of music, a lot of people are getting into the modular stuff — like how to make the music make itself. As far as the rhythm, I don’t know. If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you. I’d be over here making that shit.

Do you think that Los Angeles will ever produce another underground night like Low End Theory?

Of course there will be another Low End Theory. With every generation there’s a thing like that — a new underground spirit. There will always be kids that aren’t heard who will make something that inspires the rest of us. I’m out here looking for it.

Do you think that the increasing price of real estate and the lack of small independent music venues — even before the pandemic — will make that significantly more difficult?

It’s like anything else — people will have to pack up their shit and head further and further east. The desire to create will always exist, it might just not be in the same neighborhood.

How do you see the pandemic affecting the future?

Handshakes might be over. I feel like I’ve been taken on so many rides that it’s so hard to imagine things 30 years from now. The whole A.I. music thing is going to be a big deal. I think we’ll see shows that have just been done by computers. We’ll be comfortable paying to watch a computer. Masks are going to stay for a while. People will embrace the mask like they do in Japan.

Are you optimistic about where we’re going?

In some respects I am. I feel people have become more unified, and that will continue. I hope we won’t regress, but I suspect things will be more fucked up in some ways. As far as social media, it’ll change in that I think people won’t be super comfortable sharing this much of their lives in the very near future. But it’ll take something major to happen for that change to occur — like some crazy data breach that leaves things out in the open. It might be TikTok, it might be Gmail. What happens when you can reverse look up Gmail addresses to search for emails that went to whoever? That could start it all.

What are your favorite L.A. future movies?

Blade Runner is definitely one of my favorites, and the one that I’ve seen the most. There’s a depressed bluesy vibe to that movie. All the rain. As far as flying cars, I don’t think that’s going to be a thing. Imagine all the people drunk-driving flying cars and then crashing into houses. Although I definitely think all of our cars will be automated very soon.

Do you see yourself staying in Los Angeles?

I’ll be stuck here forever. It’s going to be fucked up man. The traffic is too crazy, too many people on the road. I tell people don’t move here anymore, just stay where you’re at and come visit when you feel like it.

Do you have hope for the future of L.A.?

I do hope for another inspiring music community to pop up soon. I really want that more than anything. I want something where everyone is excited to do the thing — “Here’s the new stuff.” I’m ready to be inspired. I think it’s inevitable, but it’s going to take a bunch of kids who are poor and frustrated. I think the new sound is being brewed and bred right now during the quarantine.

What about aliens?

I feel like we’ll make contact with alien life sooner than people think. It won’t be like super-intelligent life — it’ll be kinda like alien bugs first and that will be the first alien. It won’t be the super-intelligent psychic beings; we might meet the weird bug guy first.

Do you believe in UFOs?

I take the Fox Mulder saying: I want to believe, but I don’t know if I do. I feel like there’s something beyond the curtain, but who knows how far advanced that civilization is. Maybe we’re the one that arrives on them and shows them how they really had it great before we showed up.

Do you consider yourself part of the Afro-Futurist tradition?

I don’t really like that term, personally, but I feel weird when I’m left out of the conversation. I mean, I definitely love Sun Ra and Funkadelic and all that. I used to really love drum & bass back in the day — that was super futuristic; you felt like you were in space. I loved Aphex Twin and breakcore — that felt like the future. Amon Tobin felt like the future. Jungle always seemed futuristic to me — obviously, the artwork, the trippy cyborg girls, and cosmic space imagery.

How did Kuso reflect your ideas about the future?

Kuso is representative of my worst nightmare about the future: a future where everyone has abandoned all hope, a future where everyone has given up on giving a fuck. They’ve full-on accepted that they’re terrible people.

What is your greatest dream for the future, for the world in general?

It would feel something like Blade Runner without the rain. I think there’s something about that, but I don’t know if I’d necessarily want to live in it. It’s definitely someplace I’d want to visit. For me personally, I’m like an island dreamer; I wish I lived on an island by myself, just me and someone to cook the food.

What’s your dream for your personal future?

My dream is to keep going and being inspired and not get stagnant and not dwell on things that I did in the past. I want to keep growing and playing different types of shows. I want to fucking get super old and for people to be like, “What is this cat gonna make next?” On some Rick Rubin shit. That would be nice if I go that far, to be the elder synth god. My piano teacher is 80 and he’s hip and I know the reason he’s still with it is because he still loves playing so much. I want to be like that.

On Wednesday, Sept. 9, theLAnd co-Editor-in-Chief Jeff Weiss will be discussing the Future of Music with Andrea Domanick, Kyambo “Hip-Hop” Joshua, Cypress Moreno, and Rosecrans Vic. RSVP here.

The post The Future According to Flying Lotus appeared first on theLAnd.

A liberal sanctuary, an island on the land, the great exception within the context of American exceptionalism. But Covid-19 exposed the extent of the infection that has been festering all along. For all our self-sustaining myths, you can’t ignore 66,000 unhoused, huddled on every other corner throughout the county. A criminal justice system plagued with scandal, as swift to demonize Black and Brown people as anywhere in the Deep South. For all the leftist platitudes of the political class, their hand-in-glove redevelopment schemes and six-figure donations from cop unions and condo builders tell a different story. This is original sin.

In the economic boom of the late 19th Century, the bad joke was that the word “real” in Los Angeles was synonymous with “real estate.” Forget Chinatown — freshly arrested L.A. City Councilmen Jose Huizar and Mitch Englander are likely heading to federal prison for accepting red envelopes filled with cash from Chinese developers. It has been the strength and weakness of the Angeleno to betray a blinkered optimism. This is an end-of-the-Earth chimera that conjured itself into existence: Angelyne and Dennis Woodruff; Jack Parsons and Father Yod; Thomas Mapother IV and Earvin Johnson Jr. Sunshine myth and vexed noir baked into the equation. The land that birthed “Fuck the Police” but also Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright.” For a city so fundamentally invested in plasticine reinvention, we have to instinctively believe that things can improve.

These last several months have forced us to confront the crimes of our past, while also battling multiple crises in our present, secure in the understanding that if we don’t figure out a plan for the future, there won’t be one worth inhabiting. A homeless epidemic met a medical one, and thousands have died in L.A. County alone. Strip mall pupusa vendors and Michelin-starred restaurants, dive bars and used bookstores, D.I.Y. venues and members-only social clubs have already been wiped out, never to return. Everyone has been negatively affected, save for the billionaires whose wealth has multiplied so exponentially that it makes you want to spend your quarantine building a guillotine.

L.A.’s unemployment rate hasn’t been this high since the Great Depression, when Pasadena spent $20,000 a year on guards to stop people from jumping off the “Suicide Bridge.” Hollywood would probably remake The Fall of the Roman Empire right now if anyone were allowed to film. But despite the freefall, some are determined to reimagine what L.A. can be if it corrects for its errors, invests the city’s still-immense wealth back into the people, and attempts to actually build it into the progressive utopia that it pretends to be. These are the state, local, and county politicians and grassroots activists fighting for humane and thoughtful solutions to the problems of homelessness, housing, structural racism, and more. Those who would make L.A. a better place to actually live, and not just the kind of place even Biggie confessed was great to visit.

To understand L.A.’s homeless problem is to confront the scarcity of affordable housing, the historical ramifications of redlining and institutional racism, the breakdown in mental health, the criminalization of the unhoused, and the political inertia that extends from Spring Street to Sacramento to Washington, D.C. It’s a Gordian knot that encompasses multiple failures in public policy, civic planning, and our evangelical belief in the private sector. There are no easy answers, but it’s hard to imagine doing much worse.

According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, there are 66,436 people experiencing homelessness throughout the county. Despite the 2016 passage of Proposition HHH — a $1.2 billion bond aimed at funding the construction of permanent-supportive housing — the city is still far from its goal of creating 10,000 new units in a decade. In the meantime, the rate of homelessness has exploded, rising nearly 13 percent from last year. With more than half the county out of work and a statewide eviction moratorium scheduled to lapse at the end of September, as many as 120,000 more households could soon become homeless, according to a recent UCLA study. 

A U.N. worker infamously compared Skid Row to a Syrian refugee camp, but there was at least a civil war to explain the devastation in that country. South of Main exists on an alien scale of human suffering, a hallucinatory nightmare somewhere between Bosch and Night of the Living Dead, and somehow, still just a few blocks away from zen hi-fi bars serving $7 lattes. It’s crushing to witness the thousands condemned to such squalor, but even more troubling to wonder about a future feudalistic L.A., where the number of unhoused grows exponentially, and the politicians fight over who gets to give a no-bid “Dump the Homeless on Mars” contract to X Æ A-Xii Musk IV.

But nevermind that bloodcurdling future, it’s the present that haunts Kevin de León, former president pro tempore of California State Senate. “I took some family relatives into Skid Row and they were all saying ‘no puede ser possible!’” says de León, who is expected to take office in December as City Councilperson for District 14, Huizar’s former district, which includes Skid Row. “In Spanish, one of them said, ‘This looks like the third world,’ to which another relative said, ‘That’s an insult to third world countries.'”

It’s deeply humiliating that a perceived forward-thinking progressive place, one of the richest cities in one of the wealthiest states in one of the richest nations, is still grappling with such a large concentration of unhoused individuals. This recent explosion is a dystopian nightmare unlike anything we’ve ever seen.

The downtown “revival” championed by Huizar and Garcetti — and the previous mayors Antonio Villaraigosa and Richard Riordan, the latter of whom conveniently owned multi-millions of DTLA real estate — came at a steep cost. The entire district became awash in real estate investment trusts, Ritz Carltons, and billionaires controlling war chests of dirty money, turning it into a schlocky Edison-bulbed tourist carnival that priced out almost anyone making under six figures. While plenty of other neighborhoods have had their own unhappy stories pertaining to gentrification, displacement, and being Sqirl’ed, the end pattern is always similar: the poor and working class are pushed further east or out of the city altogether, what’s left of the middle class struggles to make rent, and rows of tents line every freeway underpass and available scrap of sidewalk — until the cops do a sweep and start clearing out possessions and handing out tickets.

It’s partially the result of a byzantine process required to build new housing. More than three years after the passage of HHH, there have been only two completed housing projects (though there have been 15 temporary shelters built in the last two years through the “A Bridge Home” program). Since January, 57 planned supportive housing developments have fallen behind schedule, which is only somewhat due to the coronavirus. The Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles, which metes out the federal Section 8 subsidies, has begun to run out of rental vouchers to give to the developers. Many of the builders are non-profits, but without the government defraying costs, most claim they can’t secure private mortgages to finance the development. 

“The current approach to homelessness simply isn’t working,” says de León, who authored the “No Place like Home” initiative in Sacramento, which was signed by Governor Jerry Brown.  While it promised a $2 billion statewide investment for chronically homeless individuals with mental illness — including slightly under a billion earmarked for L.A. — the project has had its own share of bureaucratic headaches related to litigation and a delayed dispersal of funds. “We have to set hard deadlines for building emergency shelters and long term housing, and terminate wasteful contracts,” says de León. “We need to strongly consider focusing on the construction of pre-fab modular housing and the outright purchase of motels to house people. We can’t let the cumbersome nature of bureaucracy and the lengthy permitting process slow this down.” 

De León says it’s imperative to set a firm cap on per-unit costs. Even though many of the builders are non-profits and allies to progressive causes, you’d think that Tony Soprano and Ralphie Cifaretto were behind the construction, with one Koreatown development spending $700,000 per apartment. But expediting the process and removing bureaucratic red tape is only one part of a difficult calculus. These aren’t integers, but human beings coping with their own traumas, and oftentimes mental illness or substance abuse addictions. While many share commonalities, a one-size-fits-all approach can’t fix such a complex issue.

In Venice, Councilmember Mike Bonin has been a steadfast advocate for the unhoused, despite a vocal opposition among some of his constituency. In the days just before the pandemic began, Venice opened a 154-bed temporary shelter, which would theoretically cover less than 10 percent of the area’s population.

“I make the analogy that homelessness is like cancer in that there’s no one form of it,” Bonin says. “Each type of cancer has different manifestations and prognoses. Someone who is chronically homeless requires different treatment than someone recently homeless due to an abusive relationship, or a loss of a job, or a teen runaway. Age, race, and gender makes a difference, too.”

Black people make up over a third of the unhoused, despite comprising just eight percent of the county’s overall population. Locally, that’s partly the residual effect of structural racism: the housing covenants that stymied wealth-building, a legacy of rundown inner-city schools that never received the same investments as their white counterparts, barriers in employment, and a war on drugs that disproportionately targeted and incarcerated people of color.

“For good reason, we’ve focused most of our time and resources on housing the most vulnerable,” Bonin continues. “We, of course, want to focus on the people who might die. But now the numbers of unhoused are so big and the resources are so limited that we’re effectively telling people who are near-homeless that they’re not homeless enough to qualify for the solution. That’s like telling people newly diagnosed with cancer, come back when you’re stage four.”

The city recently advertised a lottery to help needy tenants in danger of eviction, but few see it as much more than a flawed stopgap (one based off 2019 income, which means practically nothing today). As for Project Roomkey, it was designed to usher 15,000 of the most vulnerable off the streets and into hotel rooms, but to date has only housed one quarter of that goal. The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s latest quagmire is a proposal to spend $800 million (yes, a real number) to find available apartments across L.A. County and then subsidize the rent. But this is a tourniquet that involves finding landlords actually willing to rent to the homeless, and compounding that with the quixotic notion that at the end of 18 months, most of the dispossessed will somehow make enough money to afford full L.A. rent — something which few working people can afford in the first place. (The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in L.A. is $1,773, according to one estimate, or almost the entire monthly salary of a person working full-time at minimum wage.) 

Solutions exist, but only if progressives successfully organize to run and elect politicians with courage, long-term foresight, and a stomach for endless courtroom battles. A more sage and lasting solution comes from UCLA’s Luskin Institute for Inequality and Democracy, which advocates exercising eminent domain on under-used tourist hotels. With commercial real estate flagging and brick-and-mortar on the decline, it’s also worth considering the city exercising eminent domain on long-vacant properties, fast-tracking a rezoning, and converting them into apartments.

But L.A. elected officials have historically only shown the desire to invoke eminent domain on aging pensioners on Bunker Hill and Mexican immigrants in Chavez Ravine. For over a century, this city has ceded decision-making to land barons, whether it was those buying up the San Fernando Valley in advance of the Owens Valley aqueduct, the mid-century cabals that used Communist fears to fend off public housing, or the latest private equity Zuul’s paving over paradise to put up 400 condo units with un-exorcised demons in the fridge next to the berry La Croix.

While the local plight is bleak, the November presidential election could offer some relief. Even though Joe “Crime Bill” Biden is no one’s idea of an acceptable candidate, he does represent the possibility of federal funds boosting depleted coffers at both the county and city level. Without it, there will be drastically reduced money for progressive projects, and the deaths of thousands of local small businesses — to say nothing of their workers. Hundreds of thousands of local jobs have evaporated in the wake of the pandemic. Even with a vaccine, which could take years to produce, a recovery will undoubtedly be slow and fitful.

In their dreary rhetorical manipulation, Tucker Carlson Republicans lie about how all these problems are the result of leftist governance. But the five-person L.A. County Board of Supervisors lacked a clear progressive majority until 2016, when both of its two Reaganite Republicans retired and one of the seats went to a Democrat. The neo-liberalist streak of L.A. mayors dates back to Tom Bradley, a fundamentally decent man and legendary figure, whose sympathies for the downtrodden were offset by close ties with downtown power brokers, Brentwood entertainment moguls, multi-national banks, and lupine developers. It’s the same “all business is good business” mentality that ushered in our current mayor, who has never understood the fundamental contradiction of being a progressive and making statements like “I never met a CEO I didn’t like.” Garcetti’s greatest achievement will be losing the battle for Amazon’s second headquarters.

One City Council candidate who has justifiably captured the local progressive imagination is Nithya Raman, a charismatic urban planner full of compelling ideas blessed with a policy wonk’s gift for budget crunching. Facing off against City Councilmember David Ryu in this November’s local election for District 4, Raman began in politics working for the City Administrative Officer in 2014. During her time there, she wrote a report outlining how over 85 percent of the city’s $100 million homelessness budget was squandered on jailing the homeless, rather than helping to procure permanent lodging.

“In L.A., we have people who speak the language of progressivism, but who don’t act with the urgency or integrity that this moment demands,” says Raman, who graduated from Harvard before receiving a master’s in urban planning from M.I.T. “We have some tenant protections in place, but we’ve never invested in the kind of infrastructure that helps tenants realize their rights: the right to counsel upon eviction, a landlord and tenant registry, and rent forgiveness during the pandemic — all while keeping smaller landlords from having to sell properties to the banks.”

Raman, a mother of two young twins and one of the founders of the local SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition, has focused her campaign on housing and homelessness. For the latter, Raman, a former entertainment director of Time’s Up — an organization designed to combat sexual harassment in the entertainment industry — wants to build community access centers where outreach workers and mental health case workers will be anchored in specific neighborhoods. The idea is that they can get to know individuals by name and develop a level of trust to get them housing and support that can end their time on the streets.

“It’s become a labyrinthine process,” Raman says. “A neighborhood system allows people to be accountable; as it stands now, there’s no visibility of the process from the city electoral level. When you have people from the neighborhood with relationships to the unhoused, it presents real alternatives to calling 911 for every problem.”

But the homelessness crisis is merely the most inescapable aspect of a housing nightmare that shrouds L.A. Before the pandemic offered a brief cease-fire, the nihilistic forces of big capital had conspired to the point where even the gentrifiers were being gentrified. Neighborhoods like Silver Lake, Echo Park, and Highland Park are completely washed. If once defined by their diversity, character, and sabor, they’ve become post-hipster amusement parks with $70 an hour faux-retro bowling alleys and self-parodic, avian-themed, book-scarce bookstores, owned by alabaster refugees from the New York marketing world. 

There are two perpetually warring contingents that make reasonable discussions of the housing crisis impossible: the NIMBYS (not in my backyard) and the YIMBYs (you can guess). The former are resolutely opposed to development of any kind; they tend to be white, senescent, and dedicated to the antiquated belief that Southern California will always be a homeowner’s paradise and if you work hard enough, everyone can buy a 3-bedroom, 2-bath in Valley Village — which is no longer actually affordable unless you’re a cast member on Vanderpump Rules. The YIMBY’s are usually well-meaning, but misguided in their belief that supply and demand solves everything. It’s clear that the free market system has spun out of control, or rather, that it’s succeeded in its most cynical and deregulated form to enrich the greediest caste.

READ MORE: The “Mayor of Skid Row” explains the intractable nature of the homelessness crisis

The National Association of Home Builders recently designated the L.A. region the least affordable housing market in the nation. In the fourth quarter of last year, just 11.3 percent of homes were affordable to families earning the area’s median income of $73,100. (In Los Angeles County itself, the median income is $64,251.) Rents might have dipped slightly over the last month or two, but the decline figures to be ephemeral. Most new developments include a token gesture of affordable priced units to ensure their projects get passed, but no matter how many units are built, rising rents far outstrip inflation.

“We need to hold elected officials to account, and I don’t think we should wait until they get indicted by the F.B.I.,” says Arielle Sallai, the housing & homelessness co-chair for the Democratic Socialists of America, Los Angeles. “We need to see community engagement in the process from the outset and question the very nature of how developments are approved and funded. The city needs to build real social housing. What vacant lots do the city, county, and state own that they’re doing nothing with? We need more militant actions because the traditional pathways aren’t working.”

Sallai saliently references the group of unhoused families that occupied some of the dozens of homes that Caltrans owned but abandoned when plans to extend the 710 Freeway fell through in 2018. Over the last four years, organizations like DSA L.A. and Ground Game L.A. have become some of the most impactful and respected political organizations of this generation not because millennials are petulant and spoiled Jacobin cosplayers, but rather, because they have galvanized those with the desire to redress the failures of snuff capitalism. For many under 40, there is the belief that the current system has betrayed them.

Even if outright socialism seems extreme to some, the reforms of the New Deal have been so ruthlessly dismantled over the last half-century that death has become the final safety net. Once upon a time, FDR was accused of being a Socialist, to which he perhaps apocryphally quipped that he was just trying to save capitalism. Either way, we’re witnessing the death rattle of Ronald Reagan’s intellectually bankrupt and Darwinian counter-revolution. The original California raisin’s shriveled cruelty started here, where he began to unravel the health care and public education system.

Reagan’s mellow lunacy sparked Howard Jarvis’s taxpayer revolt of 1978, which left state schools chronically underfunded by dramatically decreasing property taxes. A decade-and-a-half later, the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act, enacted under Governor Pete “Prop 187” Wilson, stifled any meaningful ability for cities to control long-term rental values. For all the G.O.P. stereotypes of radical California, Republicans have occupied the Governor’s seat for 32 of the last 53 years.

One of the Sacramento legislators helping the state and city to crawl out from under the wreckage is venerable L.A. labor leader turned state Senator, Maria Elena Durazo:

“We’ve been focused on streamlining the process and taking the power out of the hands of local NIMBYs that refuse new housing construction,” says Durazo, who was elected to the California State Senate in 2018, representing an area that includes Central and East L.A. In 2019, Durazo sponsored Senate Bill 529, which sought to bar landlords from retaliatory evictions against tenants collectively organizing. It lost by one vote. This February, she introduced a bill enabling victims of violent crimes and their families to terminate a lease without penalty within six months of the crime having occurred. 

“It’s not just a matter of pushing density. Some of the most overcrowded parts of the country are in my district,” Durazo says. “We need policies that build wealth and equity for those that actually live in those neighborhoods. Rents go up, values rise, but wages don’t. We need protections for renters. Two families are often forced to crowd into the same space. 50 new units is a good thing, but not if it only creates higher rents for the rest of the neighborhood.” 

These aren’t the mom-and-pop landlords of decades’ past: all available land has been accounted for. Without serious action, private equity and real estate trusts will continue to gobble up every last square inch of the city. These are operations with zero stake or accountability to the community. Dead-eyed vultures with the aesthetic of a Scottsdale air conditioning contractor.

Take Taix, a once-beloved family-owned French restaurant and bar in Echo Park, which was sold for $12 million to something called The Holland Partner Group. The Vancouver, Washington-based behemoth is redeveloping the site into a hideous pigeon-gray 170 unit monstrosity — of which 93 percent will rent for market rate. There will be a zombified “new Taix,” but the deadening design sketch makes it look like an organic dog bakery. It’s the building equivalent of Goya’s “Saturn Devouring His Son,” a gentrified McUrbanism that will torment anyone who ever had a half-good memory over a whiskey soda and a French onion soup.

“The future will require creating more neighborhood institutions organized by and for the people,” Sallai says. “We need to force our elected officials to be responsive to the impacted groups, listen to their demands, and recognize their values.”

This cuts to the deeper question about L.A. It’s evident what its values were in the past, but unclear what they will be going forward. By its very essence, the home of Hollywood is filled with transplants who move here, spend years whining about the traffic and the lack of seasons, and vanish. It’s allowed for a political class to exploit those get-rich-quick desires and transient nature to create a city built for Instagram virality and Airbnbs — one that doesn’t cater to regular people working to survive.

This place will always be an alluring place to live, but immediate action needs to be taken to ensure that it’s actually inhabitable for teachers, firefighters, social workers, eloteros, bartenders, and artists. Our destiny for a chthonic divide between rich and poor is not preordained. The affordable housing success of Berlin, which in January instituted a five-year freeze on rent increases, reminds you that other ideas are possible and effective. We can set up land banks and consider a massive investment in public housing that refuses to rely on the price gouging private sector. We can attempt genuine urban land reform and green belts of the sort that were crushed before they ever had the chance. But it will not be enough to just have progressive politics; it will require vision, strength, and persistence. The soul of a city isn’t something you can rebuild.

The latest battle for the new Los Angeles began on May 30 at Pan-Pacific Park. Local Black Lives Matter organizers had long laid the groundwork in educating residents about the 600-plus deaths at the hands of law enforcement since District Attorney Jackie Lacey took office at the end of 2012. Over the last several years, BLM has put enough of a public spotlight on Lacey’s refusal to charge killer cops — staging weekly anti-Lacey protests in front of the Hall of Justice — that even the ex-Chief of Police requested that she prosecute. But to the average, self-consumed Angeleno, it hit differently to watch cops in riot gear firing tear gas projectiles at random protesters on that day in May, in front of organic markets that sell 17 kinds of shelf-stable infused bone broths. To see them taking batting practice with batons. To truly cement the reputation that L.A. law enforcement is famous for worldwide.

In the same way that Donald Trump’s election stunned sheltered white liberals, the revelation that the LAPD was still the LAPD came as a similar shock. For Black and Brown people, this was just another reminder of what they’d been saying all along. Did everyone think N.W.A., Cypress Hill, YG, and Kendrick Lamar were all making shit up? Melina Abdullah herself, one of the co-founders of BLM L.A., had been the target of a law enforcement plot that saddled her with eight trumped up misdemeanor charges connected to activism. (They were dismissed last February, shortly after theLAnd’s story on the charges.) But this has always been part of the great schism of L.A. life. The persecuted have long told anyone willing to listen about the corruption, brutality, racial profiling, and the school-to-prison pipeline, but politicians largely nodded their heads, issued vague proclamations, and offered a blank check to a series of opportunistic police chiefs and crooked sheriff’s.

Captured on video, the militarized goonery opened eyes that otherwise would’ve remained blind. The Black Lives Matters organizers deftly seized the moment with poignant calls for justice and shrewd budgetary analysis. The June L.A. City Council meeting in which they presented their proposed budget was as powerful as anything in recent memory. Unlike the bromides offered in the past, the City Council soon after voted to cut $150 million in LAPD funding. Most importantly, it took the first steps towards fundamentally reimagining the nature of local policing. After decades of accepting faulty inherited logic, a countervailing wisdom has emerged, reminding people that the police do not need to perform random traffic stops or serve as first responders to non-emergency 911 calls about mental health care, domestic unrest, and homelessness issues.

“The world has cracked open. I’ve never seen this level of openness to fundamental transformation. Watching the death of George Floyd made it clear that we weren’t crazy when we said that policing stems from slave catching. You could see it with your own eyes. It pierced the soul of the world,” Abdullah says, adding that BLM’s proposed budget is also about common sense. “Why would police respond to a mental health call or deal with 14-year old kids instead of a youth worker?…Why should they be doing traffic stops; if they see you with a broken taillight, they can just mail you a ticket. If they’d have done that, we’d still have Philando Castile and Sandra Bland with us.”

Abdullah mentions a Canadian program brought to her attention via Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson, wherein police officers are replaced by service workers who offer to fix the taillight for drivers instead of ticketing them for it. The contrast clearly highlights how punitive and repressive the American mentality has become.

From the Zoot Suit Riots to the Rampart scandal, the history of L.A. policing is a series of rabid attacks on citizens they’re sworn to protect and serve. After 28 years of would-be reforms, the LAPD’s “elite” Metropolitan Division is currently under fire for an L.A. Times exposé revealing that they stopped Black motorists at a rate of more than five times that of their share in the city’s population. Not only that, but LAPD falsified so much information about alleged gang members that the state of California had to stop using it in their CalGang database. Chief Michel Moore came up through the ranks during the batterram era of Daryl Gates; his June quip at a press conference about the looters being as responsible for the death of George Floyd as the murderous police officers spoke volumes.

A pragmatism lies beyond the social justice imperative for defunding the police. Out of the nearly 18 million calls to the LAPD over the last decade, a Times report revealed that less than eight percent were for violent crimes. The majority were for traffic accidents and “minor disturbances.” In 2000, the LAPD total cost of operations was $1.2 billion; it has now ballooned to $3 billion-plus including overtime, and consumes over 50 percent of the city’s discretionary spending. As municipal revenues decline, it’s wise to slash bloated police budgets to divert non-emergency services towards trained professionals. The savings can be invested in housing, health care, anti-poverty programs, and education.

The underreported good news is that L.A. County’s violent crime rate is roughly one quarter of what is was in 1992. Despite a slight increase in the last two years, it remains near a 50-year low. While the police would love to take credit, there’s been a similar drop in many metropolitan areas. What’s glossed over is that the spikes of the ‘80s and ‘90s were heavily due to the ravages of the crack trade. Yet as the city has gotten safer, our style of policing, sentencing, and legal code remain racist and obsolete remnants of the tough-on-crime era. This is why many progressives have united against D.A. Lacey, who is up for reelection in November and whose campaign has been propped up by multiple police unions. During her tenure, her office has sent 22 people to death row — all people of color. Under her aegis, they have manipulated antiquated gang statutes and wielded gang enhancements to increase mass incarceration. To Abdullah, Lacey is inarguably the most corrupt and problematic D.A. in the country:

“When you look at the sheer volume of murders at the hands of the police, there’s nowhere else that even begins to rival L.A. County’s number. She’s an elected official who refuses to be held accountable,” says Abdullah. “There have been sexual misconduct cases in her department and in several instances, the victims have been transferred out, and the perpetrators were even advanced in their career. She has to go.”

This recalcitrance towards reform has left some on the left to conclude that police abolition is the only meaningful solution. That doesn’t mean a lack of community safety, but rather, it reflects the need for new organizations conducive to 21st Century values and basic human rights. After all, these are historically corrupt syndicates directed by powerful unions beholden only to the thin blue line. Los Angeles Police Protective League spokesman, Jamie McBride, is a Bigfoot Bjornsen-type hobgoblin who, when faced with possible budget cuts to the LAPD, called Garcetti “mentally unstable.” Of course, he also posts Facebook videos yearning for the “good old days” when cops freely body slammed and tasered Black and Latino suspects. Decades of would-be rehabilitation have done little good: by all accounts, the LAPD and L.A. County Sheriff’s Department remain paramilitary organizations founded on white supremacy, gleeful violence, and a code of omerta.

Somehow, the chief mutant of the Suicide Squad is Los Angeles County Sheriff Alex Villanueva. Rightfully called “The Donald Trump of law enforcement,” Villanueva was a lightly regarded lieutenant who narrowly won a 2018 election by touting himself as a Democrat reformer who would kick ICE out of county jails. It was only the first of many mistruths. Technically, ICE is no longer “inside” the jails, but deportation transfers between L.A. law enforcement and ICE still exist. They’re now conducted through intermediaries, 80 feet away from the original handover spot. Villanueva has rehired a deputy fired for domestic abuse, ignored court-ordered subpoenas, and flouted reasonable attempts from the County Board of Supervisors to reign in his abuses of power. When the Office of Inspector General accessed confidential personnel files of Villanueva and other top brass, the Sheriff shot back by launching a criminal investigation into the watchdog agency.

“The Sheriff keeps on describing himself as a ‘progressive,’ but he’s more problematic than any sheriff that I’ve known,” says the august County Supervisor, Sheila Kuehl. “We have significantly cut the budget — not to zero, but the Sheriff’s department took the biggest hit, an 8 percent curtailment. He stands to lose between 400 and 700 deputies. Even before the public calls for defunding, we were already trying to right-size the department. ”

While reformation attempts have largely focused on the LAPD, the Sheriff’s Department has racked up arguably an even more startling record of atrocities. The largest sheriff’s department in the country and the fourth-largest law enforcement agency overall, the LASD siphons away a yearly budget of roughly $3.5 billion. Somehow, a civilian oversight commission wasn’t created until 2016, two full years after former Sheriff Lee Baca resigned amid allegations of sheriff abuses in the county jails. (Today, he withers away in a federal prison on charges of obstructing an FBI investigation into these abuses.) In 2018, the L.A. Times published damning revelations that the LASD had run a vast racial profiling scheme on Interstate 5, pulling over a heavily disproportionate amount of Latinx drivers in search of drugs. And at the moment, the Feds are investigating a secret society of tattooed L.A. Sheriff’s gang members, one of which a judge once referred to as a “neo-Nazi white supremacist gang.”

The LAPD have worn mandated body cams since the middle of the last decade, but so far, the Sheriffs have eluded them. Villanueva blames it on the Supervisors, but Kuehl says that the chief hold up is that Villanueva is demanding that deputies be able to watch the footage first before being forced to turn it over to investigators. Villanueva is up for reelection in 2022; a better future requires not just calls for defunding the police, but a suitable candidate to defeat him. 

Despite the grim times, a rare beacon of light emanated from a July Board of Supervisors vote to explore what it would take to close downtown’s hellish Men’s Central Jail within the year ­— a place that the ACLU famously described as “a modern-day medieval dungeon, a dank, windowless place where prisoners live in fear of retaliation, and abuse apparently goes unchecked.” It remains unclear what will replace it — and bureaucratic wrangling and delays are certainly inevitable — but it’s a major first step towards building a more humane system.

“At least half the people currently in jail don’t need to be there,” Kuehl says, referring to the high percentage of the jail population that consists of the chronically homeless, mentally ill, and chemically addicted. “We want them diverted, but that means really stepping up the planning to create beds for those with mental health and substance abuse problems. In the meantime, we’ve started downsizing the contract with the jail.”

If the fixation on the police appears monomaniacal to outsiders, a closer examination reveals how entrenched law enforcement has become in the machinations of city politics. One of the most prominent flanks of the progressive movement of the last few years has revolved around the push to cancel the 2028 Summer Olympics. As it stands, the private sector has agreed to foot the bill, but the city of L.A. is set to pay the first $250 million of cost overruns.

“Having 2028 on the calendar threatens to undo all the work done to defund the police and will only increase surveillance,” says Spike Friedman, an organizer with Ground Game L.A. and NOlympics L.A., the latter of which is a grassroots group aimed at dismantling the looming event. “The LAPD has said they need 3,000 more full-time officers. It requires coordination between the federal and local government that allows ICE to get their tendrils into L.A. in ways above and beyond what we’ve ever seen. It will be an accelerator of mass displacement.” 

There are so many pressing problems that it can be difficult to know where to begin or end. So many that they didn’t fit into this article: the crimes of wage theft and the failure to close down the Aliso Canyon oil field; our mass transit remains insufficient; our public schools woefully underfunded; the pandemic response has been disgraceful; and the influencers and YouTubers who hike Runyon Canyon continue to exist.

In its failures, L.A. is inextricable from the incendiary madness of a society rooted in greed and racism, both deceptive and overt. A crumbling republic led by a doddering bronzed chickenhead, policed by petulant sadists, and balkanized by ghoulish propaganda networks. A gleefully unequal and paranoid tomb squandering trillions on futile militarism while letting its own citizens frantically crowdfund to pay off medical debt. There are hundreds of thousands dead from a pandemic, their grieving families unable to even bid farewell with a proper funeral — largely due to the incompetence that began at the top but has ensnared nearly every elected official. It is supposed to be different, but too often that illusion is just slick marketing. Maybe this time things will change, that this next generation can fix the gilded lunacy and asphyxiating prejudice that has triggered our swift decline. 

There are no easy solutions, but the only conceivable fixes require organization, intense commitment, and the messianic belief in the possibility of redemption. L.A. not only needs a new generation of incorruptible and creative politicians, it needs righteous-minded housing authority executives and urban planners, parks commissioners and homeless services workers — a desire to revitalize a lifeless civil service trapped in bureaucratic languor. 

The institutions of the past are irrelevant. Without new ones to replace them, there will eventually be nothing. And it will always have to be the people to change things, because if not, it will be the CEOs and the sheriffs. Eventually, there will be no more chances, the situation will erode to where there is no path of return. In that case, there is only forward.

The post Policy of Truth appeared first on theLAnd.

History didn’t just absolve Mike Davis, it affirmed his clairvoyance. In 1990, his dystopian L.A. touchstone, “City of Quartz,” anticipated the uprising that followed two years later.

Its unofficial sequel, Ecology of Fear, stated the case for letting Malibu burn, which induced hemorrhaging in real estate tycoons but now reads like a harbinger for the infernal ravages of each fire season. Meanwhile the 2005 tocsin, The Monster at Our Door, interpreted the Avian Bird Flu as an omen of the pandemic that pillaged the globe this year.

Nearly everything else in the Marxist historian’s one-man urbanist canon has presaged the dire predicaments that Angelenos now face. There are polemics against winner-take-all globalization and the delirious cruelty of late capitalism; a structurally racist criminal justice system, state-sanctioned environmental atrocities, and a cancerous police apparatus; indictments of cash-rat developers and corrupt politicians displacing entire neighborhoods to build gentrifier starter pack condos with Chipotle’s on the ground floor. It earned Davis the nickname, the “dark prophet of doom” — a backhanded compliment confusing his righteous anger, serrated prose, and rigorous scholarship, for chimerical paranoia.

Literary fame arrived as somewhat of an accident. Davis’s biography reads like a modern-day Jack London or Upton Sinclair. He was born in Fontana in 1946, around the time that the Hells Angels spawned from that one-time steel capital of the West Coast. His father, a meat cutter originally from the Welsh-speaking farms of rural Ohio, eventually resettled the family in the El Cajon Valley, just east of San Diego. His mother was a tough Irish woman from Columbus, Ohio, who bestowed her son with a fighting constitution. The working class household was Catholic and the only books were the Bible and Readers Digest.  Amidst these conservative environs, the pre-adolescent Davis briefly became a Cold War fanatic and joined the Devil Pups — the Marine Corps’ version of the Boy Scouts.

At 16, a near-fatal coronary sidelined Davis’s father, which led him to drop out of school to toil in the local slaughterhouse. Enamored with Kerouac, bullfighting, and drag racing, the brooding teenager may have wound up the world’s most cerebral butcher had it not been for a Damascus moment in 1962 — when his cousin Carol and her husband, a Black warehouse worker named Jim Stone, took the cloistered and crewcutted kid to a protest against San Diego’s all-white Bank of America branch. The mythic tale of survival involves a bunch of redneck sailors dousing them in lighter fluid and threatening cremation. Under the aegis of Stone, an inspired Davis returned to high school, graduated as one of three valedictorians, and began working for the San Diego office of the Congress of Racial Equality.

A full scholarship to Reed College didn’t pan out. Alienated and insecure amongst the hippie scions of the upper crust, Davis got expelled for illegally living in his girlfriend’s dorm. But during that stint in the Pacific Northwest, he read the Port Huron Statement, the Ur-manifesto of New Left radicalism. The next thing he knew, he was on a bus from Portland to New York City to accept a job with the manifesto’s authors, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). The rest of the ‘60s was spent bouncing between blue-collar gigs and grassroots activism. Davis found himself on the frontlines of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. He burned his draft card in Oakland to protest LBJ sending troops to the Dominican Republic, ducked homicidal assaults from Cicero bigots at the Chicago open housing march led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and organized demonstrations against Dow Chemical, then manufacturing napalm in Torrance. The President of the SDS reportedly told Davis that he was the organization’s “most meat-and-potatoes-guy.”

About two months before the Watts Rebellion, the SDS tasked him with organizing direct actions against the construction of the 210 Freeway slated to destroy large swaths of a historically Black section of Pasadena. The leader of the movement turned out to be Jackie Robinson’s mom in her last years of life. She met Davis for coffee, gently put her hand on his knee, and told him that they had it all under control, and that he should “organize white kids against racism or something.”

After a stint in Austin, Davis resettled in L.A., receiving mentorship from the city’s “Red Queen,” Dorothy Healey, and a job managing the Communist Party bookstore on 7th Street, located within walking distance of the F.B.I.’s offices. Healey soon fired him for chasing a snooping Soviet cultural attaché out of the stacks, the closest that Davis could come to avenging Stalin’s murder of Trotsky. In these years, there would be five politically-related arrests on charges of unlawful assembly, battery, armed robbery, and carrying a concealed weapon. None stuck.

By the dawn of the ’70s, Davis lived in a dilapidated Victorian east of downtown and became a fixture at every major protest — including the Chicano Moratorium, broken up by a deranged horde of sheriff’s deputies, one of whom murdered Los Angeles Times journalist Rubén Salazar by “accidentally” ripping off a chunk of his skull with a tear gas projectile. For money, Davis hauled Barbie dolls all over Southern California in an 18-wheeler tractor-trailer, and worked as a Gray Line tour bus guide. The excursions included trips to Disneyland, the Farmer’s Market, and “Hollywood by Night,” but Davis started conducting subterranean historical voyages that contained vignettes about the bombing of the L.A. Times building by pro-labor subversives, and L.A’s little-known Chinese Massacre of 1871, one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history.

There are two stories floating around about how Davis wound up returning to college. Both involve the Teamsters-led tour bus driver’s strike of 1973. In the first version, Davis gets arrested and later fired for beating up a scab who drove a bus through a picket line. The other iteration involves the same ghoul trying to hit the strikers with a bus; but this time, Davis winds up in a room with 40 others, voting on whether or not they should each ante up $400 to hire a hitman to kill the head of the strikebreakers. Davis gave the speech of his life in opposition to the plot, but was voted down 39 to 1. This anecdote ends with the hitman getting arrested for drunk driving, and thus, dooming the plot. It seems 90 percent true, but 100 percent honest. Davis has admitted to being “something of a fabulist,” but it’s just part and parcel of his seanchaí heritage. All that matters is that somehow, Davis matriculated at UCLA as a 28-year old “functionally illiterate” freshman, studying economics and history.

After three years in Westwood, Davis decamped for a fellowship in Scotland, which led him to London and Belfast. These were the peak years of The Troubles and Davis developed ties to Sinn Féin, agitated for Northern Irish independence, bunkered down in the Shankill Road libraries to write about the 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots, and was briefly kidnapped by a leader of the Ulster Defence Association, a paramilitary militia loyal to the crown. (“He wanted to show me that it was the Protestants who fought the army, not the fucking Teagues!”)

Eventually, Davis returned to the home of the Bruins to complete his bachelors and begin PhD studies in history. Yet restlessness was the central animating force of his life, and so he moved back to London to collaborate with the cadre of brilliant socialists behind the New Left Review — helping to establish the Haymarket series for Verso, the publishing arm of the famed political journal (Davis concentrated on radical studies of American politics and culture). This saga ends with him releasing his first book, 1986’s searing anti-Reaganite salvo, Prisoners of the American Dream.

Exhausted with London intellectuals, Davis attempted to finish his doctorate in L.A. But UCLA refused to accept an early version of City of Quartz as his thesis, causing a return to truck driving. This time, Davis hauled blanket-wrapped furniture to Las Vegas in a dangerous Mack cab for substandard wages, until a financially crippling $600 ticket from a CHP inspector led him to shut off the engine. A vagabond academic career followed, as he floated from school to school as an adjunct professor. Then City of Quartz dropped, the ’92 Riots tore L.A. asunder, and suddenly, his tome became everyone’s favorite Rosetta Stone for translating the civic unrest.

You can’t overstate the importance of City of Quartz. Even 30 years later, it remains the best socio-political critique of modern L.A, the first book you’d recommend to someone seeking to understand the dark nativist currents and unyielding avarice that still shape a city so easily stereotyped but rarely understood. It is noir to the core, triangulating Raymond Chandler and Carey McWilliams, Nathaniel West with a knife to the throat but filtered through the progressive economic treatises of 19th Century reformer, Henry George. With hard-boiled clarity, Davis revealed the unseen fault lines rupturing underneath the surface, observed hairline fractures in ostensibly stable facades, and offered a damning history of the malevolent forces that led to our cataclysmic discontent.

For both amateurs and academics, it is Davis’s lens through which we most clearly glimpse this slippery, subtropical metropolis. He’s the closest thing that L.A. has to a Lawrence Ferlinghetti or Gary Snyder. Even Vince Staples insisted that I read City of Quartz had I not already. As the Walter Benjamin epigraph cautions, these aren’t the superficial inducements and exotic picaresque of the unfamiliar; this is the brutal complexity of the native son, who was somehow raised 125 miles to the southeast.

These days, Mike Davis doesn’t live far from where he grew up. The long-time lodestar and patron saint of progressive L.A. now resides in San Diego, on the fringes of a rapidly gentrifying district. He’s the type of person familiar with his neighbors and their personal histories: a former Togolese soccer player from Gabon who speaks Romanian because he played there professionally; a schoolteacher, a nurse, and a biker machinist who builds Predator aircrafts by day. 

In the aftermath of City of Quartz, Davis became one of the few remaining public intellectuals, but fittingly turned his back on a beckoning celebrity. There was a MacArthur “genius” grant that lavished him with over $300,000, which he blew on globetrotting and Spanish Civil War posters. He’s lectured all over North America, including local stints at UCR, UCI, and CalArts. Due to medical bills stemming from a pair of cancer diagnoses, Davis continues to teach at the University of San Diego. He attributes his ability to survive against steep medical odds to his old habit of running six miles a day.

I visited Davis last fall at the home he shares with his wife, the artist and professor, Alessandra Moctezuma, and their two teenage children (Davis has an Ireland-raised adult son and daughter from previous marriages). You don’t actually interview Davis as much as you absorb a series of Talmudic inquiries and rollicking Hibernian storytelling. He wears a short-sleeve button-up work shirt; his hair is grey and his eyes are iron blue, giving him a vague resemblance to the late Frasier actor, John Mahoney. Davis says that his nondescript looks give him the ability to safely blend in during chaos. But his eyes betray the sad truths of the old Irish poet: intense but kind, mischievous but fundamentally sincere. The platonic ideal of who you’d hope to conspire with over pints in an ancient Belfast pub. As I walk in the door, he offers a drink and jokingly compares himself to General Sternwood from Chandler’s The Big Sleep, who eagerly watches Bogart drink while yearning for the days when he would sip “champagne cold as Valley Forge…with about three ponies of Brandy under it.”

The Davis home is decorated exactly how you’d expect: cluttered with obscure tracts and artifacts of revolution. There are antique handbills advocating for the destruction of Czarist plutocrats, Teutonic capitalist oppressors, and the admonition to “Vote Spartacus in 1919.” Rosie the Riveter paraphernalia exists side-by-side with art-deco posters of Mexican cinema classics, and framed art commemorating the Paris communes of 1871. There are CDs of jazz greats and a portrait of Davis that an admirer sent.

“I should move this so it doesn’t look like a shrine,” he says jocularly.

I arrive that afternoon with his former CalArts student, the photographer Brian “B+” Cross, who wrote the seminal L.A. hip-hop oral history, It’s Not About a Salary, but only after Davis exhorted him to document what was then considered fringe culture. Our plan was to talk for an hour or two and take photos in the backyard, but we all wind up talking well past twilight, and I don’t even get to ask a quarter of my questions.

In April, Davis and I reconnect for a second conversation; this time over Zoom amidst the anxious monotony of the first shelter-in-place order. By now, the publication of his latest work loomed. A collaboration with the professor and journalist, Jon Wiener, Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, is practically as essential as City of Quartz. Subverting inherited myths and false narratives, the pair chronicle the underground movements and activism that defined the city during the tumult of the Aquarian Age. It concentrates on the lesser heard histories of Chicano activists at Eastside high schools, the Black Panthers and Ron (now Maulana) Karenga’s US Organization, the youth protests on the Sunset Strip, the Watts renaissance, and the gay rights movement that began at Silver Lake’s Black Cat Tavern.

Davis claims that Set the Night on Fire is as close to a memoir as we’ll ever get, which is fitting because it’s not even remotely autobiography; rather, it’s a love letter to organization and the idea of collective struggle. For someone so frequently and incorrectly branded a pessimist, there is a deceptive optimism to Davis. The constant thread throughout his life is his formidable ambition to create a more equitable and humane world — and with that comes the underlying hope that such a thing is even possible. He’s stated that the book was written so that the chain will remain unbroken, to inspire this new generation of activists with the stories of courageous unsung heroes from a half-century ago. In that same window of history, it’s hard to think of anyone who has been a better spiritual compass than Davis, a writer of fearlessness and integrity, whose timeless ideas and prescient warnings remind us to keep fighting for the future that needs to exist.

City of Quartz turns 30 this year. It still feels strikingly relevant to the issues facing L.A. When you wrote it, did you have any idea that it would continue to seem prophetic this many years later?

It’s an interesting thing about prophecy. People are regarded to be prophets simply because they keep their ears open on the streets. Not long after the book came out, I was arrested at a “Justice for Janitors” demonstration. There had been an appalling police attack where a woman lost her baby at a legal and peaceful march. I got arrested for challenging an officer to fight. What was I yelling at him? “Tiananmen Square!!! Tiananmen Square!!!”

I’m used to being in the back of cop cars and hearing cops talk. So these guys are transferring me down to the 77th Street Station, and were talking about this Armageddon scenario: “The gangs have Uzis. We’re going to end up fighting in the streets. It’s going to be worse than Vietnam.”

This was before the ‘92 riots. I’m talking like late ‘91. Every kid on the streets of South Central knew something was coming. Then when it came down, it was generally nothing like what people understood it as. I was down at a meeting with gang kids on Crenshaw and someone said, “we get beaten like dogs, like how Rodney King was, all the time!”

All these news crews and journalists were around and didn’t have a clue where to go; they were scared silly. Meanwhile, I’m out in the streets while all the stuff is going on, buying looted goods. I did the same thing in ‘65, violating curfews and ended up furnishing the whole SDS office. I just went out on Vermont and people were out there taking orders like a restaurant. “What do ya need?” I said, “I need typewriters…lots of typewriters.” They were selling IBM typewriters for $25 apiece. I don’t know what I was wandering off into. I have seen such strange things.

In ‘92, I immediately moved on from Parker Center. I called up my best friend Ron Schneck. He’s a madman, but reasonably rational about things. I said, “I wanna drive around South Central.” He says, “Not on your life, don’t make me do this man.” But he can’t resist. We got out immediately and drive down on Slauson, just west of Central — the street that has the huge power lines. We see a gas station and it’s on fire. We get out of the car and spot a group of Black guys arguing. I have a great advantage of being an entirely nondescript person. One of my students once actually offered me money because he thought I was homeless. I’m invisible to a degree that’s entirely surprising in situations like that.

We start talking to these guys, and it turns out they’re betting if the gas station is going to blow up or not. They got very irate when it doesn’t. At another point, we almost get hit by this kid on a skateboard with an enormous load of booze and a maniacal smile on his face. In ‘65, I actually saw looting Germans on Vermont, right near USC. That used to be a German neighborhood with a German language theater, and there were poor Germans, too. So on that second day in August ‘65, everyone started looting, white and Black. In that neighborhood, they looted while speaking to each other in German. The same thing happened in Detroit; there were a whole lot of Polish people arrested.

Your writing on ‘92 is some of the rare writing from the time that described how multi-ethnic it actually was.

‘65 was more of a unitary phenomenon. It was a general uprising of Black people, to which you could attach one explanation. ‘92 wasn’t like that at all. Cuban businesses were being burned down by Mexican kids. In Compton, they sent Marines up from Pendleton because Black kids from Compton were burning down a mall that was owned by wealthy Black people who lived outside the community. And it was a whole separate thing in Pomona and Pasadena. The majority of the people arrested, according to the ACLU, were arrested north of the Santa Monica Freeway. They were almost two-thirds Hispanic.

People forget that Frederick’s of Hollywood was looted.

They stole Madonna’s bra. A gay friend of mine joked to me, “The gay community did that one.”

In all the remembrances and documentaries, the action understandably is centered around South Central, Watts, and Compton, but it’s always strange to consider that all the stores around the Beverly Center were being emptied out too.

You could only wish they had gotten the Beverly Center. Another one of my memories from ‘92 is that I was down in Pico-Union on the second day, and things were burning at Andrew’s Hardware Store on 7th Street. There’s an L-shaped mini mall across the street and it’s on fire, and there’s a fire crew desperately trying to fight it. In the mini-mall, there’s a Payless Shoes and a dress shop, but in the corner, there’s a donut place.  I had run into my friend Ralph, who was a homeless folk artist from the Belmont Tunnel, and I ask him, “Is there anything you need?” And he says, “Yeah man. We need cigarettes. Lots of cigarettes.”

I’m in Pico-Union, but not for the purpose of honest journalism or anything else. Having been so successful getting typewriters in ‘65, I was looking for a big box of cigarettes. I’m talking to someone about this, and there’s some Catholic high school girls and some young guys that are looking at the Payless with the clothes in front of it, and they’re about to try to enter. All of a sudden, the LAPD black-and-white whips in in front of the donut stand, and the guy leans up against the car — real hardcore, not like the wimps He’s one of the mightier LAPD guys. He looks at the people getting ready to run, and all he says is, “Leave the fucking donuts alone!!” I go back the next day, and the building across the street has been totally ignored by the police. The shoe store’s looted; the mini mall is burned to the ground, but the Cambodian donut place was untouched and still in business. This is something that really wasn’t reported, because the police went on strike. They didn’t do shit.

I always thought it was rooted in the deep-seated enmity between Police Chief Daryl Gates and Mayor Tom Bradley.

No, they deliberately went on strike. In the Korean community, the Koreans were completely outraged. That’s why they ended up becoming vigilantes, since the cops wouldn’t lift a finger. Later that night, I’m down near Adams, near USC, and I run into Bill Boyarsky from the Times. We’re standing there watching this group of mainly younger cops, and they’re being stoned by a handful of kids. These cops looked terrified. It’s not the LAPD of 1965, who would’ve probably murdered half of these kids. That’s the thing, a minimal police presence would have saved half of the property that was destroyed — not that I’m opposed to some of it — but when it comes to ethnic small businesses…

I’ve always wondered if more civil unrest would actually be the most valuable thing to thwart gentrification, just because you’d scare off the “luxury” developers.

The one thing that my wife and I always fight about is artists moving into Barrio Logan [a traditional Chicano neighborhood in San Diego]. My position is that you need murderous street gangs to kill the first guy you see who tries to move to the block, then you’ll have a chance to stop gentrification. Here’s this great Chicano neighborhood with this fantastic history defending itself right next to downtown. But the minute the first studio opens…

Ultimately, urban reform is impossible unless you control property markets. There are even examples in the United States where that’s been done: big parks and some zoning. If you go to Canada, they have Green Belts to control reform in the city and to prevent sprawl. But you have to take on the private real estate market, not just developers for this and that, and come in with ideas for creation… If you want to see the urban crisis in L.A. these days, go to the Inland Empire, go to Pomona.

You lived in Echo Park during the 90s, right?

Angelino Heights, which was interesting because I was a tenant of — do you remember Eating Raoul? It’s a film that was turned into a comic book about these two murderous yuppies who hook up with this Chicano guy. They furnish him with bodies, and he grinds them up and sells them as burritos. I was living in this little ‘50s, one-room building that they’ve since torn down. It was really ramshackle, and there was a purposefully ramshackle Victorian next to me, which they used as the haunted house in Eating Raoul and Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” video.

Do you ever go to L.A. anymore?

Not really. Everything that meant something to me is gone.

Like what?

Rhino Records, the Midnight Special Bookstore, all the restaurants — the best one being this Hungarian restaurant next to [what was then] Shelly’s Manne-Hole. All the haunts, they’re gone.

There are definitely a lot of people trying to find a way to organize a coherent resistance to moneyed interests, real estate, and gentrification. Although until recently, it felt rather powerless to stop it.

The [impending] earthquake will reset the clock a bit, and give opportunities for normal cosmopolitan, poor communities.

When I talked to Ferlinghetti about it, he said that San Francisco “once felt like an offshore Republic, but now it’s a Bohemian theme park.”

Just like how New Orleans has become a chain theme park for Black music. The real music of the city, the bounce music, the project music, is gone.

You were active in working with some of the activists behind the ’92 gang truce between Bloods and Crips. How did that come about?

I’d gotten a $160,000 advance from Knopf for a book on the L.A. Riots. Then I sat down and had a long think about it because I’d been involved in support of various groups and stuff. I ended up knowing the mother of Damian Williams, who was one of the guys who beat up Reginald Denny. I knew the mother of the guy who started the gang truce.

Dewayne Holmes, right?

Dewayne’s cousin [Henry Peco] had been murdered by a white LAPD cop who stood over him in the Imperial Courts project and executed him on the ground. And he just walked a few blocks to the Jordan Downs and said, “Look guys, let’s hold this truce for one day.” They thought about it and said, “Okay, one day.” The truce began before the riots. Cops just turned their focus on taking down Dewayne. He organized a gang unity treaty between the three major gangs of Watts. A couple of older drug dealers working for the LAPD were trying to sell drugs in the Downs, basically setting up a police raid and Dewayne physically threw them out. He was indicted, charged with a felony, and convicted by an all-white jury in Torrance, despite the fact that there were 30 people who signed affidavits saying that it wasn’t Dewayne who did that. What really convicted him was his nickname in the Crips: Sniper.

Didn’t you used to take politicians through neighborhoods that they’d neglected?

I knew [Governor] Jerry Brown back then and he asked me to come with him on a trip there. We started the tour at a junior high school in South Central. One of the kids raises his hand and says, “why do you drive that little Japanese car? Don’t governors have big cars?’ Brown gets back in the car, slams the door, glares, and says, “I hate kids.” 

We went to Adams and Western. There’s a group of tired people waiting to go home on the bus. He rolls his window down and goes “Hi, I’m Jerry, Governor of California.” They just roll their eyes. It was totally bizarre and insane. I got Brown involved in Dewayne’s case. He went to the appeal. Dewayne was up there in Wayside at the time. Brown had apparently been pretty good to the sheriffs and police departments, but it didn’t help Dewayne at all.

In the course of this, I told Tom Hayden about it and when Dewayne got out a couple of years later, Tom hired him as a field representative. He was the only one on city council and really in L.A. politics, aside from [legendary L.A. priest and gang intervention activist] Father Greg Boyle, who understood the gang scene for what it really was. The climax of all this was that in ‘92, The New Yorker hired me to take Richard Avedon around L.A.. He was in town to photograph Ronald Reagan, and there’s this famous photograph in The New Yorker where Reagan’s just a blank slate. So I introduced Avedon to the gang truce guys and he took them back to the same studio on Melrose in Beverly Hills where he shot Reagan. I was thinking, “This could be really tricky.” But he composed them and shot them as the Burghers of Calais. These are the civic leaders of their community. They’re Roman statesmen. It was astonishing.

How did the gang truce guys receive Jerry Brown?

Well, I told Jerry Brown, “You gotta meet these guys, because they’re gonna tell you that they’ve carried out this social miracle, but it’s gonna go no further unless they get money to help.” There was a manifesto demanding everything from jobs to algebra in schools. I get Brown to agree to it. Where does he set up the meeting? At Frank Gehry’s office in Santa Barbara. So these guys came up, by this time some of them were almost famous, they had been in the news so often. I really thought somebody was going to shoot Frank. He didn’t understand a thing they said to him. I mean, Frank Gehry’s office? That was the worst possible choice. The meeting breaks up and Jerry comes over to one of the Bloods from Athens Park, who was a really magnificent looking guy who would do thousands of push-ups at the park every weekend. Jerry looks at his biceps and says, “Man, where do you work out?” He says in a very deep voice, “I go to the park every weekend with some guys and we do push-ups a lot.” Jerry Brown responds, “How did you get into doing all these push-ups?” “Well my cell mate burned himself alive up in Vacaville.”

Was it surreal being a long-time organizer and Marxist suddenly getting invited into the world of the L.A. power elite?

The scariest thing is that if you ever have the opportunity to meet the people who really make things go, you discover how fucking bizarre they all are. Brown is just a total space case. There’s something missing. [Former Mayor] Dick Riordan took me to the California Club when City of Quartz came out. He’s sitting there and he’s got a piece of lettuce dripping off his chin, and he says, “well, tell me about your book.” All he knew was that he’s a major figure in it. He tells me, “Oh, I’m meeting some Chinese businessmen later, maybe you want to stick around for that?” I explain to him, “I’m not getting involved.” The California Club…what are the chances that I’d get let into a place like that? So I say “Well, Dick, you’re actually the Darth Vader of the book.” He kind of chokes on his lettuce, like nice to meet you. I’ll show you out the door. You can hardly believe these people. So many of them are just absolute nincompoops.

It seems like the more powerful they are, the dumber they get.

When you meet someone like Father Greg Boyle, you remember them for the rest of your life. You’d really be glad you met a person like that. Or someone like [Spanish historian] Abel Paz. My daughter Roisin was living in Barcelona, and took me to meet him before he died. He was the last surviving member of CNT-FAI leadership. He was like 16 years old when he was [anarchist hero] Buenaventura Durruti’s sidekick, and was in Madrid when Durruti was killed; he eventually became his biographer. Barcelona is, in some ways, a really icky bourgeoisie city. He’s living in this run-down apartment. buying wine in half-gallon jugs and serving it out of cold bottles. I never spent an evening with someone whose humility so impressed me. When he died a few months later, about 200 people, most of them sons and daughters of the ‘30s anarchist movement, marched behind his coffin.

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What were the stories behind you getting arrested five times by the LAPD?

I sued them too. This was many years ago when me and my first wife were really young and were still commuting to L.A. from San Diego. We were at a Communist Party meeting on Barrington near Olympic, and got back into the car. Suddenly, these cars going 90 miles per hour were bearing right down on us. My car slams the breaks, it skids into the back of another car. In the meantime a guy in one of the cars is shooting at the first car. We’re terrified.

The next thing we know, a guy is standing over us with a gun. It turns out, he’s an off-duty cop who lives in the apartment, heard the gunshots, and came out. It turned out that two off-duty LAPD detectives made a pass at a woman at a bar, but the woman’s boyfriend slugged the guy. Apparently, they were chasing him, and they were going to murder him, just a couple of blocks away. Thankfully, a few uniformed cops showed up. We sued the LAPD and got a couple of grand out of it.

I even got a second payment from a “Justice for Janitors,” demonstration too. Their conduct was so outrageous that they had to pay everybody. I told the union that I’d give them all the money, but they told me to keep it. Everybody earned it that day. The next time I got arrested, it was at a Local 11 demonstration when they were trying to fire all the long-term employees at USC — all the catering workers and stuff. We sat down in Pershing Square in the middle of the street; It was [Maria Elena Durazo], a couple hotel workers, a couple staff members, and me; we all get arrested. The question is then: will they charge me or not? Everyone got a call to go to the City Attorney’s office, and I show up and there’s a deputy. I’ve had probation officers recommend to a judge that I spend a year in jail for nothing — for demonstrating. I don’t know what’s going to happen this time. I go in there and this judge says, “People like you have contributed so much to our city by your involvement in the cause of unions.”

It shows you the sea change that occurred as the unions took power. She did everything but put a medal on me. I had had a great night in jail with the workers from USC. I think only professor Laura Pulido of USC supported it. Were there any faculty out on the picket line getting arrested? I think not. USC is such a fucking evil place.

What led you to leave L.A.?

I was basically driven out of town. I couldn’t find any work. I was offered a job at USC and they rescinded it. Somebody discovered an old interview where I mentioned that in 1965, the W.E.B. Du Bois Club and SDS banded together to graffiti the campus. It ended up in the second page of the L.A. Times. $22,000 worth of vandalism. This became their excuse, so we’re basically forced out of the city.

Thanks to this improbable windfall of winning the MacArthur, I was able to get this job at Stony Brook [University]. I was happy. Great department, all radicals and I could get to the [New York City jazz club] Village Vanguard in two hours, which to me was a big deal. I was happy in New York, but Alessandra was deciding whether she wanted to have kids or not, and most of her family is around here in San Diego. She says, “There’s this job. I’m sure I have no chance of it, but if I get it, can we move to San Diego?” I say, “Of course, but I have to get a job in Southern California.” I’m totally unemployable and figure we’ll never get back. This is when Jon Wiener pulls a rabbit out of the hat, and I’m offered a full professorship at Irvine. I’m fucking sunk. There’s no way now that I could say that we weren’t going to go.

You were pretty famous at CalArts for your L.A. tours. What was on the itinerary?

Part of it was that you had to bring a bus ticket so you could prove that you’d taken the bus. I’d say, “We’re going to meet at 11 a.m. at the Watts Towers,” and they’d call and get the details for what buses to take. The European kids had no problem taking the bus. “The ghetto? It’s the first place I want to see in L.A.” But the rich L.A. kids? I had one kid go up to me like, “I don’t know where downtown is.” I’d say, “Understandable, what part of the East Coast are you from?” He said, “Beverly Hills?” I used the Belmont Tunnel because you could still break into it. It was a cheap stunt, but students always loved it, and they’d end up remembering it. You’d have to climb into this dark tunnel for almost a mile until you’re near Pershing Square, and then you’d turn the lights on for like two minutes. We’d do this at midnight on a Thursday. The neighborhood around it, [what was then known as] Crown Hill, was totally desolate — just crack-addicts and gangsters walking around. It looked maximally dangerous. Kids would come out of it feeling like they were street-smart.

The only person to get in any trouble was the Crown Prince of Fiji, right?

Well, the royalty of Fiji is huge. He was one of several princes, but he was very high up. The only time I got close to being fired was because of this. I told the kids to go out and go to bars and hang out. He ended up hanging out with some crack addicts.

Your father was raised in an entirely Welsh speaking community in Western Ohio. What was the story behind the town?

He was actually of the first generation not to speak Welsh. He was born in 1909, although he knew a lot of salacious things in Welsh like, “go to the outhouse!” It was founded in 1840; the last Welsh-speaking community in the United States, and they took all these millenarian tenets from a place in North Wales. My great-great grandfather built a famous log cabin in the town, and from its founding until the 1890s, it was totally Welsh. They’d hire schoolteachers from North Wales and had a famous little church that had an annual Welsh choral contest. There were about 115 people in the village.

My mother was a Mulligan and a Ryan. My grandfather, Jack Ryan, was a veteran of the Spanish-American war. When I used to teach U.S. History, which is something I never took in college myself, I would say to them, “The American century began at Santiago de Cuba on this day in 1898 — in one trench was my grandfather, Jack Ryan, and in the other trench was Fidel Castro’s father with the Galician volunteers.”

I’d regale students by getting them to think outside of books and the conventional concepts of history. I’d say that I knew a woman, who knew a man, who saw the emperor Napoleon. And that was Dorothy Healey’s mother, Barbara Nestor, who died at around 98. She grew up in Slovakia in a Jewish village outside of Bratislava, and the most famous man in the village was a veteran of the Austrian Army who had been at the surrender of Austerlitz. So she sat at his knee and heard these stories and I sat at her knee. A lot of them had grandparents who were my age or younger, and were blown away by the idea that I had a grandfather who fought in the last war of the 19th Century, or that I knew someone, who knew someone, who knew Napoleon.

In a recent podcast for The Nation, you were talking about how the pandemic will only hasten the onslaught of Amazon and the techno-elite, and further consolidate their power. What are the ways that people might mitigate those effects?

Amazon plays into classical questions raised at the beginning of the 20th century: What do you do with trusts? What do you do with monopolies? One wing of the progressive movement, and later the New Deal, said you bust them up. You use anti-trust legislation, which had been on the books for 20 or 30 years by the time Woodrow Wilson became President. But the other side of the progressive movement, and later in the New Deal, said no, you nationalize them. That question has reappeared in the case of Amazon because Amazon is an extraordinary creature due to their control over retail. They’re out there devouring small business and even franchises.

Even the post office, which might go out of business or insolvent due [in part] to government cuts and Amazon.

It will, particularly if Trump keeps attacking it. But I was also amazed to discover how many giant corporations are dependent on the Amazon Cloud for their computer services. Any way you look at it, Amazon has become an absolutely crucial infrastructure of our society, in the same way that gas pipelines, the energy system, and broadband are. For progressives, my recommendation is to first pass an excess-profits law, because this is something rooted in tradition. It was used by Wilson, it was used by Roosevelt, and it was used by Truman in the Korean War.

My second thing is that people on the left need to develop proposals about how to control public utilities. The progressive movement inside the Republican party and the Socialist party under Eugene Debs coincided over municipal and national ownership of utilities. This was their single most important demand, and that’s why Socialists supported the Owens Valley aqueduct because the [L.A.] Department of Water and Power became the alternative power utility. We have to take a similar approach to broadband and social media. Above all, we need to begin talking about Amazon as an irreplaceable, necessary part of our lives that can’t be controlled by Jeff Bezos. Particularly, a company run by a guy who won’t give facemasks or issue protections for workers.

I have friends who work for places like Instacart and they made it practically impossible to get company-supplied gloves and masks. The company put out a PR statement to look good, but then basically placed every barrier up imaginable to avoid actually helping their workers.

I don’t think there is a more potent and surreal symbol of the state failure than that on virtually the same day that the President was bragging about how we’re the greatest nation on Earth and have the greatest scientific and technological advancements, The New York Times devoted a page to instructions for surgical masks. My wife, who’s an artist, and a couple of her friends were in the other room sewing masks for nurse friends of theirs who had been unable to get surgical masks during the emergency. We’re back to the “handicraft” mode of production. It’s like we’re living in the 17th-Century, not the 21st.

What do you think are the things that the progressive wing of the Democratic party should be asking for in terms of additional stimulus and ways to redress the ever-increasing inequality?

It’s become urgent to aggregate the major proposals and major points of both Warren and the Sanders campaign into a real New Deal-type plan. In the meantime, it’s essential that the fight continues. The Sanders coalition needs to unite with the Warren delegates at the convention to ensure that the platform contains healthcare-for-all and other demands. There’s no reason to let Biden off the hook, and clearly, the only way he’s going to win is by galvanizing the Sanders base. The big question is will there be a convention? Or will we say we consider Biden coronated and let’s move on. It’s essential that the platform committee meet and there be a real debate about this. It seems a majority of delegates that Biden won in the deep South are African Americans and because polls consistently show that a majority of African Americans support Medicare-for-all, there are a lot of Biden delegates who would be sympathetic and would support this as well.

We’ve descended into a time where mass immiseration and hunger have returned on a large scale and unfortunately, I don’t think you can hope these conditions will change even with the end of the pandemic, even with a vaccine. The economy was prime for explosion anyway; this just detonated it.

What do you see are the long-term ramifications on the American city? Most are already totally unaffordable for working people and these new corporate giveaways only exacerbate the problem.

This is an extraordinary opportunity for developers, real estate, investment trusts, and so on to buy property. I was watching an interview the other day with a landlord in New York’s Chinatown. His family owned a big building, but it’s rent-controlled, so they depend on the businesses [the Chinese restaurants on the ground floor]. He said, “We’re just weeks away from liquidation. We’re going to lose everything.” You just know that looking over his shoulder is someone licking their chops to buy it up because prices will never be this low again.

There will be a liquidation of much of the class of small landlords. People who are renters will be forced out, and the urban real estate market will be restructured towards giant real estate trusts. Developers will have even more control over the city. The crisis is almost an extinction event for your neighborhood bistros and traditional small businesses, but it’s a huge business opportunity for those who have the wealth to move in and clean up.

The fear is that Los Angeles will turn into midtown Manhattan, where it’s just Chase banks, $15 salad emporiums, and CVS drugstores. On the local level, Los Angeles has been governed by either conservatives or spineless neo-liberal politicians. What do you think are the things that we should advocate for in terms of local public policy to ward off this cultural destruction?

Any profound urban reform is impossible as long as the cities are completely in the control of the market. I’m a follower of Henry George in that regard, the great California radical who thought the California economy was completely hobbled by landlordship. A municipal land bank would be a solution, but also an emergency break on gentrification and displacement. Right now, we have to escalate this struggle for rent control — this reframes it in a new way. This small business situation is just horrible. It’s going to just hollow out the city. We should be demanding that workers in the city — essential workers — receive priority and personal protection. I worry about the homeless, the undocumented populations, and those in the county jails. All the organizations in Los Angeles that are based on and struggle for essential human needs — that represent workers, renters, small homeowners, small business people — need to come out with an alternative program. There’s an American historian named Mark Naison, who wrote this great book on Communists in Harlem in the ‘30s. He’s been advocating for years that New York should do a survey of abandoned, little-used derelict buildings in the city, and use eminent domain or emergency laws to rehouse homeless people. In L.A., you’d find tons of these under-used or abandoned places. His proposal was that it was obscene to have hundreds of thousands of people on the street when you have the physical facilities to rehouse them.

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You also lived in New York, San Diego, and Austin during the ‘60s, but what was so special about L.A. that made you decide to devote your latest book to it?

It’s something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. I was involved in the Civil Rights movement in San Diego since age 16 and went on to work for SDS for some years; I was the first SDS organizer in Los Angeles. What’s always struck me about the depiction of the ‘60s is that it never tells the central story. It never talks about the real people who were in battle.

I’ve also realized that Los Angeles differed from other places and student movements. UCLA had one big blow up during the invasion of Cambodia, but otherwise student movements in Los Angeles were in working-class junior colleges and the two Cal-State systems. As I started to do research, it became apparent to me that the really exceptional thing about L.A. was the high school, and even junior high school kids. There were the Chicano blowouts in high schools, as well as the fact that all the Black schools in Los Angeles went on a strike. One of the biggest struggles took place in a junior high school — cops brought in to beat up 12-year-olds, and the 12-year-olds fought back.

When I started the project, my intention was to interview everybody I could find, but then I got sick and couldn’t travel anymore, and Jon Wiener, my co-author, saved the day. We had a natural division of labor; I worked on traditional narratives of Black and Brown liberation struggles, which were the real engine of the ‘60s struggles in L.A., and he wrote about counter-cultural institutions like the Los Angeles Free Press and the free health clinics of the Women’s movement.

I argue that there were several turning points within the ‘60s. I approach history like military history, it’s a battle, and the battle has alternative outcomes and possibilities. The battle takes place and reshapes the alternatives ahead. The crucial battle was carried out in Los Angeles in the ‘60s, and for us, the ‘60s includes up to Tom Bradley’s [mayoral] election in 1973.

When does L.A. in the ‘60s really begin for you?

In 1963, the United Civil Rights Committee was formed in Los Angeles. They tried to win victories across the board in education, housing, and employment for equal rights and integration. It failed and was followed by wide backlash that included Proposition 14, which repealed California’s fair housing law. That was the context in which the ‘65 Rebellion occurred, the other turning point.

Then, later in 1969, Tom Bradley was ahead in all the polls running against L.A.’s right-wing and increasingly racist mayor, Sam “the Man” Yorty. Then Yorty unleashed this over-the-top, George Wallace-type, racist campaign saying that if you like Tom Bradley, you’re putting Eldridge Cleaver in power. Bradley lost. That had huge consequences because it foreclosed the hope of winning the demands that had been raised in 1963, and again in the ’65 Rebellion — chances of winning them through this system.

It’s at the same time that Evelle Younger, the district attorney, had the LAPD and the F.B.I. jump on the Black Panther party with the strategy on how to destroy it from the outside and from the inside. It led to the shootout at the [L.A.] Black Panther party headquarters. If you look at the ‘60s that way, there are important strategic lessons that remain relevant and nothing excited me more than what happened last year with the teacher’s strike. On one hand, what teachers and students were fighting for were exactly the same issues that they were fighting for during the ‘60s — a plan to improve quality of education, to eradicate huge class loads, to fix high schools that seem designed to not graduate students of color. These are the same things they’re fighting for more than 50 years later.

The other thing that excited me so much about this successful struggle was it showed the existence of a culture of memory. Loads of kids turned out to be the grandkids of ‘60s activists. On the Eastside, kids know about the blowouts, they know about “El Movimiento.” On the Southside, kids are intensely interested in the Panthers, and that was shown in ’92 as well.

Definitely. I know rappers with Huey Newton tattoos. 2Pac was essentially Panther royalty.

There’s this continuity with the 60s, a surprising continuity in some ways compared to the popular culture of much of the city. The real function of writing this book is not to celebrate the counterculture and delve into the usual clichés or write about the leadership, but to do an actual movement history and plot the development of its ideas, tactics, strategy. While at the same time, doing this analysis of the reaction to it and the growth of a successful counter-revolution. In all important things, the movement was defeated in Los Angeles except in one way that no one could have predicted: the fact that tens of thousands of young people had been involved in a movement. Many of them carried on as activists in one way or another, and they passed it on to their kids.

What strikes you as markedly different between the activists of this generation versus those of the ‘60s?

In the first place, the often-overlooked activism in the high schools has continued, and with that, a couple of generations of blowouts over Prop 187 and over anti-immigrant laws. I have two kids in an inner-city high school and their friends are mainly Black and the children of Mexican, blue-collar workers. They’re a fantastic generation, not just in their values which are so advanced, but also in their militancy, their defiant spirit. That’s the volcano that’s still there.

Friends of mine on the left will go on for days about political correctness, identity politics, and their horrible experience with it; I actually think that’s trivial. The point is that this is about equal rights for everybody, and again, my younger kids’ generation are fiercely egalitarian about this.

What I find missing in the left as a whole, is the solidarity for the poor, ex-colonial world that was so defining for my generation, and then again in the late ‘70s and the ‘80s during Reagan’s Contra Wars in Central America. It became the hallmark of the large solidarity movements of that time.

Here we are in a situation, with the attack on civil rights, and the downward mobility of college graduates, and suddenly socialism is everywhere. Did you hear once during the primary debates, from either Warren or Bernie, any discussion of global poverty? The American lot has shaped itself unconsciously around this America First-ism, which is a cancer in our culture. Writing about the coronavirus and doing interviews about it, this is something I’ve been insistent about, and even provocative, because I take a very critical position on it. I haven’t heard anyone in the larger progressive movement talking about our responsibilities to Africa or the South Asian nations in terms of medical aid. The Obama administration at least pulled out all the stops on its mission to stop Ebola in Africa, but what have the Democrats proposed to do, now that the real killing season is beginning, in the slums of Africa and South Asia?

What gives you hope at this current moment of history?

I always get asked about hope, but hope has never been a category I’ve thought much about. I think the necessity of struggle does not depend on hope at all. This is partially because of where I grew up, in East San Diego County, and the fact that even in my own family there were Republicans. When other people in the ‘60s used to talk about the revolution, I’d say “In which country?”

I grew up used to being part of an embattled minority and now it’s a real cultural difference. I have a friend of mine in San Francisco who told me that he has never met a Republican. I still hang out with guys I went to second grade with, and I was recently down at the VFW in Campo, this little town on the border, for the memorial of a friend who had just died. I knew tons of Republicans and Trump supporters inside, so I don’t think you need rations of hope. What you need is a deep commitment to resistance and a fighting spirit and anger. Anybody who mortgages their activism to something like the success of a Sanders campaign, that isn’t a commitment.

On the other hand, it’s impossible for me to be bleak and pessimistic because in the ‘60s, I saw things that I thought were impossible. I saw the equivalent of social miracles; I discovered the bravery of ordinary people, which humbled me. Right now, we have examples of that everywhere. This is not a time for despair. We’re in the ring, and you have to be ready to go for as many rounds as it takes.

Bernie Sanders is probably the first genuine progressive to get that close to the Presidency since perhaps Henry Wallace. That’s a radical shift from you being described on Bill Moyers only a decade ago as the “last Socialist in America.”

In all of his public statements, he’s kept reminding his base that the struggle has just begun. Imagine if Bernie had won but was unable to take back the Senate. He and his agenda would be sitting there isolated in the White House with a 24/7 assault. Biden can win back the Senate because he can get the moderates, and it puts the position of the movement in a more powerful place, which is the permanent opposition inside and outside the political system. 

Above all, the continuation of the movement in the streets is imperative; we’re in the midst of one hell of a labor and civil rights upsurge. This event is radicalizing a broad section of the working class, and it’s possible now to argue for radical and socialist solutions.  Because of health bills, I’m back teaching at the University of San Diego, which is a large, expensive and fundamentally conservative, Catholic school. I was teaching athletes and kids in ROTC uniforms, but I was stunned to learn a majority of them supported Sanders. They were defiant and bitter over his defeat and I felt like here I am, trying to convince the breadcrumb fighters to support the social Democrats back in 1930. They don’t want to support Biden; it’s going to be really hard to get them to vote in November.

No one really likes Joe Biden, but at this point, it’s either that or the collapse of the Republic.

This should not be interpreted as a defeat. It all ends in victory. I was going to write something about the primary season, so I went back and looked at every state and I added in one side: Warren and Sanders as the left, and everybody else as the right. The only ones to the left of them would be the Bolsheviks, and I wasn’t sure how to define Yang.

At the end of the day, there is close to parity in the Democratic party between the progressives and the other side. Some states were progressive, the majority of his states were always 45-55. Progressives emerged from the primary season in a much stronger position than when they went in. The single accomplishment of the Sanders campaign in the primaries was the astonishing support that was created amongst blue-collar Latinos and their kids. That to me is a seismic shift.

It’s difficult to explain sometimes, but you have to fight the near while at the same time fighting the ultimate enemy. There are a million reasons to vote for Biden, while at the same time fighting him and the implied resurrection of the Democratic establishment. Fight him day-in and day-out, ensuring that if he wins, he will come into office having made commitments to the most essential demands of the Sanders campaign. That would give tremendous traction to not only the political system, but also outside of it in the streets. Force him into that and he will do this largely because he understands how little support he has from people under 40.

I see this as an extraordinary tragedy for ordinary people in this country, but it opens up historical possibilities that we haven’t seen in a very long time, and are different from those of the ‘60s. We’re in a country where young people of color have so much more social weight than before.

Ecology of Fear is nearing its 20th anniversary. Why do you think it’s had such a sustained effect on the psychological consciousness of Los Angeles?

I considered Ecology of Fear to be an example of failed writing, in the sense that it was interpreted by my critics to be the opposite of what I was trying to say. For instance, I got accused by a prominent L.A. writer of “disaster pornography,” especially the chapter where I read every disaster novel in California. What I was trying to do was show that consistently, the subjects of these books are racist ones, but it wasn’t seen like that.

However, the fundamental conditions continued; everything that blew up in 1992, the base conditions are there. Daryl Gates is gone, but the inequalities only deepened, forcing blue-collar people further and further east, over the hill into the Inland Empire. Within the city, there’s a huge population of people just like in 1992, that have no savings, no rent. We’re going to see an explosion of homelessness as a result of this.

There is also this inherent paranoia about nature in Southern California that began with a total misunderstanding of California as a Mediterranean landscape. People came with other expectations, so with the first earthquake and the first drought, paradise turns into hell on Earth. If I were to advocate for simple reform, it would be for a mandatory class in high school — a semester about the natural history of California. Before all of this, last year, I was contemplating writing something about what happens when it all falls apart, and what are the duties of the left. We’ve created a generation that’s defined itself by its radical stances and demand, but how will it deal with the catastrophic times ahead? I must confess, I’ve always seen catastrophic events ahead.

What has surprised you that didn’t come true about City of Quartz or Ecology of Fear?

What was unexpected was the incredible energy that the Latinization of Los Angeles has brought to its neighborhood and its landscape, and the reemergence of the set of values that are based on public space, the heart, and the outdoors. I wrote this book called Magical Urbanism, trying to draw attention to both the work of Chicano urbanists and Latino urbanists, which is being ignored mostly by people who consider themselves urban theorists.

But above all, this urban renaissance is imminent in the immigrant communities and communities of color in the United States. So suddenly, their emergence in L.A. seizes a social justice movement and an alternative urbanism. In City of Quartz, I did not foresee the growth of the progressive labor movement and it becoming a decisive factor in L.A. politics. I did get to participate in early parts of that, getting arrested with “Justice for Janitors” and then again with the hotel workers. Just the marvelous rank-and-file and people, and the labor movement is still there. It has its problems and contradictions, but so many of the students that I had at Riverside had parents that were involved in one campaign or another, or were even union activists. This has been the profound change for the better in Los Angeles.

What advice would give to a young activist with dreams of changing the world?

We must never cede the streets. Never give up the streets.

This article appears in Vol. 2, Issue 2 of The LAnd. Click here to pre-order your copy.

The post theLAnd Interview: Mike Davis appeared first on theLAnd.

2Pac said that Inglewood was “always up to no good,” but it’s unclear whether Suge ever brought the late, great Makaveli around the Bloods who ran the blocks between Centinela and Florence, La Cienega to La Brea. Nonetheless, “California Love” offered the state an official anthem and the city of champions a battle cry. That was 1995; Rucci was a toddler, and North Inglewood was a war zone.

Nearly a quarter-century later, this lopsided rectangle of color-coordinated asphalt, strip malls and tribal pride has slowly begun to gentrify. Billions of dollars of NFL and Madison Square Garden Company money have poured into the area, leading to the usual cycle of displacement, creeping rents and artisanal Bloody Mary bars on Market Street. But a mile or two away, you can still find Rucci, 24, who survived biblical trials and tragedies to become the neighborhood’s biggest young rap star since Mack 10 first backyard boogied. And if you want to understand Rucci, you need to start at 722 W. Beach Ave.

This was his father Big Tako’s spot. Well, technically, it belonged to Rucci’s grandmother, a domestic worker who fled the apocalyptic violence of the Salvadoran Civil War around the time that death squad demagogue Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the assassination of Saint Óscar Romero. The murder of the beatified priest sent the Central American nation into chaos so grotesque that Joan Didion shrugged that “terror was the given of the place.” In response, refugees streamed north into the arrogant dawn of Reagan’s America. This torrent included Rucci’s grandmother, who survived a brutal journey full of mercenary coyotes and border control agents, to wind up working from sunup to well past sundown in the mansions of monied Angelenos — including Matthew McConaughey, if Rucci’s memory serves him right. ‘Pac wasn’t exaggerating. By the time the Martinez clan made it to Beach Avenue, the crack era was aflame and fast cash could be reaped if you were willing to risk running afoul of rival sets and the Inglewood Police Department, who were never too far away. Rucci’s father was born in El Salvador, where he lived with his grandparents until finally reuniting with his mom around his seventh birthday. She’d settled in the turf right near Rogers Park — a territory historically controlled by the Neighborhood Pirus (NHP) — an almost entirely black gang until Juan Martinez started wearing a red rag sometime during his later years at La Tijera Elementary. The alias, Big Tako, came almost immediately, a nod to his Latin American heritage. The spelling, well, that’s all Norf.

Racial tensions were rife between the NHP’s and the neighboring, mostly-Mexican Inglewood 13s. During a stint in Folsom, a rival gang member cut Tako’s scalp open. But in the North, the Martinezes’ and their new extended family lived harmoniously.

“I was raised around all black people,” Rucci explains. “Both of [my dads’] baby moms is black. My auntie’s baby daddy is black. My uncle’s baby momma is black…”

Shortly after dropping out of Inglewood High, Tako met Rucci’s mom, Angela, a Palmdale native who moved to Inglewood in her late teens. Rucci, née Juan Martinez Jr., was born in 1994. The joke was that his mom’s water broke at Rogers Park. One of Rucci’s first memories was going to Disneyland, age 3, standing up on one of the picnic tables in Mickey Mouse’s kingdom and rapping the lyrics to Suga Free’s, “Fly Fo Life.” “My mom didn’t know what to do!” Rucci laughs. “She was like, ‘Oh hell nah!”

Back then everyone called him “Midget,” a nod to his almost identical resemblance to his father and his uncle, Anthony “BD” Martinez, who rapped and made beats under the name, P-Funky.

“All the Martinezes look alike,” Rucci says. “Light-skinned and chubby with long hair.”

Last May’s “El Perro” opens with Rucci rapping: “I remember running around bad as fuck/only five but it ain’t seemed like I’d had enough/my pops put me in the corner when I was acting up/but that was so I ain’t see him sniff that line before he bagged it up.”

This is the residue of 722 W. Beach Ave. Rucci was roughly five when the Cashploitation opus Baller Blockin became the most influential straight-to-VHS film of the new millennium.

“We wanted to be like the Hot Boys so we turned Tako’s house into the projects,” remembers the rapper 2Eleven — a neighborhood hero close to Rucci’s father and uncle. “Rucci witnessed it all, but wasn’t old enough to be in the streets like that yet,” 2Eleven continues. “We knew not to have Midget on some crazy shit or else Pops was gonna go up. And none of us wanted that; his reputation was solidified. Rucci and his little brother Angel really were project babies.”

If you pulled up to 722 W. Beach, you had to be prepared for any outcome. Picture Pinocchio on Pleasure Island banging Piru. Girls in the back, dice games, brown-bagged 40s and backwoods. Homies crashed there for days, sometimes weeks. On the front porch, neighborhood sentinels sat on a couch, straight military, sometimes shooting at the encroaching enemy, sometimes heading out on retaliatory missions. Everyone sold dope back then, so crackheads staggered up and down the block. The candy spot was next door and they weren’t selling Now & Laters.

Other NHP nerve centers existed, but this was the only one that never got shut down. It wasn’t from a lack of police effort, either. There were too many raids to remember. Armed with automatic weapons and barking, drug-sniffing dogs, they’d break down the door and aim the barrel at Rucci’s grandmother, cussing her out, and screaming at everyone to hit the floor.

“You can’t be someone who just blossoms and wants to be from over here. I took too many losses for this shit,” Rucci explains. “As a baby, there’d be guns and bullets in the house. At age three, I knew to tell my dad when the police was coming.”

He depicts his father as an Italian mobster type, obsessed with valor and loyalty above money — someone for whom the code of omerta reigned absolute. His little brother, P-Funky, was an aspiring rapper and producer who once battled porn-star-cum-rapper Brian Pumper. Roughly a decade younger than Tako, he became Rucci’s best friend and helped nurtured his innate musical talent.

“I don’t like to brag,” Rucci says of his lyrical approach. “I just like showing people what’s going on.” Gangsta rap has long been demonized by those stressing the vulgarity of the hit singles over the agonizing consequences examined on deep cuts. Shrill outsiders who key in on “Nuthin’ But a G Thang” but ignore “Lil Ghetto Boy.” Like his stylistic predecessors (Snoop and Dre, 2Pac, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Westside Connection, Cash Money, Baton Rouge’s Boosie and Webbie), Rucci artfully hedges Hennessey-swilling, molly-popping bangers with mournful anthems consecrated by the struggle.

There are artists who swerve so far from tradition that decrypting their influences is like deciphering how sacramental animal glyphs cropped up in the sands of Southern Peru. Rucci isn’t one of them. If you listened to Doggystyle in 1993, closed your eyes, and imagined West Coast rap a quarter century later, you’d inevitably get something like Rucci’s 2017 mixtape, Dawgystyle.

It pays homage to the title and anthropomorphic canine lechery of the original cover, and swipes a hook from a Y2K-era Snoop and Kokane collaboration (“Pump Yo Breakz”). A G-Funk baby, Rucci mashes DJ Quik’s “Tonite” and Keith Sweat’s “Twisted” into an auto-tuned post-ratchet slapper built to raise the teen pregnancy rate within a five-square-mile radius of Randy’s Donuts. But like YG, 03 Greedo and even Kendrick (“Bumping Jeezy’s first album, looking distracted”), the slippery bounce and gelatinous shake of Southern rap unmistakably factors into Rucci’s DNA.

His honking “Hahhh” ad-lib comes from Juvenile and Cash Money; he brags about “gold in my mouth like a nigga from New Orleans.” When he shouts “Ayyy,” it smacks like a sinistral jab. There’s an almost Kobe Bryant-like ability to absorb the go-to moves of his inspirations and perfect them for the Instagram-snippet era. His voice bristles with a subtle volatility indebted to Boosie, mutating into a bayonet snarl, a high-pitched yawp, or an unleavened spitting-that-real rhythm.

The sound is raw, but the hooks are built for hollering at shows, twisted fingers optional. “That’s Norf” is a big-glock battle cry built for blood walking, but what makes Rucci special is his gift for conjuring songs like the tear-jerking but triumphant “Bodak Rucci.” The freestyled finale from last year’s El Perro starts with revelations of familial substance abuse before Rucci offers a bone-chilling confession about seeing his first dead body at age six. Many rappers have made similar admissions, but few would follow it up with visions of watching his father wipe off his brand-new shotgun. Or his uncle numbly explaining the need for self-defense to the first grader (“They was out of bounds, plus they don’t really like your daddy”). Rucci hears their laughter, calls them stone-cold killers and calmly goes back to sleep as though nothing happened.

“He raps about what he’s been through growing up over there,” says Big Tako. It’s not easy to get Tako on the phone. Real gangsters rarely do interviews and his reputation precedes him. He’s an outlaw shrouded in mystery and street lore. A rare triple-certified O.G. from his generation who remains alive, free, and without dirt on his name.

“Back then, gangsterism was at its peak,” Tako explains. “He saw a lot of things, but he also understands the concept of right and wrong. He stayed out of stupid shit, but knows that he represents Inglewood… where his family is from… the culture and history of what we represent.”

It’s something much more deeply rooted than an address. For much of his childhood, Rucci’s father cycled in and out of prison.

In an effort to protect her son from the chaos of the North, Rucci’s mother ensured that he went to Hawthorne elementary schools. He was extremely close to her and his stepfather, but ultimately, the siren lure of Beach Avenue remained too strong. Midget couldn’t help but want to be in the mix.

When it came time for high school, Rucci’s mother wisely sent him away, this time to Santa Monica, where he followed his older sister, an all-state softball player. It wasn’t like he was welcome in Inglewood anyway; his father’s reputation with school administrators was so bad that Rucci claims he was preemptively banned from enrolling. So the younger Martinez went from Beach to Ocean Avenue, which only sounds inconsequential if you’ve never been to L.A.. The project baby was suddenly playing defensive line on the well-funded football team, attending proms in lavish oceanfront hotels, befriended by rich kids. In the hopes that he’d stay out of trouble, his mom gave him $50 a day. Sometimes, he’d skip school and hang out at the Promenade or just take the Big Blue Bus up north past Montana to see what life was like among the real housewives of Brentwood.

“I had a bunch of white and Persian friends,” Rucci says, beaming. “Moms with fake titties in huge houses, not even tripping that we weren’t at school. It was like a movie.”

But the film’s first act ended abruptly in 2010. By then, Rucci’s grandmother had moved from Beach to nearby Victor Avenue, but trouble still followed. The Piru’s turned the new home into the second projects (“PS2”). With the NFL eyeing relocation and real-estate developers circling, the Inglewood police ratcheted up the injunctions and the intensity. Early one morning, a SWAT team ransacked his grandmother’s place, arresting Rucci’s father, uncle and several other NHP members on attempted murder charges. Rucci watched the handcuffs go on and heard the police sirens vanish in the distance.

This was around the time SaMo expelled the future hometown hero for carrying a gun to school. A day earlier, members of Santa Monica 13, a Sureño gang known as the Treces, had jumped him.

“The next day I saw them in the hallway and showed them the gun,” Rucci says. “I wasn’t gonna’ do nuthin’, but they told on me anyway.”

Meanwhile, his father, facing the traps of the system, copped a plea deal for five years in the penitentiary. Dead set on proving his innocence, Rucci’s uncle — the good son with no priors — took the case to trial. But this is America. Unless you can afford Johnnie Cochran’s holy ghost, good luck trying to beat a murder rap when you’re covered in tattoos and the prosecutors tar you as a sociopathic menace. The judge condemned him to 35-years-to-life, a state prison sentence that Rucci’s uncle still serves in Lancaster. In Inglewood, from that moment on, everything started to change.

For as long as anyone could remember, Inglewood was the red-bandanna’d stepchild to South Central and Compton. Outside the City of Champions, people really only knew Mack 10, the chicken hawk stomping from the Queen Street Bloods, longtime allies of NHP. On his debut single “Foe Life,” he boasted about putting “Inglewood on the map,” which he attempted to make a reality with his own Hoo-Bangin’ Records. His artists, Allfrumtha I and the Road Dawgs, earned local love, but little more. Later, the Westside Connection alum briefly signed to Cash Money, solidifying Birdman and Lil Wayne’s alliance with the Bloods.

Inglewood’s rap moment never materialized. Compton sustained its iron grip with The Game, somehow the only star to emerge from the land south of the 10 Freeway during the ‘00s. With many ‘90s gangbangers dead or in jail, a new generation emerged. Black and Latinx teenagers ditched low riders, Chucks and size XXL Dickies for skateboards, Vans and jerking. You might catch a Tec in their skinny jeans, but the hustle had evolved.

In the waning years of the last decade, rap group U-N-I earned heavy blog buzz and toured nationally but got lumped into the passing hipster rap fad and dissolved. There was 2Eleven, whose street cred was unimpeachable, but who got lost in the quagmire of Jeezy’s CTE imprint. The all-female jerk-rap quintet, Pink Dollaz, produced some of the best singles of the Myspace era, but never signed to a major. Skeme collaborated with TDE, ghost-wrote for Iggy Azalea, and built a sterling reputation, but never became a national phenomenon. Out of nowhere, the flamboyant FRosTydaSnowMann set the city on fire with a few 2016 singles, but quickly vanished into the Los Angeles County jail system. Amateur Twitter A&Rs often forget that rap is an inherently regional art form. In the clout-scrambled calculus of first week sales and streaming numbers, no Rap Caviar placement can match the respect of the blocks that raised you (although it might allow you to afford a house in the hills). Local legends are legends nonetheless. But you can’t ignore that Mack 10 is the only Inglewood rapper with a platinum plaque — which was all supposed to change with Sean Mackk.

“He was our 2Pac,” Rucci says about his former rap partner. “That was my big bro. He was the best scammer in the world, always coming around with these big-ass Cuban [link chains] on… fresh as fuck always…. always with 10 bands or more in his pocket.”

We’re inside 2Eleven’s Level Up store on Centinela, which everyone around here just calls “the Nela.” It’s a small streetwear boutique adjacent to a dry cleaners and a soul food restaurant. In the store window, there’s a mannequin in a tracksuit and a “Grind Till We Rich” jersey. Inglewood hats are next to “Bitch Relax” T-shirts and apparel from the Norf Clothing line that Mackk co-founded.

Rucci resembles a distant cousin of one of his original heroes, Bizzy Bone — his wavy hair pulled tight in a ponytail, beard and mustache carefully clipped. He wears a white and red Norf thermal and navy blue shorts. Crucifix earrings stud his ears, matching a cross tattoo on his left cheek. A tiny heartbreak symbol and a paw print linger next to his right eye.

The door is open and during a pause in the conversation, a man in a Panama hat loudly yells into his phone: “I’m from Detroit, baby, I know all about fish bones.”

Walking up to the mini-mall from the Centinela side, a narrow vertical banner advertises obituaries. Around the corner, a storefront next to Level Up has black and white obituary pamphlets scotch-taped inside a glass case. Teenagers martyred for causes that appear senseless and alien to outsiders, but depressingly familiar around here. Business doesn’t seem booming, but you don’t see these spots in Bel-Air either.

This corner was a safe haven to collectively mourn the tragedy of July 7, 2017. Early that morning, Sean Mackk was shot dead on an Inglewood cul-de-sac – an end like Mitch in Paid in Full. The flashy hustler, allegedly double-crossed by those close to him, dead at 24. No arrests made. “Sean was a leader to all the young homies,” 2Eleven says solemnly. “Always popular… getting all the girls. If someone asked who was who, you’d have pointed to him.”

Rucci and Mackk dropped solo music separately, but their lone MackkRucci album established them as the most ferocious L.A. rap duo since Tha Dogg Pound. Cameos came from nascent South Central stars G Perico, Drakeo and AzSwaye and a SuWoop Justice League of Joe Moses, 2Eleven and FreeAckrite. MackkRucci attacked like a two-headed Cerberus unchained, barking bloodthirsty murder raps over sinister minor chords that sounded like they were played with a scythe. Think Boosie and Webbie if you swapped out Waffle House for Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles.

Destiny doesn’t exist but inevitability does. Rucci and Mackk first met when the latter got put on the hood in Tako’s backyard around the time that “Wipe Me Down” dropped. A year older than Rucci, Mackk moved fast for his age. At 15, the Inglewood native was incarcerated in the same gang sweep that locked up Tako and his brother. After a short bid, Mackk, the son of “Getto Jam” rapper Domino, spent a year on the road as an affiliate of Waka Flocka’s West Coast Brick Squad. When he was finally back home, he reunited with Rucci, who had just taken his rap name to honor a paralyzed O.G. rolling around in garish wheelchair rims.

“I’ll never forget the first time Sean brought him into a session and I was like, ‘Oh nah, his dad is gonna call us out,’” 2Eleven says, laughing. “Rucci went the fuck off, and usually Sean was the type of nigga try to take over the session. He’s like, ‘This nigga’s name is Rucci.’ I was like, ‘No! His name is Midget!’”

“My dad used to get mad at me because I’d be hanging out with his homies, but I was always like, ‘These are my friends!’” Rucci counters. “All of us grew up together.”

For the last four years of his life, Mackk and Rucci were practically inseparable – a studio chemistry that could only come from fraternal kinship. For a while, they lived in a MackkRucci mansion in Westchester. If Mackk went out of town to hustle, they’d talk on the phone multiple times a day, right up until the very end.

“Even now, over a year later, I swear to god, I still don’t believe he’s gone,” Rucci shakes his head. “He used to be out of town all the time. I always feel like he’s about to call me and be like, ‘What are you doing?’”

Rucci’s creation myth begins when his father and uncle were taken from him. After the targeted killing of his surrogate brother, he became the Jon Snow of the other North, out for vengeance, governed by honor. The story might start with Beach Avenue, but Rucci always ends every interview with the same answer. Ask him if there’s anything that he wants to add and he’ll inevitably reply, “Sean Mackk forever.”

The cops have known Rucci since he was a baby, but that doesn’t mean that they’re friendly. They’ve memorized all his rap lyrics, but that doesn’t mean that they’re fans. Rogers Park is different now. Panoptic cameras survey almost the entire nine acres, including the baseball field and the basketball courts. There’s even a skate ramp where a white dude with dreads does a frontside 180 while a sleeveless bro walks a golden retriever past. In the ‘90s, both would’ve been terrified to head even a block south of Hollywood Park (RIP). But some things will never change. Rucci has just finished explaining why he rarely comes here anymore when, as if on cue, an Inglewood PD squad car slowly cruises into the parking lot where Rucci and a half-dozen friends are talking to the photographer and me. Had they arrived three minutes earlier, there might have been a major problem. For the purposes of high art, Rucci has been posing underneath the “No Smoking” sign, ripping the matte black plastic bong that he never leaves home without. It started as a way to conserve weed during times of scarcity, but now it’s evolved into aesthetic necessity. The police do not usually agree. The days of hanging out in the park without police persecution are long gone. Last month, they asked for his ID, snapped it in two and handed it back in pieces. No reason given.

“As soon as the police see me they’re going to start rapping my lyrics and throwing up a B,” Rucci sighs. “They’ll look out the window and say ‘Neighbors!’ If we say anything back to them, they’ll stop and get out. If we say nothing, they’ll keep driving.”

“Damn, they got the runner with them,” someone behind me says, as he points out the third police officer lurking in the backseat. “That’s when they bring a guy in the back to chase one of us down if we run away. Motherfucker looks like he be running marathons and shit.” The cops couldn’t look more out of central casting if they tried. The pair in the front seat sport sandy-brown mustaches and eyes like burnt quartz that make them look like pallbearers at Daryl Gates’ funeral. The runner looks like he owns every season of Cops on DVD.

I’d bet on Simi Valley home addresses for all three. Everyone looks around at each other, attempting to figure out the best plan of action. Wordlessly, confidently, Rucci strides over.

“They assholes,” someone mutters quietly. Everyone alternates between staring at their phones and monitoring the situation. If Rucci can’t defuse it, they’ll start searching us and none of this ends well.

This time it ends well.

“Man I’m the savior over here… they like me” Rucci says, half-sarcastic, but with a game-winning, buzzer-beater smile, as the cops leisurely exit the lot. Everyone congratulates him. “I swear to god, I’m Norf!” he crows.

“They was waiting for someone to run, too,” someone chimes in. “I ain’t gonna lie… if you run towards me I’m going to run away from you. Natural instinct nigga, you just go!”

“They’re looking for people that they don’t like,” another bystander says. “If they saw one of them, it would be over.”

“You probably saved us,” Natural Instinct tells the photographer. “They saw those cameras and don’t want no problems with the camera rolling.” Someone tells Rucci that they’re going to eat at Chili’s. He tells them to hold up for a minute. There’s still more left to say.

Winter is coming but it’s still hot out here. The adjective has been used multiple times this afternoon and it’s no weather reference. The war with the Treces rages unabated and it’s wise to keep a low profile.

“I didn’t ask for this shit.” Rucci flashes a resigned look. “My mom gets mad at me sometimes because I can’t go a lot of places with her, but I’m like, ‘It’s not because of the music! It’s because there are people who don’t like me.’”

These are the realities of being a North Side baby. The allegiances are generational and irrevocable; the consequences of betrayal are lethal. Peace might take hold, but it hasn’t yet. No margin of error exists when the other side is heavily strapped and you’re a prime target. And at this point, Rucci can’t afford to fail. He isn’t merely doing it for himself.

He’s doing it for the whole North, the team that surrounds him, the soil that raised him and those spirits at rest. Sean Mackk forever.

There are those still breathing, but scattered to the winds. Rucci’s uncle may spend the rest of his life locked up for a crime that he swears he didn’t commit. About a week after Mackk’s murder, Rucci’s brother Angel was shot in the head – but somehow survived. To complete this season in hell, ICE agents swarmed Big Tako’s house earlier this year and hauled him off to El Salvador — a country that he hadn’t visited since his childhood.

This is California, but the draconian policies of the Trump administration are everywhere. Tako, a legal American resident, tried to fight the deportation order, but as a convicted felon, his options were limited. As soon as he touched down in San Salvador, his troubles only multiplied. There are no Pirus there, just MS-13 and 18th Street, L.A. gangs re-formed by those condemned to a nation that they never knew. They start recruiting new members as soon as the bus pulls into the station, and you know they don’t take kindly to Salvadorans repping the wrong side.

“I have black gang tattoos, so as soon as I got there, the MS-13 and the 18s tried to kill me,” Tako says by phone. “It’s murderous. You look down the block and you just see death.”

After 30 days, Tako fled in search of refuge, traveling north through Mexico, winding up in Tijuana. He’s selling insurance now for Allstate, living close to the beach. There are worse outcomes, of course, but he’s barred from returning to America, where his children and entire family still reside.

“I’ve been shot, I’ve been in prison. I lived that life and escaped without getting killed, life in jail, or having smut on my name,” Tako adds. “My son looks at all these things and raps about it. It makes me feel good, even though I was portraying something that was wrong.”

If Tako is ever allowed – or able – to return, Rogers Park won’t even remotely be the same. They probably won’t be selling Moon Juice on Centinela anytime soon, but art galleries keep popping up on the perimeter of the set. Rents are growing exponentially.

In 2020, the Rams and Chargers start playing in Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park, a $5 billion development that arrives with an 8.5-million-square-foot entertainment center for business parks and condos. There’s going to be a 6,000-seat music venue, ballrooms, an outdoor movie screen, a lake with a water fountain, a luxury hotel, casino and an upscale shopping center. That’s Norf?

“The cops keep telling me, ‘The Bloods gonna be gone!’” Rucci says, his smile still bright and fixed. “I be like, ‘We gonna have a house party with the white people. I’m going to be at the Rams games with ‘em!’”

In the interim, Inglewood is still Inglewood. A short scrunched-face guy in a red “Dam-U-niversity” shirt walks up to Rucci, greeting him, filming him for his Instagram Story.

“You see what’s going on homie… what up Rucci, Norf… you know what time it is Blood… Woop woop… We in Rogers putting on for the city.” Rucci throws up the set for the camera and keeps talking. There is a certain preternatural wisdom to him, the sort that you can only get from seeing too much too young, and recognizing the ability to separate what’s crucial from what’s mere posturing. He’s a natural peacemaker, handling the politics between sides, carefully navigating the myriad sects and affiliations of L.A. gangsta rap – a labyrinth unto itself, but one Rucci was born into and seems destined to conquer.

If Rucci writes songs that transcend the regional vortex of Southern California gangsta rap, everything figures to fall into place. Hood politics have forced him to be around here less, but his career has begun to ignite nationally. He recently completed a U.S. tour with Shoreline Mafia and followed it up with spot dates up and down the West Coast. He played Rolling Loud too. Over the last 13 months, he’s released four projects (three solo, one in collaboration with 1TakeJay and AzChike), with more on the way. The labels keep calling, but no deal is yet in place. If you ask those close to him, they’ll tell you that something changed in Rucci when Sean Mackk died. No one wants to lapse into spiritual clichés, but the gist is that Rucci absorbed an even greater intensity, an awareness that he has to make it for both of them now. He’s become equally adept at writing fun party slappers and ferocious pain rap dirges, gangsta rap indebted to history but hounded by the demons of the present.

In person, he’s sanguine, determined not to let his enemies get him down. He still dreams about Sean Mackk all the time, but insists that what’s most important is staying positive – never letting anyone think for a second that he can’t cope. He didn’t survive all this just to lose.

“I’m just here to put my name in the pavement, bro,” Rucci says, his voice rising above the din of the airplanes on their flight path to LAX. “It’s about being different and confident and real,” he adds. “I’m doing it for everybody around me and I want to let people know that I’m here to stay. Of course it’s on me to keep growing and to get there, but I got so much confidence in myself.”

His last syllables linger like a smoke ring. Silence screams for a few seconds, until someone mentions Chili’s again. Time to go eat. Goodbyes are exchanged, daps, pounds, etc. And as soon as Rucci and his crew get in the car to leave, the cops pull into the parking lot. Back like they never left.

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There is no dictionary definition for a real one. Realness is subjective and intangible, but unmistakably obvious. As game always recognizes game, real will always recognize real. Realness is being genuine, understanding your inner self and never abandoning your core values. Realness is being loyal to the soil, respectful of tradition and fearless in the face of cynics. It’s never going Hollywood or acting brand new to your day ones. It’s using timeless ingredients to conjure something startlingly original. It is Roy Choi.

Over the last decade, the Dr. Dre of the food truck revolution improbably transformed himself from a journeyman hotel chef into an avatar of Los Angeles’ vibrant, diverse and demotic food culture. His abridged resume includes stints as a restaurateur, author, host, go-to culinary consultant for film directors (Jon Favreau’s Chef) and a two-time member of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. The Beastie Boys tapped him to a write a mini-chapter in their autobiography. But the day after our interview—amidst the stress of hosting a television show (Broken Bread on KCET) and opening up a 9,000-square-foot restaurant at Park MGM in Las Vegas—Choi emails me to change his Top 5 all-time rappers list. He’d made a grave omission by forgetting Scarface, the Houston rap legend so real that his breakthrough album’s cover showed him wheeling his partner Bushwick Bill out of the hospital after his eye had been shot out.

It’s easy to take Choi for granted. The 48-year-old has reached a level of ubiquity to where his celebrity occasionally shrouds his lasting imprint. But in an era where chefs became “rock stars,” complete with clownish gimmicks and sordid allegations, the Seoul-born embodiment of L.A. hip-hop and car culture ultimately made his reputation by staying cool and selling $10 rice bowls and tacos out of a truck.

But sometimes a taco is not a taco. The Kogi taco was an idea, Southern California’s sabor sublimated into a feast that could fit in the palm of your hand. The components were plucked out of the familiar ether like a scene from Iron Chef Fantasia. Fresh steaming-hot corn tortillas, a blizzard of sweet chopped onions, Napa cabbage, and cilantro, a tangy acceleration of lime juice and salsa roja, and of course, the BBQ short-rib beef, practically caramelized but still savory, chopped into divine oblivion and tossed on the plancha like a sacred rite.

When Choi first began serving from a truck called “Roja” on a rainy Thanksgiving weekend in 2008, it felt less like an invention than a discovery; If you grew up in L.A., the first time you had a Kogi taco, it hacked into an atavistic code scrawled in the recesses of your cerebral cortex. The favorite taco truck you’d grown up going to in pre-Internet days that one day suddenly disappeared into the freeway archipelago never to return, colliding with the K-BBQ strip mall spot with the god-level bulgogi, that you could only go to with your Korean homie because the menu was entirely in Hangul. The Kogi taco was Magic hitting James Worthy on the fast break. Herb Hudson in 1975 renting out a storefront on Sunset and Gower to tell the world about the holy alchemy of fried chicken and waffles. Snoop teaming up with 2Pac, two of Amerika’s most wanted in the same motherfucking place at the same motherfucking time. No champagne glasses necessary at Kogi, but a Mexican Coke couldn’t hurt.

Choi’s almost mythic backstory screams for cinematic adaptation. Chronicled in his excellent memoir/cookbook L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food, Choi immigrated to L.A. from South Korea with his parents as a toddler. His madeleine’s were Tommy Burgers, Chinatown almond cookies and Bob’s Big Boy’s chili spaghetti, accompanied by his mom’s dazzling heaps of home-cooked Korean food. His family weathered struggles with alcoholism, financial pressure and countless relocations all across L.A. They eventually settled in Orange County, where they briefly ran a restaurant that served the best kimchi in Garden Grove. After multiple business failures, his parents finally hit it big in the discount jewelry business and bought Nolan Ryan’s house after he left Anaheim to sign with the Houston Astros.

His coming-of-age was tumultuous. An outsider behind the Orange Curtain, Choi cliqued up with a tough crew of mostly black and Hispanic friends who called themselves the Grove Street Mob. His book devotes an interstitial chapter to a friend who never made it out, dead from a car accident of murky circumstance (written with the pour-out-a-little-liquor pathos expected from a real one.) At one point, Choi joined a Norwalk and Whittier-based Latin car crew called the Street City Minis. Zapp was bumped—more bounce to the ounce was accomplished. There were bouts with drugs, a ferocious gambling addiction and innumerable wild and violent nights in Koreatown. Somehow, Choi survived and wound up at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. And then a decade wandering the gustatory Sinai: he worked in country clubs and for Embassy Suites, at the Beverly Hilton and a Century City pan-Asian mall restaurant from the founder of The Cheesecake Factory. The last business fired him, leaving him down and out and ostensibly marked for career death at age 38. Instead, Choi built an empire by doubling down on himself and the very thing that made him singular but symbolic of the city writ large.

2018 was a year of transition and grief. On the professional level, he parted ways with Koreatown’s Line Hotel after overseeing its food and beverage program since its opening in 2014. Last August, he closed both the Oakland and Watts locations of LocoL, his and chef Daniel Patterson’s fast food concept that sought to bring cheap and healthy options to historically underserved communities. Last year also found Choi grappling with the deaths of his friends, Anthony Bourdain and legendary L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold—one of Choi’s most steadfast champions.

To understand Choi is to understand someone possessed with a streak of indomitability. He is fiery and passionate, willing to humbly listen to criticism, but quick to lash out if he feels it unfounded. So here we are on a winter afternoon in Chinatown in the shadow of Chego, his rice bowl Nirvana located in the Far East Plaza. It’s one of Choi’s three current restaurants in the L.A. area (including the Hawaiian-themed A-Frame and a Kogi brick and mortar).

His latest venture is Best Friend, a Korean BBQ restaurant in Vegas with a menu advertised as Choi’s greatest hits—including a chili spaghetti homage to Bob’s and slippery shrimp inspired by Yang Chow. There’s an entire section of the menu titled “L.A. Shit,” featuring Kogi Tacos, carrots and elotes from his Line Hotel rooftop restaurant Commissary. Best Friend’s name is fitting because that’s the vibe Choi exudes. You know Roy Choi even if you don’t. He’s the O.G. pulling up to you at the stoplight blaring “Computer Love” from the booming system, the two of you silently nodding at each other as a sign of respect. The badass older brother of your friend that always snuck you cigarettes, who your parents said to avoid because he’d never amount to nothing. But they were wrong.

Best Friend opened around New Year’s Eve with a weekend of shows from The Beat Junkies (a very real one booking). Consider Choi the only person on earth who could bring Katy Perry and Y.G. out to a restaurant launch party. If Vegas feels permanently corny and garish, Choi aspires to bring the L.A. that exists to locals to the land of Liberace. A tall order, but one that almost feels fated, the ambassador of staying true transplanted to the city that revels in artifice. I wouldn’t bet against him.

When did your vision with food crystalize? Was it Kogi or before that?

I think I’ve always had it. But the crystallization, as far as me being able to ‘be one’ with it was Kogi. Before it, there were signs for sure. Like when I had a regular job, I’d get other jobs that I wasn’t normally supposed to get. For example, I was the corporate chef for The Embassy Suites, a mid-level type hotel.

There’s no way in the world that an Embassy Suites chef is supposed to become the chef of the Beverly Hilton. It’s just two different class levels. But the corporate side really wanted me to go to the Beverly Hilton and turn it around. When I got there, they really put me through the ringer. I was like someone showing up uninvited to a cocktail party. I could tell they didn’t want me, but they were going through the steps because their boss was like ‘you gotta give this motherfucker a chance.’

I knew that if me getting the job was only based on the interview, I wouldn’t get it. But then I always understood that if I cooked for everyone, it would be over [and I’d get the job].  I’ve always had that experience where I’ll stutter or mess up, but as soon as I’m able to cook, everything crystallizes. Just like the performer who grabs a mic and takes over. But I was only a salary man at the time, so I didn’t know what that power meant yet.

And then Kogi hit and changed everything.

It’s a weird thing. You have to have the talent, the charisma and the experience to do it. But there’s also a moment where rising to that, whether it’s in sports or music or food, where one thing can change the trajectory of everything. You can be a journeyman or a bench player and when you hit that shot, it changes everything. For me that was Kogi.

It’s like [L.A. Dodger] Justin Turner—the nobody who signs a minor league contract at almost 30 and suddenly becomes an All-Star.

That’s what happened. I was a journeyman in my mid-30’s. There was no indication that I was supposed to start a food revolution. Then there was that moment where I saw 300 people in front of me and knew exactly what to do.

How soon into Kogi were there lines like that?

Week three. Week two required a different sixth sense. It was about knowing where to go. Our first pull-up was next to [what was then] the Cabana Club on Ivar. It was Green Door at the time. [It’s now Lure nightclub.]

I found myself there on consecutive weekends once, saw Colin Farrell twice and was like ‘what’s wrong with you, never come back here again.’

We got chased out with billy clubs; it was crazy. At that time, [in 2008] things weren’t as conscious as they are now. Street food is now legal. There’s social media and everyone has these hashtags and movements. Everyone gets behind immigration. There are arguments and debates on both sides. Back then it was still run like street politics. We would park on Ivar and the cops would immediately roll through.

It was literally like Boardwalk Empire. There were nights where we’d be serving and these cops would roll up, and one guy with a tilted hat and an Irish cigarette would be swinging this billy club around, hitting the side of our truck. In the early days, we’d just show up in different hoods and serve late nights. We didn’t get threats, but a lot of signs were thrown up and names were called. We just constantly extended with love. Cars would roll up and be like, ‘fuck is you doing here, foo?’ I’d just hand them a burrito. A lot of my instincts kicked in in those moments, hand them a burrito, hand them a taco. They’d eat it; you’d see everyone’s head nod. That was the beginning of Kogi culture.

Where did those instincts came from?

I grew up in Koreatown, but moved to Orange County in the 7th grade. So it’s this tough situation where I had to live my puberty and high school years in the suburbs, but grew up in the city. I spent five years always having this longing to come back to L.A. Once I got my license, I would drive up here and roll through every corner, every block. I got into cruising. I got into lowriding. Anything I could do to get out on the streets. Sometimes, I would take the train here and just walk.

You were doing that at 14-years-old, right?

Yup. Anything I could do to be in the city. The only time I’d stay in Orange County was basically to go to school. All those things became a blueprint for the first two weeks of Kogi. I’d remember the spots I used to drive by. All these random corners in Carson, Wilmington, Hawthorne, the Valley, the East Side. I’d say ‘okay, lets go to that spot.’ We’d go there, pop up, and people would show up.

It was about the third week when it started blowing up around Miracle Mile, Wilshire and Cloverdale, and different parts of Venice. There was no blueprint for it. That moment was everything. It felt like early hip-hop, where you don’t have any experience that necessarily mimics that ‘right thing to do.’ But you grab the mic, step on stage and move the crowd. It’s over after that. There’s a moment where everything crystallizes, and you become that icon. That was Kogi for me.

One of the things that resonated with me about your book was your willingness to cop to the dark periods of your life: whether family-related or concerning your own struggles with drugs and gambling. Do you think those experiences helped you build the strength to handle success and the long road leading up to it?

Definitely. When you’re raised in those situations, and where you’ve seen the worst of it all, nothing really fazes you. Nothing can touch you. Koreans are really strong because of that mentality. Nothing fucks with us because we’re our own worst enemy. I think that’s where a lot of the older tensions between Korean merchants and black communities [which culminated during the L.A. Riots of 1992] began.

I honestly believe a lot of it was the fault of Korean merchants. I understand where that fault was. They were so stubborn, so strong-willed and strong-minded. They felt like they needed to endure the punishment to provide for their family. If they weren’t that strong, they really could’ve opened up and gotten to know what was around them. They could’ve figured out the flexibility between stealing a pack of gum and armed robbery. The problem is that in the ‘80s, those were treated as the same thing. That’s where the fault was. I’m trying to repair some of that with Broken Bread. I wish I could turn back the clock and figure out how to ease the cultural understandings. I was only a kid then…

That’s around the time when Ice Cube’s song ‘Black Korea’ came out, and it obviously contained a lot of racist invective directed at Korean people.

I’ve never crossed paths with Ice Cube, but if I ever do—now that I’m at this position in life—I’d want to talk to him about it. I imagine his argument would be that Koreans were racist towards them. And that’s the tough part. I can’t really argue against that. I just wish those artists at that time would’ve used their platforms in a more holistic way to be able to address some of those concerns.

I’d say 85-95 percent of the time, people were just living their lives. ‘Mr. Kim what’s up?’ ‘Hey how’s you doing, how’s your boy?’ And then there’s just certain bad scenes. Just like with police. Most Korean-owned businesses had really deep relationships with the neighborhood. But I’d say one out of 10 had really bad ones. Those became the target at that time. Again, I feel like the Korean folks didn’t take the time to understand. They’re probably coming from a home in Norwalk or Paramount or Fullerton, driving to the middle of South Central Los Angeles, and they open up a store and go into commando mode.

And a lot of them are born in a post-war environment of deprivation.

They’re hard on themselves. Hard on their kids. They don’t take the cultural differences into consideration. They’re treating people the same way they’re treating their kids. They probably weren’t going out of their way to be mean or racist. If you were my kid, and I was that liquor store owner, I’d grab you and smack you. You come home with an A minus, you can’t go out for a month. It was 0 to 100 when it came to punishment.

Were your parents like that with you when you were really young?

Kinda. It was 0 to 100, and that’s what I think contributed to the tension. A pack of gum. Little kid coming in, you know, being a kid, and the next thing you know it escalates out of control. But yeah, ‘Black Korea.” I dunno, man. I hope one day I can talk to Ice Cube about that.

What would you want to tell him?

I’d probably want him to re-address that song. We all make mistakes. I’m trying to make up for the years of my mistakes with everything that Kogi has given me. I’m trying to bring love and light to this world. I think something as mean-spirited as that maybe deserves a second look. Especially since you are still a very current and relevant artist in a sense.

Did you ever expect any of this to happen?

I’ve never been the center of attention until Kogi happened. That’s why my [Twitter and Instagram] name is “Riding Shotgun [LA].” I’ve always been riding shotgun.

I thought it was interesting how in your book one of your favorite literary characters was Sal Paradise because he was perhaps the most iconic person riding shotgun.

I’ve been a latchkey kid since I was four years old. I used to ride the bus here and walk around the jewelry district, Chinatown, and Koreatown, all by myself. I don’t know what people were thinking then. It was the ‘70s — a different time. If you saw a 4-year-old kid walking around alone today, you’d think something was weird. I was always a quiet kid left to roam, almost like an alley cat, so I’ve been always been able to connect and always be in the mix.

In the ‘80s, I was deep in the B-Boy mix, lowriding all throughout Norwalk and that continued on through high school joining different gangs, this and that, connected to the weed world. Now as an adult, a lot of people don’t know where I come from. People have written or commented that he’s trying to be gangster. Maybe because I come from an older generation, but I never really understood these Internet haters and commenters. Because they don’t know anything about me, they comment that I’m just trying to gain street cred. They don’t understand this is who I’ve been the whole time. LocoL and Kogi are things that I’ve always been, but now finally as an adult they’re things I now have the ability to execute.

Do you think the historically tumultuous relationship between Koreans and Black people in South L.A. led to you wanting to bridge the divide with LocoL?

It’s really just that now as an adult I have the ability to do what I want to do. These are the things I did when I didn’t have money or the ability, or when I was a child. I don’t know any other way. That’s why LocoL existed. I had to get to a place where I got the platform to talk about these things. Everything was lining up for this moment: having these relationships, putting in the work beforehand, having a direct contact to Watts, being accepted by Watts. Everything was set up for it.

You hired exclusively people who came from Watts, right?

They were all folks who accepted us. We became part of their lives and they became part of ours. When I was younger, I used to have homies from Watts who I would pick up and drop off there. In the second part of my life, I met a gentleman named Aqeela Sherrills, one of the architects of the Peace Treaty [also known as the Watts gang truce] in ‘92 with Jim Brown. Around 2011, I was doing a lot of charity work at Jefferson High School and through a community redevelopment organization, I got connected to Aqeela. We hit it off and remained friends.

When LocoL came around, I hit him up for recommendations for a real estate agent. He said, ‘Listen, if you come into Watts, let me bring you in. I’m gonna be your chaperone. I’m gonna connect you to everyone from grandmothers to shooters to young bangers to OGs to triple OGs. You get in, we get you the hood pass, and you be you.’ So that’s what I did for six months.

Before you even opened?

Before we even signed the lease. He walked me through the Jordan Downs [public housing projects] and brought every OG out and every single young banger. Then we brought the whole thing and concept to them. It was really just us presenting this plan and asking the community ‘are you cool with this?’ We got the co-sign from Aqeela and everyone looked at it with clear eyes and said ‘OK, we fuck with that.’ The thing that kept us going was that we delivered on every promise we made: hiring, development, investing, ingredients in the food.

I imagine that a lot of your frustration with the press coverage of the closure was that few people knew how deep the commitment to Watts went.

They didn’t. A lot of journalists summarized everything as if it was a matter of fact thing. The headlines bothered me because they started with ‘failure.’ But that’s only if you equate success and failure based upon financial gain. We invested about $4 million into this project. We built a $1.5 million facility, which is still running. We gave over 50 jobs to the community, and there are about 10 people who have learned and gained skills and moved onto other jobs. We brought a world conversation to a situation that’s happening in towns like Watts and Baton Rouge and St. Louis.

You’re talking about food deserts?

Yeah. We got the world to talk about those things. We brought people to 103rd and Grape Street that would’ve never come there before. We got a lot of social services reinstated since bringing LocoL over, like street cleaning and parking enforcement. On top of that, there are children that we affected during the almost three years we stayed open. There were elementary school kids able to see their family members working in the facilities, having this as a memory point. These are all huge things.

Even the way we presented it, we said ‘We’re gonna take a different look at the retail side; LocoL is not closing, we’re going to start catering.’ And all of a sudden, all the headlines are ‘LocoL is a failure.’ ‘LocoL is closing.’ As soon as the announcement was made, reporters showed up for lunch and interviewed two people. Those people aren’t media savvy. They just said whatever was on their mind in the moment. On top of that, it was only two people. They took those two people’s statements as proof of why the community didn’t want LocoL there. They framed the whole thing as like this savior thing, and it was never that. We came from the inside out, not the outside in. And that bothered me. It didn’t bother me in the sense of armchair quarterback criticism: I can handle that. It bothered me because it perpetuated the narrative of poor black communities and crime. As though it couldn’t work. And that doesn’t do any good for anyone.

I feel the same way about this magazine. If we only do a handful of issues and stop, it won’t be a failure. It’s a success that we got a DIY enterprise off the ground and hopefully produced quality work. Nothing lasts forever.

I felt the Pete Wells thing was unfair [The New York Times restaurant critic gave the Oakland location of LocoL a zero stars review], not because I can’t take the shots. You wanna take me down, cool. But what bothered me was that he didn’t take the time to understand the context of what we were doing. He shot it down as if it’s no good and these people didn’t know how to execute. He didn’t understand. The only person who really understood was Jonathan. [Jonathan Gold named LocoL the L.A. Times 2017 Restaurant of the Year.]

Jonathan understood where we were coming from, what the current state of existence is, and how we’re all starting a new process together. I responded to [Wells] in this sense like, he came to a junior high school play and yelled ‘boo.’ You’re not understanding that these kids are just figuring it out.

The other thing that bothered me about the articles was that no one took into context all the different layers. It was just success or failure.

It’s inevitably a function of celebrity. Anything that is ‘less successful’ than Kogi is considered a failure. Do you feel like having that fame has made for a bigger target on your back?

Yeah. And I can take all of that for normal, for-profit restaurant work. If someone wants to give Best Friend a zero stars and say ‘He fucked up. He lost his touch,’ fine, whatever. It is what it is. The thing that stung with LocoL was that it wasn’t about Daniel Patterson or myself. It was about trying to come up with new ideas to talk about and bring to life the reality of poverty, the reality of food access. Him and I, we’re not looking to be heroes. It was a project.

It felt like an experiment and obviously experiments need to be refined.

It was tough because those articles from the New York Times and the headlines about failure, really hurt the movement. Who’s to say that the success was garnered upon the first wave of it? The first wave is where I could get the conversation across in this very binary, over-stimulated world. We’re in it for the long run.

This first wave was literally just to get it open, to get the conversation going. If I look back on it, that was a success. We got it open; we got people talking about it. We got more people going than had ever been before. People started to discuss the idea of food access. The 2.0 version could be what the next step is.

What would you do differently?

I’m very happy with the way it came out. The only thing I’d do differently is try to raise more money. We ran out of money after three years. Based upon the history and the impact of segregation and systematic inequality, all these things lead to disparity in this country. For this little hamburger shop, those first three years were about working through the weeds of that — trying to get up to sea level.

Even $6 million is nothing compared to most of these start-ups. Even if we had another $3 million, we would only be in a position to stretch our legs. We were given a chance to solve this equation in the first round. Because we didn’t solve this equation, all the funding dried up. I really wish we could’ve raised double what we did. It took that much money to get to the position where we could talk about the goals everyone wanted in the first place.

It’s also insanely difficult to alter the eating habits of generations of people who grew up eating fast food. You’re not just competing with McDonald’s or In-N-Out, you’re competing with deep taste bud memories of childhood.

There’s that saying that it takes about as long to unravel a problem as it does to create it. It’s unrealistic to expect to change overnight after a 50-year infiltration of fast food into these communities. Looking back, I realize how unrealistic that was. It’s going to take a little more time.

For some folks, there is the issue of habit. A lot of people don’t want to write about that or think about that. In the three years we survived as a retail outlet in Watts, the economic situation of the community didn’t really change. Even though we got all this press and attention, there still aren’t enough jobs in Watts. No restaurants opened up after us. There’s still no access or education in these fields.

Somehow it got turned into that Watts didn’t want LocoL. That’s the part that hurt me. How the fuck did they know what Watts wanted? Our employees were the ones living there. We’re the ones who spent three years there and we didn’t even know in full. We can’t even speak for the community.

Did you ever meet 03 Greedo during your time over in Watts?

Yeah, Greedo and his team were like family to us. He used to hang out in our parking lot…used to come up to the Oakland store. He had connects everywhere. We used to feed him. I love Wolf of Grape Street and Purple Summer 03.

What was your first introduction to rap?

Ironically, when I moved to Orange Country at 13. I went to my friend’s house, and he put the needle on the record to Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That,” and I was instantly like ‘Whoa, what the fuck is this?’

Around the same time, “Jam On It” came into my life. “Rapper’s Delight” came into my life. LL came into my life. Ice-T’s “6 in The Mornin'” came into my life. I was kind of fucking up at that time as well and got sent to military school in Long Beach. I saw Beat Street and Krush Groove, and it was on from there.

What were you listening to before that?

It started with my parents’ music: Delfonics, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett,  Gladys Knight, Elvis.

Then during my rebellious period where I was moving from L.A. to Orange County, I became a metal kid. Suddenly, I was surrounded by almost entirely affluent white people. It was cool, but all deep suburban, and I looked different from everyone else.  My parents were also going through a lot of ups and downs. They were starting to drink a lot more. So from like 13 to 15, I was really into Slayer, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Motorhead, Metallica.

What was your first concert?

I remember going to a lot of hippie concerts in the park and stuff like that with my parents. But my first real concert was KISS in like ‘78 or something like that. And then Missing Persons, X, and The Who in the early ‘80s. I’d go with friends, but this was the ‘70s, so our parents would just drop us off.

We’d be two 8-year-olds at a KISS concert and the venue would let us in. You can’t even imagine that right now. Even at a Taylor Swift show you’d have to have a chaperone. And then in high school, I started going to a lot of Dead shows.

Was there a specific thing that changed everything other than just hearing Run-DMC?

When I first got to high school, I’d get picked on [by] older jocks, who called me ‘chink’ and pushed me out of line. I wouldn’t take it. So I beat up this other kid and a crew of kids from Orange saw me and said ‘what’s up.’ I started hanging with them and got really introduced to hip-hop. Those kids were breaking, popping, DJing and writing graffiti. N.W.A. hadn’t come out, so we were still listening to World Class Wreckin’ Cru, buying mixtapes at the swap meets.

Did you ever make music?

Yeah, I did. My crew was called Legion of Doom — LOD. We had two rappers up front, a DJ and I was like a hype man. We made a few songs, but I was always kinda the homie dude. I’d help my DJ friend Carlos — bringing the records and rolling the joints. His record collection was really when I started getting into hip-hop like the Egyptian Lover and Rodney-O and Joe Cooley. It was that era that really kind of moved me from Slayer to hip-hop.

How did your parents react to all of this?

I was always trapped between my parents’ expectation and me being this free spirit. All my friends were getting laid. I didn’t get laid until I was 19. They were dancing, spray-painting, DJing, rapping, singing. Always getting girls. I was always part of that crew; I was in the mix, but couldn’t express myself. I was a real quiet kid, y’know? A stoner living a double life because I was Korean and raised to be studious. I was in the GATE Program, honors classes, AP classes. And I was having a lot of trouble and trying to figure it all out.

Did things change for you when N.W.A. came out?

I listened to them, but wasn’t a huge fan [at] first. It was really Public Enemy that got me into hardcore rap. I was working at the Montgomery Ward, and picked up my first Public Enemy album. From that point I really started to get serious with it. Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted was the one where I really started to get deep into gangsta rap.

I understood the anger and angst of everything that was going on with N.W.A., but for me, I was more of a quiet nerdy-type dude, and I was never really a violent guy, so those weren’t my problems at the time. I was angry at other shit. I was never militant in that respect, but I have been militant in how I approach my life.

Did you go to any of the early legendary L.A. rap shows?

I caught Public Enemy at the Palace and that was fucking great. Chuck D was just on the rise and I was right up in the front, so I remember that show vividly. I caught a bunch of small shows where World Class Wreckin’ Cru was playing, and when Cube was coming up. I can remember Cube hanging with Dre and freestyling in the parking lot.

I caught 2Pac before he was ‘Pac too. I went to a Digital Underground, Queen Latifah and Naughty by Nature show at the Palladium, and ‘Pac had just come out, with “Same Song,” and he was there just wildin’ out onstage with Digital Underground. So I was at that show. That was a great show. I saw Too Short early on, E-40, early Ice-T, Tha Alkaholiks, Del tha Funkee Homosapien.

Even if it’s not explicitly political, much of what you do is political in some respect. How do you feel the current political climate affects you?

I try to be political by never being political. I’m not afraid, but you won’t hear sound bites from me. I’m tackling these issues head on. I’m not tackling them in a way of battle, or winning by way of putting a person down. I’m not looking for debates, I’m looking for answers.

What’s an example of that?

Just look at the show Broken Bread. I’m taking topics like food access, food justice, food waste, homelessness, vegetarianism, veganism and people on the fringes. Instead of debating or expressing my political beliefs and saying you’re either with me or you’re not, I present the argument, and try to find or give solutions.

We’re doing an episode about criminalization of cannabis and the entire episode examines all areas of cannabis: the gentrification of it, the legalization, the beauty of the plant itself. We’re also focusing on those who were unfairly criminalized for it and serving sentences. We’re finding people on the ground trying to overturn those laws.

I look at it like a chef does. Where I get political is, I’ll say ‘Here’s the problem, here’s what I think of it and here’s my solution.’ It’s the same thing I do in the kitchen. There are 200 people to serve tonight. We have about three hours of work left. Here’s what we need to do. Forget about your arguing — what he or she did or didn’t do. Here’s the plan. I tend to do a lot of audibles. Let’s throw that old plan out—here’s the new plan. Let’s just get to the finish line.

What I see right now in social media and other forms of media is everyone is arguing the micro-concept of everything. Everyone wants an absolute answer or fix to these really complicated, large, multi-tentacle issues. What I try to do instead, with things like LocoL, is just pick off one thing and try to make it better.

What advice do you give to your teenage daughter about the world?

I tell her to always be kind and extremely aware. Be very giving, but be critical. Never assume anything and never take anything for granted. I tell her to listen and to try to have a lot of love and understanding. I try to prepare her to defend herself and be confident in situations. In a nutshell I guess, to be open-minded, say please and thank you. Don’t be afraid to offer your opinion and don’t be afraid to disagree, but don’t be hung up on your disagreement being the absolute truth.

Do you get caught up in obsessing over the latest daily insanity in the news?

I don’t. I know a lot of it is rhetoric. Whether it’s Trump or Kavanaugh, I believe that there’s someone behind them holding the puppet strings. I try not to get caught up in the rhetoric. I hear that type of shit every day because I’m a boss. I hear ‘so and so didn’t do this so that’s why we failed at that.’ ‘I gotta make up for his lack of execution that’s why I couldn’t do this.’ I’m always forced into situations where I have to look at every single thing and analyze what’s really going on here. Is something really burning on the stove or not?

It doesn’t bother me to be honest because I don’t take it personally and I’m out there trying to make small little changes. I’m better at mobilizing in the shadows. I’m better at internalizing everything going on, all the frequencies and algorithms, then putting up a piece on the wall that makes everyone think. That’s my role in life. If there’s a family fighting with each other, I’m the little kid that puts the needle on an Al Green record and gets everyone to just stop the feuding for a moment and to try to figure out a solution.

You employ a bunch of people. How does being a business owner affect the way you see complex situations that could potentially cut into your profits like minimum wage or health care?

I feel like America has to adopt some form of socialism. We’re unwilling to confront the issues of our past. I think that’s the biggest obstacle in our existence. We’re unwilling to confront what our country was built upon: the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of the black community. And we don’t want to admit that these things can’t be fixed unless we provide a pathway for them to be fixed. We’re going to be constantly arguing with each other until we say that everyone deserves a basic amount of rights and living standards. Those who have been marginalized deserve some form of reparation.

I’ve been with a lot of folks in the Watts community who say, ‘Let’s take $7 trillion dollars, give $1 trillion to each of the seven major inner cities of America, start there. No payback, just reparations. Let the community rebuild itself.’ I feel like that combined with healthcare, education, and certain living standards would get us to a point where we can talk about how to create some sort of healing between both parties.

Are you a religious or spiritual person?

I’m very spiritual. As I continue to get older and a little bit wiser, I’m in tune with the echoes and reverberations of what I feel is beyond our physical self. I’ve been heavily meditating for the last six years. Dreaming and seeing things. Feeling things. Leading with love. Those things have helped me to be able to search for one thing deeper than I normally can. I don’t know if I’m religious. I don’t believe in the stories as they are in the Bible. I can’t believe those, because of very specific facts that don’t line up. Then that fundamental detective quality comes out within me.

As a chef, I have to have that detective quality. You’re telling me you did all the prep work on a dish. My sixth sense is saying you didn’t. I have to go through and investigate. I realize you cut corners on the sauce. I say, ‘no you didn’t,’ and I can break it down to you. I also don’t understand how one type of people, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam can decide that they’re the only belief that can understand the relationship with God.

How much has doing psychedelics shaped your consciousness?

When I do take psychedelics, whether it be acid, ‘shrooms, even highly potent forms of THC—like in the crystallized sugar form—that’s where I believe in spirituality and a religion that goes beyond us. Even meditation to be honest is a form of psychedelic transformation. These things open the door.

Was there a formative psychedelic experience in your life?

I remember one experience where I was frying and listening to an R.E.M. tape at my friend’s house. The whole tape played through and started over again without rewinding in my head. But it really happened too. Things were also coming out. And actual beings were touching me. They were pulling me in and moving this whole thing.

Another experience was with my mom. There’s a whole other level of psychedelic experience, which concerns fortune telling in Asia. There are these half-human half transformative beings. Essentially, they’re shamans. I witnessed her transform into my ancestors and saw their ghosts coming out of their body. I saw that in a small little room in a hillside in Seoul, Korea.

On acid or sober?

Sober. There was a process to get to that point. The shaman starts chanting, sets the room, gets you going. I don’t know how to explain those two things.

This year has had a lot of tragedies within your orbit, particularly regarding the deaths of Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold. Where are you in the grieving process?

I’m definitely still grieving both. Jonathan’s death really affected me. We were really friends. We were from different times, different upbringings and different styles, but we were homies, man. Over the past three months, I’ve been stricken with these waves of grief that come out of nowhere. I could be chilling with you like this, and it comes and hits me and rips me apart.

With Jonathan and Tony, I never really had the high-minded intellectual relationship with either one. I always had a relationship with Jonathan like kids in the room playing Sega together. We never talked that much, to be honest, not as much as people believed. But we could spend figuratively 48 hours playing Genesis together, not saying anything.

That’s actually what people have told me how Dilla and Madlib were. They barely spoke, just communicated almost telepathically and through a series of grunts and gestures.

That’s how J Gold and I were. I didn’t have to explain to him, he didn’t have to explain to me. We were just the Dilla and Madlib of the food world. He got it. He understood everything I was trying to translate. He was the guy able to put it all in ink. All the stuff he used to write about me, I never told him. He was the only guy able to get it right, just from being able to eat it.

What was your relationship like with Bourdain?

Tony felt like this iconic force. A Jimi Hendrix, a Janis Joplin. When I look at his shows now that he’s gone, it affects me the same way as when I think of people like ‘Pac or Hendrix or Cobain. They were here eternally even when they weren’t.

Who are your Top 5 favorite rappers?

We’re not doing this.

You can do a top 10. I’ll even include this caveat that, of course, you are going to leave people out and no one should complain.  

Okay. Definitely A Tribe Called Quest, Rakim, early Public Enemy, Dilated Peoples, EPMD, early MC Lyte. A whole mix of Top Dawg between Ab-Soul, Schoolboy, and Kendrick. Mos Def. Okay, I got eight. [He later emails me to include Scarface, as one should]

What are you working on in the immediate future?

Broken Bread and Best Friend. What I’m trying to do with Best Friend is bring L.A. to Vegas. I want to bring everything we’re about and have been about, everything that I love. I want there to be a bit of nerdiness and smiles and wackiness. A greatest hits of sorts but with a bunch of new stuff too. I want to create our own lane and make it very L.A.—a platform for L.A. culture in Vegas where we can share that love with the Vegas audience.

In terms of L.A., what’s your next move?

I’d love to see where we take LocoL from here. I guess I’m Dre after Death Row right now. I have to look at what is the aftermath of everyone’s perception and misinformation about LocoL. Where do we go from here? I don’t need to open any more restaurants right now. I want to spend my energy in L.A. figuring out how to turn around LocoL and just keeping Kogi and Chego alive. I like being low-key.

I’m sure you’ve had tons of offers to franchise Kogi.

I know you asked me earlier about the price of fame, but if you really take a step back and look at the chessboard, I run taco trucks and a $10 rice bowl restaurant. You know what I mean? It’s what I do for the city. I know that it comes with a lot of baggage and hot air. It’s just something that comes with who I am. I don’t know why. I don’t know why people are so interested in distorting or amplifying what I’m about without actually looking at what I’m about. But maybe that doesn’t matter, I know those who fuck with me really understand what I’m about.

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