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Prince of the City

By Gabriel Kahn — Fri, 31 Aug 2012 16:38:00 GMT

Photograph by Christina Gandolfo

Eric Garcetti has the sort of résumé that other politicians pine for. He’s an Ivy Leaguer (Columbia), a Rhodes scholar, and a Navy Reserve officer. When he first entered politics, he already had some name recognition (his father, Gil, served two terms as L.A. County’s district attorney). He won a seat on the city council at age 31, and by 34 he was council president. Now, at 41, Garcetti wants to make the leap to the mayor’s office. Though the campaign isn’t in full swing yet, Garcetti clearly is. When he’s not bouncing between meetings at City Hall, it seems as if he’s either attending a ribbon cutting or walking the streets of his council district, the 13th, which stretches from Hollywood to Echo Park and north to Atwater Village. Last year, after a decade of living in Echo Park, Garcetti moved with his community activist wife, Amy Wakeland, to Silver Lake. And while he’s known for being polished, he’s also known for being an all-around nice guy—perhaps too nice to run a tough mayoral campaign, let alone to make unpopular decisions as mayor. We caught up with him at Taix restaurant in Echo Park, where, between bites of a salami sandwich, he greeted a stream of well-wishers and acquaintances.

Hollywood has seen lots of new development in the past decade. But the revitalization has also priced out many longtime residents. Did you see that coming ?
It’s the most famous neighborhood we have in L.A., and for 30 years it was always just about to come back, always on the brink. And it did. Of course, everyone wants the good things that come with gentrification. They want lower crime, and they deserve it. People should have a park, a good school. But it also should come with a conscience. If you look at the incomes, Hollywood is still extremely working class. It also has 25,000 fewer residents. You can’t plan where people move. I have the densest-populated district in the city, so I would say it’s right-sizing. People are rational creatures. They are going to move where they can buy a better home for the same amount of money. When I’d go door to door ten years ago, a home would open up and you’d think only one family could have lived there, and there would be three. That wasn’t good for them or for anyone. But we have tried to preserve the single-family neighborhoods—the low-density neighborhoods—to bring back what’s beautiful.

Did the experience of watching your father run for office three times here shape you at all?
A lot of people thought I grew up in a political family, but he ran for district attorney the year I graduated from college. I grew up anonymously; no one knew the name Garcetti. On the one hand, when I decided to run, my father said, “What, didn’t you learn anything from me?” But he also said that you better know who you are going in because it will be who you are going out.

You grew up in Encino. What’s different about L.A. today?
The Los Angeles I grew up in was this place that felt completely anonymous and completely familiar. It was a place where you felt safe, you knew the community, and you could flip on the TV and see The Brady Bunch. And so “everywhere America” was, at least for me, the San Fernando Valley. My parents would say, “See you by sunset,” and I would go off to Little League or wherever. Police officers would wave to us. My family and I had a community garden plot along the 101 freeway. And we’d pull carrots from the ground while meeting our neighbors.

Certainly plenty of people in Los Angeles back then didn’t feel all that safe. Did you have a sense of the larger city?
My great-grandparents and grandparents grew up in Boyle Heights. My Jewish side came there fleeing the Russo-Japanese war, the Mexican side fleeing the Mexican Revolution. My Mexican grandfather never finished junior high school. He fought in World War II and then raised my dad and his sister with my grandmother in South L.A. So absolutely I knew that, saw that. I’d spend every weekend with them. In the ’70s, it was a much safer city, though, even in the tougher areas.

What’s the accomplishment you’re most proud of from the six years you have served as city council president?
Probably the most important thing is the role I’ve played during this budget crisis—a half-billion dollars in pension reform [over three years] and keeping the city from going into bankruptcy. I personally led those negotiations. I didn’t bury my head in the sand, which is what some people did, just wanting to add a zero and say “This budget is balanced.” But I also didn’t say the city employee unions are our enemies. These are people who are providing amazing, critical services to us. We downsized the number of city employees by 4,900. We’ve raised the amount city workers pay into their pensions from 6 percent to 11 percent of their salary. There is no other big city in America that has done that. We’re paying out of pocket for health care for the first time.

Though the budget is technically balanced, a chunk of the balancing act relies on some quick fixes, like furlough days in the city attorney’s office. L.A. is still facing a huge fiscal crunch. In his last budget the mayor proposed cutting about 200 more jobs, but the council postponed any firings until January. Isn’t that kicking the can down the road?
When you look at the money that the layoffs would have saved, it was paltry. Morale is about as important a driver as you have for productivity. And the impact of starting by saying we’re going to have 200 layoffs in a staff of 36,000 is one of the most destructive things you could do.

A hallmark of your style is that you seem to get along with everyone. You’re on good terms with unions. You draw on your Mexican background, your Jewish background. Is there anyone who doesn’t like you?
I can give you some names. I’m not in this office to be liked—I’m in this office to get things done. But I do think that you get more done if you’re good at relationships. You have to realize that on any decision where someone might need their ego addressed, someone else might just need to be invited to the party. In a political structure as complicated as Los Angeles’s, a leader has to be able to navigate all that. You have to be comfortable crossing borders, and that’s who I am.

That’s great when running for office. But the next mayor is going to have to make some unpopular decisions. Have you ever done something really unpopular?
When we created Meadow Park in Silver Lake, the loudest people were the opponents. The easiest thing to do politically would have been to just not create the park. I’ve had that experience with all 25 park projects I’ve done. The political playbook of L.A. is, Keep your head down and don’t do anything new.

I’m sure there were some teed-off local residents. But being for a public park is a little like being for puppy dogs and sunny days. Is there anything that you’ve done that was really unpopular?
Well, I try not to do things that are totally unpopular. I try to build consensus. But going to public employee unions and telling them “You’ve got to give something back” was immensely unpopular. I’ll never apologize to anyone for having balanced the city’s budget. When I got here, it was immensely unpopular to do anything in Hollywood that involved a liquor license. And who could blame them? They had prostitutes and drug dealers down the streets. But Hollywood was dying, and if a restaurant is responsibly run, if it serves a glass of wine, it’s not a bad thing. We had to overcome 20, 30 years of unpopularity of saying yes to anything. CicLAvia was immensely unpopular at first, too. Can you imagine telling people you’re going to close the street in front of their house? But there were folks like me who went door to door and said, “Hey, let’s try it. If it stinks, you’ve got my word we won’t do it again.” And now CicLAvia is part of the L.A. that’s being reborn.

OK, but like a park, it’s difficult to think of CicLAvia as being truly controversial.
But it was. There is nothing more unpopular than messing with someone’s street. You can say that it’s puppy dogs, but it’s not out there. It’s warfare. We’ve got big problems to solve. I’m running for mayor not because I want the title but because I want to do the work. I’m a committed, passionate Angeleno who believes in the potential of the city and doesn’t see it fulfilling that potential.

So where is L.A. falling short?
We’re not positioning ourselves for the jobs of tomorrow. The most important thing that we can do as a city is not to complain about the jobs that have left us; it’s to create the jobs of the future—in technology, entertainment, health care, hospitality, and trade. In all these areas the city has elements that other cities would die to have. We need to do better marketing what this city is. That’s perhaps the most important thing we can do. We don’t have a chief technology officer for the City of L.A. If an enterprise this big has no tech strategy, that’s a problem.

How would you rate the current mayor?
I think he’s finishing strong. It takes time to figure this place out. I don’t care if you were the speaker of the assembly, you need to be someone with a good decade of experience under your belt to hit the ground running. We’ve had good nuts-and-bolts mayors in the past who couldn’t inspire people. This mayor can inspire, but we still need someone who can do the nuts and bolts. We shouldn’t have to choose between the two.

Do you think the city is better off now than it was eight years ago?
We’re a safer city. But we’re also a city that has seen jobs leave—166,000 fewer jobs [over the past 30 years], with 800,000 more people.

In 2008, you and Mayor Villaraigosa announced a plan to make the city more business friendly by slashing from 12 to 2 the number of city agencies a new business needs to deal with. But the plan never went anywhere. What happened?
As mayor, I could implement this quickly. As councilmember, all I could do was introduce legislation. We did not see the follow-through from this administration. Period.

When was the last time you took public transportation?
Probably two weeks ago. Expo Line to Culver City and back downtown. To see the city and not have to worry about the traffic? It was awesome.

For a meal out, El Conquistador or El Compadre?
Well, El Compadre is a hangout of ours. The margaritas there are an L.A. treasure.

You’ve been in office for more than ten years, and you’re barely over 40. If you don’t win the mayor’s race, do you see yourself still being a politician or having a different future?
I see myself first and foremost as an Angeleno. It is not my lifelong dream to be a politician. I haven’t dreamed of being mayor for 20 years. I haven’t had my eyes set on higher office. It’s a very demanding job. I’m in this race to win it. And I hope to be the mayor for the next decade. But I also know who I am.

Control Central

By Gabriel Kahn — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:21:00 GMT

Photograph by Christina Gandolfo

Wendy Greuel got her first taste of city hall politics when she served on Mayor Tom Bradley’s youth council while in high school. After being elected to the city council a decade ago, she helped get so many potholes filled, she earned the nickname “Pothole Queen.” Indeed, Greuel’s attention to detail can border on the obsessive. She used to comb through the accounts of her father’s building-supply and trucking company, looking for the extra penny to make the ledgers balance. Since taking the job of Los Angeles controller three years ago, Greuel, who turns 51 in May, has been trying to do the same with the city’s books. She’s harangued city departments for handing out too many cell phones, and she’s accused the Department of Animal Services of not collecting enough license fees from dog owners. She argues that her brand of in-the-weeds management is what L.A. needs. And that’s why she aims to be the next mayor. Greuel wants to offer a reality check to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who swept into office with promises of fixing schools, revitalizing public transportation, and planting a million trees. But does Greuel, who is so focused on making the machinery of municipal government grind forward, have bold ideas about how to lead Los Angeles? We recently caught up with her over a glass of wine downtown at Checkers.

You’ve had your nose in the city’s finances for a few years now. How bad are they? Is there a way out of this mess other than selling municipal parking garages?
We’re facing the same challenges as many other cities. Los Angeles has historically said, “Ha, we’re L.A. We’ll get through it. Businesses will move here. Tourism will grow. We will survive without having to make some of the drastic cuts that others are being forced to make.” What we’ve learned is that we’re no different. It’s all about making sure we are looking at our bottom line and not avoiding the decisions we need to make. Dealing with the budget is not like fine wine. It doesn’t get better with age.

Are you saying we’re going to have to get used to a city that provides fewer services?
We have to focus on the core services. In my first election for city council, when I was knocking on doors in the Valley, residents did not say, “What’s the housing policy of the City of Los Angeles?” “What’s the Department of Sanitation doing?” They said, “My sidewalks haven’t been repaired.” “My street hasn’t been paved in 50 years.” “I can’t get a policeman to come when we call.”

But what can the city do without?
Parking lots, for example. The city does a lot of good things—but also a lot of things we might not need. Is the city best equipped to manage parking lots, to collect the revenue? Is that a core service? Probably not.

A lot of your job as controller involves going around to different city departments and nitpicking about how they spend their money. That’s not exactly a page out of How to Win Friends and Influence People. How do you build a mayoral campaign after that?
I think the public is interested in having someone who sits in the mayor’s seat and cares about the big things and the little things. I can’t tell you how many people stop me on the street and say, “I love what you did with that last audit.” “I love how you went after the city on cell phones.” I think people will be excited by someone who knows how the city runs, who knows what the revenue sources are, and who knows where the bodies are buried. Someone who will say, “The emperor has no clothes.”

Speaking of emperors, how’s this mayor doing?
People ask me to grade him, and the grade is an incomplete. He’s clearly had bumps in the road, but he’s coming into focus on some issues. He’s tried to do everything for everyone. But sometimes you have to focus. He’s done a good job of bringing attention to improving schools and infrastructure, for example.

Where has he failed?
The challenge has been managing the city. A lot of departments haven’t measured up. It’s about taking care of the less sexy things, and that’s been challenging for him. This is a very difficult city to manage.

You’ve been controller for three years now. What have you learned about the city while on the job?
Most elected officials have no idea how the budget really operates or what the city controller really does. None. They don’t understand anything—from cash flow to our financial reporting to how the financial system impacts the city. Either they don’t understand or they don’t care. That was the biggest surprise. I’m not sure I’d want to give this test to my council colleagues, but I’d bet if you asked them to name the top four revenue sources for the city, they wouldn’t be able to answer.

You grew up in Granada Hills in the 1970s and ’80s. What do you miss most about the Valley from that time?
I was in Granada Hills recently with my son, who’s eight, and I said, “I want to show you where I went to elementary school and the route I took when I walked to school.” He was like, “You walked to school? Alone?” It was a different time. What I loved about the Valley was that you could go to a local public school and feel you were getting a good education. You didn’t spend all your time on the freeways. My family had a building-supply and trucking company that wasn’t hassled every week by the city. There was a sense of community. And I think it’s incumbent upon the mayor to create that sense of community and pride.

Where were you when the song “Valley Girl” came out?
I was at UCLA. So I wasn’t even in the Valley then but certainly knew people who talked like that and hung out at the Galleria and everything.

For lunch—Art’s or Jerry’s?
Art’s. My husband and I have been going there since we were first dating. When my son was a month old, we went there, and Art just rested him on his shoulder and walked around with him so my husband and I could have some peace. It’s kind of like home when we walk in there.

You’ve concentrated on the little things since you entered politics. You were in the city council only a few months before people began to call you “Pothole Queen.” But the little things don’t always add up to big ideas. You said the city needs to be run better. Beyond that, what’s your vision for what the city should be?
The vision is for this to be a city where people feel they can get a good public education and not spend their life on the freeways creating smog. It would be a city where you graduate from college and find a job. I imagine a city that is manageable in terms of quality of life, good recreation, parks, public libraries. My vision of L.A. is one that allows us to say that you can really achieve your dreams.

Well, for starters, how would you get more middle-class people to take public transit around here?
No simple, easy answer to that. The first is to make a seamless transport network. If you are a doctor or a lawyer, you can’t spend two hours taking a bus. Sometimes things have to be really bad to get people to change their behavior. Carmageddon? What a great weekend that was! Why? Some people left the city because they were afraid the sky was falling. Or they decided to have a neighborhood party. Or they decided to go to the Universal lot and take public transport downtown.

When was the last time you took public transportation?
A couple of weeks ago when we went to Hollywood from the Valley. Took the subway.

Do you take it frequently?
Not as frequently as I’d like. I’ve got three jobs: running for mayor, controller, and being a mom.

You’re the only main contender for mayor with a child in public school. As a parent, what do you make of the Los Angeles Unified School District?
We wanted our kid to go to public school. We had a school in the neighborhood that wasn’t so good. But a principal came in 2001, and she turned that school around. She held the parents accountable, the teachers accountable, the kids accountable. She got the support from the community. She got a science lab, a computer lab. It really said to me that a principal matters. There are still so many challenges we face. The number of kids in the classroom, for example. The three women who ran the administration office got transferred. They knew everything about the place, including which kids had to take medication and at what time. Now they’re gone. I’ve learned that there are a lot of problems with the LAUSD bureaucracy. And not all schools are treated alike. We are very lucky, for example, that when they were laying off teachers, they asked all the parents who could afford it to kick in to keep some of the teachers. Every year we have to fight to stay where we are and fight the bureaucracy.

The mayor’s race is going to be costly and nasty. How ready are you to throw yourself into raising money?
You know, my son has been dragged around to numerous events. We were going to a fund-raiser, and I said, “Hey, it has F-U-N right there in the name. It’s got to be fun!” A few days later I was driving him and a friend, and I heard him say from the backseat, “If your parents ever tell you a fund-raiser is fun, don’t believe them.” But I’m leading in fund-raising. I don’t vote on contracts, and I don’t vote on development. So people either believe in me or believe I’m going to win. I’m fine with either of those.

What would you want your legacy to be?
I went to this bicycling event, CicLAvia, recently, riding with my son. At one point a woman screamed, “I love Los Angeles!” And everyone looked around a little awkwardly. And then they all burst out clapping. I want everyone to say, “We love L.A.”

That Other Election

By Gabriel Kahn — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:23:00 GMT

Photograph by Christina Gandolfo

When Jan Perry abruptly quit her post as city council president pro tempore in November, she said she couldn’t tolerate the backroom dealing and insider culture of Los Angeles politics. But the knock was hardly a repudiation of city government: Perry wants to be your next mayor. Though she complains about a lack of openness, she has no illusions about how sausage gets made at City Hall. For more than a decade Perry has represented District 9, which includes some of the roughest parts of South Los Angeles as well as many of the downtown developers who provide the financial juice to city politics. No surprise then that Perry is a proponent of big development projects, such as the proposed Farmers Field next to the convention center, which she sees as the best hope for denting the city’s high unemployment rate. The only African American woman on the city council, the 56-year-old, who is also a convert to Judaism, was raised in a political family. Both of her parents served as mayor of the Cleveland suburb where she grew up before attending USC. Between now and the March 2013 primary she’ll be vying with fellow council member Eric Garcetti, city controller Wendy Greuel, and former deputy mayor Austin Beutner, among others, for your vote. We recently spoke with Perry and—cheeky of us—asked that she keep her answers to under a minute.

When did you first come to Los Angeles?
It was 1974. I came here with the Ohio State alumni association for a Rose Bowl game. I looked up at the mountains, and I saw the snow and the blue sky, and I thought this place was just Shangri-la. I was coming from the Midwest. Tom Bradley had just become mayor, and things were changing rapidly.

How would you evaluate Antonio Villaraigosa’s performance as mayor?
He opened up the dialogue on why the schools need to be better, and that’s a good thing. But he was coming from Sacramento, with its partisan perspective, so I would imagine that being here is very frustrating for him.

Are you saying that being Speaker of the state assembly, with all of its party divisions and squabbles, was poor training for the mayor’s job?
It’s just a different fit. He may have understood it and maybe was frustrated. I can’t get inside his head.

Who’s the better mayor: Bradley or Villaraigosa?
They are both charismatic, but I’d vote for Bradley because his deep, deep commitment to the city was so clear. Bradley fully inhabited the office of the mayor. He had fluid relationships with the city council, but he also enjoyed an enormous amount of credibility with people throughout the city. So he could go out and, on his own word, rally support for initiatives.

L.A. has had a black mayor and a Latino mayor. How does a black woman candidate play into the racial politics of a city that’s becoming increasingly Latino?
I’m a black woman who speaks Spanish, and I’ve represented a Latino district for the past ten years. No door has ever been shut to me. I’ve always been able to communicate with everyone. And as a woman, I put myself in the place of other women who are trying to take care of their families.

What kind of reaction do you get from people when you tell them you’re Jewish?
“Oh?” That’s about it. When you think about being Jewish from a global perspective, there is no monolithic notion of Judaism. Los Angeles is a global city, and there are plenty of Jewish people who look like me or approximate me.

If you could eat lunch only once in L.A., would you go to Langer’s or Canter’s?
Got to go with Canter’s. The waitresses—they’re funny.

In November you quit your post as president pro tempore of the city council, decrying the lack of openness. Many people would say the city council has never been open. What specifically prompted you to step down?
It was over the remapping of the city council voting districts. We had a situation where people were drawing up maps outside of a formal process and not letting people know. The fix was already in. Redistricting is a process we go through every ten years, and it reflects how we see ourselves and how we see our city. It’s a precious right, and it needs to be inclusive.

How has the political climate changed in the ten years you’ve been on the city council?
Well, term limits have kicked in. You have people coming from different political and cultural backgrounds. You’ve got 5 people out of 15 on the council who come from [the state legislature in] Sacramento and the possibility of at least 3 more coming on. So that would be 8 people out of 15. Sacramento is a partisan political environment. There it’s more transactional, as opposed to debating and vetting and having discourse on the public record. In many cases agreements are made before you get to the meeting.

You’re termed out at the city council, but why would you want to be mayor?
The city is broke. The mayor’s job doesn’t even have all that much power when compared with other big cities. Sometimes I’ll go and watch the projects I’ve helped complete and see how people experience them—the Augustus Hawkins wetlands in South L.A., for example. Sometimes I’ll sit on a bench there on a Sunday and watch kids who scream when they see a turtle for the first time. We get back as much as we give. When you know you’ve changed someone’s life, that’s powerful. I know I can do this on a larger scale. There is a lot of psychological reward in that, a lot of fulfillment.

How much is your mayoral campaign going to cost?
Between $2.5 million and $3 million.

Asking people for money sounds like one of the most awful jobs in politics. How do you stomach it?
It’s an acquired taste. I’m not a wealthy person, and it’s part of the task. When I ran for city council the first time, I had to raise money. Once you accept the fact that you’ve got to do it, it’s not such a big deal. You choose this life of politics; no one forces you.

What’s the toughest aspect of being on the council?
The loss of life. I do regular walk-throughs on skid row. One night I saw a lady and asked her to come into one of the missions for a bed. She refused, and an hour later she was murdered, stomped to death. There was a triple homicide recently. I spent time with a family who had lost someone, and that was very difficult. Homeless people get dumped on skid row, driven in from elsewhere and just left there, and that really gets me.

What’s the most important project the city can take on in the next two years?
The project that brings the greatest number of jobs to the city as quickly as possible. That’s probably the stadium and the convention center expansion.

That project is also beside one of the busiest stretches of freeway in the country.
It will bring more traffic. Hopefully we will work with AEG on their traffic mitigation program and encourage people to use public transportation as a first choice instead of a last choice. If we do this right, it would be a tremendous opportunity to expand public transportation and correct some of our past mistakes.

When was the last time you took public transit?
About a month ago. The Gold Line from Little Tokyo to Pasadena. Saw a movie.

What’s your favorite part of the Valley?
You know, I like Chatsworth. I like the topography. I like the rocks. And because it really makes me feel like I’m in another place.

What do you think of the current state of the city’s schools?
Clearly we need to do better, and as mayor I would ask voters to grant me a seat on the school board.

A lot of cities with successful public schools, like Chicago and New York, have brought them under the direct control of the mayor. Is one seat enough?
It’s a good place to start.

What does having a seat change?
It gives you direct influence on policy and process within the district itself, and a vote. You see how much success you can achieve with that in terms of funding programs, reducing midlevel bureaucracy, and empowering principals with their own budgets.

But asking the LAUSD to reduce its own bureaucracy is a bit like asking the turkey to cook itself for dinner. How is what you’re proposing different from what we’ve seen before?
People have come from an outside perspective. They’ve taken over schools or focused on a couple of initiatives, and while that’s had some success, I don’t know that it’s focused on improving the mainstream educational institution. I don’t want it to be left behind. Charter schools are one answer, but they may not be the only answer.

Do you think charter schools have put competitive pressure on the regular school system?
Hopefully. I can’t answer you on whether it’s changed the way LAUSD does business. I just know what I read and anecdotally and from looking at the schools in my district.

Is the city suffering from a leadership deficit?
We’re getting into that difficult area of negotiating pensions [with city employees]. And we’ve got a long way to go. We’re in some situations right now that are not sustainable. We’re going to have to have some cultural shifts in the way we create expectations in the future.

Does that mean you are prepared to have a frank and possibly painful conversation with city unions about pensions?
I not only want to be frank, I want to have one conversation that is on the public record. I think part of our problem is that…we’ve had third-rail conversations going on with other elected officials, which made things much more insular, more complicated, and more fractious. People would shop around for the answer they wanted to hear. A leader needs to hold the line and say, ‘This is the place where you come to have engagement.’ Anything else is not relevant.

The Loud Mouth

By David Davis — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 20:03:00 GMT

Photograph by Gregg Segal

He has called Frank and Jamie McCourt “chowderheads” and compared Pete Carroll to a Roman emperor. Since 2007, sports radio’s Petros Papadakis has conducted his daily Petros & Money show on AM 570/Fox Sports L.A., with cohost Matt “Money” Smith, employing the same blitzkrieg attitude that he displayed on the field as a USC running back. Now several pounds heavier, he dissects L.A.’s pro and college teams—not even his beloved Trojans escape the scalpel—in between belting out reggae tunes and sharing too much personal information, all in a baritone set perpetually at bellow. Papadakis was born in San Pedro, where his family’s Greek restaurant was a neighborhood fixture. He regularly appears as a commentator for college football on Fox Sports Net and was the first host of Spike TV’s Pros vs. Joes. Papadakis fortified himself with breakfast at Patys in Toluca Lake as he looked back at a painful year in local sports.

The Bowl Championship Series stripped USC of its 2004 national title this year as a result of the NCAA violations. How do you tell winners that they’re actually losers?
You’ll have to ask the NCAA. Look, the NCAA is a governing body—they are not a court of law—and they make their own rules. But it’s like with any kind of business. If you own a restaurant, you’d better have a good relationship with the health department and the city. The truth is, Pete Carroll and [former athletic director] Mike Garrett created a bad relationship with the NCAA. They didn’t corral Reggie Bush when or after he was playing, and they were flippant with the NCAA when they came to investigate USC. That pissed off the NCAA. None of this had to happen. That’s what frustrates me the most. Not that the kid took money, because kids make mistakes. I’m not naive. But the aftermath—how it was handled by the kid and the coach and the A.D.—is what caused the problems at USC.

Evaluate the Pete Carroll era at USC.
I was at ground zero for everything that Carroll created. I saw the great ascension. I saw how they had their success. But I also saw how it got corroded from within and became a bit like the Roman Empire. I remember seeing five little kids lined up for autographs after practice, and Pete’s security guy hustled Matt Leinart and Reggie Bush past them like they were rock stars. I said, “This is bad. This is not college football.” The separating of those guys from the team—that was symptomatic of what happened. And there’s a billion stories like that, most of which I’m not comfortable telling, that shine a light on what went wrong. But nothing would have gone wrong if everything didn’t go so wonderfully right. Most teams that have a lot of success deal with these types of problems.

Reggie Bush won—and lost—the Heisman Trophy. What’s his legacy?
He was one of the most exciting, electrifying players at the college level. I saw him do amazing things. But he was a selfish kid, and there was nobody to reel him in. Pure hubris. I hate to see the other kids suffering because of the sanctions USC received, I hate to see the university suffering because of it, and I hate to see the conference suffering because of it. And because USC is the premier college football program on the West Coast, I hate to see college football suffer because of it.

How is Pat Haden doing as USC’s new athletic director?
We get idiots calling the show and saying, “Why isn’t Pat Haden fighting the NCAA?” and “What’s wrong with Pat Haden?” They should realize that Pat Haden is smarter than all of us combined. He’s brought in a compliant, conciliatory attitude and environment, and that’s the right thing to do. A great way to win a press conference is to hire Pat Haden.

Is Lane Kiffin the right coach to lead USC?
I respect him for having good people on his staff because a lot of young coaches, like Steve Lavin when he got the UCLA basketball job, don’t want an adult voice advising them. But I think, in general, we expect too much from our football coaches. We treat these guys like they’re leaders of society. We treat them like they’re Charles de Gaulle. This is a football coach, people. They’re P.E. majors. They drink light beer. There are a lot of good people in football, but there are a lot of climbers who use 18-, 19-year-old kids to get their next job. I’ve seen both of them, and I’ve seen both of them succeed.

Across town, UCLA’s Rick Neuheisel is on the hot seat. Will he keep his job?
He has to produce. If UCLA goes 6-6 and gets to a Bowl game, they’ll probably keep Rick. The truth is, the Bruins should be pretty good. They don’t have a quarterback, and that’s a big deal in this conference, but I’ve never seen depth like that on the front seven defensively.

Pac-10 commissioner Larry Scott grew the league to 12 with the inclusion of Utah and Colorado. How’s it looking?
I’m a simple guy. If I’m doing a game at Cal, I have a hot dog at Top Dog. In Oregon I eat the Tater Tots. At Stanford I go to the Oasis in Menlo Park. That’s me. But college sports is a business, and Larry Scott is a visionary guy. He’s very polished—he’s the right guy at the right moment for the conference. With the new TV contract in 2012 [reportedly worth nearly $3 billion over 12 years], he’s been phenomenal for the schools and for the exposure of the conference. I’m comfortable with change because things are always changing. If you’re not comfortable with change, you should work in another business.

You seem to prefer college football over the NFL.
It’s in my blood. My dad took me to see USC at the Coliseum when I was growing up, into the locker room and in the tunnel with the players. All I remember is staring at a bunch of yellow asses because I was so small. But to me, college football is special because of the places, the tradition, the color, the pageantry. In college football kids make mistakes, and that leads to big plays and big excitement. I grew up a Rams fan because my dad rooted for them, but I’ve never been to a pro football game in my life. An NFL game in Tampa is the same as an NFL game in Philly. It’s just the weather’s different. It’s packaged, and everything’s homogenized. In the NFL everybody is so fucking good. The margin of victory is this [holds fingers apart]. It’s a marvel to watch them work, but it leads to less excitement.

Does L.A. need an NFL franchise?
The city does fine without the NFL, and the NFL does fine without the city. Are they going to be here? Yeah, politically they’ll cut through it eventually. But it no longer interests me because it’s been so freaking long. It’s 17 years—I’ve had enough. I don’t care.

There’s been a lot of talk about concussions in football.
It’s great as a topic if you’re on public radio and you speak in a hushed voice. But nobody playing football is worried about head injuries. If they were, they wouldn’t be playing. They’re there to make money because they know that their career can be over like that [snaps fingers]. In a perfect world, football wouldn’t exist. The sport breeds violence. Players are trained to respond with violence from the age of 14. It was great for me, and it teaches you a lot about yourself, but it’s a brutal game.

You popularized calling the Dodgers the “Doyers.” What’s the origin?
Dodger coach Manny Mota was a guest on the show, and he says it like that. We clipped it and started using it on the show. Now, ten years later, they’re selling T-shirts with DOYERS on them.

As a lifelong fan, what’s it been like to watch the team this season?
Sad and depressing. The night Frank McCourt bought the team, I had him on my show. Afterward I was like, It’ll be interesting to see how this goes. It just didn’t smell right. Then when the divorce news broke, I said on the air, “The sooner these people are gone, the better. This is going to be ugly.” No one could fathom how ugly, dirty, muddy, and depressing it would become.

You tell a lot of stories on the air.
Late at night, at my family’s restaurant, that’s what you’d do. There’d be three or four parties left—friends of ours, cops, wealthy people—and everybody would come to one table and listen to music and tell stories. When I was young, I’d be serving these people. When I got older and had more clout, I’d sit down. It was an intimate thing. We were a dining experience, and there’s not a lot of places like that.

You’ve been knocked for talking too much about your personal life, however.
Oh yes, especially when I first started. I wrecked at least a dozen important relationships. Maybe more. If you put me in your wedding, I was going to talk about your wife. There was a time when all that mattered was the two hours on the radio, this little piece of my day. The theme of the show was “Everyone’s welcome and nobody’s safe.” Being a little older now, I have more of a filter. It’s easier now because my life is more conventional. I’m married, and I go home at night, and my wife and I watch bad reality TV together. I’ve got to be honest with you—if I had to go on the air every day and talk only about the Dodger woes or what Angels rookie-of-the-year candidate Mark Trumbo’s batting average is or the NBA labor dispute, I’d go nuts. I always enjoy telling stories and opening the door a little to my life. People have responded to me making fun of myself and calling myself fat or ugly or lispy.

The transition from athlete to broadcaster couldn’t have been easy.
It was hard. In 1999, I shattered my right foot catastrophically during practice. It basically made me a cripple forever. They repaired my foot and got me back on the field for 2000. I wasn’t the same, but I could still play a little. My senior year was a disastrous season for USC football—the coach was fired—but everything was about this practice, this game, this moment. And then it was over. I didn’t have any plans other than working in the restaurant. I got a gig on TV talking USC football, and it was awkward because I was covering the team that I had played on. I felt like an athlete impersonating somebody else. I was comfortable talking with reporters as an athlete, but now I had to learn all of those nuances: how to interview people, how to analyze a football play quickly, how to look into a camera and talk while a producer is talking in your ear. How to dress myself and do the makeup. I needed a lot of polish. Slowly I began to feel like a reporter or an announcer or a commentator—all these different roles I play. I’ve become the mask.

What do your critics get wrong?
What I hear a lot is, “When I first started listening to you, I couldn’t stand you. I hated your voice. I thought you were obnoxious. I thought you were an asshole. Now I love you—I listen every day.” I’m assuming that most people who do my kind of job don’t get that a lot because most people are less offensive. I want a reaction. With so many people in sports talk radio, you can almost hear the producer saying to the announcers before the segment, “OK, you take that side and you take this side and argue.” I never had to do that because my opinions get enough of a reaction without having to contrive something. I’ve always felt fortunate in that way.

Do you want to go national?
I don’t care about being the number one this or that. Whatever happens, happens. What I want is to do radio every weekday and call college football games on Saturdays. I want to work. I’d like to do voice-overs for television. I’d like to pick songs for something—maybe be a wedding DJ. I’d be good.

Looking In

By David Kipen — Fri, 28 Oct 2011 16:50:00 GMT

Conversing with the writer Jonathan Lethem is like playing Ping-Pong with Serena Williams. Even if it isn’t exactly his day job, he’s surely good enough to wipe the floor with you if he feels like it. Lethem (with a long e, as in “Lethal Lethem,” his high school nickname) has already notched a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant,” a National Book Critics Circle Award for his novel Motherless Brooklyn, and a plum tenured gig teaching writing and contemporary fiction at Pomona College, filling the void created when David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008. The terrific early word on his new, artfully selected nonfiction collection, The Ecstasy of Influence, proves justified. Lethem, who is 47, has also become a model literary citizen, parlaying an early career scouting underpriced first editions into a healthy sideline championing such underrated writers as Walter Tevis (The Hustler), Thomas Berger (Little Big Man), Paula Fox (Poor George), and science-fiction visionary Philip K. Dick—whose best-selling Library of America editions and this fall’s posthumous Exegesis Lethem shepherded into print. I recently welcomed Le-them to Libros Schmibros, the Boyle Heights lending library/used bookshop I founded last year, to jaw about Raymond Chandler, how literary canons change, how neighborhoods evolve, and what a nice kid from Brooklyn is doing in Claremont.

In 2007, you published a novel called You Don’t Love Me Yet that’s set in the Silver Lake music scene, which I gather you researched partly over a two-month visit and partly by reading a lot of Jonathan Gold. Is there anything you would change about that book now that you’re actually living in Southern California?
I really want to be slow to authorize myself to have important things to say about L.A. Your photographer just said, “How do you like it here?” and I said, “I love it here, but I’m not here.” My wife and I drove to the coast for a friend’s cocktail party the other night. Got a baby-sitter, got dressed up in Claremont, got in the car. The joke is that this is like living where we used to live in Brooklyn and accepting an invitation in Philadelphia. My wife and I had plenty of time to talk while we were in the car. It’s a very different transition from getting on the subway or in a taxicab. Here you go into your cocoon. You get to listen to the radio. Music always sounds best in the car.

Do you think you could ever write about Southern California from the inside?
I used to be a California writer in some sort of technical sense. When my first two novels were published, I still lived in the Bay Area, and they were both set, in their way, in California. But I didn’t have the capacity to write, or for that matter to think, about place in the way I first blundered into—and then cultivated—when I moved back into the borough and became a kind of self-anthropologist in my relationship to Brooklyn. For at least that one six-square-block quadrant, I really went all the way. Whether I could ever extend that very far to another urban zone, I have no idea.

Do you think New York and San Francisco understand or misunderstand Los Angeles in different ways?
It’s not really a matter of misunderstanding. There’s just a preemptive resistance that does not even want to understand.

Here in Boyle Heights we’re in the thick of something that has been taken—or mistaken—for, heaven help us, the next Silver Lake. Are there lessons to be learned from the gentrification of your native Brooklyn about how to turn a place into something better without turning it into someplace else?
The problem with the concept of gentrification is that the map is not the territory. The idea that a lot of invasive real estate people use a wedge of superficial hipsters, who would be willing to live anywhere, to destroy a deeply indigenous neighborhood with roots in one monolithic authenticity is a lie at 12 different levels. The impoverished artists who are seen as the dupes of real estate interests are themselves human beings who want homes. It’s not done cynically except in retrospect. There are ironic losers in every sort of gentrification because it all happens with so much more fitful slowness than anyone thinks. It all happens on some sort of 30- instead of a three-year timetable. The whole thing doesn’t make sense as a story. I grew up in an antigentrification family. My parents lived in a way that I’m still moved to describe. They forged bonds with their immediate neighbors. My father helped open a youth center, and we had a jail in the neighborhood where my father taught art to the prisoners. Either you make large movements, political movements, that protect the poor from dispossession and the encroachments of monolithic capitalism, or you don’t bother to have any sympathy for them at all. Gentrification, or its opposite, are chimeras. [Pause.] That was a big lecture.

Speaking of good neighborhoods and bad neighborhoods, let’s talk about the literary canon. What’s it been like working on those beautiful black reissues of Philip K. Dick from the Library of America?
When you say that, it sounds like I’m approaching a very large building in D.C., about to argue a case before the Supreme Court for the first time. Will this bumpkin survive? What it really means is that a marvelous writer, Geoffrey O’Brien, is running the program when he calls me up and says, “Let’s have lunch, we’re kind of weak in certain areas, and I want to pick your brain.” And he and I hit it off, and I say, “Wait, you mean you’ve never read Philip K. Dick? You’ve got to go back and try again.” By the end of the lunch, I’m the editor.

Is it true that the initial reissue was Library of America’s all-time best-seller?
Not cumulatively, but it was the fastest-selling book in their repertoire. It made doing a subsequent two volumes of Dick’s work a cinch. It was incredibly fulfilling, and now I’m enmeshed in putting together his folly-slash-masterpiece Exegesis in a single, almost 1,000-page volume. Despite the out-of-print status and trashy covers, this is a major American writer. I’m like the guy who bought Apple stock in 1975.

And you had first editions of all the books...
Yes, it was all a piece of calculation on behalf of my holdings—I fixed the market!

Library of America included the script for Double Indemnity in one of two Chandler volumes. Do any other screenwriters deserving of canonization come to mind?
The first screenwriter I would nominate for Library of America is Preston Sturges. I think his screenplays read like masterpieces. It’s one sensibility. His voice is there. That would probably be my first pick. You?

Maybe Dalton Trumbo first—especially with the letters that were collected as Additional Dialogue. Incidentally, because your m.o. has been to throw the reader a curve every time out, does it get you down when you’re pigeonholed as, say, “that postmodern guy”?
Lots of writers have labored to get out from under labels. You never get completely free. William Gibson is cyberpunk forever, no matter what he does. Even Chandler is still kind of a “mystery writer.” “Crime writer” is a little better.

There went my lede: “Jonathan Lethem puts the pomo in Pomona.” So why is The Long Goodbye your favorite Chandler novel?
It’s a novel of character. By this time, Chandler has settled into his aphoristic brilliance, and he lets the language go all the way to the heart of emotion in the narrative voice. He lets himself linger over the city. He has given himself permission to be less concise, and he just has so much to say about male friendship and betrayal. It is right at the crossroads of the same thing that makes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby seem so profoundly American, where the promise of American freedom is meeting its limits, both in the nature of the human animal and the hangover of historical memory—the things that can’t be left behind, can’t be forgotten.

As someone who writes in the new book about walking past the house in Berkeley where Philip K. Dick wrote several of his books, have you made any—or are you postponing but hoping to get around to any—author pilgrimages in Southern California?
Early on I went to Chandler’s grave in San Diego. It’s a weird pilgrimage to make because there’s not much around there. The cemetery is this vast acreage of stones with no dates, and just a name on them. You have to find the row and number, and it’s like visiting a marker in cyberspace. There’s nothing to distinguish it.

What should there be?
A door, with a man walking through with a gun in his hand.

You’re a partner in a bookstore called Red Gap near your getaway in Blue Hill, Maine. Any plans to open a Claremont branch?
I don’t have the guns. Really, I get too much credit for Red Gap. I’m like the phantom bookseller there. They have some of my books , and I like to book scout for them. But as the professor and family man, I barely keep all those plates spinning.

Is the David Foster Wallace shadow at Claremont ever oppressive to you?
The presence of his absence is the kind of thing that could only be aptly or fully described by a Henry James. I never knew him. I’m not in any obligatory relationship to his work or teaching. Instead I’m helping people move forward. But I feel a really distinct tendril of his presence in the building and in people’s queries, like yours just now.

In The Ecstasy of Influence you wrestle a bit with the shadow of Advertisements for Myself as Norman Mailer’s early memo to posterity. What terms are you on with posterity?
We all have really deep limitations. I can see I’m not going to write my version of Proust or Anthony Powell. I think about that kind of project all the time. I think about the immensity and the detail, but I don’t have time, or exactly the gifts or opportunities, to do my A Dance to the Music of Time. The heartbreak of your own limitations is something that Mailer made very tangible and expressive. He stands as a permanent emblem for me, and rightly for a lot of other people, of toxic preposterousness or ego, but he is an emblem of risk taking—of making sure that you are always up on the tightrope of your own capacities.

Do you have a feel for where the completion of this nonfiction collection might take you next?
I see this book as something of a farewell to the mode. I am writing a little book on the Talking Heads’ Fear of Music. And after that I have a novel that’s consumingly interesting to me and that I’m going to get back to as soon as I cross the t’s and dot the i’s on the Talking Heads thing. Then I’ll be the guy who says no to every magazine and book review.

One last question: When I came out with my book The Schreiber Theory—about how screenwriters are the secret auteurs of their movies—you sent me an e-mail that read, “May it change the world.” Do you think a book can change the world?
The world that The Schreiber Theory should have changed is the ten, or maybe 500, people who will forever think about screenwriters differently, or write differently, because of the book. I’m not against canons. No, I just like the plural, canons—your canon, my canon, where they meet. A million canons. People talk about postmodernity with this terrific fear that it’s about the demolition of standards. It has nothing to do with the demolition of standards. It’s about their discovery in unexpected places. So when I say to you, “May your book change the world,” it changed my brain instantly. I saw the canon that you saw. It became visible to me, the canon of screenwriters as opposed to directors. Does that make me want to burn my copy of Andrew Sarris’s auteurist manifesto and stop thinking about directors? No. But now your canon is visible, it’s alive, it’s part of my world. You have to remember this: Most people don’t give a shit about any of it. What you really did was join the conversation and change it, and that’s what matters. That’s what my whole premise is. It’s about being in the constellation of arguments, of canons, of literature. I don’t want to be the only book in the bookstore. I want to be one of the books in the bookstore.

Photograph by Gregg Segal

Ask the Manager

By Jim Rosenthal — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:00:00 GMT

It hasn’t been an easy time for Don Mattingly, the Dodgers’ manager. A close adviser to Joe Torre when they were both with the Yankees, he was considered a lock to replace his mentor. Instead the Yankees passed him over, and “Donnie Baseball” joined Torre in L.A. as his hitting coach and trusted friend. This season, Mattingly’s first as manager, has been a worst-case scenario. Following in Torre’s giant footsteps would be tough under any circumstances, but Mattingly has had to spend most of 2011 trying to keep his eye on the ball despite the team’s many problems off the field, from the brutal beating of a San Francisco Giants fan in the parking lot to the financial plight of its failed ownership. Then there’s the team itself, which has struggled for consistency. Mattingly, who is 50, has responded with the same steady professionalism he exemplified as a longtime Yankees first baseman and Hall of Fame-caliber hitter. Here’s what he has to say about the McCourt situation, the ups and downs of this season, and the influence of Torre on his perpetual optimism.

This season has been a roller-coaster ride. What are your impressions?
I’ve loved it, but I’m not at all happy with the results. It has been a blessing for me to get the chance to manage after not getting the opportunity with the New York Yankees. But it’s a big challenge, and one that I am enjoying, to lead this club back to winning games.

Joe Torre was a legend known for his outsize personality. You have a quieter style. How difficult has it been to follow in his footsteps?
The transition has been easy because of all the things I learned from Joe as his hitting coach with the Yankees and Dodgers. He was one of the great managers—a master of strategy and managing personalities and dealing well with challenges. You have to be true to yourself and make your own decisions. We do have different styles, but you’d better learn something when you get a chance to work with a guy like Joe. I learned to be patient and gained insight into dealing with conflict in a focused, relaxed way.

What kind of input have you gotten from him since you took over?
We talk all the time, and he is always positive and helpful. If we lose a couple of games in a row, he’ll call to ask me how I’m doing and to make sure I don’t get upset about anything on or off the field.

He always said you’d make a great manager.
Even before I coached for Joe he told me I had potential to be a good manager someday. George Steinbrenner also told me I was a born leader and that I could be a great manager. When legends like Torre and Steinbrenner say you’d be a good manager, it does get you thinking.

Between the highly public divorce of team owners Frank and Jamie McCourt and the assault on the Giants fan, Bryan Stow, the team has had a lot to contend with off the field.
Of course, the divorce and the assault in the parking lot have been major concerns for people working for the team. My job has been to get the players to focus on the culture of baseball. No matter what is going on around the team, the guys still have to play hard and do all the little things it takes to win.

But the ownership situation must have been a distraction.
It can be a distraction at times, but not to the extent it has an impact on what’s going on during the game. I can’t let it become such a distraction, or we won’t make progress as a team. I can’t control what happens with ownership. [Dodger GM] Ned Colletti has to deal with it a lot more than I do, and I have to deal with what’s going on with McCourt more than my coaches or the players.

So you’re saying it hasn’t had a negative impact on the players?
Distractions are a constant in baseball. The fans in San Francisco are rowdy and try to get the players’ attention. The weather can be miserably cold or very hot. You always have personal issues that could, if you allow them to, get in the way of doing your job. But you have to separate all this stuff from baseball. I ask my players to separate all those things, including the ownership issue, for three to four hours every day. This is the time to get away from all the negatives and just enjoy the experience of letting it fly and playing hard.

What’s it like working with McCourt?
He has always treated me fairly, and he has never told me who to play or what to do. I respect him and like him, and I know he is going through a very difficult time.

Having been through a difficult divorce, you must have some empathy for what he’s going through.
I had a very tough time dealing with my divorce, but I can’t even imagine what it’s like to have a divorce played out in public. He’s a decent person, and a tough divorce like this one with its financial issues would make it even tougher.

McCourt hasn’t been at Dodger Stadium in months, though. Isn’t that a concern?
I really have no idea why he’s not coming to games, but it could be that this is his way of not becoming a distraction for our club, and he wants us to stay focused.

Attendance is way down. Do you think it is a reflection of the team’s record?
If we can win enough games to be in a race to win the division, and then win the National League pennant, the fans will come out and the attendance will get back to where it should be. The team has struggled with consistency, and that does not help draw people to games, but the answer is probably more involved than just wins and losses.

Juan Uribe, Rafael Furcal, Rod Barajas—the team has definitely had to deal with a lot of injuries this year.
We have had our share of injuries, but that’s part of baseball. I don’t want to make any excuses. We have had a lot of chances to win games, our pitching and defense have been good, but we just haven’t scored enough runs. If you go through and analyze every Dodger game this year, you won’t find a lot of blowouts, but we are not winning those close games. It comes down to a key pitch or a hit, and we’re not getting it done with enough consistency.

Who are the guys you expect to form the nucleus of the team next season?
Clayton Kershaw, Matt Kemp, and Andre Ethier are the three core guys we are going to build this team around. But we have other players who don’t have big numbers but have what it takes to be an important part of our future success: Jamey Carroll, Aaron Miles, and Casey Blake are stand-up guys who have had to work hard to become successful. I like players who are willing to pay the price for success.

Ethier reminds me of you as a hitter—he has that classic, smooth left-handed swing. Did you work with him a lot on his swing?
I worked with all the guys when I was a hitting coach under Torre. You get a chance to see how they handle pitchers and different pitches in different situations, and they also had a chance to get to know me as a person. The players learned that I am not the type of guy who is going to panic when they are slumping at the plate. They know I am consistent and fair in how I treat them, both in good times and bad, and that’s helped with all the challenges we’ve had this year.

Managers have people second-guessing them all the time. But even you’ve second-guessed some of your decisions in the press.
If you don’t second-guess yourself, then you are not trying to get better. Joe would always tell me that you are going to make decisions. Some of them are not going to work out, and it does not mean that they were the wrong decisions. I have had many occasions this year where I questioned and second-guessed my decision in a game, but it comes down to learning from mistakes and being accountable for what you did right or did wrong.

Can you think of a decision you second-guessed recently?
The Mets had Jason Bay waiting on deck with an open base, and I could have walked the lefty hitter and pitched to Bay. Instead the lefty got a hit, and I kicked myself for not challenging Bay and walking the other guy with an open base. We all have the temptation to be backseat drivers when it comes to decisions that don’t work out the way we want.

What’s been your season highlight?
With all of our struggles, I am proud that this team continues to play hard and work hard to improve every day. As a manager I have been given an opportunity to develop a culture of playing the game the right way. I told the team when I took this job my goal was to win a championship, and every decision I make is designed to move us in that direction. We have to play the game the right way, regardless of whether we are up ten games in the NL West or ten games out of first place.

What’s your favorite thing about Dodger Stadium?
As you drive into the stadium you look at the mountains and palm trees and the beautiful setting. Then once you are inside you have that positive vibe and good feeling from the loyal Dodger fans. With everything that has happened this year, the fans at Dodger Stadium are still really excited about our club, and that means a lot to me.

Have the Dodger fans given you guys a hard time when the team has struggled?
Any fans will be disgruntled when the team is not doing well. We hear the chorus of boos and the catcalls if we screw up. The fans are laid-back, but that does not mean they don’t give us a hard time if we’re losing. I can’t say I blame them.

How would you say Dodger fans are different from Yankee fans?
They are very much the same, as you have two franchises with all this rich history. Yankee fans are always talking about Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Dodger fans talk about Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Jackie Robinson, Davey Lopes, Ron Cey, and Steve Garvey. But the L.A. Dodger fan is obviously much more laid-back than his counterpart in the Bronx. It is a very different scene, and that leads to a little less intensity in the crowd in L.A. But we have Dodger fans in every city on the road, and that’s the one thing that reminds me the most of what it was like with the Yankees.

Photograph by Tom Schierlitz

Restoration Artist

By Ed Leibowitz — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Since Michael Govan became director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2006, the institution has raised its profile by living large. The Broad Contemporary Art Museum was already in the works with architect Renzo Piano when he took over, but Govan (rhymes with oven) has since overseen the creation of LACMA’s BP Grand Entrance as well as the Lynda and Stewart Resnick Exhibition Pavilion. With the opening of Ray’s restaurant and Stark Bar, he’s helped make the museum more of a scene. And he’s commissioned massive attention-getting outdoor sculptures—Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, a 340-ton boulder you will be able to stroll under when it opens to the public in November, and Chris Burden’s Urban Light, composed of 202 closely grouped vintage L.A. streetlights. Before coming to L.A. Govan, who is 47, headed the Dia Art Foundation, where he built an acclaimed contemporary art museum in an old Nabisco factory in Beacon, New York. Now in his sixth year at LACMA, he recently renewed his contract for another five. Though his $1.1 million annual compensation is hefty for a museum of LACMA’s attendance and size, Govan brought in $251 million during his first three years alone—$100 million more than what was raised during the three years before he arrived. We talked to Govan about how LACMA stacks up in the art world, the scuffle over the museum’s film program, and why wealthy Angelenos can seem tightfisted.

In January 2009, you said in an interview that LACMA was a good museum but not yet a “super-world-class” museum. At the end of your first five years, what do you think LACMA still has to accomplish to join the ranks of the super world class?
Did I say “super world class”? LACMA has exquisite and rare things, and we have some things you can’t find anywhere else in the world, like Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe and the Ardabil carpet. At the Victoria and Albert Museum you can find one other Persian carpet that rivals our Ardabil carpet, but we always say ours is better. That said, a lot of major artists are not even represented. We have a Rembrandt, but we don’t have paintings by Goya or Velázquez. If you’re a general museum and you’re the Metropolitan Museum of Art, you would expect to have those works. We can probably claim to have one of the most diverse collections of ancient American art and pre-Columbian art in the country, but our status in the ranking of museums and collections—if you go collection by collection, it’s not near the top except in areas like pre-Columbian and ancient Korean and Japanese art.

In those rankings LACMA is being measured by the criteria of the art worlds of New York and Europe, which give short shrift to Asian and Latin American art. Why worry about what they think?
Your words are music to my ears. Our job is to find ways not just to live by the measure of the Met and Europe. It’s to set our own measure—that’s exactly the point. Nobody else is really making the huge investments that we are in ancient American and colonial Mexican art, and in recent years we’ve spent over $2 million to take a very fine collection of Japanese art and make it one of the finest. Our Korean collection is the largest presentation of traditional Korean art in the nation. I’m not guessing we’re going to have a Goya or a Velázquez of any large scale in our future, although maybe we’ll get lucky on one of those. But that doesn’t mean we can’t define ourselves by a different set of metrics.

While we’re on the metric system, you seem to like art with a lot of metric tonnage. It was one of the things Dia:Beacon was known for, and it’s certainly evident in Chris Burden’s Urban Light, Robert Irwin’s palm garden, and Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass.
I did a lot of my art history studies in Rome, researching ancient Rome and other ancient cities. Art plays a role in cities of the past that it seems to have lost in cities of the present—in the outdoor spaces and in public space. The cliché now is to build a big museum and then have a little artwork in the entry. I’m trying to reverse that trope. Renzo Piano’s architecture is simple and beautiful, but it also provides a backdrop that allows Chris Burden’s lamps to scream out at you as a real icon—and as architecture. It was my dream that the image of the museum be an artwork, not a building. Not that I don’t love buildings. LACMA has great buildings, but you want to lead with art.

By introducing a general encyclopedic art museum through such massive works of contemporary sculpture, do you run the risk of misleading visitors about what they’ll experience once they’re inside?
First of all, I want to abandon the word “contemporary” from art. It’s just art, right? There’s art and there’s artists, and if you’re going to build public sculpture in Los Angeles and you’re going to commission an artist, you can’t commission a dead artist, you know? That’s not an option. You commission living artists and architects to sculpt and shape your space. Chris Burden’s project is so beautiful in part because it deals with the city, and it speaks to—I wouldn’t call it a golden age—but the history of Los Angeles. The dates are right on the lamps. Similarly, one of the reasons Robert Irwin was so interested in creating LACMA’s palm garden was their primordial relationship to the La Brea Tar Pits—the site’s prehistory. There’s also this issue of L.A.’s cultural history, of seizing on palm trees to help identify the city. And Mike Heizer spent time in ancient Mexico and Egypt, and his whole issue was, “How come you can’t channel some of that energy of ancient cultures in art today?” In his Levitated Mass you have a monolith marking space. It’s the Incas who had that tradition; it’s the Egyptians. So I’d say these works provide pathways from our present circumstance into history and from history into our present circumstance.

What’s going on with the life-size sculpture of a locomotive dangling from a crane that LACMA commissioned Jeff Koons to create? Is there an estimated time of arrival?
I wouldn’t put an arrival time on that train in particular, but progress is being made. We did a feasibility study examining buildability issues and public safety issues. Then we began to scan the train into digital files, and now it’s being analyzed by a company in Germany that is exploring methods of construction.

You went to graduate school in San Diego, so you came here already familiar with Southern California. Still, were there any surprises about the arts and cultural climate in Los Angeles—pleasant or otherwise—when you began this job?
Before moving to L.A. I always thought that the city’s midcentury architecture was so well cared for. L.A. really is a city of domestic architecture, whereas most cities have all this architecture that’s commercial or religious or governmental. So I assumed everybody treated those houses as the masterpieces of art that they are. Then I got to L.A. and realized that a lot of these houses were in danger.

You’ve said you want LACMA to be a steward of some of those endangered homes.
To me it seemed like you could actually take care of them like a sculpture. I wasn’t proposing that we would go out and buy a lot of things as much as I was encouraging people to think of their houses as they would a painting. That’s what we’re doing with our restoration work on Watts Towers.

The current owners of Frank Lloyd Wright’s endangered Ennis House in Los Feliz lowered its purchase price from $15 million to less than $6 million. They still can’t find a buyer. Isn’t this residential masterpiece a better value as a work of art than a $50 million Andy Warhol silk screen that might have taken 15 minutes to make?
Those houses are not very good values, in the sense that the Ennis House needs $12 million of restoration and a $20 million endowment to really take care of it.

Sounds like you’ve penciled it out.
We’ve been in touch with the sellers, but we don’t have the resources to take on the Ennis House. Nevertheless, in terms of scholarship as well as restoration and access, we can be a great vehicle and conduit for patrons to invest in things that are guaranteed to be world class. It’s not like you’re taking a risk here. The Ennis House is one of the greatest pieces of architecture in the nation.

Last year you got an earful when you considered suspending LACMA’s chronically underfunded film program.
We never ended up putting the program on ice. And our goal has been to strengthen our attention to film and make it a more central activity of the museum. So we have this year’s show on Tim Burton, and we’re working on the Stanley Kubrick show for next year. We’ve teamed with Film Independent to bring artists and filmmakers to the table. And we’ve jointly hired Elvis Mitchell to lead our film program. Obviously there are a lot of strong points to Elvis, but one of the strongest is his interdisciplinary approach to film. He’s a film geek, but he also has an interest in art and television. So I’m sure he’ll show great old and historic films and will have surprising ways of presenting those films.

There seems to be a fundamental reluctance in this city to get involved and give. Why do you think L.A.’s richest citizens are so unmotivated to play a bigger philanthropic role in our civic and cultural life?
There’s a cliché that L.A. is a more selfish culture—you hear that on the East Coast—and I violently disagree. I think the main factor is time. L.A. is a much, much younger city. You look at a picture of LACMA’s site in the 1930s, and there’s nothing here. We didn’t open until 1965. So give it time.

Yet there was stronger philanthropy here in the ’20s, ’30s, and ’40s, when the downtown clique ruled L.A.’s civic life.
Some of the philanthropy you’re talking about came from businesses that mirrored those of the East Coast, like banking and newspapers. It was a bit of an East Coast model. Hollywood is literally only 100 years old. Now we have to establish a new tradition.

Philanthropist Eli Broad provided money to construct LACMA’s Broad Contemporary Art Museum. How do you feel about his decision to not donate his collection to LACMA and build his own museum downtown?
It’s great that Eli’s leaving his collection in Los Angeles—better to give credit to that and be excited about it and know that those works are available to us in a diverse presentation, and that with BCAM he generously created a facility that launched the rebirth of LACMA as an institution. It’s fine because it also leaves a great deal of space for others to participate.

Still, aren’t you somewhat disappointed? If not about that, then the $5.5 million in cost overruns in BCAM’s construction that LACMA had to write off when Broad determined he wasn’t obligated to pay?
I wish that collectors who have huge resources like Eli Broad would better see the value of participating and giving and playing a smaller role in a larger enterprise, because I think there’s such power in larger collaborations and contributing to a larger whole. It can be frustrating in the short term, but it has immense power in the long term. Look at the Metropolitan—all that collaboration over so many years, and look what you have. So I can be honest: I wish. But that’s not going to let this slow me down. If we were relying just on Eli Broad, it would be a sad state of affairs for this city. There are more—there have to be more.

Photograph by Sian Kennedy

Divided We Fall

By Amy Wallace — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 07:00:00 GMT

For a decade the leadership of the Screen Actors Guild was marked by conflict that pitted some of America’s most famous faces against one another (and led to the coming and going of seven executive directors). David White, who was SAG’s general counsel during some of the worst of it, watched those executives come and go—and eventually left SAG in 2006 to run his own consulting business. In January 2009, he opted to return to the 120,000-member union as its national executive director. Since then SAG has negotiated and ratified at least ten contracts, nearly closed a $6.5 million budget deficit, and used technology to improve services to members. At Hollywood’s largest union these days, dysfunction has been largely replaced by efficiency. White, 42, talks about creativity, Aristotle versus Plato, and the power of a carrot and a stick.

So, you work for actors. They can be a high-strung group.
Actors bring our stories and histories to life on the screen. We ask them to channel our greatest fears and our greatest triumphs so that we can live vicariously through them and then go to dinner and talk about it. This organization provides the space for them to do that. When they’re working, they’re in their most vulnerable moment. And most of them don’t have anyone to protect them other than this union.

Most people, if they know anything about SAG, think of it only as the place that ensures actors get paid on time—or at all. Sounds like you think the union has a role in the creative process itself.
No question about it. Without the union, the amount of time you have to sit in makeup without eating has no boundaries. The amount of distance you have to travel, the amount of sleep and family time you can have between workdays, all of that is regulated by these agreements. If you take that away, actors will drive themselves into the ground for the opportunity to express their creativity through a performance because it’s in their DNA. Professional actors don’t have the option of not acting. They will do it under almost any circumstance, which is one of the reasons why people are so emotionally attached to this union.

Where did all this passion for organized labor come from?
Many of my father’s relatives migrated from Macon, Georgia, to Detroit to work for the auto industry. Some were members of the UAW. They were relatively uneducated African American workers who were decent, hard-working citizens looking for an opportunity, and their union membership allowed them to have a middle-class life. My father and his sisters owned their homes and have retirement because they were members of unions. Unions were a source of hope for people leaving the conditions of the South. No union, no opportunity.

Where did you grow up?
Born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and at the age of five moved to Kansas City, Missouri. My father was a salesman for IBM, one of the first to enter through its affirmative action program. My mother was a self-educated entrepreneur who was the executive assistant for my father’s boss at IBM. She was part of the group that started one of the first HMOs in the ’70s, and ultimately ended up having her own consulting company.

Would you ever have guessed you’d be doing what you do for a living?
I wanted to be a doctor. But I went to an all-male Jesuit high school and in my junior year got really serious about theology and philosophy. That moved me to start thinking about how to be of service to the world. I went to Grinnell and focused on political philosophy. There I learned to deconstruct traditions and institutions and to ask: Why is this like this? Why should we accept that? It was a fantastic setting to learn how to be thoughtful about the way the world works and doesn’t work.

You were a Rhodes Scholar, right?
Yes. I came out of Grinnell dissatisfied with the ideas loosely associated with Platonic thinking. Without realizing it, when I became a Rhodes Scholar I walked right into an Aristotelian institution at Oxford. Plato starts with universal truths and speaks to a process of becoming in tune with those truths. Aristotle does the reverse. He looks at the practicalities of the human condition and reaches for an understanding of human virtue. That works much better for me. I’m looking for practical guidance in a chaotic world.

When you became executive director of SAG, the organization had been through perhaps the most chaotic period in its history. Your predecessor, Doug Allen, was a former Buffalo Bills linebacker with the demeanor to match. Some believed there was too much Platonic thinking then—too much digging in of heels and too little looking at how things could actually get done.
That’s true. That usually doesn’t yield good results.

When you were doing labor and employment work as a lawyer with O’Melveny & Myers, one of your clients was the Screen Actors Guild, which eventually hired you as its general counsel. What made you leave SAG in 2007?
I had done what I had set out to do as general counsel, and it was a good time for me to engage in some of the entrepreneurial interests that I have.

Your departure wasn’t related to the fierce infighting between rival factions that marked that period in the union’s history?
Not so much. Infighting doesn’t bother me that much, except as it prevents our ability to do the work. People having different opinions is a natural and positive aspect of a robust democracy. For me it was more about “Do I have anything significant to add in this position, and if I don’t think I do, what else should I be thinking about?” In this industry there are over 80 collective bargaining agreements in play at any given time, and while large studios and networks have staff to handle that, the vast majority of everyone else doesn’t. I knew that they would pay for someone to simplify the process of dealing with such a thicket of regulations. So I formed a consulting company to provide that service. I did that for two years.

Marc Dreier, the New York lawyer who was your major investor, was later implicated in a massive securities and wire fraud case that involved a scheme to sell $700 million in fictitious promissory notes. He’s currently serving 20 years in federal prison. How did that affect your business?
He was working with a number of prominent folks in the Industry, and even after lots of background checks, nobody understood what he was also doing with five of the largest hedge funds on the planet. When all of that caught up with him, we removed his investment, and right around that time, some members of SAG reached out to me.

The place sounds like it was a hornet’s nest.
You might say. But I was trusting that the resources were here to get us out of a mess and put us back on track.

So what did you do first?
SAG is a sprawling bureaucracy. We have 20 branches across the country. We have five governing bodies—a national board, a national executive committee, three division boards—and dozens upon dozens of committees, all with member input. So we have to develop systems where we know what the left and the right hands are doing. That’s number one. Number two, we must use technology in a smart, effective way to support the work that we do. The third thing that always drives my thinking is member services.

Which includes speeding up the processing of residual checks?
We receive $2 million a day in checks, some of which are for one penny, coming in from dozens of companies. And when I came in, our process was to manually pull the documents out, take the data off the paper, and type it in. That’s crazy. I was determined that we try to get more of that information digitally—and now 67 percent of the companies are delivering digitally. To handle the other 33 percent, we obtained machines that can scan the full variety of information that comes in—rather than doing it by hand. We call them Rocky and Bullwinkle. Two other machines, Boris and Natasha, collate the information with the checks and stuff the envelopes to get them out the door.

To an outsider that sounds like pretty dry stuff.
Few things excite me as much as bringing an efficient process to life. Another thing we’ve used technology to streamline is the signatory process that producers of movies, TV shows, commercials, and new media must use before they hire a professional actor. Signing up with SAG is a complicated process that requires over 200 documents. Now it’s all online.

How does that help actors?
It dramatically simplifies the process for people who want to employ our members. It removes manual processing, allowing our staff to focus on the more meaningful aspects of their jobs. And this process makes us able to return what’s left of the bonds we require producers to put up more quickly. Then they can use that money to employ more of our members. Here’s the phrase we’ve used to describe SAG since I took this job: Easy to work with, hard to fight.

How has it been dealing with the SAG board?
President Ken Howard and the current leadership have made a point of keeping the board as a strategic, policy-focused part of the organization and giving space for me, the executive staff, and our staff nationwide to do our work and improve our operations. It cannot be overemphasized how important that is.

Where are you in the process of merging SAG and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists?
January 2012 is our target for completion of all related merger documents. That’s when the boards will decide if this is what we want to send to the membership. If it is, the vote would come after that. The only way to protect our members is to remove employers’ ability to play these organizations off each other. A merger is the most effective way to do that. Somebody said it long before me: United we stand, divided—you know the rest.

Photograph by Chris McPherson

The Long Run

By Gabriel Kahn — Mon, 02 May 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Last month, Austin Beutner quit his job as first deputy mayor to embark on what some regard as a quixotic bid for city hall. Though the election is two years away, the former Wall Street executive has already begun assembling a campaign staff, including people he brought with him from his time working with Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. He also recently picked up a high-profile endorsement from former mayor Richard Riordan. Beutner faces a crowded field made up mostly of longtime Los Angeles pols, but he has deep pockets and a tight connection with some of the city’s business elite. Beutner spoke to Gabriel Kahn recently about his candidacy.

You spent 15 months working for a mayor who is widely regarded as being ineffectual and distant. How do you plan to distinguish yourself from him and his administration in a race?
What I worked on with the mayor is changing the way the city approached business, employers, and job creation in Los Angeles. I’m proud of it. The mayor supported it and worked closely on it. He’s spoken for the record about how we’ve made a difference and how we do things differently. He and I are different. I have a lot of regard for him as a person. But I’ll do things differently.

How much do you think this campaign is going to cost?
I have no idea. I really don’t. Campaigns are expensive, and we plan to do it right.

Are you prepared to spend your own money?
Well, I definitely plan to be out there raising money in different communities. Getting third-party support is a pretty good indicator of whether or not people think you can do the job of mayor. And if they won’t support you, it’s a pretty good indication that you should be doing something else.

But are you prepared to invest in your campaign?
I’m making the most important investment right now by investing my time. Whether I end up using my own money or not, that’s something we’ll have to decide down the road.

What’s the first thing you would do as mayor?
Make Los Angeles a city that works. That means that Angelenos who want good paying jobs have to be able to find them, and the city needs to do a better job of serving its constituents. The city itself has to work better. That’s the foundation. If there’s no economic foundation, the other pieces you can’t pay for—they don’t sustain themselves. I grew up in Michigan. I remember Detroit as a vibrant city of 2 million. Today it’s a city of 700,000 that’s been rotted to the core because the middle-class jobs left. Los Angeles has an unemployment rate of 13 percent, but if you count the people who have stopped looking for work or are only working part-time, I think the number is closer to 20 percent. If we don’t put people back to work, pretty soon the other pieces aren’t going to matter.

You’re a 50-something white male in a city that is increasingly ethnically diverse. Do you think that creates a handicap? Or are we getting beyond the era of racial politics?
I think I’ve shown in the last year the importance of creating jobs in every community in Los Angeles. I take skills learned in the private sector and skills learned in the public sector and make that work for Angelenos. I don’t think this race is going to be about identity politics; I think this race is going to be about who is best equipped to deliver on that promise. All will make the promise.

What’s the most important thing you learned during your 15 months in city government?
Los Angeles is a complicated place. Listen. Learn from the constituents, learn from the communities what matters. We can make a difference, we can change the culture of city hall. They are called public servants because they are supposed to serve the public. We started a program in my office to actually make phone calls. Everyone in my office reached out to five employers in the city each week—large, small, South L.A., East L.A., the Valley, San Pedro—to understand what their needs are and to deliver city services to support them. That’s what’s going to create jobs and change the tide, and I think that same principle applies to everything the city does. To exist in the hermetically sealed building of City Hall, that’s not where city government really belongs. City services belong out in the neighborhoods among the constituents.

Do you think you can get along with the entrenched players in this city, such as the city council? Unions?
I think we get along fine. I think we have a common agenda. Certainly, in the past year, I’ve visited almost every council district together with the council representative. Collaboratively, we passed the business-tax holiday. Collaboratively, we worked together to pass the local-preference ordinance. And where there is a common agenda, of course we’re going to work together. But I think it’s the mayor’s job to set that agenda and to provide, with the bully pulpit that the mayor has, a way to hold the city accountable.

For more on Austin Beutner, read "The Unpolitician," our May profile.

Shock Absorber

By Amy Wallace — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:00:00 GMT

You’ll recognize Lucy Jones by her face, not her title. She is a seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey and has been a visiting research associate at Caltech’s Seismological Laboratory since 1983. She’s often the first person you see on TV after a quake, explaining why your bookshelf just waltzed across the living room. Now she wants to help you get ready for the next one. Listen up: Earthquake preparedness starts at home.

You’re famous for going on television after the 1992 Joshua Tree earthquake with a sleeping baby in your arms. One story I read said you even shushed a reporter to keep him from waking your son.
That part is apocryphal, but it’s an interesting evolution of the story, and I have a theory about why. Here’s what actually happened: I do research on foreshocks, and I had cochaired a committee to decide what we should be doing about earthquakes near the San Andreas Fault and the possibility that they would trigger something bigger. So in 1992, there was a 4.6 right by the San Andreas, and I came to work and left my husband home with the kids. Then the 6.0 happens at ten o’clock at night. My husband is a seismologist, too—he runs the seismic network at Caltech—so he grabs the kids, who were one and five, and runs in to work.

Our younger son, Niels, had been sound asleep and was very grumpy about having been woken up. If we put him down, he screamed. If one of us held him, he didn’t. There was a computer crisis and my husband had to go, so he literally handed me the kids in the middle of an interview. We ended up making a statement that there was about a 15 percent chance of a San Andreas earthquake the next day, so the media were freaking out, and since it was based on my research, I kept on doing interviews and kept on carrying Niels.

So what’s your theory on why the story has morphed into an exaggerated version?
Even though we have both male and female experts who talk about this stuff, without question the women get remembered more. Because you feel better when Mommy tells you it’s OK. Women are more reassuring after an event. I’m pretty sure that’s why that image—me carrying my child—became so powerful. It also showed the reality of working motherhood. But then it became this symbol of “women can have it all,” which always made me feel bad because it doesn’t really work. We compromise. I felt like I wasn’t everything I could have been for my kids—and for my job. Soon after that I ended up going part-time. I worked part-time for ten years.

That didn’t stop you from becoming lodged in the public’s mind as “the earthquake lady” from Caltech.
It’s funny. I’m not the only person here who talks to the media. There are other people who do it more often than I do. My actual job is to run the Multi-Hazards Demonstration Project, whose aim is to use hazard science to improve a community’s resiliency for natural disasters. The project is an explicit attempt to make use of the fact that people recognize me to get the message out.

And that message is?
The San Andreas Fault has to move. Most likely it will move in one big earthquake: a 7.8 or maybe even bigger. And when that happens—you’ll notice I say “when”—the lifelines that cross the San Andreas and come into L.A., all the major highways, the railway lines, all our natural gas pipelines, electrical lines, and water lines, will rupture. The chance of fires getting out of control is an extremely devastating part of this. Here are two pieces of advice: However much water you’ve got, store some more. And get a couple of fire extinguishers and make sure you know how to use them. Extrapolating from the 110 fires that occurred after the Northridge and San Fernando and Loma Prieta earthquakes, we have estimated that a big quake creating a strongly shaken hundreds of thousands of square miles will yield 1,600 fires. And you’ll need to fight those fires yourself. You have to be ready to do that.

How much water do you have stored?
We’ve got three big crates of the half-liter bottles plus a saltwater swimming pool. We have a system to distill the water and make it drinkable. That’s a big source of water.

Are we crazy to live here?
Actually, no. It’s a rational choice to live in Southern California because if you take the sweep of natural hazards that affect the country, you are no more likely to die from a natural disaster here than anywhere else. In fact, less so. We have an irrational fear of earthquakes, partly because they create a feeling of being out of control. We’re afraid of dying in them, even though the risk is extremely small. You’re almost undoubtedly going to live through it. And probably your house is going to be OK. It’s the aftermath that we need to prepare for.

Your sons, now 20 and 24, are fifth-generation Californians. Your roots run deep here.
My great-grandparents are buried on the San Andreas Fault, in Banning. When the Big One happens, they’re gonna be flying.

What’s the first earthquake you remember?
It’s one of my first memories of life. It was 1957, and I was two years old. We were living in Ventura, and there was a magnitude 5.1 close to where we were. I have a clear memory of my mom taking me, my brother, and sister into the hallway, and she had us cover our heads and she was on top of us. Our Siamese cats were screaming. They used to sleep on the TV because it was warm there. And when the earthquake started, they jumped off—thinking the TV was moving—but the shaking didn’t stop. So they freaked out and started screaming that special Siamese yowl. They never slept on the TV after that.

Did you vow to become a seismologist at two?
No. My father was an aerospace engineer at TRW, and he worked on the lunar escape module descent engine. So when we landed on the moon, when I was 14, I remember telling him I was going to be an astrophysicist and live on the moon. I thought that by the time I was this age, we would be living on the moon.

You ended up majoring in Chinese at Brown University. How did that happen?
Well, I was bored as hell at Westchester High School, so I took the SATs early, in tenth grade. Back then you could go to a UC without graduating from high school if you had high-enough SATs. So I was going to go to UCLA. But then my aunt and uncle, who were living in Taiwan, invited me to come live with them. My grandparents had been missionaries in China, and my dad was born and grew up there, and my uncles were both China analysts for the government. So instead of going to college at 15, I flew to Taiwan and went to Taipei American School. I graduated just after I turned 16. While I was there, I met Jimmy Wrenn, who taught Chinese at Brown, and he sent me an application.

Growing up in L.A., I had never heard of Brown. I’d heard of Harvard. So I applied to Harvard and Brown and got into both. Well, actually, I got into Radcliffe, and it offended me that I couldn’t go to Harvard. My math teacher tried to convince me I should go to Radcliffe because they had a better class of men to marry there, and of course that would be why I was going to school: a Mrs. degree. I went to Brown.

What did you study?
Mostly physics and math as well as Chinese language and literature. But along the way, at a brunch I attended because there was free food, I met a couple of geophysicists who said, “You don’t want to be a physicist. The only jobs are building bombs. Come into geophysics, and you can play in the mountains and get paid for it.” I didn’t take my first geology course until my senior year, but I fell in love with it. I read the textbook in the first week because I couldn’t put it down. It was so cool.

Why?
It was explaining the world. I had been a classic physics snob—you know, “Rocks are for jocks. Geology isn’t a real science.” But suddenly I was hooked. I ended up doing my senior project on the evidence of earthquakes in ancient Chinese literature.

So you head to graduate school at MIT and in February 1979 become the first U.S. scientist to enter China.
Yes, in 1975, there was an earthquake in northeastern China with more than 500 foreshocks that as far as we could tell looked like it had been predicted. So when I applied to grad school in 1976, my adviser said, “Why don’t you start studying foreshocks, and then if China ever opens up, we’ll be in a position to send you over to study the Haicheng earthquake.” I spent five months there in 1979 and had three other trips over the next three years.

Can earthquakes be predicted?
We can do a good job of predicting where the next earthquake is going to be. For example, we’re not going to have an earthquake at 100 miles below the central United States. The only place you have deep earthquakes are in the slabs of a plate boundary. Similarly, the majority of earthquakes happen on active faults. As for predicting when, I can predict there will be an earthquake in California today, and I’m going to be right because I didn’t specify the magnitude. What we are trying to do is predict the time and the magnitude of a future event.

We average about 30 earthquakes a day in California, and we tend to have two or three that exceed magnitude 5 every year. And when that happens, the rate of other earthquakes jumps up. We psychologically process it by assigning the name “aftershock” to them. But they’re still just earthquakes. Aftershocks are earthquakes we expect.

You’ve advocated for developing a better system to alert people when an earthquake has started, giving them a few seconds to react before the shock waves reach them. Why would that be so helpful?
It’s less an early warning than a just-in-time warning. In fact, the word they use in Japan, translated into English, is “now-casting.” It’s not a prediction. It’s that the earthquake is under way, and we’re determining that so quickly that we can tell you about it before the waves have gotten to you. We’re working hard at trying to do that, but we need a lot more money to do it right.

You’ve used the example of a surgeon having just enough time to remove a scalpel from a patient.
Right. You could move children under their desks, make sure they’re more protected from falling glass. In industrial settings you could stop pouring out a vat of chlorine, for example.

What’s it like being a seismologist married to a seismologist? When you’re awakened by a jolt, do the two of you turn to each other in bed and say, “That was a 6.7”?
No, although you can figure out a certain amount. The duration of the quake—how long it shakes—is what gives you the magnitude. My husband was out of town for the Northridge quake. He was so bummed. I know it sounds weird, but this is what we have spent our lives studying. You don’t want it to come, but if it is going to happen, then you want to be able to experience it. When the Landers earthquake hit, however, we were both in the same bed. I was nursing a baby, so I was awake. I started counting, and I got to 30 seconds for the duration of the shaking, which I knew meant that it had to be over 7. And yet nothing had fallen down in our house, so I also knew that the quake had to be pretty far away. A reporter called me before the bed stopped moving—Gary Robbins from the The Orange County Register. He said, “What can you tell me?” I was like, “Gary, how do you think I do this? I’m still in bed!”

Photograph by Gregg Segal

ALSO: Read more about he Big One plus how to prepare in our L.A. Handbook on Earthquakes