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Yes, I agree and EB should listen to Simon---its well worth the hour. There are really interesting things to write and think about in his USC discussion.
I want to pick one general theme Simon talked about. It's the idea that a city has a history and part of the newspaper trade is to know that history and report in relation to it. I got to know some of the history of a particular part of LA as a kid growing up there and it forms a distinct part of my way of thinking.
I realize that world has probably disappeared, or left only lingering residues. Whether or not it sitll exists in some fashion, it was a story I always wanted to write. Simon sort of shows you how to do that.
Part of my motivation was the image that LA had and has created for itself was pretty much imaginary with little connection to realism and with my experiences. In other words it was a fabrication. What did I expect from Hollywood? This fabrication was both much better than reality or my reality, and then much worse. It has a completely wrong balance.
I could never figure out how to write that story. I thought in terms of film, because most of the story is composed in images with fairly simple stories. Get up, go to school, have some adventures, come home, play, eat, go to bed. But just following that simple line, at least in my memory takes in a universe---of urban America at one point in time. What makes it interesting to me are all the elements that will come to play important roles later, are all there at this junction which had just started turning away from cities and out to the suburbs. What was lost in that turn? It's that universe that I once inhabited. So, what clicked for me, was Simon's discussion of the history of a city. Actually, it is the history of the neighborhoods and their changing relationships to the city's institutions, and the reporting and knowledge of the papers.
Within my kid world that turn took the form of moving from downtown out to the Valley, urban flight. The particular reason was my mother scored a higher paying teaching job at Olive View, a TB sanitorium with a kids wing. It was out passed San Fernando. Even back then it was more than a forty minute commute. There was a big fight over moving, because M my stepfather liked where we were living. He had to go find another job, which he did quickly in state Employment Office in Van Nyes. We found a nice little place in San Fernando which was also mostly a latino area, so I hardly noticed the difference at first. But it got worse and worse as my mother moved us up the economic ladder into the lower reaches of the upper-middle class. For some reason of teenage remorse and moodiness, I became obcessed with what happen to my boyhood friends left behind in the city. What happen to Dee, CB, Bobby, Martin, Malinda, and the Jackson twins? (Yes, those were haunting names that still exist here and mean different people--weirdness. All the kids I knew, that were gone, like steam vapor... What was the fate I would have lived? Yes I was lucky (we now say privilaged), and I was probably better off for not going to Virgil Junior High which had a bad reputation.
Simon is very good at this kind of story telling. When he tells his stories, he makes Baltimore come alive. I can see now why. It is because he got inside the streets and the institutions, so you need both to tell the story.
My only insight was as a kid, living with two families, one with my father who worked in the newspapers, and the other with my mother who was a school teacher in the giant LA district. (The other theme was the LA art crowd of the period, but that's a whole other story or system of stories.) The particular point here is that I remember the talk about the LA newspaper wars between Chandler and Hearst. When was the Mirror going under? Decling circulation, the god damned Managing Editor and the cock-sucker ad dept... Pops was getting shifted around from evening to morning edition a lot and had almost no holidays. Or in turn, having to be bi-lingual as a first grade teacher in order to start reading lessons. It didn't change much because Olive View had mostly Mexican-American kids---gee I wonder why? There were endless credential fights, etc. The wars an urban school teacher faces are ... awesome.
Then there were always the cops, detectives, motorcycles, squad cars, red lights... the rotten ass LAPD who I lived with from 0 to 20. One of my favorite memories of those bastards was my five hour homicide grilling about how I killed my mother. I was lucky to get off. Detectives start with a theory of what happened, based on stereotypes and then they work it, with you and your part, your role. You find you match every detail, and yet you had nothing material to do with what happened... They weave the story for you, and you try to defeat their dramatic conclusion. It's an exercise in fiction. You suddenly see detectives are fiction writers who creat the crime from the circumstance of the dead body. It is an amazing art.
This is how they get millions of guys into prison. We are not exactly innocent, i carcieri, but rather not very guilty.
It's a deeper question of degree of complicity. The cops are not stupid. They know everybody is guilty of something. The whole game is to link up that guilt with a real material crime.
Most people have no fucking idea what that kind of cop shit does to the mind, to the soul. Millions of city kids live in that world and yet it gets no traction. Even Simon can't see this part, because he hasn't been to the dog of revolt aa a boy. You need burning scars, deep ones, disfiguring ones to open this dimension... I don't even know where to start...
My jobs have tended to expose me to these urban histories and their institutions and the changing nature of both. At one very interesting point in local history here, my ex-wife worked at the City and I worked at UCB, The relationship of the university to the city is a fascinating study in waring government power between cities and the state. The other theme was the changing stature of the African American community and its place in this struggle and of course the economic war of jobs, housing, and schools. In terms of economic battles there was another big fight with the chamber of commerce, the real estate board, and the city council over re-development of Tele, Shattuck and University---and of course real estate prices which have always been too high---captive market econ theory, etc. It was almost a textbook case of capital pigs, attempts to buy power out of the city managers office, and warring city council seats. It was all done in miniture here, so you could study it like a little city of mice in a lab.
I notice the thread move to Simon's politics. I am sure he is a liberal. But hell liberals can have good ideas and do good art.
Cooking the statistics to paint a legend. Also Simon's dismay at focusing The Sun on SSI as welfare fraud, instead of tracking down the social workers.