Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 27

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The L.A. County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously this Tuesday, April 14th, to approve a program providing $1,000 per month for three months to households in L.A. County where workers have been hit particularly hard by the halting of the economy due to COVID-19. The program is still in early stages and therefore not open to applications yet, and it’s also not clear how many families in L.A. County will be able to benefit from the program, but the bells have been sounded. This is also a separate program from the Angeleno debit cards announced by the mayor’s office earlier, which applies to residents of the city of Los Angeles.

As supervisor Hilda Solis, who co-authored the motion for the program alongside supervisor Janice Han, noted in her introduction of the item:

“About 57% of L.A. county renters are rent-burdened, and 1/3rd of residents are considered severely rent-burdened, meaning that they spend more than 50% of their income on rent (and that they’re only one paycheck away from being evicted and unhoused).”

The Board of Supervisors team oversees many of the less visible cities and communities throughout Los Angeles outside of the city proper, including public parks, libraries, juvenile detention facilities, and the men and women’s jails in the county where Black and Latino inmates over-represent the population of the incarcerated, and more. The job of the supervisors, as servants of the public good, is, at the very least, to voice the concerns of L.A. county residents, and during this time, to be within their reach as they work to commit L.A. county resources to be of service to the public.

The goal of JIMBO TIMES is to provide readers with this type of information regarding the city’s leadership, even if only to inform readers of key numbers for their reference; For instance, in response to supervisors Hahn and Solis’ introduction of the motion to support the county’s renters, supervisor Sheila Kuehl pointed out:

“Los Angeles County has one of the lowest home-owner rates in the entire United States. Over 55% of the people who live in the county are renters.”

This is a number that every one of those 55% of renters in Los Angeles County should be familiar with, if only just to conceptualize exactly how many of us live in such similar straits to one another.

While the board’s meetings aren’t popularized to the same degree as those of those of mayor Garcetti’s or governor Newsom’s, their work is just as crucial to keeping the wheels turning for Los Angeles County, where over 10 million residents depend on someone to access the roads, schools, and other public services that situate our lives here.

I think in the same vein of Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the director of L.A. County’s Public Health department, whose daily briefings have frequently shown her to be precisely the type of leader for this moment; one who provides transparency regarding the case’s progress through Los Angeles, and who also urges residents to remain calm despite the hardships presented by the toll of the virus. Dr. Ferrer also understands that racial inequality is an important factor when discussing public health, as well as that deaths related to the virus are not “a small price” for anyone during this time. In her remarks for the meeting, she noted that:

“We see a disproportionality [in cases] across the board…African-American communities, Latinx communities, Native Hawaiian, Native Alaskan, American Indian, the GLBTQ communities. We need to make sure that when we’re addressing the pandemic we’re not allowing the disproportionality to once again inevitably lead to poorer health outcomes among those least able to have the resources needed to protect themselves.”

I sincerely hope that one day, not long from now, we have biopics on people like Dr. Ferrer, Supervisor Hilda Solis, and more of their colleagues, as public faces who made an effort to place themselves on the right side of history through this chapter in our history. Make no mistake about it: there is still a long way to go both during and after this crisis before L.A. County can be considered a truly-forward city in its response: rent forgiveness, a renewed effort on affordable housing, the end to placing any of L.A.’s kids–and residents of all ages–in custody unnecessarily, and so much more. But this work is simply not solely for Solis, Hahn, Garcetti, or any other local leader’s to do on their own. Not in a million years.

The people need to see that this is our work too. That these public servants are our representatives today, but that they can be elsewhere tomorrow. The people can therefore also be of service to our city in this way. We can lead the way for public health and uplifting; I can’t wait to see those biopics.

J.T.

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Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 22

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Over the past nearly six years with my blog, I’ve seen frequently how writing–just like educating myself–has rarely ever been just about my personal peace of mind, but about shining a light on the specter of the world around me.

In Los Angeles, that shadow has consistently loomed through the confines of poverty. And the interest to speak out and create awareness about this world hasn’t been just a light, but a conflagration in my mind and a roaring passion in my spirit I suspect won’t vanish until every breath in my lungs for a better world leaves my body.

I glance at the past. A hundred years ago, if it weren’t for Malcolm Little coming to share a home with his single mother and eight other siblings, I wonder if he’d still have been able to stand at the intersections of Detroit and Harlem, calling out to the streets in the name of justice as he eventually came to do.

A hundred years before Malcolm X, in Harriet Tubman rose a woman with no formal education who still understood the most important issue of her time: that slavery was an offense to the history of the human species. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act notwithstanding, she literally led others to freedom.

When I think back to Los Angeles then, a city at once quite removed from the history of slavery at the same time that it’s steeped in slave wages and disinvestment in its communities, I see a world where education has never been more accessible at the same time that it’s deeply devalued.

I also see a world where, long after the coronavirus passes, our communities will continue struggling to honor a few basic tenets of humanism: that every child deserves an education empowering them; that every human being deserves a living wage and a place to call home like any other; that no community should be victim to policing, jailing, and conviction simply for being the least resourced among our society. The same world that loomed over Malcolm, Tubman, and so many more. I also see myself moving through these worlds, searching at each turn for a better way to unite and advance them.

Earlier today I filed Articles of Incorporation for Quien Es tu Vecindario, a special step for the collective that it’s turned out to be. If approved, it will be the first step in officially recognizing the group’s arts and education work in East Hollywood as non-profit work, making it eligible for funding such as grants as well as partnerships to sustain and expand its noble movement through Los Angeles.

During this time of so much resetting, and so much reflecting, small acts like these keep me not only wondering, but looking forward to what such work can still bring to the future of my community. Because from one generation to the next, we have to keep standing, calling out, and running: the fight for a better world continues. It is a long road towards all of our freedom.

J.T.

Five Times David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest FAILS

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(Pandemic in Los Angeles: Day 15)

In an effort to write about something other than the Coronavirus for a moment, even if it’s just one moment, I’m now on page 592 of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. This means I’ve got just a little less than 400 pages to go before completing the late author’s famous magnum opus. If I can keep up with my reading schedule, I should spend no more than two weeks from today finishing the legendary novel.

David Foster Wallace was a brilliant writer and thinker whose non-fiction I really enjoyed before his fiction, but I’ve actually got quite a few issues with Infinite Jest. The vast majority of reviews hail the work as pure genius, but today it’s clear that such reviews are of a different time, and mostly written by white generation X-ers like Mr. Wallace himself. This makes it so that as a millennial Latinx blogger from Los Angeles, I’ve got a different take to share. So here are Five Times David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest FAILS:

1. When the book is highly unreadable. Sure, the epiphanous literary oases that make up each “chapter” (or Sierpinski triangle) of the novel read musically for book-worms or lovers of Dead Poets Society everywhere, but at some point they tend to muddle the author’s point more than clarifying it, and this is not helped by the author’s titanic footnote excavations or “side-explanations.” As a result, it takes nearly 400 pages into the novel to get a firm sense of who’s who and just where the characters of Infinite Jest may be going. And I get it. Wallace wanted to challenge his readers in a critical way, demanding their full and undivided attention during what he rightly saw as an era of mass distraction. He was prescient for seeing how reductive and repetitive American pop culture was becoming in its numbing of attention spans everywhere, but how much did he really need to pontificate about aerodynamic theories as divulged at elite institutions like his book’s Enfield Tennis Academy’s? In 2005, during Wallace’s famous speech at Kenyon College, at one point during his lecture the author skips through his own lengthy descriptions, saying “etc, etc., [I’m] cutting stuff out because it’s a long ceremony.” At many moments throughout Infinite Jest, it feels exactly like one of those “long ceremonies” that could use some cutting out.

2. When the book is totally White and from the Mid-West, meaning that yes, it frequently enjoys throwing racist jabs at minorities. The year was 1996. Nirvana and MTV ruled the billboards, ratings, and t-shirts. Black superstars were either “latchkey” kids from New York or South Central L.A., while “Latinos” were basically Mexicans “randomly” spread throughout the states (according to the dominant pop culture). Infinite Jest, despite frequently being called “ahead of its time,” offers virtually no alternative reading of these groups’ contributions to American culture, instead relying on stereotypes like “n-words and spics,” as much as any other cheap film during America’s beloved 90s era. But ask these types of groups today if treating their culture as such was as grossly reductive then as it is today, and yeah, it was grossly reductive then too, and only stands out more now.

3. When the book treats women in its plot really, really badly. In 2020, three years after the rise of the #metoo movement–and despite nationalist white guys in tandem insisting otherwise–treating women in pop culture as objects serving mostly for men’s barbarities is by and large fundamentally unacceptable, worthy of the utmost scrutiny. As with the part about minimizing Black and Latino characters in its story, this is another area where Infinite Jest was actually not only NOT “ahead of its time,” but waaaaay privileged and condescending. This also demonstrates the first point about the writing “going on and on” in a way that’s not only unnecessary, but downright obnoxious. A case in point, in one sequence of Infinite Jest, Wallace describes an abortion for one of the many side-characters in truly harrowing detail, presumably to give us “an example” of his Ennet [Rehab] House’s many dysfunctional characters. But what purpose does the detail serve? Is it supposed to be like gore in a horror flick? It comes off as indulgent. Moreover, the fact that treatment of women throughout the novel in this way is almost never discussed in the vast majority of the book’s reviews also speaks to the “trade-offs” overlooked when reviewers praised Wallace’s literary genius.

4. When the book enjoys ridiculing disabled people. Readers need to look no further than the constant reminders of Mario Incandenza’s difference from from others as the prematurely-born and oddly figured member of his family, which tend to run on in a way that isn’t just expansive, but bordering on sadist. Take the following passage, for example, when Wallace describes the one romantic experience of Mario Incandenza’s life:

“[A girl] was trying to undo Mario’s corduroys but was frustrated by the complex system of snaps and fasteners at the bottom of his…Velcro vest [which supports his disabled figure]…it was when [Kent] wrapped one arm around his shoulder for leverage and forced her other hand up under the hem of the tight vest and then down inside the trousers and briefs, rooting for a penis, that Mario became so ticklish…”

As a reader, on the one hand, I know that Wallace wants to endear readers to Mario’s extraordinary physical makeup, which in spite of its difference, doesn’t keep Mario from having a strange sexual interaction like any other teenager out there. On the other hand, idunno, it feels like Wallace is–as in other sequences–exploiting the character’s “defects” too. I’m not sure if it’s Wallace just doing Wallace, or if he’s being humorous at the expense of someone else’s “deformity,” which brings up another question I don’t recall being posed to Wallace by popular reviewers: why so many “disabled” characters? If Wallace was in an editing room today, I’m sure he wouldn’t get off as easily with such literary devices just because at the end of the day the writing is simply so witty.

5. When the book blames poor people for their own damn problems. Although the “middle class” kids who make up the Tennis Academy’s student body are all grotesque personalities in their own way, they mostly get away with this for being young and really smart. By contrast, when it comes to say, a Randy Lenz, who’s got issues that go way back to his (Lenz’s) working-class background, when Wallace makes psychoanalytic exhibitions of these types of characters’ experiences with such things as incest, rape, child abuse and other issues that tend to face people in poverty, it doesn’t come off as “just witty,” but as narcissistic, and not in an ironic or ‘gotcha’ kind of way. This makes it so that at many points in Infinite Jest, Wallace seems to view urban Boston as just another petri dish of lost or abandoned characters the way just another white kid in a Michigan basement would view “dirty city-life,” his literary prowess notwithstanding.

(5. Continued) But what about, say, white-collar types who are also addicted types and not far off from the city, exploiting those same “lost or abandoned” types in their own grotesque ways when they aren’t promulgating pop-culture to keep the American population dormant to America’s inequalities? Why not expound on the idiosyncratic mannerisms, of say, an Alan Greenspan or Bill Clinton? Wallace does NOT achieve a “fair-share” of doling out his psychoanalysis even with say, “President Gentle,” who is only a “background” character, the descriptions of which only make him a shallow political figure and nothing else, even though presidents in American history tend to play a major role in “shaping” pop culture. And Enfield Tennis Academy–for all its cruel, elitist tendencies–does NOT come off as an “equal” counterpart to Ennet House’s “trashy” makeup, so the book falls short of juxtaposing these groups for Wallace’s larger point about American culture’s wayside decline.

Okay, even with these gripes, is the massive 1,100 page book still worth reading? If you don’t count the footnotes, the novel is not that long, weighing in at more like 981 pages. And yes, it’s still worth reading. Despite these and other shortcomings, Wallace’s writing still challenges readers to imagine farther-reaching, more complex prose as a form of expression. And no matter what verdict different readers might give Infinite Jest, it’s worth pointing out that rather than breaking the rules, Wallace’s book bends them, expanding the bandwidth of literature overall to elasticize the reader’s ability to imagine different ways of expressing ideas.

I just would chill on all the boundless praise that earlier reviewers have tended to give the book, but would still recommend readers to be challenged by its virtuoso achievements. I would also say it’s an especially approachable book during these times, when literary oases have never more been needed to get away from the news. Speaking of which, that’s enough of a retreat. Let’s get back to our coronavirus woes.

J.T.

Coronavirus Lands in East Hollywood, Silver Lake

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It’s official. According to the L.A. Times tracker, which began releasing known information about infected areas as recently as a day ago, and which at the time of this writing was last updated at 1:32 PM PST this March 29th, there are now five (5) recorded cases of patients who’ve tested positive for COVID-19 in East Hollywood.

In the adjacent neighborhood of Silver Lake, there are fourteen (14) recorded cases of patients who’ve tested positive.

Nearby, Hollywood has thirty-eight (38) recorded cases of patients who’ve tested positive for the novel coronavirus, while West Hollywood next door has fifty (50) caseloads on its records. According to the L.A. County Department of Health–last updated at noon this previous March 28th–L.A. County now has a total of at least 1,809 known cases of the virus.

Even these numbers, however, should be considered an under-count. Despite two weeks of the stay-at-home-orders in Los Angeles, the fact is that widespread testing for COVID-19 is still out of the picture for the foreseeable future. According to L.A. County’s leader in charge of testing, Clayton Kazan, a major hindrance has been waiting for test results to get back from out of state:

We need a massive scaling locally. As long as we’re having to ship our labs out of state, and we’re having to compete with all the other states that are struggling with their own outbreaks, then we’re going to be struggling.”

An additional problem, of course, is simply whether you have adequate access to healthcare at your fingertips; of the people who have been tested, reports do not show which are insured. In East Hollywood, made up predominantly of Latino and Asian communities, but also Armenian, Black, White and others, the median household income is estimated by Census Tracker as in the range of $39,562 USD, substantially less than the “average” of $69,138 for families of the same size in L.A. County.

While I’m not aware of specific data showing how many of the neighborhood’s residents are insured or not, it’s safe to infer from other available data that the majority of them–surviving on the minimum wages (and below) typically paid to their demographics–do not have adequate coverage at their fingertips.

Here, the words of Dr. Barbara Ferrer, the director of L.A.’s public health department, resonate loudly:

“There are thousands of people in our communities who are positive but who have not been tested.”

Readers are advised to increase their level of precautions, and to reach out to loved ones–safely–on further steps to ensure and maintain their health and well-being in the upcoming weeks with this public health threat.

J.T.

Kevin Walton King: During Crisis, Love is Essential

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I was hesitant to write some of my thoughts during this time of change and transition due to the Coronavirus. The main reason is because it seemed odd to me to offer my metaphysical musings at a time when people are looking for physical solutions: Food. Economic resources. Material comfort and the like. But I realize there is no time like the present to focus on what is important to us. Finally, more people, including our mayors and governors are asking, what is essential to human culture and life? What are things or activities we can do without? Maybe in this way we can begin to live simpler and more sustainable lifestyles.

At the micro level we can ask the same questions. What is important to me? What gives my life meaning, joy, and strength and vitality? And when we find the answer, we can then find the courage to make sure that we commit to those things. For what gives us joy is a gift not only to ourselves but also to the world. Without these gifts being let to shine, we are left collectively poorer and wanting.

In my own life, I’ve found that love is essential. But I also understand that during trauma and crisis and times of transition it can be very hard to remember that love is essential. That joy is essential. That a smile is essential. That creativity is essential. The teacher said that ‘we can not live by bread alone.’ That means that there is an intangible nature to life. A spiritual nature. You can’t name it, but you know it when you experience it.

Trauma and crisis and transition bring our focus rightly to the material, but life is not only trauma and crisis and transition. The teacher has something to say about this as well when he offers ‘that he came to give us life and life more abundantly.’ The abundant life is a full life. Life in all its fecundity. Flourishing life. Life that beams in all seasons and at all times so that during the harvest we sing songs of triumph and during a drought we shout the blues.

I also understand that this time of adversity will affect our emotional and mental and spiritual well being. For some, it will be exasperating, one more inconvenience and difficulty and chaotic event thrust upon their already overwhelmed life.

For others, it will be like the Polish tale of the Rabbi who advises the farmer to bring his livestock into his home even as the farmer complains that his home is chaotic and devoid of peace and quiet. Many of us, like the farmer in that tale, may experience a moment of liberation when we realize that the majority of our complaints, in the grand scheme of things, are of little consequence.

The majority of us, however, will find ourselves somewhere in the middle. And the blessing of this state is that we will realize that we are a part of a vast continuum, with stress and anxiety on the one end, and liberation at the other. And with our eyes open to this reality we may find that we are a part of an expansive and infinite world full of possibilities. May we all, especially at this time of challenge, experience the greatest of these possibilities.

(This article was first published in The Weekly Oracle)

K.K.

Alan Keving Walton King is one of a growing number of Love Performers who finds creative ways to add love to his life and, in doing so, helps us to remember that love never fails. King is also the author and mind behind The Weekly Oracle, where he is an “oracle for the people – what is substantive, what matters, the heart, the core [of] what is important, what touches us deeply, out of which we come into being, and through which the world is created.”