LOS ANGELES BRIEFING April 2005

News this month

Race race

As the mayoral election date of May 17th approaches, the biggest unknown factor in the battle between Jim Hahn, the incumbent, and Antonio Villaraigosa, his challenger, is which way the African-American vote will swing. In racially charged Los Angeles, this is a fairly big point.

Matters don't look good for Mr Hahn, who was elected mayor four years ago: in the March 8th primary, he secured only 24% of the total vote, well below Mr Villaraigosa's 33% and a smidgen more than the third-place finisher, Bob Hertzberg. His loss of the city's black vote contributed to his woes. In 2001, 71% of black voters supported him; this year, 54% supported the unsuccessful campaign of Bernard Parks, the black former police chief whom Mr Hahn sacked in 2002. Mr Hahn's camp hopes black voters will return to the fold. Mr Villaraigosa, campaigning to become the city's first Latino mayor since Cristobal Aguilar left office in 1872, was off shaking hands in African-American neighbourhoods as soon as the primary ended.

Bias?

Los Angeles's chattering classes tend to talk about Hollywood (that is, themselves) and little else. But in recent months, dinner-party conversation has revolved around a rare subject: the printed word, namely alleged sexism on the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times, one of the country's top newspapers. Susan Estrich, a syndicated newspaper columnist (though not for the Times) and a political science professor at the University of Southern California, has long campaigned for more women on the paper's editorial pages. Now she has upped the stakes with a personal attack on Michael Kinsley, the editor of the paper's opinion page. In an e-mail to Mr Kinsley, who suffers from Parkinson's disease, she wrote that “people are beginning to think that your illness may have affected your brain, your judgment and your ability to do the job”.

Mr Kinsley, a former editor of the New Republic, Harper's and Slate (and a former journalist for The Economist), was not amused. He called her comments about his health “disgusting” and described her campaign as “blackmail”. Ms Estrich apologised for the health-related comments, saying she was only trying to “warn an old friend what was being said about him around town” (she and Mr Kinsley were once friends at Harvard Law School). While the LA Times is far from achieving gender-equality on its editorial pages, it does publish a higher rate of opinion pieces by women (20.5% in the first nine weeks of 2005) than either the New York Times (17%) or the Washington Post (10%).

Trouble in Fantasia

The woes that have befallen the Walt Disney Corporation in the last two years have reached cartoonish proportions. First, there was the bust-up between the Walt Disney Corporation and its film-making partner, Pixar (which was characterised as a personal battle between Michael Eisner, Disney's chairman and chief executive, and Steve Jobs, head of Pixar); then the shareholders revolted against Mr Eisner's chairmanship; and finally Mr Eisner was dragged to court to defend a huge payoff for Michael Ovitz, his one-time friend whom he hired as Disney's president and then sacked, almost immediately.

But the trouble keeps coming: on March 14th, Roy Disney (Walt's nephew) and Stanley Gold, two leading shareholders, accused the company's board of being “deaf and insular” in choosing Robert Iger to succeed Mr Eisner. They say the board has so far failed to investigate allegations of a senior management cover-up of mistakes made in Disney's $5.3 billion acquisition of the Fox Family cable channel. But the pair aren't entirely unhappy, now that Mr Eisner is promising to leave this September, a year earlier than he had planned. “While it has taken three years to reach this point, our efforts to remove Michael Eisner as CEO of the Walt Disney Corporation have finally succeeded”, they said.

Public employee protests

About 1,500 angry demonstrators gathered outside the Century City Hotel on March 16th to protest against some of the governor's proposed changes to state pensions and teacher salaries. Firefighters, teachers and nurses, angry with Mr Schwarzenegger's attempts to privatise pension funds, increase patient-to-nurse ratios in hospitals and cut school funding, waved placards that read, “California not for sale”. The Gubernator, who likes to dismiss such protesters as “special interests” bent on impeding his reform efforts, was at a pricey fundraiser in the hotel at the time.

The nurses have a particularly popular case: they are demanding that the governor stop blocking a law (signed by his predecessor, Gray Davis) mandating a ratio of one nurse for every five patients, instead of the one-to-six balance Mr Schwarzenegger favours. The nurses argue that fewer patients will mean better care, but the governor says that a five-patient ratio would result in empty beds and even hospital closures, given LA's nursing shortage. Protesters have promised to press their case at every public appearance by the governor. They have since dogged him at events in Irvine and San Jose.

The right to sell junk

After rumours of violence and extortion along Venice Beach's boardwalk, the city council has started a new system for assigning space to street vendors and performance artists. From the beginning of March, eager peddlers and performers have had to stump up a $25 life-time fee to take part in a lottery, held every two weeks. The first drawing saw 95 bidders for 154 spaces. But for the libertarians of Venice, the rules smack of “Big Brother”; protesters at the first lottery shouted, “Keep Venice free!” Passing tourists will notice no difference: the east side of the boardwalk still has its mix of tattoo parlours and tacky T-shirt vendors; the west side retains its dishevelled sidewalk artists and political misfits.

Catch if you can

April 2005

All the Mighty World: The Photographs of Roger Fenton

Until April 24th 2005

In 1855 Roger Fenton, a British painter who had become entranced by photography, was commissioned to take photographs of Britain’s troops in the Crimean War. The assignment earned him several broken ribs and a case of cholera, but he still managed to return to London with over 300 large-format negatives—haunting images of the war's horror.

War was not his only muse: influenced by his painterly background, his works include magnificent landscapes and studied portraits (he photographed the children of Queen Victoria). This travelling show at the Getty (which will tour the Tate in London) features 90 of Fenton’s photographs. His career as a photographer lasted only ten years; in 1862 he sold his equipment and thousands of negatives and became a lawyer.

The Getty Centre, 1200 Getty Centre Drive. Tel: +1 (310) 440-7300; Open: Everday except Mon, 10am-6pm (Fri-Sat until 9pm). Tickets are free, parking is $7. See the museum's website.

More from the Los Angeles cultural calendar