Ojai's Main Street

Ojai has a not-always-deserved liberal reputation, a haven for artists and writers and the kind of place where mavericks might feel welcome. Dating from the 1920s, the advent of Annie  Besant’s Theosophical Society, the valley has prided itself on its “New Age” metaphysics, a widespread belief that the area has been spiritually blessed in some indefinable way. California psychobabble is prevalent here surfacing in Holistic Journey classes, Vedic Association meetings, lectures on vichara (whatever that is), qigong, energy-shifting or body-mind integration.

Situated about 12 miles from the Pacific Coast Highway in an 18,000-acre valley, ten miles long and up to three miles wide, whose fertile terrain yields avocados, oranges, apricots, almonds, apples, and orchids, Ojai is once-seen, never-forgotten. What visitors remember is the felicitous main street; its small, friendly shops tucked behind monastery-like pillars.

North of town the jagged Los Padres mountains, simultaneously protective and inviting (although few rise to the challenge) offer a famous “pink moment” as the glowing sun sets on rugged slopes that reach heights of 6,000 feet. Apart from the rainy winter months there is almost constant sunshine -- with July and August 100-degree hot, but with pleasantly balmy evenings. Even in winter, temperatures hardly ever drop to freezing, and the rains rarely turn to snow except for their dramatically picturesque coverage of the mountains. There are pictures on file of Ojai’s snow-covered streets, back in 1918, 1927 and 1948.

Edward Libbey's craftsmen home, designed by Los Angeles architect Myron Hunt in 1908, is currently for sale for $6.25 million

Visually the town is unique having been styled by Edward Drummond Libbey, an Ohio glass millionaire, who was captivated on a visit, then returned to commission the colonnaded arcade, tower and park that exist today. It became the kind of distinctive place that stayed in the visitor’s mind, and its reputation was enhanced in 1937 when director 

Frank Capra chose to shoot scenes from the movie Lost Horizon east of downtown. Reportedly, the director spent thousands of dollars to rent the world’s first snow machines, used to create Himalayan peaks out of canvas and plywood. Shangri La!  Now there was an identity Ojai could optimistically adopt.

As early as 1915 when Donald Crisp’s Clunes Picture Co. filmed part of Helen Hunt Jackson’s  weepie novel Ramona, the Ojai valley attracted stars. Claudette Colbert, Norma Shearer and Robert Taylor began vacations by landing at Henderson Field, a grassy airstrip behind the highway in Mira Monte, and Bud Abbott and Joel McCrea both owned nearby ranches. There’s a whimsical 1949 ad of Charles Laughton appearing in a Pabst Blue Ribbon commercial shot at the five-star Ojai Valley Inn.

Local schools have graduated Jackie Coogan (who starred in Chaplin’s The Kid) and Tatum O’Neal and Keith Carradine; and Anthony  Hopkins, Jeff Corey, Tim Burton, James Brolin, Rory Calhoun and Johnny Cash all had Ojai homes. Today’s best-known local star is Larry  Hagman who lives in a spacious mansion (designed by his wife Maj) atop Sulphur Mountain, with panoramic views and an indoor swimming pool. He is occasionally seen at local functions and sits on the board of the local theater.

	Emily Thacker, scion of the family which began raising oranges in the  Ojai Valley in the 19th century and now farms  75 acres of the crop

Otto Heino may not be a familiar name to most readers but the ceramic pots he creates in his Ojai studio fetch $25,000 or more in Japan. That’s because he spent years trying to create an elusive yellow glaze that had been used by Chinese ceramicists centuries ago and when he finally succeeded the demand almost exceeded his capacity to supply. The pots have “the color of butter, the hardness of stone and the price of  "a small car” observed Santa Barbara magazine.  Preparing the clay takes about an hour while throwing a large pot takes only a few minutes, Otto explains: “The speed of pulling the form and exerting the right amount of tension on the clay, contribute to the vessel’s freshness”. Otto, 88, was the cover story for the third issue of my magazine.

Orange orchards are ubiquitous, especially east of town where they rub shoulders with horse ranches; orange crops were being shipped across country by the close of the 19th century and the annual crop was fetching more than a million dollars by the 1950s. The orange business is less and less profitable as imports from Morocco and Brazil flood the market. In the western part of the valley, stretching 12 miles to the ocean, a handful of oil derricks are a reminder of the first strikes made here as  far back as the 19th century.

SOME OF THIS history I already knew when I first took up residence in 2001, having written it up for my five books about California; the remainder I researched for a little guide, Pink Moment, that I put together soon after arriving. (Pink moment is the famous local phenomenon when sunset drapes the Los Padres mountains). The guide was not received well—only a couple of shops would sell it—and I got the distinct impression that it was regarded by the powers-that-be as an act of hubris, as in Who is this interloper who dares to come here and write about us?  Of course, that could have been my imagination, but when I volunteered for work at the museum (which had also declined to display my guide) my offer was rejected.

Patricia Fry and stack of her books

0ur local historian, Patricia  Fry, is the descendant of a pioneer who arrived in 1876, sold brooms door to door and was the father of a man who planted the first olive orchard in the valley. She realized early on she wanted to be a writer, and had her first book signing at Barts Books, the famous store which keeps some books on a sidewalk display, available to all-comers at any hour of the day or night (just drop payment in the slot in the door).

Fry’s next book was a history of Ojai, a task that kept her so engrossed in the past, learning about people long-dead and immersing herself via newspaper reading in a community no longer here, that she could at times become momentarily disoriented. “One day I was in the library all day long” she recalls. “I was doing this on just about a daily basis and they called that the library was going to close in five minutes. It took me  few minutes to get my bearings and I put the newspapers back and stepped outside and for a moment I was really shocked…that cars were speeding down the road.”

Oh yes, you had been in the past…

“I had. I fully expected, not anything consciously, but evidently I expected the clippety clop of horses and buggies slowly going down the street. So it took me a while to get back to reality”.

My attempts to get people interested in working on a local cable TV show brought no response. Perhaps everybody was infected by today’s greed syndrome: if there’s no money to be made, why bother?  Most people these days are  not inclined to spend time producing something without some immediate payback, and so it’s perhaps not surprising that the most democratic system of communication even invented, is so little used that in Ojai at least it will soon become obsolete. Long before You Tube, the cable TV companies were offering (often reluctantly) Public Access, one or more channels open free on which anybody could air their programs.

I quickly found my own Tuesday night half-hour slot to be a satisfyingly efficient way to let off steam about many of the aggravations that I accumulated from reading the daily papers and monitoring other media. You probably have been getting annoyed about some of the same things yourself: the state of the world, greed, atrocious art, celebrity fetishism, moronic fashion, tawdry taste, to name but a handful. What a wealth of subjects there were to talk about! And that’s without even mentioning politics. There were more examples in every day’s newspaper. I thought I might summarize some of the things that I talked about on my solo raps on the show.

 

“Guile, gall, grit and gamesmanship” have been used to describe the “activist investor” Carl Icahn, but surely “greed” should be added to that appraisal. Here’s a guy who’s devoted his life to moving into companies with borrowed funds, bullying his way onto the board of directors and then emasculating, stripping or closing down the company solely to make a personal profit. This is much admired in the business community and in this manner, after exploiting such companies as Texaco, TWA and Blockbuster, Icahn has acquired a fortune of $14 billion. But, of course, that’s no reason to stop. Like most avaricious capitalists he’ll never have enough no matter how many people suffer from his depredations. When last heard from he was gobbling up shares of Yahoo, hoping to oust the ten-member Board and substitute his own sycophants.

Nobody is surprised any more that corrupt African dictators siphon off billions to establish personal fortunes, but one always wonders if they ever give a thought to their starving subjects.

There are more billionaires on record every year but not many of them seem to be grateful for the opportunities they have been given to get filthy rich. Quite the opposite: many of them spend more on lawyers seeking ways to avoid taxes than most people earn in a lifetime. I guess what I’m trying to say is, why can’t some of these folk be rich and generous at the same time? Obviously a few of them are but many more think they will never have enough and if it means taking from people who have so much less, well, there’s nothing wrong with that.

The only explanation we heard about why it was imperative to bail out huge greedy companies on the verge of bankruptcy was about the catastrophic fallout that would ensue if we didn’t act, with banks and other companies collapsing in succession like a row of dominoes. But such warnings are never specific and make economic dunces like myself suspicious that once again we were conned by a private language only the in-group understand, things deliberately kept obscure so we won’t understand the trickery.

People like me, who don’t understand economics, are baffled by the way that half of the world can suddenly be having financial problems simultaneously. Everybody, every place, every country bereft of money at the same time? Where did all the money go? It can’t all have been suctioned up by hedge fund managers and Chinese and Russian billionaires.

If things were run by logic, some deity would pass on the word from on high that from now onwards all debts were forgiven and everybody starts even again. Not that that situation would prevail for long, because the greed heads would never stop trying to steal other people’s shares; that’s the essence of the capitalistic system.

The glum collateral damage of these times is that the multi-billion dollar bail-out still leaves many home buyers who were conned by unscrupulous financiers undeservedly to their fate. But far more numerous are the greedy gamblers who made disastrously bad guesses. Is a compensatory payoff obligatory to such folk whose made the wrong bets if other innocents have to pay for it?

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation guarantees personal bank accounts and so does anybody really care that hedge fund managers and investors will suffer after the obscene profits they have already made? And what about the billionaires who ran these now-collapsing companies and yet still get multimillion dollar payoffs that presumably could otherwise pay down some of the debts?  We’ve always been brainwashed to believe that only huge golden parachutes will secure the services of brilliant CEOs who might otherwise defect to rival companies but we have learned pretty quickly how brilliant some of these guys are. Sometimes I think the basic unspoken metaphor on which America really operates is that old saw about how we must destroy this village in order to save it.

But there’s something about the way language is constantly being manipulated by what we call, for convenience, the right wing. Take, for example, words like liberal (“one who is open-minded or not strict in the observance of orthodox, traditional or established ways”—Merriam Dictionary) or socialism (“advocating collective or government ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”). Are these ideas really dangerous? “Socialized medicine” is a particular Republican bugbear. In actual fact it means that medical care becomes a responsibility of the government and covers everybody, not just the people who can afford it. The reason why the right wing hates it so much is that by their reasoning somebody should always be able to make a profit, even in matters of life and death.

When the market is alleged to be able to take care of itself it merely means that there are no limits as to the profits than can be made by greed heads who don’t care about anybody but themselves. So, with the recent rescue by the Federal government of the banks and financial institutions we see a resurfacing of the old cliché: socialism is what comes to the rescue when capitalism fails.

In the election we saw two other examples of perfectly sensible ideas painted as evil incarnate: “spreading the wealth” and ”class warfare”. How could anybody except a greed head think it a bad thing that if there’s plenty of money around that it shouldn’t be shared to some extent by all classes and not just the rich? And shame on the “haves” who think that the “have-nots” lack the right to fight for a share. I have rarely found myself agreeing with Los Angeles Times columnist Joel Stein, but during the financial meltdown that occurred recently he advanced the suggestion that rather than an expensive bailout, maybe the best action would be to do nothing.

Greed has so many facets and so many bases. Wikipedia defines it as “the selfish desire for or pursuit of money, wealth, power, food, or other possessions, especially when this denies the same goods to others. It is generally considered a vice, and is one of the seven deadly sins in Catholicism”.  If you Google the word, you’ll find that there are 26 million references to the subject and it’s doubtful that you could read a single issue of any newspaper, anytime without finding examples.

One that was new to me was to learn how much sports fans are willing to be exploited. Being a fan is one thing, but quite another is being such a fanatic that there is no limit to what they’ll pay to rapacious stadium owners to pursue their hobby. At the three new stadiums that will open next year (2010) in New York, season tickets will more than double, with fans being asked as much as $500 per game. Aren’t the builders of these stadiums usually given huge subsidies by the cities where they establish their domains? But rip-off ticket prices are only part of it: in some cases a “personal license” of anything up to $20,000 must be paid in advance to allow fans to buy tickets at all. Of course, if the fans revolted and refused to pay, the prices would come down but most of them are as cowed (and as stupid) as moviegoers who absolutely, positively must see a film the day it is released. Not much hope of that.

From time to time we hear about the sad plight of problem gamblers who can’t afford the amount they wager. But not too much is heard about gambling compulsives who can afford their indulgence but rarely have second thoughts about their moronic extravagance. Daniel Negreanu, a four-time World Series Poker champion, boasts: “We don’t think of money the way salaried people do. We don’t love money the way rich people do. We know we can always make more of it”. Another poker star, Mike Matusow, is an advocate of “proposition betting” which in his case involved betting $100,000 he could lose 60lbs by a certain date. (He won). “These guys may play poker ten hours a day but that still leaves 14 hours in which they need to do something”. Helping other people, of course, wouldn’t even occur to them.

Libby Park Fountain

New York has several channels and last time I checked there was a waiting list to acquire a slot. Not so in Ojai where there has been so little interest that Time Warner cut back the programming to Monday and Tuesday nights (with a tape of the City Council meeting shown on Wednesdays) and is said to be ready to close down this channel altogether by the end of the year. With amazing short-sightedness, the local council seemed to be indifferent to this threat and at the time of writing have done nothing to prevent it.

Public Access is the cheapest and most democratic system of mass communication ever devised and the council should have been encouraging and expanding it to get more people involved, rather than collaborating with Time-Warner to help its demise. Time Warner is very unpopular--of all the places I have lived and explored in my lifelong career as a travel writer, I have never encountered a cable system that has come in for more criticism. Greedily, they tried to abolish public access in Ojai from the first day they took over from those criminals (literally) who ran Adelphia. They pushed out the saintly Carole McCartney, as dedicated a public servant as could be found, and sent somebody from 20 miles away two nights a week to put on the tapes. The council should have challenged them at that point.

I have never understood why one cable company should have a monopoly; certainly competition would improve conditions and bring down the rates. Some cable suppliers, ie Cox in Santa Barbara, are enthusiastic about public access and go out of their way to help train a new generation of would-be television presenters. Has the council ever explored the possibility of turning over the monopoly to some other company other than T-W? Sad to say there is some self-interest here on the part of the council who, under the new policy, will have new, state-of-the-art equipment to continue broadcasting their own posturing while denying the opportunity to others. It's reminiscent of Mayor Bloomberg's grab for power in NYC, buying the votes of the council to extend third limits (which NYC's citizens don't want) by also extending the terms for council members.

In my experience, small towns the world over usually share many of the same problems, some of which are absentee “residents” who work elsewhere and have no true commitment to the town apart from being a place to sleep or spend weekends; a dispute over some tree that is scheduled for demolition (its roots often disrupting the sidewalk or somebody’s property); and developers who demand their rights to build versus the advocates of “no-growth”. Ojai has endured fights over the last two but also, of course, has special conflicts of its own.

With only occasional modifications, Ojai’s five-member City Council, remains the same year after year, the members repeatedly running for office and getting re-elected. They alternate their turn as mayor which means some of them have filled the office four or five times. And there is no shortage of arrogant entitlement. One two–time member decided not to run again and then changed her mind on the grounds that her potential opponents didn’t measure up. “I think if strong, established citizens had stepped forward…Citizens I spoke with felt that not only did I have a strong track record but there were no logical replacements”, she boasted.

The Council’s website claims that they are “independent, impartial and fair in their judgment and actions, and conduct public deliberations and processes openly in an atmosphere of civility” but, like councils everywhere, their motives are often questioned. Especially when it comes to preservation vs development.

The main one, at this particular time, concerns the winding highway, SR 33, through the lovely Los Padre Mountains north of town, which all too often are traversed by hundreds of trucks carrying tons of rock and gravel en route to construction projects. Stop the Trucks! is the slogan of concerned locals who worry about the deleterious effects on road safety and air quality. The campaign, instigated by Howard Smith, a writer and local business tycoon, has been covered thoroughly by Tyler Suchman, founder of the Ojai Post.

     In its online vision statement, the Post calls itself “a community blog, featuring Ojai residents from all walks of life writing about the unique Ojai experience. Ojai is a special place, not just for its geography, flora and fauna, small-town architecture and rich native American history - it's also because of the people - talented, creative souls who tend to walk to the beat of their own drummer and carve their own path through life. Check in for daily musings, rants, Ojai news and greater goings-on from the place some call Shangri-La”.

Now that our little town is likely to lose its Public Access channel at the end of the year, the Post will be our only up-to-the-minute report and it does an especially good job of encouraging feedback from readers who act in some ways like a reporting staff. One example, the saga of Ojai’s dueling phone books, prompted more than 60 responses among which was the explanation that the second directory, the Ojai Phone Book, had been started by a pair of disaffected former employees of the Ojai Valley Directory. Many readers bewailed the waste of trees, or at least paper, but some noted that competition had made the original much better. Advertisers, though, were not so happy at having to spend money on both of them.

When I first arrived in Ojai (with a large backlog of taped shows which had earlier run on Manhattan Cable and on other systems) Carole McCartney had been hired by the local operator, Adelphia, to superintend Channel 10 and she gave generous assistance to would-be programmers. Unlike some other venues, Ojai did not have an operating studio from which to do live shows but tapes could be filed for transmission and Carole was always willing to help edit them. Then Time Warner took over (why are these franchises always a monopoly?) from a bankrupt Adelphia and TW pretty much pushed Carole out.

But for the time being at least, public access was still available and when I put myself on camera I was never short of opinions. Fashion became a favorite subject on which I had some unpopular thoughts.

It’s a matter too obvious to dwell on that the vapid 12-page photo layouts in elitist magazines by, say, Calvin Klein, Gucci or Hugo Boss are aimed only at the wealthy who often possess more money than sense. But even some of these over-paid snobs might appreciate an occasional gesture of generosity (so long as it’s not their money being spent).

Supposing, for example, that Donna Karen or Ralph Lauren or any of the other over-the-top, trendy sharks, paid for a dozen pages but filled only eleven? The cost of the extra page could be devoted to providing health care for some of designer’s sweat shop slaves in whatever Third World country currently being exploited.  The company might even devote a line or two to explaining their generosity, earning goodwill from all their modish customers who didn’t have to fork out themselves.

But then everybody except a complete idiot is already aware of the empathy gap between the editors of Vogue and real life humans. Earlier this year, the papers retailed, over a 16-page spread in that shamelessly irrelevant magazine, visuals of poverty-stricken Indians modeling Fendi bibs and $10,000 Hermès handbags—and you can bet that the models were not paid  Union rates. Nearly half of India’s 465 million population lives on less than $1.25 a day, but fashion magazines apparently have no compunction about mocking them. “Lighten up” Vogue’s India editor Priya Tanna told critics, and babbled about how the magazine is about “the power of fashion”.  It could be appropriate to urge a boycott of the luxury companies which so clearly lack comprehension of the life of poor people, but it’s a fair assumption that most of their customers don’t read.

What possible sense does it makes for fashionistas to crave jeans costing two or three hundred dollars a pair—fancy stitching! real rips!—that are inferior to the genuine Levis invented in 1873?

And now we learn about the new store in New York’s Soho which is reported to be “a sunglass emporium with a VIP room”. Here the affluent MMTS (more-money-than-sense) crowd can indulge their taste for $350 sunglasses from the likes of Ralph Lauren, Dior or Balenciaga.  For an extra $1,395 buyers can add diamond-studded frames. A 21-year-old student from the University of Mississippi is quoted in the New York Times: “I’m beginning to love sunglasses as much as I love shoes and bags and jewelry”. Get a life, dearie. “Sunglasses are still a novel way to acquire the cachet of a signer brand” the paper adds helpfully.

It’s always a joy to read about some new category of over-priced goods that have fallen victim to forgery. The buyer of some ‘antique’ mahogany chests, a California designer, recently paid almost half a million dollars and subsequently discovered they had been cobbled together in 2004 from contemporary wardrobes. So numerous other buyers are now worrying that their purchases from this “high end” London dealer might not be worth the hundreds of thousands of dollars they handed over. (Silly to ask if they bought the items because they liked them or because of their supposed value).

And on the subject of inappropriate advertising, how much does an eight-page, full-color ad for the Fresh Air Fund cost in the New York Times? Certainly a quarter of a million dollars would seem to be a minimal guess. And wouldn’t that money be put to better use by fulfilling the Fund’s boast of “serving children”? Another mystery is the weekly full-page ad by Pastor Ock Soo Park touting his Good News Church in downtown LA. Containing at least 10,000 tightly-packed words from the Bible it seems unlikely to be read by more than a handful of people and obviously must cost thousands of dollars.

SOMETIMES THE SUBtEXT of my on-camera rambling was the medium itself, as when I asked my audience:

Why do most newsreaders and presenters talk so fast, gabbling through the script under the illusion that not a second must be wasted? Unless you’re very rude, or drug-addled, you don’t address your friends that way. You give them time to appreciate and absorb what you are saying. Even worse, of course, are the attempts to reel off credits at breakneck speed, a cynical attempt to fulfill legal obligations, in token if not in actuality. It’s the audio equivalent of listing bedrock information in 7pt type.

Probably the most infuriating thing about television is the way that networks act in collusion to present their commercials simultaneously. It’s obviously a defensive measure to protect advertisers who won’t be lost to a competitor, but it always makes me wish that some anti-trust or monopoly law could be invoked to stop it. The great joy of being able to sample another program during a commercial break from the one you are watching, is being denied. What happened to the principle of competition? But then again network programmers are not necessarily smart, particularly when they set similar programs against each other (CBS’ 60 Minutes vs Dateline NBC, for example) thus effectively halving the audience for both.

Whenever a new device is announced or a new version of an existing device, the slaves to Being Firstism are there lining up, sometimes days in advance. What is it that impels such insecure people to believe that it’s some kind of achievement to be first, when it’s clearly obvious that days or even weeks later the device will still be available and more appraisals have been tallied? Occasionally, to the delight of those of us who relish schadenfreude, the early buyers of say, the iPhone, get caught by discovering that the excessive early price was just for suckers—people who’ve been manipulated for commercial reasons. Generating pre-release demand is just a marketing device, aided and abetted by the MSM which benefits so much from the advertising. Every week there are vivid examples of this with the release of new movies whose worth is judged solely on the number of bums on seats counted during the first weekend.  If moviegoers reverted to waiting for a day or two, the industry would be obliged to give its new releases a longer gestation period which would be of benefit to both to the producers and the customers, everybody in fact except the advertisers.

MY WEEKLY 28-MINUTE show, Wait a Minute! might sometimes be remembered for its bile, but it would never win awards for technical proficiency, being a casual melding of segments of myself ranting on camera, separated by video tape of such local events as studio artist tours, parades or festivals in the park, plus travel footage of my trips to China, Japan, Costa Rica, Mexico, Vietnam, Spain, Italy, France, England etc. By 2008 I had produced about 800 half-hour shows, mostly cobbled together with the minimum of jump-cut editing on a decrepit VCR, and I continued to make more every time I traveled. (These can be seen under the category Wait A Minute! or read in various issues of the Ojai Orange, all cached on my website at www.ojaiorange.com). Sometimes an Ojai story would be almost too good to be true, as in the case of Jennifer Moss, the notorious naked cyclist.

Wearing flower petal pasties over her nipples and G-string, she stretched out her shapely body under the oaks in my garden and explained why she had swapped her local notoriety for a life in Oregon.

     “The number one reason I left Ojai”, she said, “is they are not conscious enough about the air, the soil, the water. Either you get it or you don’t”.

Cited several times for riding her bicycle with nothing more than she was wearing now, she had been twice ticketed for public indecency although the DA had declined to prosecute. Explained Police Chief Bruce Norris: “They just don’t believe they can get a conviction on the nudity issue. There are constitutional issues about why a man can run around without a shirt and a woman can’t”.

At her first semi-nude appearance in Santa Barbara, she recalls that she was harassed by police who gave her a sobriety test, confiscated her drinking water and tested it. “They treated me like I was insane, then let me go.“   She claims that she was more or less forced out of town.

In Ojai EarthFriend Jen had both attackers and defenders. “Ojai tolerance is not eternal” wrote one right winger in the Ojai Valley News calling her public displays “naked narcissism”.

“Lighten up people! Enjoy the view or look the other way!” another reader responded.

The paper’s weekly feature, ‘thumbs up, down’ carried a gripe about .“people who encourage and take pictures of the Pastie Lady’s bad behavior…What do you call a grown woman who stands on her head in nothing more than pasties and  G-string with her legs spread wide open at Libbey Park and the skate park, and who jumps in front of moving school buses full of young children…?” 

Earth Friend Jenny

Jen, 32, who described herself as a social artist and environmental activist, scoffed. “It’s always adults moaning about how something might harm the children, but it’s adults who have poisoned the world. It’s a world of hypocrisy and it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s up to us to speak the truth, the naked truth”.

Why does nudity upset people so much?  I asked her.

     “Because nakedness represents freedom. America is supposed to be the land of the free but is actually one of most repressed and obsessed societies. It’s in denial.

      “We’ve exchanged gold for paper which is now becoming more and more meaningless. I’m into the real gold, the gold that is in the heart and soul. We have got to start growing more, getting more humanly involved with our environment. Instead of getting our resources from China we need to start making them more and more. We must have faith in our power”.

Her return to Oregon, where she was born in Corvallis, was partly because her new home, Ashland, is known for performance art, but it’s also where local law specifies people must cover their genitals, and this has been interpreted that bare breasts are acceptable. She aims to grow her pubic hair long enough to cover her genitals. When she announced that she would ride a bike in the July 4 parade, wearing only a G-string, the parade chairman responded that entries must be “appropriate for a family audience”. He said she could display her breasts any other day of the year but not July 4. One councilor, Eric Navickas, defended her. He said it was “an interesting commentary on our society that we’re willing to tolerate dead bodies through our aggressive foreign policy but not healthy naked bodies”.

     Jen (website: EarthFriendJen.com) says she will continue her quest to promote peace, emphasizing body, spirit, mind and soul. “It’s all about the world”, she says. “The world does not define me, I define me.”

In her own way, Jennifer was definitely a local star who caught my attention, but as a general rule I’ve never been much impressed by celebrities, even though usually admiring or at least respecting their talents. On the other hand, I heartily disagree with those who criticize them lending their star power to causes or political philosophies. If you’ve got it, flaunt it, I say. Why not take advantage of the slight edge that stardom offers, even if it’s not backed by the kind of intelligent perception that we most value?

Nor have I ever given much credence to commercial endorsements which, by their very nature, are often hypocritical. A celebrity may or may not like or use the product to which he or she lends a famous name, but it’s become so commonplace that there’s an inevitable cynicism about its verity. And I suppose--now that it’s so widely practiced--it’s old fashioned to cling to the idea that big, hugely-recompensed stars really don’t need to sell their names to advertisers. Although you might remember that until a few years ago, stars who made commercials abroad had contracts demanding that the ads not be seen back home, suggesting that the celebrities themselves felt that being so overtly commercial diminished their luster.

Aung San Suu Kyi

My heroes are of a different kind and top of the list is a woman, Burma’s leader Aung San Suu Kyi who has not been allowed to fulfill the post to which she was elected almost 20 years ago by the brutal army generals who seized power to negate a landslide election in her favor. To many people she’s a Mandela for the 21st century, a heroine whose bravery was acknowledged with the award of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 when her acceptance speech in Oslo was delivered by her son Alexander Aris. He reminded his audience that “the lonely struggle taking place in a heavily guarded compound in Rangoon is part of the much larger struggle, worldwide, for the emancipation of the human spirit from political tyranny and psychological subjection”.

Although his mother, he said, was often described as a political dissident who strove by peaceful means for democratic change, it should be noted that her quest was basically spiritual. And he quoted her: "To live the full life one must have the courage to bear the responsibility of the needs of others … one must want to bear this responsibility”. Her strength, she explained stemmed from Buddhism, the foundation of traditional Burmese culture. "The quest for democracy in Burma”, she declared, “is the struggle of a people to live whole, meaningful lives as free and equal members of the world community. It is part of the unceasing human endeavor to prove that the spirit of man transcends the flaws of his nature."

Millions of people around the world hope that this beautiful and noble lady, now 64, will eventually see not only her own freedom but that of her suffering people. Meanwhile, would-be supporters can help the struggle via the website uscampaignforburma.org

DEFINING MYSELF AS a columnist might seem perverse considering that after 50 years—and more than 1,000 columns—I have never been able to make a living from this particular vocation. My career could more accurately be described by the 30+ travel books I have written in the course of visiting more than 30 countries. After being more or less forced into retirement by Insight Guides, I continued to travel, but at my own expense. Often choosing tours (China, Vietnam, France, Alaska, the Caribbean) for their ease and convenience, I continued to write, publishing my findings as columns,  or in my magazine, the Ojai Orange.  This was almost always factual reporting. Opinions I usually reserved for my appearances on camera.

It's not very charitable to be indifferent about somebody dying and certainly not very kind to let them die in pain when you could do something about it. You might almost feel that it was genuine retribution, even karma if the same thing happened to them. Or their closest friends or relatives. Deliberately allowing people to die in pain is exactly what the (DEA? NIH? etc) do every day, something the Supreme Court mandated for many more lifetimes. Yes, we're talking about medical marihuana, the legalization of which has been established in many states, but is still ignored by these unfeeling barbarians. They're all in corrupt partnership with the smugglers, the DEA, the NIH, the prison structure, the police, the vast federal bureaucracies, the paid-off pols. Their shared credo is economic not moral. They are willfully mindless about the consequences of their behavior.

On a similar theme, I can’t help but feel that there’s a certain irony in a situation where people feel it’s okay to kill doctors who practice abortion on the grounds that even-unborn life is sacred and must be protected at all costs. And as a male I resent the fact that men can take it on themselves to decide what women can do with their bodies, indeed their lives. The only men who should be allowed to prevent women having abortions are those who are willing to adopt the unwanted children. And note how often are the supporters of the death penalty the very same people who scream that (unborn) life is sacred. But obviously saying one thing and doing another is not confined to this controversial issue.

But obviously saying one thing and doing another is not confined to this controversial issue. So many issues never seem to die. Abortion is certainly one of them, a subject that presumably will always be controversial. The overall impression, as I see it, is that it is usually Catholics that head the ranks of anti-abortionists but to mention their religion seems to be deemed unfair although it’s obviously the most important factor behind the “choose-life” movement.

Every week, indeed almost every day, there are examples that appropriately could be filed in the category labeled “Get Over It”. Mostly these are instances that stem from political correctness which insists that humor should be at least protested (and hopefully barred) if it is directed at…well, anybody at all. Some students at a Los Angeles High School tampered with the names in a yearbook, changing them so that they were almost as ridiculous as the existing ones (does Starkeisha, Shaligua or Q'J'Q'Sha ring a bell?) True, the exercise was aimed at the sometimes–ridiculous names adopted by African-Americans, but so what? Blacks have been choosing unique names for centuries, nothing wrong with that. Which is not to say that Caucasians (and probably Asians and Latinos) are not equally guilty of this propensity for eccentric naming. How about Track, Willow, Bristol, Piper and Trig? But if you’re going to give your child a strange-sounding name, how strong is your case when somebody makes fun of it?  It’s not racism, it’s sarcasm. Get over it.

Why are estimates invariably wrong, deliberately low and bearing little or no relation to the final cost? Realistically, of course, we know from experience that we are expected to accept these deliberate lies accepting the fact that the estimate is totally phony. Budgets? There’s always a deficit, never a surplus. So, unless the increase is calculated and factored in, what’s the point of the estimate in the first place?  Sometimes we hear about bonuses for finishing the job ahead of time, but how often are there penalties for being late or false estimates?

AN OBVIOUS advantage of choosing art as a subject to talk about on camera, is that you can illustrate your opinions at the same time, as when I asked my viewers

Getty Images
	Francis Bacon self portrait

Why are Francis Bacon’s ugly portraits so admired? What’s so clever about distorting faces so they are unrecognizable? Come to think of it why are gullible suckers willing to pay so much--$34 million, for example, for his repulsive 1976 triptych Three Studies for Self Portrait, a smeary, misshapen trio of the same face twisted three ways. Is this supposed to inform us of something we didn’t know or understand about the person depicted? If so, it’s no revelation to me; it’s still ugly. Makes me think there’s something sick or malevolent about its creator. Almost a dozen of Bacon’s works have sold for more than $25m apiece since the death of his lover George Dyer in 1971. Looking at that portrait makes you think that it’s enough to prompt suicide all on its own.

So-called “art lovers” rarely love the art they buy—just the money that it represents, commodities that increase in value and bring a profit when sold, just like anything else. If you really loved art, wouldn’t you want to keep it instead of just making a profit?

It’s not as if artists even make the art that bears their name much of the time. Jeff  Koons’ huge construction Balloon Dog placed atop the once-distinguished Metropolitan Museum was neither conceived nor constructed by him. As Peter E Rosenblatt wrote in a letter to the New York Times: “Mr. Koons simply found something to duplicate and suggested making it big and shiny. That’s creative?”

And his contemporary Damien Hirst whose only motives (assisted by his crew of 150 fabricators) appear to be ego and greed, ably aided by the so-called collector Charles Saatchi whose modus operandi is to buy the work of unknowns, promote it heavily and then sell for a vast profit. How could that beautiful and bright goddess of the kitchen, Nigella, fall for such a lout?

Billionaire Interview publisher Peter Brant, a big collector, is like so many others, more profiteer than art lover. With the inexplicable multiplication in value of artworks, one example of his recent good luck is his ability to sell Roy Lichtenstein’s 1963 Ball of Twine for $18 million. He bought it in 2001 for $4million.

You might think that modern art isn’t about anything more than huge sums of money except that Sotheby’s and Christie’s have reached the point where they are often willing to forgo profits just to win commissions, thereby beating out the other on sales totals.

These two major auction houses sold $12.5bn in artworks in 2007, but the boom may not last for ever “Art isn’t like a bond or a share—each piece is simply worth what you can persuade somebody else to pay for it” wrote The Week magazine adding that art dealer Richard  Feigen would argue that the likes of Koons and Hirst ‘have no place in the history of art’ and that their value is dictated by the ‘mafia’ of the art world—dealers and curators who lead the gullible rich into paying absurd prices”.

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Mostly I’m BLISSFULY content living in Ojai. It’s a tranquil haven whose amiable folk, much like people in small towns everywhere, smile and offer a friendly greeting as they meet in the street. The police were all-too ubiquitous when I arrived but now do an excellent job of handling unobtrusively what small amount of crime there is.The surrounding countryside and especially the Los Padre mountains are a delight. But living here can get pretty boring. Unless you’re involved with the local theater or are a fan of bar life, there’s nowhere to hang out, which makes it hard to meet people. That’s why I go away so often. Occasionally I make new friends on trips, but they don’t live in Ojai and most have the mistaken impression that it’s too far to come for a visit--although Los Angeles can be reached within a couple of hours’ drive.

Obviously I’m too old to hang out at the skate park, and the occasional Art Center openings are filled only with stolid, married couples. Nobody introduces anybody.

Most places I’ve lived, I have started a publication which invariably enticed collaborators, contributors, writers, readers. Not here. When my little magazine was originally on sale nobody was even curious enough to buy it. When I decided to make it free, I put on the mailing list everybody who requested it. Two locals asked. Today it has a dozen readers around town, several hundred elsewhere in the world, as well as being cached on my website. I invariably leave a single copy in the post office when I pick up my mail, and whenever I have a copy with me I drop it into an open car or leave it in the library. One issue was devoted to our local saint, Jiddu Krishnamurti, described  by my friend Martin Gardner, as “this thin, frail, shy lad of Brahmin birth…one of the most peculiar gurus ever to come out of Mother India”.

Krishnamurti lived in the Ojai valley for many years in a cottage on six acres bought in 1922 for the Theosophical Society by its international president Annie  Besant. Her friends included Anais Nin, Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts and the renowned local artist Beatrice Wood (who died in 1998 aged 105 and whose studio is kept open and frequently visited).

    Besant and Charles Leadbeater, an English author and clairvoyant, who were the most famous disciples of Madame Blavatsky,  became convinced that the young Jiddu was the new messiah, or world teacher, and the reincarnation of Lord Bodhisattva Maitreya, the fifth Buddha.

Jiddu’s father lost a lawsuit trying to regain control of his son, who had now been adopted by Besant. The close relationship lasted only until 1930 when Jiddu resigned from the Society and began to travel the world giving lectures.

“Although Krishnamurti outgrew the theosophical nonsense that Besant and Leadbeater drummed into him”, Gardner wrote, “he never stopped believing that he and he alone, knew the truth about everything. His teaching was a mix of dull platitudes and murky phrases such as ‘the observer is observed… thinking is the thought. ..choice less awareness’ and that to be transformed on must ‘die to the moment’.

Although his name is on more than 40 books as well as countless videos and audiotapes—all available locally at the still active Krishnamurti Foundation—it is sometimes difficult to comprehend exactly what his message was. Gardner describes it as “a kind of watered down Buddhism in which the key message is that everything is connected and one must live in the moment, without fear, and accept everything that happens with resignation and tranquility”. His writings contain no hint of a personal God or the survival of personality after death and no other thinkers are quoted.

“There were two Krishnamurtis”, Gardner explains, “One was the person presented to the world through lectures and books, a man without ego who lived a sanctified life of celibacy and high moral purity. The other Krishnamurti was a shadowy, self-centered vain man, capable of sudden angers and enormous cruelty to friends, He was also a habitual liar. Krishna, as his friends called him, freely admitted his compulsive lying. He blamed it on simple fear of having his deceptions detected”.

Perhaps his biggest deception was for 30 years conducting a secret affair with Rosalind, the lovely wife of his friend, disciple, business manager and editor Raja who understandably became his enemy when the treachery came to light.

But Krishna remained a revered figure until his death (aged 91) in Ojai and his presence is still evoked, and his videotapes replayed, at regular gatherings of his followers. Back in the 1960s he was a popular lecturer on the grounds of a famous local landmark, the fabled Casa Barranca, a Charles and Henry Greene Craftsman House commissioned by oil magnate Charles M. Pratt in 1908.

Casa Barranca, like Ojai, has “a Zen-like quality” says owner Billy Moses

The Greene and Greene Centennial, celebrated this year, was organized by Casa Barranca’s sister home, Pasadena’s Gamble House. “Of the five bungalows, Casa Barranca is probably the least known but arguably one of the most impressive” says Ted Bosley, curator of the Gamble House. “I believe Casa Barranca is very nearly the epitome of what the Greenes wanted to design throughout their careers”.

Bill and Eliza Moses, the current owners have restored the house and filled it with Craftsman era furniture as well as starting an organic winery whose products frequently turn up at local events.

Every June I faithfully volunteer for the Ojai Music Festival and gratefully accept the reward of a ticket for two concerts. And every year, lounging on a blanket in grassy Libbey Bowl, the downtown park built for $12,000 in 1957, I am disappointed to hear the familiar (i.e. unfamiliar) screeches, growls and groans of indubitably cutting-edge music. For some reason unclear to me, the organizers of the festival are unregenerate avant garde snobs to whom the idea of corny, familiar music by the likes of Tchaikowsky, Beethoven, Bach, Mozart or any one of the hundreds of beloved classical composers are anathema. Instead, what we get are advanced and experimental works by little-known composers whose preferred instruments tend towards kitchen utensils, automobile parts, animal bones and—at least making  some sense—synthesizers.

Which is not to say that none of this is interesting, because some of it is captivating, but a little goes a long way. When, for example, a world-class soprano or contralto stands center stage and pitches half a dozen high notes over and over for three quarters of an hour, the tendency is to ask Why bother?

The festival has a distinguished history going back to the first concert in 1947. Igor Stravinsky was musical director in 1956 and 1957, and Aaron Copland the two years that followed, then again in 1976. The celebrated conductors Michael Tilton Thomas and Pierre Boulez have each filled the post six times.

FOR A SMALL TOWN, Ojai is more than adequately covered by local media with a weekly tabloid from Ventura, VCReporter, supplementing the twice-weekly Ojai Valley News. For nearly 20 years the eccentric Ojai & Ventura Voice  appeared every two weeks, edited by Jeffrey W. San Marchi who died, aged 57 of a heart attack two days before Xmas 2007, while in Ventura delivering the fortnightly tabloid. A quirky, iconoclastic paper, definitely on the side of the underdog, it was often filled with mostly left wing publicity releases, music puffs, readers’ gripes and critiques of the local council. San Marchi maintained a continuous feud, often marked with over-the-top anger, against a rightwing, longtime member of Ojai City Council.

When he died it was widely said that no single person could fill his shoes, but a few months later the paper reappeared, although with the same unimaginative and humdrum layout as before. It was challenged by a rival Ojai & Ventura View which was better-looking, with color, but more importantly had spirited away many of the earlier paper’s contributors.

Currently the battle continues, providing the tiny town with an unusual array of newsprint. My main reservation against our local broadsheet, the Ojai Valley News—apart from the fact that it’s twice weekly (75c each time) which the news doesn’t seem to justify—is that it carries very little about many of the undoubted talents, famous and otherwise, who obviously live locally. Clearly there must be some gifted writers among them but there appears to be no attempt to print stuff by (or even about) them.

On the whole though, it’s an amiable production and its editor, Bret Bradigan, with whom I have lunch once a year and exchange e-mails, is a friendly fellow. I asked him what he had to say about his six years in Ojai and here is his response.

 

My Ojai - behind the orange curtain

by Bret Bradigan

Given the daunting task of providing some "provocative, anecdotal musings" about my time in Ojai, John Wilcock has prompted an identity crisis. I'm a nice guy, most would agree, with a Jungian dark side driven by forces I'd rather not face. Best let sleeping demons lie. A few true if bland platitudes about Ojai's majestic natural beauty, its fascinating esoteric history, its sturdy sense of community, should suffice. Right? Wrong!

I am acutely aware that John is one of those Zelig-like figures who shows up at critical junctures in our cultural history, seeding the future with new forms and ideas, then vanishing off to the next horizon, the next big thing. So it is written (by him), so shall it become filtered into the conventional wisdom, into The Last Word. He writes something unflattering about me, and 100 years from now my rich, full life of romance and travel and adventure will be remembered solely from his few snarky comments. So I'd better do what he says.

My defining context as it relates to Ojai is that I grew up in a family of eight in a three-room tarpaper shack. Most of the food I ate before I joined the military at age 18 was either grown or shot. I was the town gravedigger for six years. So now I find myself in a place where many people (including myself, on occasion) routinely spend more for lunch than my family of six did for a month of groceries.

Bret Bradigan

Now I live in an Ojai world of inherited wealth and privilege. I never thought of myself as a class warrior, and still do not, my innate sense of fairness doesn't allow me to paint people with a broad brush (Alexander of Miletus wrote, "Be kind. Inside each of us a great battle rages." Or, as my dad used to say, "Everyone has a long row to hoe"). But I have to tell you, these trust fund hippies, these "trustafarians," are annoying. It doesn't matter if they are conservative or liberal, it's their smug entitlement that maddens me. The worst offenders are conservative, with that George W. Bushian smirky sense that, as the late, great Molly Ivins observed: "They were born on third base and think they hit a triple." But the rich liberals, with their airy nonsense and untested assumptions, also drive me crazy. Let's just say I don't share the Red State resentment of Hollywood and liberal elitists, but I understand it.

Ojai is full of decent, hard-working, modest people.  These trustafarians are the decided minority. But I've never had much experience with these type of people. They do plenty of good work - if only from a sense of social preening and narcissism. They write checks, and someone has to pay the freight. As Milton may have written if he had been rich rather than blind: "They also serve who stand around at cocktail parties talking about their Aspen vacations." As one wag put it, "There's nothing wrong with any nonprofit group in Ojai that a couple of rich widows couldn't solve."

My most illustrative anecdote is about a person who opened a restaurant in town as one of a chain of enterprises he was engaged upon, full of grandiose ideas of how Ojai should pull its head out of its ass and smell the fair-trade grown coffee. Basically, he seemed to expect other people to clamber over themselves for the opportunity to implement his great notions.

Well, he signed an advertising contract for a year. Three months into the contract, he still hadn't paid for any of his advertising. So I had to call to collect this sum of money, which I knew was less than he spent on a pair of shoes, but was worth a week's salary to one of my employees. He not only had the temerity to cancel his contract, but essentially said he shouldn't have to pay because the business was doing poorly and that meant the advertising wasn't effective. It was our fault he owed us money. We rarely enforce advertising contracts in a small town. It just isn't worth the bad-will it creates.        

And dunning merchants for their past dues is my least favorite chore, and one which I spent much more time on in Ojai than any of the poorer, blue-collar towns in which I have plied this strange craft of community newspapering. I quiver with frustration when I hear the same people who complain about not having enough to pay their bills bragging about their trips to Europe.

Another telling story is about another person who came to town all full of swagger and certainty about his business skills. He bought out two beloved businesses, promising to further their legacies into the 21st century, then opened another lavish enterprise of which we already had too many, was proclaimed "Entrepreneur of the Year," and promptly closed two of those businesses, and the third appears to be hanging in there, but clearly not thriving. He's a nice guy, so I don't want to single him out, but you shouldn't pretend to be an expert when your only qualification is family money. As I've heard people say, "If you want to make a small fortune in Ojai, start with a large one."

And of course, I was accused of head-butting one right-wing slacker, who I have loathed since the moment I looked into the emptiness of his shark eyes. He is well-known as a textbook pathological narcissist. But a trashy twice-monthly publisher, mediated by a mutual attorney friend, who, in my considered opinion, is mean as a snake and more than a little mentally unbalanced, printed his side of the story like it was some big front-page exposé and all the gossipy trolls were atwitter. I have to tell you, though, it only redounded to my credit. As one friend said after reading it, "I get two messages. One is that this guy is a whiny little crybaby and the other is don't mess with Bret Bradigan." I truly hated being mischaracterized as violent or out-of-control, but someone has to stand up to these bullies.

It does little good, in the end. These trust-fund hippies seem to recognize each other, whether they are in the typical Ojai attire of socks-and-sandals and graying ponytails or armored with Armani. It's like they emit some kind of tribal pheromones or something. So no matter how bad their behavior, no matter how much they abuse the common good or notions of decency and fair play, they will still get the A-list invites, still get the table next to the dance floor at the lavish fund-raisers, still flaunt their wealth and privilege behind a sheen of smug certainty.

Still, it's no contest. I love this town and its people deeply, even most of these trust-fund hippies. I want to spend the rest of my career here, safely ensconced in its protective mountains, nourished by the creative energy, the sense of the possible that seems to flow so freely here. But there are times, I tell you. There are times.

–Bret Bradigan, Editor & Publisher, Ojai Valley News 

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My letter to Arianna Huffington noting that I, too, had been influenced by her early mentor, a London Times columnist named Bernard Levin, brought a gracious reply. I had asked if maybe the Post could mention my serialized book but received, in return, an invitation to contribute to the Huffington Post.

All it took was one column, which they used, for me to realize that I didn’t belong there. Ninety per cent of the Post’s content is blogs of opinion whereas my column is 99% fact. So I ‘resigned’ and pondered once again on why the material that I offer is so unappreciated.

It’s always been a mystery how I could misjudge so badly the caliber of something that I have written for so long. I honestly/egotistically believe that my column is both interesting and a valuable contribution, bringing to wider audience things that ought to be better known. Over the past few years I have offered the column (free) to a dozen publications but not a single one has even replied (although it did run in the Montecito Journal for ten years) Could the column possibly be that uninteresting or badly written that it was unusable? After all I have been doing this for half a century now and have consistently scooped newspapers by quoting stories from magazines months before they broke onto front pages.

Sunday’s New York Times ran a similar column for a while last year, the difference being that mine was not only more interesting but that it used some of the same items weeks before its rival.

I’m a big fan of Arianna and her trend-setting magazine but its format is getting so hackneyed. Everybody has opinions, even me, but I’m not sure how often I want to read the predictable set of blogs diving in with their obvious views, in response to every action or comment by our political class. Blogs, blogs, blogs –is that all anybody is interested in these days? Being a columnist has been the core of my being for most of my life and I have a lot of thoughts on the subject. But I’ll save them for the final chapter.

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