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Garcetti Directs Departments Start Open Data Initiative

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Los Angeles — On Dec. 18, Mayor Eric Garcetti issued an executive directive establishing an Open Data initiative in the Los Angeles.

Garcetti directed all city departments to collect data that they generate and prepare it for posting on a city website, which will go live in early 2014.

“This executive directive empowers Angelenos to participate in their government with greater understanding and impact and promotes a culture of data sharing and cooperation among city departments,” said Garcetti in a released statement. “I look forward to launching LA’s Open Data portal in early 2014 to promote transparency in government and give Angelenos a new way to help us solve our toughest challenges.”

Diane Gershuny, In Memoriam: The Loss of a Long Beach Champion

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I can’t say I really knew Diane Gershuny. I didn’t even know that cancer was a part of her life. So I was a bit stunned to walk into Portfolio Coffeehouse on Sunday night and see the newspaper notice of her death, right below a picture of her, smiling in that quiet way of hers.

My acquaintance with Diane was limited, centering on her seemingly tireless efforts (through her marketing/PR business and otherwise) to promote all things 4th Street. Although I had received press releases from her now and again, my first real contact with her came in late 2011. She knew I had written a novel and done a reading at {open} bookstore/performance space (I doubt such an event could have taken place on Retro Row without her knowing about it), and she sent me an e-mail inviting me to do a reading at Portfolio as part of the coffeehouse’s new Local Writers Series. She printed up these beautiful promotional postcards for the event, displaying an amiable deference to my neurotic need for everything on them to be just so.

From then on we had what I’d call a friendly acquaintance, running into each other from time to time at various events or—where else?—4th Street. I never experienced her as anything but pleasant. I’m referring to a sincere pleasantness, not the politesse that you can’t help feeling gets in the way of really seeing the person in front of you. As much as I didn’t know Diane well, I always felt that my limited view of her was nonetheless a clear one.

Not quite a year after my Portfolio reading, I was doing another at Fingerprints. Remembering Diane’s postcards, I e-mailed her to inquire about what service or software she used. I would have been grateful simply for the information, but Diane offered to send me a template for printing up new ones. All I needed to do was supply her with replacement text. I did so, though once again I had to have things just so. As was her way, Diane displayed nothing but alacrity in helping me out.

That always stuck with me about her: how ready she was to be helpful. In the case of my Fingerprints reading, there was nothing in it for her—I wasn’t paying her; she wasn’t promoting the event. And yet she helped beyond what was asked. She loved 4th Street, so I’m sure the fact that the event was happening at Fingerprints was partial motivation. But I have no doubt that had I made the same request for a reading I was doing in Boston, she would have been no less generous. I didn’t know her well, but I think that was her way.

There are people in far better positions to eulogize Diane on a personal level. From my perspective, the best I can do is to meditate on how the loss of someone like Diane diminishes a community. I have never been part of a community remotely like Long Beach, and its glory comes down to the people. Yeah, the weather’s great, and it’s nice to live near the water (despite its surflessness), and there are many cool businesses and so forth, but it’s all meaningless without the people. And if Long Beach is on the rise—as I’d like to think it is—it’s due only to the work of community members.

Diane Gershuny epitomized what I’m talking about. You didn’t have to know her well to know that she loved Long Beach and was doing more than her part to make it that much more loveable. And unlike many of us simultaneously promoting Long Beach and our own individual ends, Diane never seemed interested in making it about her. No doubt she desired a fair wage for her work—we all need to pay the rent, right?—but I get the impression that she would have accepted complete anonymity if somehow that would have increased her effectiveness in promoting her community.

As it happens, Diane was not anonymous. Many people knew her; many people loved her. But even more people in Long Beach will miss her, whether they know it or not. They’ll miss her because their community has lost one of its champions. To whatever heights Long Beach rises, it will be a little harder to get there without Diane. We’ll miss her. I’ll miss her.

LB Playhouse’s A Christmas Carol: Airy, Ghostly Version

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By John Farrell, Curtain Call Writer

Cynics would say that Charles DickensA Christmas Carolis done to death every December.

Cynics (including this reviewer) have seenA Christmas Carolso often that, when an actor goes up on his lines we feel the urge to shout out the words for him. We have them engraved on our brains.

But there are plenty of audience members out there who haven’t seenA Christmas Carolfifteen times in four years or so. They are the ones buying the mulled wine to take in with them; they are the ones who clap along with the music at Fezziwig’s Christmas party, who cheer Tiny Tim’s “God bless us, every one.” They laugh in all the right places (and a few wrong places) and generally have a great time that cynics can only admire.

That was the case with A Christmas Carol at the Long Beach Playhouse on opening night. There were a few cynics in the nearly sold-out house, but there were hundreds of others who loved every minute of the Playhouse version of Dickens, a one-act, one-hour-and-ten-minute version that hit all the highlights, used the stage effectively, boasted a fine Scrooge and an effective cast, including a Tiny Tim who was authentically tiny but also spoke her lines with firm conviction (and a loud voice).

POLA Container Volumes Increase 17.3 Percent in November

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San Pedro — The Port of Los Angeles released its November 2013cargo volumes.

November overall volumes increased 17.3 percent compared to November 2012. The increase is due in part to larger vessels calling at the port as well as improvement in the U.S. economy.

Imports increased 18.7 percent, from 288,273 Twenty-Foot Equivalent (TEU) containers in November 2012 to 342,247 TEUs this November. Exports jumped 23.3 percent, from 145,344 TEUs in November 2012 to 179,175 TEUs in November 2013.

Combined, total loaded imports and exports for November increased 20.2 percent, from 433,617 TEUs last November to 521,422 TEUs in November 2013. Factoring in empties, which increased 8.7percent year over year, overall November 2013 volumes (683,849 TEUs) increased 17.3 percent compared to November 2012 (582,981 TEUs). After 11 months of 2013, total container volumes (7,215,223) have decreased 3.7 percent compared to 2012 (7,489,560).

Current and past data container counts for POLA may be found at: http://www.portoflosangeles.org/maritime/stats.asp

 

Citywide Gun Buyback Gets 817 Guns

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Los Angeles — Mayor Eric Garcetti and Los Angeles Police Department Chief Charlie Beck announced Dec. 16, that 817 firearms were taken off the street during the city’s Gun Buyback Dec. 14.

In total, 387 handguns, 268 rifles, 131 shotguns, and 31 assault weapons were collected at three in Central Los Angeles, Wilmington and Van Nuys.

In exchange for surrendering weapons, participants in the Gun Buyback receive a Ralphs pre-paid card. The amount per firearm is dependent on its type, up to $200 for assault weapons as specified by the State of California, and up to $100 for handguns, rifles and shotguns. The LAPD Gun Unit determines the type and classification of the firearm surrendered.

The Mayor’s Gang Reduction and Youth Development Office staff also conducted a voluntary survey to participants at all three of the Gun Buyback locations. A total of 500 surveys were collected and they noted the success of the program, highlighting that 90.7 percent of respondents felt their neighborhoods were now safer, 36.9 percent of respondents said they did not keep the surrendered firearms locked, 72.9 percent said they did not intend to buy another gun, and 58.6 percent of respondents said their home is now gun free.

Theater

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December 20
The Nutcracker
The South Bay Ballet presents The Nutcracker at 7 p.m., Dec. 20.
The narrative is of a grandma who tells a story of a young girl on Christmas Eve, dreaming a lush and vivid fantasy of her faithful Nutcracker prince.
The play will also be showing at 2 p.m., Dec. 21 and 22.
Details: (310 329-5345; www.centerforthearts.org
Venue: Center for the Arts, El Camino College
Location: 16007 Crenshaw Blvd., Torrance

Winter Wonderland Concert
The North Torrance Youth Musicians Ensemble present The Winter Wonderland Concert at 7 p.m., Dec. 20.
The NTYME host an evening of musical entertainment with their concert featuring performances by their symphony and orchestra.
Tickets are $10 and $15.
Details: (310) 781-7171; public_relations@ntyme.org
Venue: James Armstrong Theatre
Location: 3330 Civic Center Dr., Torrance

LA City Council Approves AltaSea Lease at POLA

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Los Angeles — On Dec. 17, the Los Angeles City Council unanimously approved a 50-year lease to transform a 100-year-old pier on the Los Angeles waterfront in San Pedro into an urban marine research and innovation center.

The center is called AltaSea at the Port of Los Angeles.

POLA and Rockefellar Philanthropy Advisor signed the agreement for the AltaSea project, which involves about 35 acres of land and water at the port’s City Dock No. 1 site, Berths 56 through 60, 70 and 71.

AltaSea will be developed through a public-private partnership that includes the port, AltaSea and a host of regional public and private universities. Funding commitments for Phase 1 of the project total $82 million to date, including $57 million in site-related capital investments by the port and a $25 million gift by theAnnenberg Foundation. Phase 1 is estimated to cost $185 million with a 2018 completion goal.

The AltaSea campus will feature circulating sea-water labs, offices, classrooms, lecture halls, support facilities, an interpretive center, a facility for marine-related commercial ventures and an opportunity to develop the world’s largest seawater wave tank for studying tsunamis and rogue waves. The anchor tenant of Phase 1 will be the Southern California Marine Institute, a strategic alliance of 12 major universities in Southern California that have marine science academic and research programs. The entire project cost is estimated at more than $500 million with completion over a 15- to 20-year timeframe.

Penelope Sudrow

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a wandering waif with

a hint of noblesse oblige

By Lionel Rolfe, Contributor

I met Penelope Sudrow at a backyard party in the SilverLake home of my actor friend Lee Boek, who runs Public Works Improvisational Theater.

I sensed that she was somebodymore than just a pretty lady. What was intriguing about her was that sense that she was a woman-child. Although she looked like a woman, she had the vulnerability of a child about her as well a sense of fun and wonder you rarely see in a normal grown up. I was not surprised when I found out she had been a well-known child star.

I was probably drawn to that quality because my mother, Yaltah Menuhin, had been a child prodigy pianist, playing Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with Pierre Monteux and the San Francisco Symphony when she was 10.

Yaltah died at 79 years old, after giving a concert of Chopin and Debussy for the students at the Orwell Park School in Ipswich, England. She played and then danced down the aisle of the auditorium with the children following her like the pied piper. Then she came home, had a heart attack and died. She died in the arms of a neighbor, who held her and screamed at her, “Yaltah! No, no, don’t go!” I know that child prodigies sometimes have terrible lives and sometimes wonderful—think Mozart in his last years prior to being buried in a pauper’s field.

And just because a grown woman has a strong inner child in her does not mean she is innocent of the ugly ways of the world. Now, most people emerge from their childhood into adulthood with a certain blasé attitude toward the awful things that people do to people. But people whose inner child dwells more strongly in their adult bodies are perhaps more easily shocked by ugliness—it is not in their DNA to be blasé about how things really are. Such a person is Penelope, and such a person was my own mother.

Penelope is best known for her role in the 1987 horror film, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. She played Jennifer Caulfield, who is killed by Freddy Krueger as she watched television. She is grateful for that role, because it became a cult classic among horror film aficionados. She is grateful for the fans who remember her role—her website is built by one of those fans—www.penelopesudrow.com.

How a Young Christian Musician’s Drug Choices Almost Ruined His Life

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It was strange not to hear from Darin about the gig. Musicians can be flaky, and 20-year-olds even more so. But Darin was a pro. Literally. So despite the fact that none of us knew him especially well, his non-responsiveness over a period of several days was surprising.

It turned out that Darin was in jail, a case of dubious choices and a futile “War on Drugs” combining very nearly to permanently derail a promising young life.

*****

He started with drugs way too young. Marijuana was first, at 15. Booze and LSD at 16. Psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) a year later. He was interested not in simple pleasure but in mind expansion—the same drive that turned him on to books by Aldous Huxley and David Wilcock. An interest in Christianity followed, though he was unsatisfied with narrowmindedness he found there.

“I grew up without going to church, and I always knew that I was searching for something,” he recalls. “That became the Bible for a while and Christ, but then I tied in the use of drugs—psychedelics—into spirituality. Before I ever experimented with it, I remember praying to a source or a higher self or God, saying, ‘I know the Bible isn’t all there is, that there are lies that are easily mistaken for truth.’ […] I remember reading all these things and trying to share them with my pastor, who was a conservative Christian. And I just remember him saying, ‘No, this is not right. Here’s why’—and showing me the Bible. I learned from then on that I had to keep these things to myself.”

Feeling that psychedelics helped him not only with his emotions but even with his studies, he began turning fellow Long Beach Poly classmates on to what he had found.

“[Psychedelics offer] a great possibility for altering your perception of how society is, what we’re told to believe, and how things operate in this crazy world,” he says. “And I wanted to share that with people.”

Darin’s first brush with law enforcement came during his junior year, when he got busted for misdemeanor possession of cannabis. His parents were upset. “Don’t blow your education just for getting high,” his father told him.

Although he didn’t stop using, Darin graduated high school with a 3.86 GPA and was off to major Christian university on a partial music scholarship. But despite the school’s religious bent, there was no shortage of people interested in drugs, and soon Darin was dealing psychotropics. He viewed doing so as a sort of public service. “I was trying to help people out by giving them these sacred substances,” he says.

He was making $100 to $200 per month, before the day in early April when he arrived at the university-owned apartment where he was living to find Campus Safety conducting a search. “Someone expressed concern” is the justifying phrase Darin remembers. And when the search turned up not only marijuana (for which he had a doctor’s recommendation), psilocybin, LSD, and DMT—substances he admits to dealing—but also cocaine, Norco, and Xanex (substances he says he neither dealt nor really used, but was obsessed with “collecting”), the police who later arrived told it to him frankly: “You’re in big trouble, buddy.”

Darin was taken to jail and waited alone in a cell until he his 3 a.m. interrogation. Impressed with the officer’s forthright manner (and a big beard that made Darin think of Deadheads), Darin agreed to speak without a lawyer and admitted to everything. At 5:30 a.m. he was released on his own recognizance, despite the fact that he was looking at multiple felonies.

A week later came the interview with Campus Safety. He gave up the names of a few people to whom he’d sold pot, hoping this might save him from expulsion. It didn’t, and Darin regrets the move now.

“I thought I was covering my butt,” he says. “[Now] I think giving the names was selfish, because I was thinking of my own self.”

Expulsion was soon the least of his concerns, as his court case began winding its way through the system. He spent $2,500 to secure an attorney, and he began attending Marijuana Anonymous meetings. Yes, Darin says, he thought the court might look favorably upon such a move, but he also felt his usage of cannabis has escalated too highly over the last three years.

“[Marijuana] was constantly taking my money,” he says. “And also—let’s face it—marijuana can be addicting. I finally came to terms with it.”

Despite the obvious difficulties, Darin says he found a sort of liberation from his getting busted. “I was happy and sad that everything got taken away,” he says. “I was sad because I got in trouble for it, but I was happy because it kind of felt like a burden was lifted. One of my friends at church said, ‘You may feel this was Satan that did this to you, but it could have been God, you know? Because maybe He was trying to save you from yourself.'”

Darin had already stopped doing LSD after a bad trip last November, which included the incredibly reckless choice of getting behind the wheel of a car.

“I thought I was driving intro infinity,” he relates. “All of a sudden I had a thought that I was in someone else’s body. Then I thought I had woken up in a different place—I was, like, in Bombay, I was in London or something. […] I wandered into [an] abandoned building, went up this staircase, and I came to this doorway at the top. I thought that if I walked through a door, I would go to hell.”

A year later he was facing a much more tangible hell, when his attorney advised him to accept the plea deal being offered by the district attorney, even though it meant a sentence of 180 days behind bars, only 80 of which he’d actually. Otherwise, the attorney said, Darin was looking at something more along the lines of three to five years.

And so, on November 6 Darin pled no contest to possession of LSD for sale, possession of psilocybin for sale, and possession of cocaine. To his and his lawyer’s surprise, the judge ordered him immediately into custody, and before he knew it he was an inmate of the Twin Towers Correctional Facility. He knew he was going to lose his job at Starbucks when he didn’t show up for work that weekend. But he had more immediate concerns, and Darin says he prayed to Archangel Michael for protection.

Whether it was divine intervention or dumb luck, Darin’s stay in jail was far less traumatic than it might have been. Darin describes his cellmate, a 54-year-old black man (his ethnicity noteworthy in context, considering that it was immediately apparent to Darin that the prison population was highly segregated), as “really nice,” and after six days Darin jumped at an offer that he perform 120 hours of community service in lieu of his remaining jail time. He’s extremely grateful for his good fortune.

“I would have missed Thanksgiving, I would have missed Christmas,” he says, shaking his head. “[…] The place was more than dirty: it was contaminated. […] It would have been brutal [to have stayed in jail longer]. What they were feeding us was bologna and, you know, fake bread, fake peanut butter, fake jelly. […] One guy kept trying to take my stuff. My celly was like, ‘Hey, watch out. Don’t give him an inch.’ […] You could see people trying to start fights in there. […] I believe in guardian angels, and when I got out I thanked my guardian angels for watching over me while I was in there, because if I’d gotten in something like a fight, I could have been in there another six months.”

Darin says his misadventure is “definitely a wake-up call for my life. […] As my good friend said, ‘[From now on] you’ll be dealing the Holy Spirit,’ instead of selling chemical compounds that control, confuse, compromise, and contradict the workings of the Holy One.”

But as we sit across from one another at a coffeehouse on a mid-November evening, I can’t help wondering whether it’s enough. Darin is a sweet kid, and he shares his story with admirable openness. But it’s not clear that he fully “gets it.” Whether he’s referencing God or the books he’s read or his own experience, he strikes me as someone who is perhaps a bit too impressionable, who takes too much on faith, particularly his own understanding of things. His eyes have that slippery look you sometimes see from heavy use of psychedelics, and he concedes that he might have been better off not having started with such substances so young.

“Yes, I think so, because I would have taken a different road, definitely,” he says. “And I might have been a little more along the lines of what society wants—go to college, get a degree, don’t do drugs, maybe have a drink every once in a while. But the road I’m currently on is kind of the ‘warrior’ route—you know: ‘I’m not going to conform to society.’ That’s had its positives and its negatives.”

When asked about whether he has any misgivings about having introduced his brother—three years his junior—to such substances around the same time he was first experimenting with them, his answer is even more ambivalent: “Yes and no. […] He could go down the path I kind of took.”

But he falls back on his faith. “I know that God has a plan,” he says. He admits to still drinking a bit and smoking pot—though far less than he did formerly—as well as having discovered a new “sacred substance.”

“My new medicine is ayahuasca,” he says, having been turned onto the plant by an older musician friend. “It was very healing.”

Perhaps it’s salient that ayahuasca has reportedly helped many people make major life changes—such as kicking drug addiction—because Darin says he wants to make changes in his life. “It’s hard to make changes,” he says, “but it’s definitely worth it.”

One change Darin says he’s already made: he’s done with dealing—not only for fear of more legal peril, but because, despite his best intentions, he can’t be sure everyone he’s turned on to psychotropics have benefited from them.

“I’m portrayed as a criminal, even though I was trying to help to people,” he says, before admitting that to some degree his good intentions may have been misguided. “Because of me giving them that door, I don’t know what they’ve done with their life since.”

*****

Anyone who has taken an genuine look at the lay of the land understand that the “War on Drugs” is a failure and programs like D.A.R.E. are a farce. Darin (that’s not his real name, by the way) was a product of D.A.R.E., and the “War on Drugs” can’t keep drugs out of prisons, never mind college campuses (religions and secular alike).

But while honest and pragmatic approaches by the government and schools might yield better results in keeping kids off drugs, ultimately everyone is going to have to choose for himself. Darin does get one thing: he’s made some bad choices.

“It was difficult to share at first, but I knew that in sharing there is a sense of recovery,” Darin says as we conclude our sit-down. “A first step to breaking a habit is admitting. I admitted to you these things that I am proud of and not so proud of. I hope my story inspires others to learn, to wait, and to realize that we have our whole life to do drugs.”

Or not to do them. Of course, in American society, where we’re surrounded by alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, and prescription medication—not to mention illicit substances—almost no-one goes that route.

That’s okay, too. Or it can be. It all comes down to individual choice. And no-one is going to stop you from making bad choices but you.

Just ask Darin.

Long Beach Tax Preparer Sentenced for Aiding in False Tax Return

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Los Angeles — Rathana Ung and former director and officer of Lim’s Income Tax and Lim’s Tax Inc. in Long Beach, was sentenced to 12 months and a day imprisonment, one year of supervised release and ordered to pay$103,736 in restitution to the Internal Revenue Service, Dec. 9, for aiding in the preparation of a false federal income tax return.

According to court documents, between 2006 and 2010, Ung, 41, filed at least 60 false Forms 1040 with the IRS containing false deductions and false business losses. She admitted in court on July 1, 2013 that she knew that the taxpayers for whom the returns were filed were not entitled to claim such deductions when she pleaded guilty to one count of filing a false federal income tax return.

Ung, a resident of Coto De Caza in OrangeCounty, filed federal income tax returns for numerous clients claiming false deductions for mileage, meals and entertainment expenses, and other unreimbursed employee business expenses. Some of the tax returns contained false Schedules C (Profit or Loss from a Business) and at least one return contained a false deduction for tuition and fees.