L.A. as a Parallel Universe of New York?

 

parallel universe - noun - a world conceived of as coexisting with and having certain similarities to the known world but different from it in some fundamental way (Google).

In the early 1980s, I knew New York well as I worked and lived in Manhattan. Obviously, over a period of roughly fifty years, it has grown into something other than what it was back then, something indefinable, at least to me. At present, I reside in Los Angeles, nearly 3,000 miles west. Even though I have been a resident for just a week, I can say that these American hubs are the same, only different...parallel universes in a sense. 

What are the similarities? For one, there is commonality of origin. Just about everyone I have met here so far either was born in the New York Metro area or arrived here relatively recently, cementing my theory that L.A. is just a suburb of New York, a grouping of cities tied together by freeways at the southern end of the continent, a continuum of vast, uneven topography. To exemplify this observation was a cashier at Target from Brooklyn who actually admitted that he missed the weather in New York; for some unfathomable reason, he was actually mourning the loss of snow shoveling. To which I replied, "The grass is always greener" or in his case, whiter (with snow). Yet only a native New Yorker would complain about the near perfect atmospheric conditions in L.A. Another similarity (other than the recent earthquake in the suburbs of New Jersey, which seemed to come as a gift direct from SoCal) would be the traffic. Most in New York would swear that the traffic is worse here; but for the most part, it is the same, the difference being that there is equivalent volume but fewer roads merging into each other, accounting for the jams. Yet if you migrate here fully prepared for the stop and go, go and stop on the 405 or the101, PCH, etc., it isn't irking at all, well, not terribly so anyway. It is just another test of patience. As for the cost of living, it is pretty much the same albeit the gas is more expensive here (and you will pay a lot for car registration) and the utilities, yet the apartments are cheaper (and much nicer as many come with pools and fitness centers at no extra charge). Some restaurants are not as expensive as New York eateries; however, car washes are twice the price albeit experts will wash your car by hand. Give or take, everything balances out. 

Conversely, there are a few noteworthy differences. One monumental dissimilarity would be in the disposition of the inhabitants. Perhaps due to the prevalence of sun, individuals here are kinder, more polite. And like the sun, they shine; their ebullience sparkles. While some envious New Yorkers condemn L.A. congeniality as "fake," it feels pretty real to me. Unlike most New Yorkers, liberal or conservative, people in L.A. seem to take the climate crisis a lot more seriously and work to curb it. For example, the garbage collectors here go through your trash with a fine-tooth comb. If there is something in the circular file that doesn't belong there, you receive a warning and a checklist of what you can or can't include in it. In addition, the DMV requires all gas cars, no matter how new, to go through a smog test for sixty dollars at places that look like they used to be gas stations. Although this has nothing to do with the environment– even though I have been driving for fifty-five years (I started when I was ten...don't ask)–I had to take a written driving test like I did when I was seventeen in Jersey. And it was hard being that it was on nearly one hundred pages of material. Apparently, some of the laws governing the roads here are outside of the norm. In terms of these polarities, balance doesn't come into play.

Parallel or not, the universes known as New York and L.A. will always have their arguable pros and cons. The truth of the matter is that both cities are magical enough to fall in love with at first sight. If you can't afford to live in either, at least you can visit. From what I know, there are about thirty flights going back and forth between the two cities daily. If you book in advance and don't mind flying steerage, you might pay below $300, which is pretty cheap, all things considered. Flights might even be a bit less to either depending upon where you call home in the U.S. Wouldn't it be nice to formulate your own tale of two cities? 

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Side-Stepping Pedantry to Get Along With New Neighbors

 

pedantry - noun - excessive concern with minor details and rules

In this current vastness wherein political correctness rules, pedantry has pushed its way into the populace, particularly real estate attorneys. If you have been following this recent short string of blogs, you have probably figured out that I am selling my house to two nouveau yuppies, now labeled Millennials. Although they are wet behind the ears (meaning young in case that idiom escapes you), I like them. It is their legal representation that leaves little to love. Why? One word: PEDANTRY. 

Okay, okay, I get it. The lawyer is doing her job, and Goodness knows that in this climate of litigiousness one with the master key to a law office has to be extra careful. But to what avail? 

Case in point: As any lender must have a property surveyed before a mortgage can be offered, on Monday, an industrious set of two uniformed surveyors flagged my property in hot pink plastic price tags sans prices and measured every inch and boundary of my lot with their collection of transit levels, tripod rods, bluetooth laser distance meters, etc. Just when I thought I'd make it to the end of the game (the closing) without any more complications, two days later, I received a call from my attorney, informing me that two of my three neighbors have been encroaching on my land. One unknowingly erected a privacy fence up against my own privacy fence three feet onto my property and the other, a relatively new neighbor, put up behind my fence a children's play set, half of which is taking up four feet of the portion of my backyard that I can't see. Ugh. Getting the one neighbor to remove her fence was easy albeit I had to rely on an ex-boyfriend to do the job; however, convincing the other one that the survey was/is indeed accurate and he would have to move the one side of the swing set that his kids never use anyway, was a herculean feat. I struck out, but my real agent agents seemed to make it to first and second base. Who knows if they will manage to find their way to home plate. After much cajoling on the part of the agents, the disgruntled neighbor promised he'd move the set but was inordinately angry at the buyers, exclaiming, "That's no way to start out, bossing a new neighbor around. I know I won't ever speak to them unless they come over here with a peace offering." Perhaps he made a valid point.

Adverse possession laws aside (because they require thirty years of proven encroachment in New Jersey), I realize that the lawyer is thinking that if some child falls out of the jungle gym portion of the set, it might just be the buyers' responsibility to cover hospital fees. But isn't that what homeowner's insurance is for? If the neighbor's kids don't even use the monstrosity, is it worth starting off on the wrong foot with someone who is probably not going away for at least twenty years? I don't know about you, but I say to heck with pedantry. Messing with minutiae is just aggravating to everyone except for the one doling out the aggravation. "Don't sweat the small stuff" may not be advice that legal eagles embrace, but perhaps their clients should remind the professionals that stepping outside the bounds of pedantry and making concessions to insure domestic tranquility between neighbors may not be such a bad idea. 

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Veneration and its Converse: Renting an Apartment as a Retiree in Los Angeles

 

veneration - n. - great respect; reverence

Although I have probably touched on this before, I feel I must state the obvious one more time: veneration is rare these days. It used to be that if you were a halfway decent person (meaning kind, compassionate, etc.) had money in the bank, the world was your oyster. Well, let's put it mildly, if you consider yourself to be venerated today, chances are you may have the attributes aforementioned, but you aren't sixty five or over.

Over the past weekend, I was hit with ageism head on while trying to rent an apartment in Los Angeles. Mind you, L.A. likes to bask in the often obfuscated light of a democratic state, well aware of the hazards of discrimination. In fact, there are placards posted in myriad places reminding the public reader that it just won't tolerate prejudice of any kind. Funny thing, though, every possible example of bias is mentioned except ageism. 

Case in point: admittedly, I, like many of my kind, am a senior citizen with a healthy portfolio and income coming from several sources. Fortunately, I can afford to lease an apartment in both New York and Los Angeles, albeit not simultaneously. In Los Angeles as in many other hot spots in the U.S., in order to secure an apartment, you must prove that your income is three times the monthly rent, which is not easy if the rent is 3K or more. The main problem, though, is that if you happen to be retired, there is no separate application for you. These conglomerates that own the luxurious resort hotel apartment complexes operate on a "one size fits all" policy. Basically, they are not interested in you if you do not have a steady job that pays you a high weekly salary, not even if you are a multi-millionaire sans an occupation other than gardening and golf. Their computer algorithms are created to accept only those who are gainfully employed, blind to the probable possibility that if they are living paycheck to paycheck, they could get laid off at any time, rendering them unable to pay the rent. Contrarily, New York real estate operates on the basis of common sense. In New York City, you have to prove you have fifty times your monthly rent in the bank, which is hard to do when the average price of a one bedroom is $4,500 (or $225,000 in the bank), of course, but most of the young renters have wealthy parents who can and do co-sign their leases for them. The real estate moguls in the City know that money in the bank pays the rent on time, not an iffy weekly salary. 

As for me, I liked a complex in the lush, tropical, yet pragmatic planned community of Playa Vista just south of Marina del Mar (both in L.A. county) and applied to rent at Runway, a sleek resort-style complex with all of the amenities you can think of in tow. Because Runway's rental application completely disregards retirees, I was rejected not once, but twice. After much frustration, I gave up on renting there (even though the leasing manager finally emailed me offering me the apartment and apologizing for the ineptitude of his colleagues and data base) and signed with a competitor who took one look at my portfolio and said, "You're approved with verification from your bank." Smart man. He did the mental math. 

Regardless of your particular age, it should not be so incredibly hard to rent an apartment these days. And landlords of any kind should not discriminate against cotton tops turned Clairol box tops like me who slaved for many, many years yet cannot boast that they are earning a consistent weekly paycheck. Correct your websites, people in this biz. Add a separate application for retirees or very lucky independently wealthy scions before you continue to embarrass yourselves. You're losing business due to your dearth of common sense. Money is money regardless of its source. That being said, as a new renter, I am still thrilled to be free of all the complications associated with homeownership. The algorithmic aggravation was well worth the transition from money pit to someone else's responsibility. To me, that is a taste of veneration right there.

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Selling a Home? Beware of the Overly Punctilious and Entitled

 

punctilious - adjective - showing great attention to detail

Anxious to kickstart a new chapter in my life on the West Coast, I decided to sell my home in the Jersey suburbs myself with a generous portion of help from an associate, a former friend, turned beau, turned friend again, who happens to be a real estate agent. Of course, I am paying him something for his time as even one percent amounts to a comfortable chunk when the house is worth 750K. What started as an innocuous pairing of the Bobbsey Twins (I'm dating myself here) has segued into Beowulf and Wiglaf (now I'm really dating myself) as it is NOT easy to sell a house in this age of the punctilious and entitled. In fact, it was probably easier for Beowulf to slay the dragon because after all, he and Wiglaf did have knives, something no respectable seller can rely on when negotiating a sale with the buyer's cutthroat real estate attorney. 

At present, most of the buyers out there are Millennials, a generation that is used to receiving trophies for showing up. Although most of them are intelligent, they seem to get away with doing comparatively little to earn their inflated salaries. Yet it probably isn't their fault entirely as it is easy to "quiet quit" when supervisors' expectations are low. Unfortunately, the lackadaisical attitude has carried over into real estate sales. 

Twenty-five years ago, I was a single mom in my late thirties, fresh out of divorce court with a seven-year-old daughter who wanted to reside in a neighborhood of families with children. I was desperate to provide the right, healthy environment for her, so I bought an old, decrepit house in a solid environment and spent the next 24 years dumping money into the money pit, only to realize recently, much to my disappointment, that no matter what you spend and how much you do to improve your property, it is not good enough for these young, newly wed buyers who see the house as yet another potential trophy. The feeling is if they put up enough in the way of savings and loans and mom and dad's monetary gifts, the house should be picture perfect in every way regardless of its age. Sorry. It just doesn't work that way. Like the human body, no matter the age, continual maintenance is involved. There will always be something that needs attention.

This is a wake-up-and-smell-the-roses moment for all of you nouveau riche Millennials out there migrating from your primitive apartments in Brooklyn to the overpriced suburbs of New Jersey or Connecticut: If you buy a house, no matter how old or new it is, you are going to have to work and spend a lot of money to maintain the the luster of the trophy, no matter how it was obtained. Nothing will come easily. And in ten years, when you decide to sell your Cape Cod starter home in order to buy the McMansion dream, you must realize that even your township of record will try to take you down by dredging up open permits from before you even bought your place and then charging you $150 to inspect areas that have nothing to do with the open permits, only to fail you, again charging you another $150 to return after you have spent even more money to appease them. I just wrote over $500 in checks to my township this past week. Why they need this kind of cash is beyond me. You would think my 10K a year in property taxes would appease them. Think again. As a result of the shenanigans, I am beginning to put a lot of credence in conspiracy theories involving the government, any form of it at all. 

For those of you Florida-bound-hopeful Boomers who are thinking of trying to take advantage of the current sellers' market by putting "For Sale" signs on your front lawns, think twice. No matter how much you have put into your houses to make them presentable, you are going to have to cough up a lot more because no Millennials want to buy fixer-uppers, for what should be obvious reasons by now. If there is too much to be done, save yourselves some aggravation and sell to builders. To these wet-behind-the-ears buyers, new is always better no matter how well built your Jazz Age, craftsman bungalows are. 

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A Needed, Avuncular Voyage

 

avuncular - adjective - like an uncle; careful, heedful

Sometimes it is unsteadying to reach a certain milestone in life and then look back at the past, as the tendency is to compare what was then to what is now. If you are 65 or over and gaze back over your shoulder about fifty years, the differences between then and now are so extreme that they could make you dizzy. Although I make a conscious effort to live in the present, occasionally I drift back into the past when prompted. 

The other day, a gentleman whom I met recently suggested that I watch an oldie but goodie, Carl Reiner's black comedy "Where's Poppa?" (1970, United Artists) on a streaming service. Since the film's cast is topnotch (George Segal, Ruth Gordon, Ron Leibman, Trish Van Devere, Rob Reiner, and Vincent Gardenia), I could not say no. If you are brave enough to follow my lead and take a walk on the unwoke, wild side, make sure you are safely ensconced on a couch for the entire duration so that you don't get a quick case of vertigo from the experience of watching. After having gotten used to a sanitary, woke world, to take in scenes of the opposite got me reeling. Nothing, believe me, nothing about this movie is remotely politically correct. If writer Robert Klane were to attempt to submit his screenplay to any production companies today, he would be laughed out of Hollywood. Cancelled indefinitely. 

In case you are too scared to take the plunge, I'll spill the beans re: the contemporary atrocities in a work wherein cultural stereotypes abound. Warning: there is no subgroup that is not satirized. To start, Jewish men, their wives, and their mothers are ridiculed: Ruth Gordon, a brilliant character actress, plays the insufferable Mrs. Hocheiser, demented mother to forcibly avuncular George Segal (lawyer Gordon) and Ron Leibman (henpecked Sidney). She has them both shackled to their dying father's wish, not to put their impossible mother into "a home," the only sane solution to the problem. George bends over backwards to get her into an early grave, including buying and then wearing a gorilla suit in order to scare her to death. When he meets the love of his life, angelic Louise (Trish Van Devere), a caregiver who answers Gordon's ad for help with mom, he loses patience and informs his brother Sidney (Ron Leibman) that he will throw Mom out of the window if he doesn't take her off his hands. Despite the protests of Sidney's unsympathetic wife, he answers the call but must first go through Central Park after dusk before he can get to Gordon's apartment. While in Central Park, he is accosted by ruffian rapists and muggers (all played by African American male actors, which would NEVER fly today) not once, but twice. Fragile, malleable Sidney himself is forced by the unlawful gang to "rape" an off-duty, gay police officer dressed as a woman who doesn't not press charges, claiming the encounter was one of the passionate highlights of his life, icing the cake that is his infatuation with red roses. There are other subgroups that are criticized, namely American military officers who are depicted as austere, profane, immoral warmongers capable of genocide. Naturally, the film is an unforgiving, biting satire at which audiences laughed only to realize that '70s society needed to change drastically.

And somehow at some point it did a 180. Today, nothing is politically incorrect, nothing is satirized for fear of reprisal, cancellation on social media. Very few have the audacity to take pot shots at what is wrong with society today, even comedians are kept at bay. So it all comes down to us being left to take an honest look at what is going on around us and make a few alterations. "Where's Poppa?" of the 1970s may very well segue into "Where's Sanity?" in the 2020s, a needed, avuncular voyage.

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Is LESS More? (a book review)

 

spoony - adjective - foolish, tenderhearted

Andrew Sean Greer's celebrated Less (Back Bay Books, 2017), a gay take-off on Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love, features forty-nine-year-old Arthur Less, a self-deprecatory, "spoony,"gay author who attempts to solder heartbreak by traveling the world to fulfill long-overdue literary obligations (and a suggestion made at a poker game). Greer's voice has a unique flair, belting the reader with one bizarre metaphor or simile after the next, humorous on occasion as some of the farfetched comparisons are so exaggerated and incongruent that the reader can't help but collapse into guffaw at the absurd imagery projected. 

The hard truth is that the unsympathetic protagonist, Less, is, more or less, not likable. He comes off as a stereotype of a gay man: eternally lonely, weak, promiscuous: a fool for beautiful young boys or famous, older mentors. Ironically, at one point, his homosexual writer colleague criticizes him for denigrating the community by composing a minimally successful modernization of Homer's The Odyssey via his Kalipso! about a bi-sexual Odysseus trapped in hedonistic paradise with a beautiful man, Kalipso. Naturally, when he breaks away to rejoin wife Penelope, the critic feels slighted as no self-respecting, authentic gay man would do that even if the woman happens to be the beguiling, long-suffering Penelope. Despite the denigrating criticism, his well-written novel lands Less invitations to various literary events in Europe, all of which he accepts on account of former paramour Freddy's marriage; Less needs a valid excuse as to why he can't attend one day's nuptials, so he makes sure he is out of the country for a least a month. But it does make sense since the groom, Freddy, the son of Less's nemesis Carlos, remains his biggest love, an insurmountable emotional obstacle since it is left unrequited. Towards the end, just to elongate the book, Greer has Less venture into Morocco to visit an old friend and India to give him ideas for a new tome. At the end, he winds up in Japan to critique the food. How desultory is that? 

Worthy of mention as well, but not surprising, is that there are no leading ladies in this tall tale. There are a few interesting, yet fleeting females that seem to appear and vanish like mirages in the Sahara, but not one is memorable unlike some mirages that are :). 

Unfortunately, there is no real eating (but there's the drinking of champagne and there's what he does or attempts to do in Japan) or praying (Less is not religious, yet he winds up on the grounds of a Christian retreat in India) in the 259-page book. Which means there are no actual concrete motifs (unless you count the champagne) to unite the random except for the anticipated, unconnected, outlandish conceits that kept me picking up the book instead of putting it down and leaving it closed indefinitely. The novel is glorious in its wordplay. It does not surprise me that Greer won the coveted Pulitzer as he is the only young author whose work I've read lately whose creative writing comes close to inspired or inspiring, so there is that. 

However, as a conservative, pedantic, Old School writer, I am pretty closed minded when it comes to rules. A half century ago, I was taught to keep the point of view of the narration consistent. Greer doesn't, and it confuses the reader as most shifts that come out of nowhere do. Going from third to first in the last few pages may suffice as the "unpredictable" touch that one learns to add into a short story in one's first fiction class, but it is just unnecessarily jarring to the reader. (Actually, I guessed the identity of the narrator from the very beginning, so I wasn't surprised at all.)

Unless I get my small group of close gay friends together in a book club, which is highly unlikely because most of them are touring actors, I think I'll pass on any "Less" sequels by Greer. But that doesn't mean that you should. This is a subjective opinion piece, after all. Read it for the uniqueness of voice and wish secretly that you could come up with comparisons as inventive as Greer's. 

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Chick-A-Chick-A Boom! The Residual Effects of War

 

residual - adjective - remaining after the greater part or quantity has gone (Google).

There can be no debate. Nothing good comes from full-scale destruction. Obviously, the weightier the war, the more consequential the effects on the people who experienced the fray head-on in the trenches. Yet the deleterious outcome or outcomes are not limited to the participants. Successive generations can feel the sting of violent opposition. Hatred can obliterate the capacity to love over decades. 

Case in point: take the damaged men of my generation, most aptly named the Baby Boomers. The moniker is not meant to stand as onomatopoeia attached to the soundtrack of battle as in "Boom went the bombs" (but if the shoe fits...). No doubt, boom could be a play on the word boon (windfall) or the slang term booming (as in increasing), representing the surge in population after World War II. Let's face it, after being deprived of physical love for such a long time, the soldiers wanted to make up for lost time,"boom-boom"legitimately with their significant others, and they did. The results of which produced about 2.5 babies per household, many more if the vet dads ascribed to a specific religion. Yet the shoe does fit in the literal sense. Many Boomers are suffering from the after effects of the bombs that fell around their desperately ducking dads on the battlegrounds. They are damaged goods and got that way due to the residual effects of the war. Sorry, men of my generation. You are inextricably blemished, and I have the common sense to prove it.

World War II left its participants torn, bleeding, not merely physically (in some cases), but psychologically. Most who had survived combat walked away with PTSD. There was no way around it. However, these men were expected to "get over" their feelings perceived as "weak." Of course, they couldn't do it themselves; consequently, having no choice, they went on with their daily lives, thankful to be alive. These psychologically impaired men continued on to become the flawed fathers of Boomers, who couldn't authentically be available for their children. The halved vets were incapable of being whole, and their sons, who really needed them as role models (Moms couldn't do everything but often did), found them to be feckless examples as absentee parents. 

The most tragic residual effect of World War II? Male Boomers' inability to love. Okay, fine. I'm not saying all of them are cursed in this sense, but many of them are. (Most of the single ones are. Believe me.) Just listen to the complaints of us female Boomers, who often are creased as well but who have ironed out better and can function well emotionally because we are wired that way. There are men of my generation who hold topnotch degrees and successful positions in their places of employment, but these same people can't seem to love in the true sense albeit they think they can. Ironically, they can commit to academia and the demands of their vocations, and perhaps even their offspring, but they are clueless when it comes to intimacy in the form of romantic love, hence the growing rate of divorce and mass loneliness. As for the predecessors of the Boomers, are they better off? I think not. Many of them can't commit to anything at all, no less love.

Maybe the defect I'm underscoring has nothing to do with war at all? Maybe it is just part and parcel of human nature? I can't give you a definitive answer because my thesis is based on opinion and personal experience. But this I do know to be factual. Nothing good comes from war. So if you feel the solution to the miscellaneous confrontations making front-page news today is bombing the antagonists all to oblivion, think again. A solution can never fall under the nomenclature of HATE and pan out well. I think Martin Luther King, Jr. whose birthday we recently celebrated, said it best: "Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." 

So man up, Boomer men, and learn how to love your women well. Gender and generational differences aside, we all need to stop blaming our parents for whatever they might have or might not have done and commit to full-scale love.

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