The One-Year Anniversary of Neighborhood Chaos

Los Angeles, California



Are you old enough to remember the opening scene of the television series M.A.S.H.? If so, close your eyes and imagine you can hear that whirling sound of a helicopter. Now, multiply that by, say, four or five-fold. You now have approximated the noise that woke us at 6:00 AM last Friday. Are we in a militarized state? Thankfully not. Was there are brush fire? Well, we do live in the foothills of Los Angeles, so that was not out of the realm of possibility. A little early in the season, perhaps, but possible. Still, no, it wasn't a brush fire. Prison escapees or bank robbers on the loose? Uh-uh. So what catastrophe, disaster, or news event of real import was creating this cacophony of whirly-birds over our sleeping heads at such an ungodly hour? Have you guessed it? It was the one-year anniversary of Michael Jackson's death.

Now I do get this. I clearly remember the anguish of John Lennon's untimely death. And I recall my elders saying, at the time, what is the big deal about this? He was just a musician. They just didn't get it. They were not part of the generation that precedes me, who were devastated by the death of Buddy Holly. The day the music died, they called it. And, evidently, Glenn Miller's disappearance over the channel was just one more loss chalked up to the war effort. But for me, and for many of my generation, after Lennon's death, we understood the impact of the loss of our cultural icons. But this isn't about that. It's about the war zone -- in other words, our neighborhood.

You see, we share a neighborhood with the Jacksons. We live a hop, skip, and a jump away from the Jackson family compound. And everyone who lives here uses that street, where the Jacksons live, for both ingress and egress. It's the road to the market, the bank, the freeway. We had a peaceful coexistence, despite groups of fans and media who occasionally gathered at the time of breaking news-- at least until last year, when Michael Jackson died. Then, our neighborhood became gridlocked by gawkers, news trucks, & police. It was rough. Then, they closed the street altogether. House guests who were arriving for the Fourth of July weekend were not allowed to pass. They had to use their navigation device to find an alternative, convoluted route through the winding back lanes. The closure went on for two weeks. Our streets here are narrow. A parked news truck will reduce a road down to one lane. It was chaos. The only bright spot in all this was the day I saw a car full of young gawkers rear-end a news van. This introduced a bit of glee into our landlocked lives as word spread to friends and neighbors.

Now, back to the helicopters. During that time, they hovered above us from early morning until night every single day. Finally, the memorial was scheduled, and there was talk of a private funeral; a decision was made about custody of the children; a rumored arrest of the attending physician; etc., etc. You get the picture . . . and the frame. People eventually went away; the street was reopened; the helicopters moved off. But every time there was anything about Michael in the news, everyone came back. It was frustrating, but more or less, temporary. And, now we have arrived at the one-year anniversary. It's not the zoo that it was last year, but, once again, there are gatherings in front of the gate to the compound. And, of course, the helicopters arrived, en masse, at 6:00 AM.

Now saying I get it, doesn't speak to how I feel about living in the juiced-up environment of a celebrity-driven culture propagated by the entertainment industry. I am a second-generation Angelino; a third-generation Southern Californian. The movie industry didn't exist when my grandmother was born in Santa Barbara, back at the end of the 1800s. But it existed when I was growing up just a stone's throw from both Warner Brothers and the Disney studios. It just fit better into the perspective of life in Southern California. After all, the "industry" back then was aerospace. My father was an engineer and part of the aerospace/aeronautical industry, as were a lot of my friends' fathers. Other fathers were accountants, doctors, other executives. I don't remember a lot of small business owners, and, I don't remember a lot of lawyers, though I'm sure both were out there. And, it being the era on the beginning thrust of feminism, most of the mothers were of the stay-at-home variety. But, I did go to school with people whose families worked in television, or for "the movies." At the time, there seemed to be something unstable about that. Like they hadn't grown up to have a real job. In some small way, that judgement still pervades my thinking. Of course both the judgement and the nostalgia are meaningless now. The "industry," here and now, is entertainment, 24/7. I could prepare a long list of people I know who either work in this conglomeration or are connected to someone who does. But frankly, few of them are from here. So, I suspect that most do not know the Los Angeles that existed before this explosion. The Los Angeles without gridlock, and transplanted Easterners who learned to drive by watching the aggression of their cabdrivers. Before road rage, the biggest complaint I ever heard about traffic was about "Sunday drivers." Yep. People drove too slowly.

Of course, complaining about all of this is about as useful as gesturing to the helicopter pilots to move on. That's not going to happen. And I suppose all my rumination and nostalgia is a sign of age. The I-remember-when syndrome. I really don't want to be that person. But, on the other hand, I do remember when. It was a golden place to live and grow up. It was a hot-summered, Beach Boys- and Eagles-soundtracked, slow-paced world of California natives. We had a population that worked to design and manufacture instruments which helped us to fly further and faster, and which, ultimately, had put a man on the moon. Somehow that still seems more important than today's obsession with weekend grosses, or worse, with what's up with the celebrity du jour, or the celebrity of yesterjour. And, in the current whirl of a multitude of helicopter blades chopping the air above me, I miss that world that came before. And, had you known it, I am certain that you would too. Thanks for reading my blog (even if you weren't born here. Seriously.).