http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b08DChU5qsg
or hows'about this Greese reprise from the cult classic Repo Man:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fN2AXsF-kwc
Oh wait, we got one more! God I miss the 70's.. how's this for a svelt action hero:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vF-dgroq4TI
Go Cannon!
That was so random that it looks like the last time I played bumper cars at Lake Quassapaug as a kid...
So kidding aside, it's the LA River, and what makes the LA River so vital in it's current form is that, well, it's kind of a natural disaster, and it has grit, and well, grit can be in short supply in Sunny La La land, but fantasy there is a business (and tongue in cheek, I will say fantasy is a business even more so up in the San Fernando Valley where the river originates, but I will leave that joke up to the adults to figure out!). So when you are too cheap to film on location like The French Connection, why not run people through the world's biggest drainage ditch to supply a little cement bottled desperation to spice up the visual, even though Paris Hilton is tweezing her dog's eyebrows a few blocks west.. it's what's called character in the land of Sun and Fun.
But I bet a few of you didn't even ever figure that was a river, ever.. a few of you figured it was just some massive public works thing in the Home from Nowhere landscape of the American industrial nightmare, and I wouldn't blame you, but a river it is.. and it used to, and upper parts of it still do, look like this:
LA River Kayakers
http://activerain.com/blogsview/3380586/kayak-down-the-los-angeles-river-
Does this photo seem like they have no association with the videos above?
You see, since sometime in the mid 2000's people have started to take the LA river seriously again.. and not just location scouts and cinematographers who endlessly repackage the industrial areas south of downtown and the bridges over the river for car chase after action scene, since car chases in the river are now done!.. so last week! (alright, one more.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-PCs8V7nLg )
So since I wrote about the East River in my piece of Tidal Power, Hope Unda da East River!?, and nothing makes an Angelino insecure like a New Yorker (and vice-versa, but don't worry fly over states, you don't worry them at all, just keep investing in stocks and watching movies), I gotto balance the continent, and this is a worthy story. It's going to be a bit like the Everglades pieces on a smaller scale, but the chicanery in LA tends to be much smoother and more under the radar. LA functions on a subtle form of indifference than Florida.. In California, the public good is the goal AND people get screwed, it's not nearly so Latin... ask Jack Nickolson:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aifeXlnoqY
Believe it or not, Chinatown was about water, the LA River and a few other rivers as a matter of fact,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppGd-2nEOVQ&list=PLE3500CBEEC5651D0
but I'll get into that in a bit.
My awareness of the LA River as, well, a river, began with my coming across this article a year or two ago, 2011, about the Winnipeg band Twin, and their attempt to Canoe the LA river as a break from Tour:
http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/04/what_happens_when_six_canadian.php
I feel like I read a version of it in an airplane magazine, and it got my wheels turning. If you didn't read the whole thing patiently like required of all readers of this blog (Eat Your Meat!), the upshot is that they got arrested, but the fallout has been that this act of civil disobedience, intentional or not, started the wheels of progress turning on the LA river somehow a lot more than the token act by party hound LA Mayor Anthony Villagarosa in 2006 to begin exploring actions to improve the river, or, to be more honest, to turn it into a river again.
http://www.lariver.org/download_publications.htm
While the plan may be a well written piece of Ecological and Urban Planning, but LA is cash strapped like everyone else these days, and the funds aren't really there, dream though it may be, but it has been a theme of this blog I am starting to realize that little changes come first, the big changes later, like a locomotive building steam, or perhaps like floodwater coursing down a 50 foot deep channelized sluice that once was a natural watercourse.. things start with a trickle...
So this story comes tied into the three bogeymen of the environment of the American West (I'll leave out the other three perhaps, the BLM, the DoE, and global warming for now..), the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the LA Water and Power Company. Unlike in Chinatown, and the shenanigans of the California Water Wars in 1915 in the Owens Valley, or later in places like the Colorado River, Colombia River, just about every trickle of water in California as far north as the Klamath, and places like the Hetch Hetchy Dam and Mono Lake, the story of the LA river is a bit more straight forward *straight forward indeed, it's runs like a bullet!); it was a river.. it flooded, and destroyed things that perhaps shouldn't have been there in the first place, but were, and the solution became this huge gutter we have now. I would love to give you some stories of intrigue that acolytes of Marc Reisner's groundbreaking book (since the west is a dry crust these days anyways!), Cadillac Desert would eat up, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SPakQ7hH6I ouch! watch with caution! but I ain't nosey enough to imagine a conspiracy theory here. It was, well, again, straight forward.
The idea is that it doesn't rain much in LA, about 15 inches a year before things started going wacko as we approach 400 ppm CO2, but when it comes, it often comes in torrents. The heavens literally open.. the ground is covered mostly in cement which can intensify rain through rapid heat release, what little ground there is is usually bone dry and doesn't soak up the rain at first, and to jokingly quote Robert Deniro in Taxi Driver, a NY movie by the way, the rains come and wash all the scum off the streets.. and it has to go someplace in a hurry, scum and all... When there were just natives living there, the Tongva People, known to others as the Gabrielenos, they were used to it, lived on the high spots or the beaches and anticipated this, but then came the Missions, then the Hasciendas, then the Orange Groves with American Families like that of George Patton's coming west for a new life after their loss in the American Civil War (yes, George Patton was an Angelino, should have been obvious due to his flair for the dramatic.. as an odd bookend, Admiral George Mullen, recent Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also grew up in none other than Hollywood.), then movies and weather, sun and fun, caught the dreams of a restless nation and world, and within a century the LA basin and it's environs had to support not the 100k or so people at it's beginning, but 20 million odd persons now.
So those 20 million people didn't want to have their homes washed out past Catalina Island once a year as was likely, so they did what Army Corps and Bureau of Rec do so well... they channelized, made it an express bus, and drained the water like any good mid century water engineer dreams of...pollution and all.. does this sound familiar from my Piece on DDT? That river got the same treatment, and dumps out a few miles over from the LA river.. It's a weird thing, driving around LA.. there are hills for natural features, but nothing you would call a river.. it's as if the natural topography got washed away, you never use any ground features for navigation, just the freeways and major boulevards, and for all the desperation the place has for water, they began to look everywhere but right under their feet, as the estuaries and cienegas were dried up for land land land, and almost every inch of rain that fell was exiled to the Pacific instead of being allowed to replenish the local aquifer like happens in just about any place on earth we haven't screwed up (It appears I was a little premature in this judgement, as they claim to capture 80% of the water in, well, man made dams for replenishment, which give LA 15% of it's water scroll down here to 'DAMS and FLOOD Control' near the Bottom. I do wonder if that was a post 'filling in every natural water body in the basin' figure to come up with 80% replenishment.).
It's a funny thing to, because I often compare how water moves to how money or emotions move around a place, and California's state budget is likely the wackiest and most obscenely funded, and if you get pissed at an Angelino, don't expect much, because your anger flows right off them without soaking in like water flows down the LA River Channel, it's water off a ducks back, if they didn't choke to death on soap suds and motor oil, the LA thing is to simply not give a crap what you think.
After the Flood of 1938, which claimed 113 lives and did 40$ million worth of damage in the dollars of the time,
we were already in the mood for big projects, with the infrastructural leap forward being performed to try to grind us out of the Great Depression, the US for all intents and purposes a socialist nation at the time, and that flood was all ti took to get the attention of the swarm of ant like workers and agencies created to fix any problem they could find, and 3,000,000 barrels of concrete were laid by 10,000 hands, wait, 20,000 hands assuming they all had them all, 10,000 workers, to fix it up nice and good. Dam's were built within the next few years. The Greatest Generation didn't cut no Corners! You could land the space shuttle in that place...
The Core: Endeavor Lands in the LA River wait.. they did! Didn't know that Hillary Swank had her Pilots licence, did ya!? Actors are Awesome! Kind of Gives you an aerial view of the problem at about minute 5 doesn't it... man, what excitement!
But like I said, slowly things are sinking in, and not just on the maybe 5 miles of the 48 mile course of the main branch that aren't 'channelized', and since 2006 moves by the USDEP, Local government and now Local People are starting to happen. There were declarations about that time to declare the river navigable, and to start giving it status' that just about any other river in the country has under the Clean Water Act.
If there is one thing I know about LA, nothing is hipper than activism.. ask Barbara Streisand or Warren Beatty.. it gets you laid! And activism in LA happens in groups, big showy pretentious groups, but in this case, woo hoo.. the big showy pretentious groups will be another good excuse to show off your buff, sports bras and even swim suits.. doing good one narcissistic hang at a time.. time to pull the Prius over and do some kayaking, because online and in the 'river' there is a proliferation of activity since Twin's 2011 attempted float.
They have had an advocacy group since 1986, but now they seem to have like 4!
http://folar.org/
http://larivercorp.org/
http://www.laep.org/target/units/river/riverweb.html
but why hope now... well, since 2011 the traction seems to be happening.. online you got a documentary:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdWl35DIqHk
might have been older, but they finaly decided to post it...
then you got the Kayakers:
http://lariverexpeditions.com/page_about.php
http://www.theriverproject.org/projects/paddle-the-river
http://paddlethelariver.org/Paddle_the_LA_River/Home.html
http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/lariver/confluence/river-notes/even-more-la-river-kayaking-expansion-news.html
Again, this is all in the last two years..
check out the bar on the right, where KCET, the local PBS affiliate has aggregated things about the river:
http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/lariver/confluence/
and the Park plan from 2006 is starting to happen:
http://la.curbed.com/archives/2013/03/stretch_of_la_river_will_be_open_to_the_public_this_summer.php
Now Runners are in on the Game:
http://lariverfunrun.com/
Now people are noticing..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/27/los-angeles-river-storm-drains
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323530404578207642711599814.html
http://www.economist.com/node/21524902
But let me bring you to what to me is the most important link, but let me explain first: People who complain about the Military tend to not have met too many soldiers since the Army went volunteer. They are a pretty crafty and well intentioned group, and if you make it through this video, which rehashes a bit of what we have been discussing, while throwing in a few extra facts, there is a subtly seditious act at the end, again, from 2011. These Army Corps guys have been watching their buddies in the Everglades and elsewhere, they know what environmental restoration is, and they know they can accomplish both flood control and environmental restoration. They are the new breed, and it looks to me like they are asking for the cash to take on the task of creatively turning this sewer back into a river:
Army Corps of Engineers on LA River
Looks like the trickle is turning into a flood..
So maybe it's time I go home, for my own good, like Jack Nicholson..no matter how pretty Faye Dunaway is. I think it's gunna happen on it's own... and I need my nose for other things...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8G0BVEIjGyo&list=PLE3500CBEEC5651D0
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