How John Delorean Took Us Back to the Future — Introduction —
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Cover: Matthew Porter Gold Hill, 2015 archival pigment print © Matthew Porter, Courtesy M+B Gallery, Los Angeles Table of Contents Alex Espinoza: Introduction Ben Ehrenreich: Strange Behavior Bonnie Johnson: Magritte in Koreatown Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre: An Urban History: The Influence of Street Gangs on Contemporary Art Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn interviews Ron Finley: #PlantSomeShit Molly Strauss: The Fight for Frogtown Rex Weiner: How John DeLorean Took Us Back to the Future — INTRODUCTION — Once, while at a writers’ conference in San Antonio, Texas, I happened to meet a local artist who had some very strong opinions about Los Angeles. He complained about the traffic and the weather. (Yes, the weather.) “Plus,” he said, “everyone there is, like, so fake.” After some time, when I realized he was not going to waver from his opinion, I simply walked away and left him standing there, in mid-sentence. San Antonio artists might not fully appreciate these pieces, I thought as I sat to write this intro, and I determined that this was, indeed, just fine. Each of the pieces gathered here resists an idea of a single, dominant narrative about Los Angeles. Each of the pieces reveals the ways in which contact and conflict have given rise to innovation, creativity, and resilience. In “Magritte in Koreatown,” Bonnie Johnson explores the enduring lure of one of Hollywood’s most emblematic restaurants: The Brown Derby. In “How John DeLorean Took Us Back to the Future,” Rex Weiner’s “[t]attered, coffee-stained courtroom notes,” transport him, and us, back in time to April 18, 1984, the opening day of the trial of auto wunderkind John DeLorean, charged with trafficking cocaine. Rodrigo Ribera d’Ebre charts the effects of LA street gang culture on everything from housing projects to iPhone cases. Here we also experience the slow evolution of LA neighborhoods struggling under the influence of police brutality and gentrification. Ben Ehrenreich writes about the residents of one San Fernando neighborhood who counter a narrative that authorities are too eager to feed to the media. In “#PlantSomeShit,” Janice Rhoshalle Littlejohn interviews Ron Finley, the “gangster gardener” who reclaims his South LA neighborhood and nurtures cultural pride. We meet LA-Más, an advocacy group helping the residents of Frogtown resist efforts to gentrify and displace longtime residents of the enclave in Molly Strauss’s “The Fight for Frogtown.” Ask anyone outside of Los Angeles for the quintessential “LA story,” and they almost always have one that usually involves shallow people, plastic surgeries, and Sig Alerts. Ask anyone from Los Angeles for the quintessential “LA story,” and they’re stumped. These pieces here prove why. — Alex Espinoza Strange Behavior Ben Ehrenreich If the LAPD can hold out for another few days, Miguel Angel Cano, aged 34, will retain the unwanted honor of being the second-to-last man killed by the department in 2015. They’re up to 20 for the year. Cano died early in the afternoon of November 9 on Stagg Street, in a quiet San Fernando Valley neighborhood just west of the Van Nuys airport. The first news reports were puzzling. “A man was fatally shot by Los Angeles police Monday afternoon after he was reportedly acting bizarrely and standing in traffic,” wrote the Los Angeles Times. Bizarre behavior is not usually a capital offense, so I read on. The Times quoted a police spokesman who laid out a brief official narrative. “The officers observed the man and his strange behavior,” he said, “so they deployed a Taser to de-escalate the situation.” When that weapon proved inadequate to the task, the officer went on, police fired beanbag rounds. The problem, whatever it was, was still not solved. It did not de-escalate at all. Instead, “the situation escalated,” the spokesman said. “Shots were fired and the man was killed.” Confused, I called the LAPD media relations line. The officer who answered the phone couldn’t tell me much, only that Cano and the police “did get into a use of force before the OIS,” or officer involved shooting. In other words, “there was a struggle.” When I asked how it began, what was “strange” about Cano’s behavior, if he had been armed or in danger of harming anyone, the officer asked me to wait while he looked for the file. He couldn’t find it. “I think he reached for a weapon,” he said eventually, apologized, and then fumbled some more. In the end, all he could tell me was this: “They gave him commands. He failed to obey. A Taser was deployed and used. A beanbag shotgun was also used. It did not have any effect. An OIS occurred. There were no injuries on the officers’ side.” He wouldn’t be able to say more until the incident had been investigated. How long would that be? “About six months.” Soon, though, the department settled on a slightly fuller story. Chief Charlie Beck told the Police Commission that Cano had been “running in and out of traffic, acting very aggressively,” and when police confronted him, he “refused to submit to arrest,” so they shot him with a beanbag round — a sort of mesh sock stuffed with metal or ceramic shot — and then a Taser, but he continued to lunge toward them. “In fact,” said Chief Beck, he was able to wrest the beanbag shotgun away from one officer and fire off a round. “They returned fire, killing the subject.” ¤ That Saturday, I drove out to the Valley. Just before I turned onto Stagg Street, a battered van drove by, spray-painted with the words, “LAPD killed my friend. We need justice. You could be next.” Across the back doors, beneath a window emblazoned with stickers (Dodgers, Raiders, Hello Kitty) were scrawled the words “RIP ‘Drifter.’” The van stopped a few feet past a small shrine on the curb that marked the spot where Miguel Cano, a.k.a. Michael, a.k.a. Drifter, had fallen five days earlier. There were candles, flowers, a teddy bear, a six-pack of Corona, a can of Modelo, a wooden cross. Behind it, on the picket fence of the closest house, a handmade sign spelled out the words “Stop LAPD violence” in black and red marker. The van’s driver was a white man in his early 30s named Robert Laverdure. His arms were heavily tattooed, and more ink, on his scalp, peeked out from beneath a ball cap. He had known Cano, he told me, for 15 years. “He was my friend,” he said, then choked up and went silent. That Monday, Cano already lay dead on the asphalt when Laverdure had arrived at the scene. But Laverdure’s girlfriend, Stephanie Moreno, a young woman with a pierced lip who sat looking shell-shocked in the van’s front seat, had been with Cano just before the shooting. So had Ray Beedle. It was in front of his house that Cano was shot. Cano used to date Beedle’s niece, and hung around long after that relationship ended. “He just kind of grew on me,” Beedle said, “like a fungus.” He shook his head. “He became one of my best friends.” At the time of his death, Cano was unemployed and staying with friends in a house down the street. Beedle, a thickset man in his 50s, saw him nearly every day. Everyone in the neighborhood knew him, Beedle said. “No one disliked him.” Cano was drunk a lot and could be obnoxious, but he made up for it by clowning and making people laugh, and he had a big heart, Beedle said. “He helped everyone out.” No one but Miguel Cano and the two police officers who shot him were there to witness the events that immediately preceded the shooting, but none of the witnesses I interviewed who were present just before and after it occurred found the LAPD’s story credible. That Monday, Moreno had been driving to Beedle’s house to help look after his elderly mother, she said, when she noticed Cano on a side street with three young white men around him. They were skaters, and Cano’s head was bleeding. She thought that they had jumped him. She stopped the car and called out. The skaters told her that Cano had fallen and they were trying to help him up. He was cursing. “I was like, ‘Oh, he’s drunk,’” she said. A police helicopter was already circling the block. She assumed it was for Cano, that someone had called 911. She tried to convince him to get into the car. He refused. “He could hardly walk,” she said. “He was barely making it.” She parked and managed to get Cano into the Beedles’ backyard. Ray Beedle met her there. Cano, he remembered, kicked at a piece of wood as he walked into the yard and was so drunk that “he spun around completely and fell down.” The helicopter was still circling. They tried to convince him to stay, but he refused. He pushed past them through the gate and stumbled back out to the street. Beedle and Moreno stepped into the garage and were debating whether or not they should go after him when they heard the shots. “It was seconds” after Cano walked off, Moreno said. “Not minutes, seconds,” and not nearly enough time, she said, for the sequence of events described by the LAPD to have occurred. The shots, Beedle said, were all the same: the sharp, quick pops of handgun rounds, not the distinctive echoing bark of a shotgun. (LAPD’s beanbag rounds are fired through an ordinary pump-action Remington with a slightly modified barrel and a neon green stock.) His sister, Kim Romo, was inside the house at the time.