Name That Los Angeles Neighborhood!

by Eric Spiegelman

You’re standing at the intersection of Wilshire and Highland. What neighborhood are you in? The sign on the corner says you’re somewhere called Brookside. The sign on the other corner says you’re in Park Mile. The sign a block away, in full view of the other signs, says you’re in Sycamore Square.

Google Maps doesn’t mention any of these. Google Maps calls this neighborhood Dockweiler. Where it gets this from, I have no idea. Los Angeles does have a Dockweiler — but it’s Dockweiler State Beach, 15 miles away, by the airport. Google Maps calls the adjoining neighborhood Sanford. But that’s Koreatown. Google Maps is just making stuff up.

Talk to someone who lives around here and the picture won’t get any clearer. One person will say the intersection is part of the Miracle Mile, which it kind of is. Mid-Wilshire is also semi-accurate. Someone else will say it’s Hancock Park, which it isn’t, but it’s close enough, and Angelenos have a gentlemen’s agreement to let people say they live in a neighborhood when really they live right next to it.

Consider the three Carthays, which lie a mile to the west: Carthay Square, Carthay Circle and South Carthay. Real-estate agents call this area ‘Beverly Hills Adjacent.’ This is geographically accurate; the Carthays are indeed right next to Beverly Hills. But Beverly Hills has higher property values, its own school district and its own police force. The Carthays have houses with bars on all the windows. If someone tells you they live Beverly Hills Adjacent, they’re selling something.

People who live along the eastern edge of East Hollywood will sometimes fudge their way into Los Feliz. There’s a section of Los Feliz where it’s popular to consider yourself part of Silver Lake. Hipsters who think Silver Lake has become too gentrified claim the disputed border between the two for Echo Park. Locals who don’t care refer to that border as HaFo SaFo, after the Happy Foot Sad Foot sign at Sunset and Benton. A friend of mine insists he coined this but I’m skeptical. The city’s official name for it is Berkeley Hills. Nobody calls it that.

Locals divide Sherman Oaks into South of the Boulevard and North of the Boulevard, the boulevard being Ventura Boulevard, the subtext being that one side is much wealthier than the other. Franklin Hills carved itself out of Los Feliz some time ago and maintains they were never a part of that other neighborhood to begin with. They’re so adamant about it that everyone’s like, fine, go be Franklin Hills. Windsor Square refuses to believe it’s part of Hancock Park. Google Maps calls that area Oakwood. Again, not a thing.

There’s a neighborhood called West Los Angeles. West Los Angeles is not to be mixed up with the Westside of Los Angeles, which includes everything west of Hollywood, including West Hollywood, which isn’t part of Hollywood because Hollywood is part of Los Angeles and West Hollywood is its own city. There are a good two miles of Los Angeles to the west of West Los Angeles. There’s a major street called Western that’s on the Eastside of Los Angeles, which you should never confuse with East Los Angeles, because East Los Angeles is also a separate city, to the east of Downtown Los Angeles.

Los Angeles has a Chinatown, a Thai Town, a Little Tokyo, a Little Ethiopia and a Little Bangladesh. Google Maps only shows Little Armenia. A couple years ago the city named one area Historic Filipinotown, even though it hasn’t been a Filipino neighborhood in fifty years. Hence the “historic” designation. Other areas are also named for things that no longer exist. The locals call Elysian Valley ‘Frogtown’ because their lawns used to fill with frogs before the river was lined with concrete. Then there’s Historic Downtown, which is different from the Historic Core that happens to be Downtown, and an Old Bank District. Historic West Adams, however, is the same thing as West Adams.

“What part of Los Angeles do you live in?” is not always an easy question. There are the 30 or so neighborhoods that used to be listed in the back of the Thomas guide, a map book that every Angeleno kept in their car before there was Internet. There are the 87 recognized by the Los Angeles Times in its Mapping L.A. project from a few years ago. At least half of those have disputed boundaries. There are the hundreds of sub-neighborhoods the city keeps trying to formalize with little blue signs. These are often dubious. There is the handful of unofficial neighborhoods named spontaneously by the people who live in them. And then there are the ones recognized by Google Maps, which have little foundation in reality.

So back to the corner of Wilshire and Highland. A friend of mine used to call that area ‘Trader Joe’s Adjacent.’ Which kind of stuck, though I think that neighborhood should really end a block to the north.

Eric Spiegelman is a proprietor of Old Jews Telling Jokes.

26. ThirdPower Fitness
25. Wizard Painting And Power Washing
24. Flower Power Herbs & Roots Inc
23. Power Pilates
22. Power Image
21. American Power Technologies
20. Power Print Management LTD
19. Bargaining Power
18. Directory of Electric Power Producers
17. Elemental Power Group
16. Mega Power Sports
15. Digital Power & Light
14. LS Power Development
13. Power Performance Fitness
12. River Hill Power Company
11. Power 1051 FM Radio
10. Power Systems Research Inc
9. Sithe Global Power
8. Terra-Gen Wind Power
7. Power Luxury Radio Dispatch INC.
6. Power Management Concepts
5. Word Power
4. Empire One Power
3. New Power Technologies Lc
2. Raid Power
1. Con Edison

by Liz Stinson

If we’ve learned anything from Hollywood, it’s that there’s a million ways to bite the dust, and nearly all of them are unpleasant. No film utilizes the fear of the precariousness of everyday life quite like the gore-horror franchise Final Destination, even if it is a prisoner of its own formula. Beginning as each film does with fairly “everyday” accidents — bridge collapses, racetrack explosions, roller coaster accidents — and proceeding to the outlandish, just how far does Final Destination go in order to punish those who cheat death? The answer: pretty far, yes, but almost never into the realm of impossibility. (Although yes, to date, no one has died of Lasik surgery. Also? Statistically speaking, you are wildly unlikely to die in any of these awful and often upsetting ways.)

In the movies…

In real life…

You can only cheat death so many times before it gets fed up and decides you’re just not worth the trouble of a spectacular Hollywood finale. Enter Alex Browning, the protagonist in the first pic of the series. After dodging three potential deaths, we learn in passing that he finally met his match with a falling brick to the head.

Yan Zhen Zhao was fatally injured when a brick fell onto her head back in 1998. The 16-year-old was walking past an elementary school in Brooklyn when the brick tumbled from a roof that was under construction.

You should always be wary of machines that can chew through a tough-barked chunk of wood like it’s cotton candy. Chainsaws, axes, wood chippers — best to keep them in a bolt-locked shed far far away. Thomas Burke and Kimberly Corman find this out the hard way when they reach a gruesome end via a flesh-hungry wood chipper in an alternate ending to FD 3.

Brian Morse was trimming birch trees in Loveland, Colo., when his gloved hand got caught in a wood chipper. He was pulled through the machine before anyone could help him. Official cause of death: “total morselization of body.”

A relaxing day at the pool is bound to go wrong. Or at least it does for Hunt Wynorski in FD 4. After the tanned and toned hunk encounters an excessively-powerful pool drain, his rock-solid body is turned into a pitiful puddle of guts.

In 2007, six-year-old Abigail Taylor’s internal organs were partially sucked out of her body while she sat on a wading pool drain at the Minneapolis Golf Club. Doctors replaced her organs, and the nation applauded this medical miracle. To make a sad story more upsetting, she died the next year from rare transplant-related complications.

You will regret being tall enough to ride. It doesn’t matter what your 8-year-old cousin says, roller coasters are scary. They’re scary when they’re working, and they’re extra scary when they’re careening off their rails. A ride called Devil’s Flight should have been clue enough, but FD characters aren’t exactly known for their risk-aversion skills. Death catches up to the survivors of the Devil’s Flight — though no such luck for the extras, who die when faulty hydraulics and a freak accident involving a video camera causes the ride from hell to lurch off the tracks and plummet to the ground.

While you’re more likely to die on something like a Sizzler than the Mamba (seriously, that thing is dangerous!), roller coaster accidents still do happen. Take the case of a 19-year-old woman who died after the Fujin Raijin II, a fast-paced coaster in Osaka derailed due to a broken axel. Cause of the accident? The ride’s axels hadn’t been replaced for 15 years, as of the 2007 accident.

Elevators malfunction. That’s a fact. And believe it or not, there are worse fates than getting stuck in a cramped box on the 31st floor when it’s 105 degrees outside. In FD2, Nora Carpenter loses her head when, while panicking, her braids get caught on a cart full of prosthetic limbs while riding in an elevator. (As so often happens.) While she’s struggling to get out, her hair holds her back, causing the elevator to sever her head.

Dr. Hitoshi Nikaidoh, a surgical resident at a Houston hospital, was decapitated by a malfunctioning elevator in 2003. The doctor’s shoulders were pinned by the doors, which then allowed the ceiling to slice off most of his head as the elevator continued to move upwards. Even worse than reading about this terrible story? Watching it happen — which is what happened to a physician’s assistant, who was then stuck in the elevator with the decapitated head for at least an hour.

You are, after all, just a piece of meat. Take the death of Peter Friedkin in the new FD5. (Spoiler!) After he tries to kill a coworker in a botched scheme to add more years to his life, Peter gets what’s coming to him. And what’s coming to him is a giant meat skewer to the back. (Bonus: If you haven’t seen actor Miles Fisher’s cover of “This Must Be the Place,” well…. Somewhat NSFW!

An 80-year-old Brit named Leslie Ince was impaled by a 22-inch meat skewer in his own home. He was found half alive in a cupboard but died a month later in the hospital. Last we heard, authorities were still trying to determine if it was murder or a self-inflicted accident.

Liz Stinson is a Nebraska-based writer. She did not enjoy this research.

“Working with real bears was like working with trained dogs. Granted, mama and papa bear were like big strong scary willful dogs. But the cubs were very cute and cuddly. It took a month to train the them all and still there were very human things we wished they could do, like actually cooking and serving the pasta. We had to pull that off in other ways.”
 — Element 79 senior VP-group creative director Chris Laubach discusses his agency’s new commercial, which reinforces the timeless association between bears and pasta.

Do scarecrows creep you out? Then don’t click on this link, because it will take you to a collection of photos from the Kettlewell Scarecrow Festival in Yorkshire, England, and scarecrows creep you out, remember?

It was 17 years ago this week that Madonna’s “I’ll Remember [Theme from With Honors]” dropped out of the top 50 of the Billboard Adult Contemporary singles chart*, and I worry about its legacy. I know not every piece of art lasts forever, and that even the most deserving works of culture are occasionally forgotten or overlooked in our relentless obsession to discover the new, but it would be a real shame if this timeless gem fell into obscurity.

Much like the film to which it provided thematic support (1994’s Alek Keshishian-helmed With Honors, which features a subtle, underrated performance by Moira Kelly and shows Patrick Dempsey beginning to develop the precision and gravity that would be the hallmark of his later work), “I’ll Remember [Theme from With Honors]” teaches a valuable lesson that every generation needs to learn anew. In the film With Honors, the lesson is that homeless people will steal your college thesis if you accidentally drop it down the steam vent to the library of your Ivy League university, but they also will help you realize what really matters in life. Then they will die.

As for the song, “I’ll Remember [Theme from With Honors],” the lesson is also about homeless people at Ivy League universities, but with a more personal twist. “I’ll remember the strength that you gave me/Now that I’m standing on my own/I’ll remember the way that you saved me/I’ll remember,” sings Madonna about a homeless person who taught her “how to cry” while she was visiting what is rumored to be Yale. But the mechanics of sobbing is not the only lesson Homeless Guy From Yale (let’s just call him that) taught Madonna. No:

I learned
to let go
of the illusion that we can possess
I learned
to let go
I travel in stillness
And I’ll remember
happiness
I’ll remember [I’ll remember]
Mmmmm… [I’ll remember]
Mmmmm…

HGFY taught her to “travel in stillness.” It is something we all need to know how to do, particularly in these troubled times. All of us who are traveling in motionness are just carrying around a bunch of needless anxieties that prevent us from finding our proper reason to cry. If the question of the age is “How do I teach my heart to sing?” — and given everything we know, is there really any other question? — then the answer is very clearly revealed in Madonna’s “I’ll Remember [Theme from With Honors].” As she herself puts it, “Mmmmm… [I’ll remember].” She’s not saying she DOES remember, she’s saying she WILL remember, which, when you think about it, is perhaps the most essential step in the remembering procedure, since it’s going to happen in the future.

Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this song is too important to be forgotten. If there’s one thing you take away from the web today, let it be that you remember “I’ll Remember [Theme from With Honors]” and take its lessons to heart. I think we’ll all be a little happier if you do.

*Probably. I tried checking but Google gave me nothing. But if it wasn’t EXACTLY this week it must have been kind of close. I mean, somewhere within a two month period for sure.

What do Awl pals Eric Freeman, David Roth and Bethlehem Shoals have in common? Well, they’re Awl pals. But also this.

A Reasonable Guide To Stock Market Volatility

Jon Methven is the author of This Is Your Captain Speaking, due out in 2012 by Simon & Schuster. He can be reached here, or follow him on Twitter @jonmethven.

“It’s hard to say who came to the Ace first, the beautiful people or the creative cool kids.” This is me, my mouth forming a perfect O, and now quietly closing my laptop — I’m off for a hot soothing bath of ammonia and bullets!

by Awl Sponsors

You know what’s great? When clothes look great on you. That’s why the Gap 1969 Fall collection is so great, because its first priority is flattering you, what more could you ask from clothes? (Not much!)

There’s an emphasis on sophisticated fabrics, the ones that just feel, for lack of a better term, cool. For women there’s a Legging Jean that is exactly what it sounds like, coming in both neutral, classic colors, but also in some less conventional colors for that additional pop. For the guys it’s about classic pieces that work well with a lot of different things, so that mixing and matching can be done effortlessly, but also effectively.

To see videos (instead of just reading words about them) from the Gap 1969 Fall collection, just go to the Gap 1969 Facebook page and take an inside look at the 1969 denim studio in downtown LA.