Fifty years ago, in my twenties, I often hitchhiked the Pacific Coast Highway through Southern California. I slept on pristine beaches, swam in the ocean, and spent endless hours watching seals and dolphins ride the waves just a few yards offshore.

A favorite spot was in Santa Monica, where Sunset Boulevard meets the sea at Will Rogers State Park. This gorgeous stretch of white sand, framed by the Santa Monica pier to the south and the Malibu Hills to the north, seemed like paradise.

Today, fulfilling a lifelong dream, I live in the San Fernando Valley, a forty-minute drive from the Pacific, half of which is through beautiful Topanga Canyon.

This evening there was something else—an unwelcome terror.

This past Friday, I set off for my weekly bike ride along the beach. As usual, I parked at Will Rogers and rode my bike south down the concrete path about six miles to the Venice Pier. The final stretch, through Venice Beach, featured a constant cloud of the cannabis smoke that now flows free and easy in the land of legal pot.

Sunday, November 11, 2018, 2-4pm
Studio 35, 3055 Indianola Ave.
Growing Cities is a documentary film that examines the role of urban farming in America and asks how much power it has to revitalize our cities and change the way we eat. In their search for answers, filmmakers Dan Susman and Andrew Monbouquette take a road trip and meet the men and women who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food, one vacant city lot, rooftop garden, and backyard chicken coop at a time.

Q+A following the film to discuss the local food system in central Ohio.

$5 donation at the door. Come early to network at the bar starting around 1:15 pm.

Lee Israel’s abrasive and self-destructive personality is established in the first scene of Can You Ever Forgive Me? While working a late-night job, Lee (Melissa McCarthy) hits the wrong person with an F-bomb and is immediately fired.
 

This launches a downward spiral that threatens to expel Lee from the New York apartment she shares with her ailing cat. The spiral ends only when it’s replaced by a moral and legal spin out of control.
 

The fateful catalyst is a letter from a famous author that falls into Lee’s hands. Attempting to sell it to a dealer in literary ephemera, she’s told it would be worth more if only the subject matter weren’t so bland. An author herself—though one who has trouble even giving her latest books away—Lee seizes on the idea of manufacturing spicy correspondence supposedly written by luminaries such as Dorothy Parker and Noel Coward.
 

You’ve been radically misled to believe that the only thing, or the most important thing, or one of the super important things you can do is vote. Voting in a functioning democracy would be a fairly important thing to do, but wouldn’t somehow eliminate the thousands of important things that would also need doing. Voting in a broken democracy is a mildly important thing to do, for the reasons you know by heart, but also for this reason: Seeing so many people so eager to do something alerts everyone else to the fact that you give a damn.