CURIOUS CITY,
2012-2025 * R.I.P.
By CHARLES ANDREWS
NOT IMMEDIATELY…
And not forever, yet. But its days are numbered. The very last one will be sometime in 2025. This is the last regularly-scheduled CURIOUS CITY, the loved and hated blast of uncomfortable truths (as I see them) that all of Santa Monica has held its collective breath for each Wednesday, for 13 years. Whatever will you do with your Wednesdays now?
“OMG I knew it, they finally sacked Charles. One too many columns about that horrible School Board…” No. This is my choice entirely, and the Daily Press has supported me wonderfully through the wind down over a couple of years. I thank publisher Ross Furukawa, co-owner Todd James, and especially Editor-in-Chief Matt Hall, a man of high personal and journalistic integrity who has been on the front line of the mostly partisan angry reactions my columns sometimes provoked. So many times Matt went more than the extra mile for me. Ross especially, and Todd, were on the receiving end of screaming phone calls and cursing emails, and rarely mentioned it to me. Reporter Thomas Leffler has also been a big help recently.
SO WHY AM I PULLING THE PLUG?
Discouraged at not being able to make a real difference? (Although I think my long, hard push for electing the entire independent slate of Brock-de la Torre-Parra to City Council, which most thought an impossibility, had something to do with that earthshaking break of SMRR-controlled local politics. OK, maybe the May 31 looting of Santa Monica had something to do with that too.) I have had that thought of powerlessness sometimes, but from a lifetime in print I know that change can move glacially. I also believe that constantly banging the right drum has more effect than you might guess. I spent a few years in advertising, where it is a maxim that people have to see or hear something over and over and over before it has a chance to change their thinking.
I’VE BEEN IN GREAT COMPANY
My dear friend and longtime, revered SMDP political columnist Bill Bauer told me with certainty three different times in his last years that he was going to throw in the towel on his “My Write” column – “what’s the use, I keep exposing these corrupt politicos here and people keep electing more of the same.” Another SMDP columnist and very close friend, Jack Neworth, also told me several times he was going to quit his very popular and beloved “Laughing Matters”column. I think he wondered how Trump could still be stalking the land after all the satire, derision, mockery and contempt Jack heaped on him. How could that McNuggets-stuffed Mango Mussolini still stand? But neither columnist did give up. They wrote until cancer stole the words out of their keyboards. Both should get a statue.
Writing about 1,000 columns for SMDP since 2012 has been a grind many times. I often had to toss an important sentence, paragraph, or entire column because extensive research could not prove something I was certain of. That’s frustrating. What to write and what to leave out is a constant moral dilemma, and I didn’t always get it right.
I have to send out a tsunami of love to all of you who commented personally or wrote to me. I read every email, and I tried to respond to each one. I met a few people over coffee and that gave me a better sense of our city. Not a column went by that I did not hear from people I had never heard from before, and that reassured this solitary columnist shivering, hungry in a dimly lit room, hunched over an ancient writing device… oh, sorry, but it has let me know someone is reading it. Often they would write, “I have been reading your column for years but never wrote before…” Those were the ones that really kept me going. As well as so many friends and a handful of “enemies” and strangers on the street and in the supermarket. (That’s why you put your picture on the column. I learned that in college.) I also feel like I am letting each one of you down by quitting this column. I do have a fairly compelling excuse, though.
I HAVE BEEN LEGALLY BLIND SINCE THE FIRST OF THE YEAR
And losing my eyesight for almost three years before that. I can measure the loss almost daily. It is what is called so elegantly “a geographic atrophy,” a pinpoint destroying the retina, which will only expand, a result of macular degeneration (that I lived with for eight years with no noticeable effects). No cure, but finally a drug was approved recently that MAY slow the process down by about 20%. It does require getting an injection, yes into the side of the eyeball, ewwww! every six weeks, but I’ll take it. It is not as bad as it sounds, and I HATE needles. I have been treated by Dr. Thomas Chu for all those years, who is, according to my friend and globally-recognized ophthalmologist Houman Hemmati, “one of the best in the world!”
It is a great irony, or just another proof that God has a dark sense of humor, that I spent my entire life since college protecting my one good eye, the left one, after a rock thrower at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration I was covering as a reporter in Albuquerque, made a very high flying direct hit on that right eye, resulting in an immediate 50% loss of sight. It was an annoyance since then, that I could compensate for, but when this atrophy decided to show up, it chose my one good eye. But it does mean that even if I lose all sight in the left one, that foggy bit of vision remaining in the right will make it my “good” eye, and it will keep me from bumping into walls. So if I have passed you somewhere and didn’t seem to recognize you, please forgive. I can’t recognize a face more than three feet away, and that will get worse.
I know some people born blind graduate from law school with honors. They are heroes. (Well, except for adding another lawyer to the deck. But you wouldn’t want them to be surgeons, would you?) Many people have suggested some form of accessibility assistance to magnify things and use voice recognition, and I could. But I don’t want to. I’ve carried this torch for the city I love for a long time.
IT’S SOMEONE ELSE’S TURN
Hopefully, someone like Bill Bauer who is not afraid to call out bad management, hiring and planning, corruption and political ambition and cowardice, and name names, not someone who thinks we should put certain former mayors on a pedestal without being aware of their overall impact. We have very few political heroes in Santa Monica.
I will continue with the weekly music column NOTEWORTHY for as long as I can. But CC took a lot of time and difficult research, and I need that remaining vision time for personal projects.
I kept my news to family members mostly, not because I am ashamed in any way of my affliction, but because I know so many people in Santa Monica and I didn’t want to enter a room or take a walk and feel like the first thing everyone thought about me was, oh, there’s that poor Charles Andrews, going blind. For as long as possible I wanted to leave it at, there’s that libtard Andrews who dreams of a sleepy beach town, and can’t write his way out of a paper bag. And he’s NOT funny. That I can live with.
See you around.
Charles Andrews has lived in Santa Monica for 38 years and wouldn’t live anywhere else in the world. Really. Send love and/or rebuke to him at therealmrmusic@gmail.com
