This Week: Acres of Books, Slum Futures and Coyotes

Tues | APR 1 Dandy British supermarket Fresh & Easy—with locations in Long Beach, Lakewood and Compton—enters its six month of American operation with crumpet sales somewhere around 70 percent below expectations and a marketing disconnect so severe that the Los Angeles Times interviewed a Norwalk man who said he hoped to visit a Fresh & Easy location one day, but hadn’t been able to find one—“unaware,” added the Times, “that there was a store in plain view from the back of his truck where he was loading groceries.” That’s not an image problem. That’s actual invisibility. Until company boffins unravel the complexities of the domestic consumer eyeball, Fresh & Easy plans to postpone opening several new locations, although those locations may actually already be open and possibly on fire for all anyone can tell.

Wed | APR 2 “Livid” “ant-like people” cower before a “behemoth” in a special Roger Corman/Press-Telegram co-production of It Came From Beyond Southern California Edison, the story of a normal suburban family who wake up one morning to discover unspeakable municipal infrastructure implanted in their front yard. An Edison spokesdrone clacks its mandibles and tells the P-T that moving the rogue power pole—a replacement for an obsolete but unobtrusive corner-mounted pole that offers much greater eyesore efficiency, as well as wheelchair access for differently-abled taggers and saboteurs—is “not an option.” Ski Demski was unavailable for comment at press time. In related budget B-movie news, port officials discover and quarantine a shipping container painted with “ANTHRAX A GIFT FROM OSAMA” on the side, but are disappointed to discover neither anthrax nor gifts. Pending formal apology, all further gifts from Osama will be returned unopened.

Thurs | APR 3 Slum futures continue to skyrocket per last month’s Atlantic Monthly article reporting on a Virginia Tech study predicting 22 million vacant McMansions by 2025—about 40 percent of homes occupied now—and a Chicago Tribune article explaining how certain lenders are now foreclosing on and then abandoning properties because they aren’t worth the maintenance and tax expense, which is excellent news for copper pipe bandits and coyotes searching for dry places to birth their litters. “Many low-density suburbs and McMansion subdivisions, including some that are lovely and affluent today, may become what inner cities became in the 1960s and ’70s—slums characterized by poverty, crime, and decay,” says the Atlantic. Meanwhile, in downtown Long Beach, the West Gateway hole surges on in preparation for 291 luxury housing units, scheduled for completion in 2009 and guaranteed pregnant-coyote-free till 2012 or until those little paws figure out how to work an elevator.

Fri | APR 4 Acres of Books officially accepts a $2.8 million buyout from the Redevelopment Agency, whose project to take the Long Beach out of Long Beach demands only the leveling of a few more lonely hulks before the cityplaceification process is complete. Acres of Books, which like many of America’s most valuable institutions no longer has anyone able and willing to take care of it, could close as early as October, to be replaced by a mixed-use project tentatively titled Acres of Quizno’s-T-Mobile-Sell-it-on-eBay and marketed to a wealthy creative class so dubiously mythological that its hedge funds invested heavily in Bigfoot’s website redesign. Reached later by a Los Angeles Times reporter, longtime Acres stalwart Ray Bradbury speaks for all remaining local humans with a heartbroken “Oh, no!”

Sat | APR 5 While promoting a documentary examining the debate over intelligent design—unfortunately subtitled No Intelligence Allowed—Ben Stein today tells a Press-Telegram hive writer to beware Darwin’s theory of natural selection, which, he says, “was one of the fundamental props of the National Socialists and the Nazi Holocaust. For that alone, it deserves extremely careful scrutiny.” The P-T sadly reports nothing about Stein’s opinions of accelerating economic collapse, the suspension of civil liberties as solution to a never-ending national emergency, the popular conflation of xenophobia with patriotism, and the specific persecution of ethno-religious minorities as a domestic security measure, most of which are completely irrelevant in America today and few if any of which fed into the rise of National Socialism or any insalubrious historical events ever, most of which were caused by angry phantom cavemen.

Sun | APR 6 Residual rage for Acres closing, presaging Long Beach’s development apocalypse and eventual rebirth as Santa Monica’s unpopular try-hard little sister. As always in times of real estate tribulation, I revisit Dave Wielenga’s unassailably profound observation that Long Beach is a city intent on killing its own soul, yet generally so inept that it can’t quite do it right. Unfortunately, even the angriest caveman learns that club smash! sometime, and an agency that can wound Ray Bradbury’s gentle heart can smash with the caviest of them. As the man said to the Martian before his home exploded: “The old got to give way to the new. That’s the law of give and take.”

Mon | APR 7 Saw a coyote and she was looking pretty fat. So watch it.

Tags: acres of books, coyotes, lakewood, Long Beach, power pole, slum futures