Dennis Hollingsworth

Admin/Mail Call/Bo

The Comments are still out of commission for the meantime, that's alright by me. I don't miss the insidiously neccessary despamming chores. People chime in via email (the address is to your left in the margin), and that's been working out fine.

The comment function will be restored soon enough, reliant as I am for the help of a good friend for this fix. I told him no worries, to do it as his own pace, and I meant it.

Meanwhile, a former student of mine*1, Bo (Bolivar I?iguez) writes in after we met incidentally at a restaurant (Allegria in SilverLake) recently. It seems I got a rise out of him from the OchreVille blog post.

Here's Bo:

seems i'm not the only one with a broken blog , your comment php thing is kaput . since i didn't find out until after i typed a comment for ochre ville , i though i'd email it instead , so as not to waste it ...

it was good to see you ,
welcome back to los ?ngeles

b

i dunno ... i like the scale of NY better - the 4 story brownstone scale . as i understand it , the average american consumes twice as much energy as its european coutnerpart , and the only obvious reason to me is LA-style zoning . that brownstone-bearing lot that accomodates 4 families in a more traditional city barely fits one home in LA . that means easily 4 times more street to service the same population , so that the walk to the corner store turns into the drive to the 711 four blocks away .

i was staying with a cousin last time i visited the old country*2 [ http://aniconic.org/journal/ec-dialup/page01.html ] . he lives in a residential neighborhood [ el paraiso ] developed in the sixties or so , yet i found the scale to be very pleasant (not at all like the contemporaneus san fernando valley) , with smallish lots and a reasonable negative to positive space ratio . i think i spotted like 4 corner shops (not a single parking lot) walking down the hill to the main street , where i found all the mass transit i could possibly need , which got me downtown and to the malec?n [http://malecon2000.org/malecon2000/ ] in about 15 min .

there was a primary school across the street from his house . basically a three story volume on the street and adequate open space beyond . the street it's on is a narrow residencial street that provides little parking and dead-ends in a cul-de-sac , yet there wasn't any of that typical LA school frenzy of cars picking up or dropping off students that reminds me of parking at the mall the week before xmas . it seems to me we make it more difficult than it needs to be .

*1 ...now an architect, working for a firm that designs low cost housing (?Muy bien, Tio!).

*2 Bo's was born in Ecuador