Seeking Valley of Our Discontent Causes Some to Disconnect

Dear Valley Diary:

Day One

I pull off the freeway at Laurel Canyon Boulevard, looking for a strong cup of joe and an angry spouse. The San Fernando Valley wants out of a stormy marriage with Los Angeles, and the whole thing could be sealed in November.

You don’t care about us, the Valley cries.

You don’t listen when we talk.

You take our hard-earned money and blow it on that tawdry Downtown girl.

“You know what really irks me?” asked a friend from Sherman Oaks.

You tell some Westside snob you’re from the Valley, or you give them a phone number that begins 818, and you can see something growing in their eyes. Pity, contempt, superiority.

As if these snobs live in Paris.

I turn west on Ventura Boulevard and stop at Peet’s Coffee, where I see one of those L.A. people I have always wanted to be. Some guy in dress-down comfort, nowhere to go, sitting on a bench like work hasn’t been invented yet.

But Cameron Lowe, 37, does have a job. He’s a director, he says. TV commercials, actually.

And documentaries, of course. He’s doing a documentary on his father’s band, a Valley-based ‘60s crew that recently reunited.

The Electric Prunes.

In this sunstruck moment, I love the Valley like never before.

I ask Lowe about secession, the subject that surely must infiltrate his every waking thought, if not his dreams.

He shrugs.

“I don’t know anyone who talks about it.”

What about the lousy services? I ask, telling Lowe about secession leaders and their wounded cries of taxation without representation, trees that aren’t trimmed, cops who never show.

He shakes his head.

“There’s nothing wrong with my trash or the water service,” Lowe says. “And I’ve never had to call the police.”

On top of that, he says, this stretch of Studio City looks pretty good to him. “It’s got some character” and is more neighborhoody than a lot of places over the hill.

Bottom line, everything’s fine in his world, and he sees no need to change the name of it.

Dear Diary:

Does the very community that secessionists seek to create already exist?

Is the secession plan nothing more than pointless doodling by a few doddering old men with nothing better to do?

Given the depth of real problems like transportation and housing, not to mention the uncertain economy, can anyone be expected to take this thing seriously?

There have been times when I thought you could take all the people who were worked into a lather about secession and fit them into a 7-Eleven on Chandler. I went to Galpin Ford for the historic meeting on the naming of the new city, and only 100 people showed up, which means that approximately 1,349,900 stayed home.

I thank Lowe for his thoughts, wish him luck with the documentary on the Electric Prunes, and go inside Peet’s, where I find two women named Susan and Laurie who have roughly the same take as Lowe.

“I think it’s silly,” says Susan, who does not know a single person who speaks passionately about secession one way or the other.

That would include the mayor, whose uninspired defense of the city’s borders ranks alongside Mexican Gen. Andres Pico’s surrender of California to Lt. Col. John C. Fremont at the Universal City Red Line station in 1847.

Lucky for Hahn the other side has no Gen. Patton in its ranks. I’ve met secession leader Jeff Brain and all I can say is, if this guy’s name is Brain, somewhere in the world is a guy named Dolt who’s a genius.

In the course of my conversation at Peet’s, I learn that Laurie and Susan are former Westsiders who used to turn up their noses at the mere mention of the Valley. They changed their tune when they had children and it was time to buy a nice, affordable house in a good neighborhood.

Studio City was the answer, and now they’re big Valley defenders who just don’t see a need to change the city limits or the name of the town.

“Actually, I might still be a Valley snob,” Laurie says.

What do you mean?

“Studio City and Sherman Oaks are fine, but I wouldn’t live in Canoga Park or Woodland Hills. My husband [who works in Beverly Hills] wouldn’t even go to dinner in Encino.”

Secession is going to die.

The Valley doesn’t think collectively, it thinks in pieces, and people move in small circles that occasionally overlap but seldom intersect, as someone once wrote.

I climb up Coldwater Canyon, turn right on Mulholland, and drive to an overlook where I get a great view of all this contented isolation, and a good cell phone signal, too. The phone rings now and it’s the Valley’s porn industry people getting back to me, eager to put their own spin on the breakup.

*

Valley Diary shall return. Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at [email protected].