I hereby propose a new rule to improve the quality of California’s local democracy. When the bars in your city close, so must your city council.

The idea occurred to me while watching recent Santa Monica City Council meetings, including one gathering so long (nine hours plus) and so full of nonsense and hate (from hundreds of public commenters) that it could make you reconsider your support for free speech and self-government.

The bars had shut at 2 a.m., but the council was still going, groggily, at 3:30 a.m. when it logged its latest late-night failure: canceling plans to organize a representative assembly of city residents to help decide the future of its airport. The vote came after a couple of hours of public testimony from residents who spewed misinformation about such democratic processes (which are common in cities around the world). Their ramblings on old ballot measures, capitalism, and interest group power could only make sense at such a late (or rather, early) hour.

Alas, this sort of decision-making is to be expected in Santa Monica, which takes perverse pride in meeting agendas that run longer than the U.S. Constitution, and in sessions so long they exceed the length of a legal work shift (one recently clocked in at 10-and-a-half hours). Residents and councilmembers waste a considerable amount of that time listening to off-point rants, or arguing about the lengths of the meeting themselves.

Long meetings are also a defect of councils in other California political hothouses—from Huntington Beach, where conservative culture war battles extend meetings into the late night, to Richmond, where the council recently stayed up past 1 a.m. to endorse the Palestinian side in the Gaza war. Perhaps the late hours explain why such cities are so politically out there; researchers at UC Berkeley (located in another city with a history of late council meetings) have found that the sleep-deprived brain is more risk-taking and extremist.

But even less politicized cities fall into the long meetings trap when they start sessions in the evening, controversies intrude, and more and more speakers show up. City councilmembers end up debating and taking votes at hours when they should be home in bed.

The pandemic-prompted switch to remote meetings has contributed to the problem, since more residents make public comments when they can do so from home.

There are ways to avoid going so late. Some councils start meetings early in the afternoon, and begin with a closed session to get work done before bringing in the public at 5 or 6 p.m. Many councils have cut the length of time members of the public can speak—from the old-school five minutes down to three, two or one. A few councils have even applied speaking limits on the councilmembers themselves.

In some places, however, such limits are not enough, and councils have adopted curfews. San Jose’s city council established a midnight curfew back in 2017. Other councils require members to agree to let a meeting go past a certain hour—11 p.m. is common.

As a frequent attendee of council meetings, both in California and around the world, I’d suggest the problem is structural: We pack too many things into these gatherings.

Council meetings serve two essential but very different purposes. First, they are business meetings of a city, which is essentially a corporation. Second, they are democratic events where people make their voices heard and perform politics.

We’d be better off if we separated those two functions. Cities should have short and formal “business meetings” to make decisions they’re legally required to make—on budgets, hiring, and contracting. But, before making such decisions, councils should have separate gatherings, both in-person and online, devoted to getting real input—and not three-minute rants—from citizens.

The 21st century provides new ways to do this. Local governments around the world use participatory processes that allow citizens not just to weigh in on council decisions, but to set budgets and write laws themselves. Madrid and more than 100 other cities have created online environments in which everyday people can become co-creators of policies.

If you’re a night owl who loves the late-night council meetings of Santa Monica, there’s an invention for you, too. More than 50 cities around the world, including Montreal, Amsterdam, and Bogota, have started some form of “night councils,” governing bodies that meet late and tend to focus on problems that affect cities after dark.

Santa Monica would benefit from reforms like these, because the city’s longest meetings tend to produce head-scratching decisions. For example, municipal watchers around California have long puzzled at Santa Monica’s decision to launch an expensive, years-long, and mostly losing fight against voting rights lawsuits that demanded the city switch from at-large to district elections. Almost all other California cities and school boards have settled such lawsuits cheaply and quickly. When I asked a former Santa Monica official why they fought so long in a case one local calls “Bleak House on the Beach,” he said the city had made too many decisions on the litigation late at night.

Former Santa Monica Councilmember Bobby Shriver has complained publicly that when he tried to recruit more diverse candidates to serve on the body, they often turned him down, citing the length of the meetings.

“It seems that every meeting of the Santa Monica City Council there’s a debate or controversy caused by how darned long the meetings are,” wrote Damien Newton, the executive director of the Southern California Streets Initiative, which publishes nonprofit news site Santa Monica Next. “These meetings are bad for Democracy… The current process makes it difficult or even impossible for normal people to give comments at meetings and the late hours are bad for the Councilmembers themselves.”

The fault lies not just with overly talkative politicians but with the public itself. One evening earlier this year, the council cut off public comment on its very first agenda item after five hours—the item was, ironically, a proposal to regulate overnight noise. But the Santa Monicans attending the meeting refused to go along. Instead, more than 40 people stuck around to speak on the motion to end public comment. Councilmembers, stymied, gave up and ended the meeting.

The bad news: the council failed to conduct business on an agenda that included an emergency ordinance, a proposal for downtown housing, and, of course, rules for meeting participation.

The good news: the meeting ended before 11 pm—early enough for councilmembers to stop for a drink on their way home.

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But Santa Monica could create such a park. It already has more than 150 acres of contiguous land under public ownership, with no homes on it, and only handful of existing structures. This land is called Santa Monica Airport.

Most of the land at the airport has been in aviation use since the late 1920s. But it was originally purchased by Santa Monica residents with a park bond in 1926. Last November by a 60 to 40 percent vote, Santa Monica voters approved a measure to convert the airport into park land—which the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) opposes. As the city’s legal efforts to close the airport gain momentum, what might happen when the city gains control?

One of the densest West Coast cities, Santa Monica today has only 1.47 acres of parkland for every 1,000 residents, compared to Los Angeles (8.5), San Francisco (10.3), Seattle (11.8), Portland (26.2) and San Diego (30.8).

Such a park would serve not only Santa Monica but also the region. While our beaches and mountains provide us with incredible open space opportunities on the edges of our urban environment, in the heart of Los Angeles we have only two large regional parks: Griffith Park in Northeast Los Angeles (at 4,210 acres) and Kenneth Hahn State Recreation area in the Baldwin Hills (387 acres). (The L.A. River promises to become a third.) Such opportunities should be seized when they present themselves. Within the last generation, we lost a rare chance when over 300 acres of the Ballona Wetlands were turned into Playa Vista, instead of being restored to natural habitat.

Plans call for a good portion of a new Santa Monica Great Park to be dedicated to sports and playing fields for all ages. Multiple trails for walking, hiking, jogging, cycling, and skating will be woven throughout—and spectacular views of the Pacific Ocean, Hollywood Hills, and Santa Monica will become accessible to everyone. Then come the social spaces—community and botanical gardens, picnic areas and children’s playgrounds, artworks, cultural facilities, a municipal pool, and maybe even a farm animal sanctuary.

There is also broad support for significant new natural habitat, including native plants and an urban forest or arboretum. With California having lost over 90 percent of its wetlands since the 1780s, a water element could be part of the Pacific Flyway for migratory birds.

Addressing climate change and the drought through establishment of a park must be a priority. Planting a new urban forest would help mitigate against rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. Solar power should be part of its design. And the park should capture and retain rainwater, and perhaps feature a large underground cistern for water storage. If the park’s design responds to various environmental concerns, more regional, state and federal moneys might be available to cover capital costs.

At least one new through-street is likely to be part of the park—both to increase access to the park and to ease extreme north/south pressure on nearby streets. Such a street should be like the mellow roads that cross Central Park in New York or Golden Gate Park in San Francisco; there also should be a reliable transit connection to the nearby Expo line.

How to fund park operations? Here’s one answer: by leasing several on-site city properties at higher rates. North of the runway, buildings that have been used for aircraft operations at well-below market rents for years could house tech incubators, with higher rents supporting the park.

South of the runway, the goal should be not to raise rents, but to retain and enhance the arts, culture, and education community there. This area already has arts studios, a museum, a theatre, and the Santa Monica College Arts Building, as well as the iconic Barker Hangar events space. Five additional aviation-related buildings there could be converted into arts and cultural facilities.

Rarely do we get such an opportunity to meet so many public policy needs and goals at once. But that’s what happens when over 150 acres of public land turn from serving a small number of people to providing for the millions that will use the Great Park over time.

How fast could this happen? On July 1, 2015, the City of Santa Monica’s 1984 agreement with the FAA to operate the airport expired, as did all leases to aviation tenants. Soon, the airport may have a much shorter runway and no aviation services. It then may be possible to close the entire airport and convert the whole runway and adjacent areas into parkland.

Local elected officials in Santa Monica—and those in neighboring communities in the city Los Angeles—have been behind this transformation for some time. Making a big difference today are two neighboring members of Congress—Karen Bass and Ted Lieu—who are pushing the Federal Aviation Administration hard to honor Santa Monica’s wishes and clear the way for a park. Locally, activists have coalesced into the aptly named Santa Monica Airport2Park Foundation, “to support and promote the creation of a great park on the land that is currently Santa Monica Airport.”

What has been a weak link in our natural environment could become a strength. Instead of air pollution and contamination from private jets, we’ll have new lungs on the Westside. As we plant new trees and other vegetation, we un-pave the Earth so it can breathe.

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Norman had been trained as a pharmacist at the University of Buffalo and understood the side effects of medication and the nutritional deficiencies caused by them. When the pharmacy’s customers weren’t doing as well as he and Mary had hoped, they decided they should provide customers with education and other alternative methods of healing, even though it was far more profitable to sell just prescription drugs. When a homeopathic sales rep entered their store shortly after purchasing, they were intrigued and decided to see what would happen if they offered these remedies to their customers.

When customers came in with allergies or aches and pains, Norman started giving them a homeopathic remedy instead of a drug. After those customers ran out of remedies, they came back for more. Complaints about side effects went down. Customers had fewer symptoms or were symptom-free. As word spread, many local doctors and individuals came to inquire about alternative ways of treating their ailments.

Norman and Mary’s passion for homeopathy was contagious. My grandfather formed relationships with doctors in the community, and even took some M.D.s under his wing, teaching them the homeopathic trade. A form of treatment that used to be considered snake oil or a placebo remedy proved to be an effective, non-invasive approach to a wide range of health issues.

Homeopathy is a system of medicine founded in the early 19th century by German physician Samuel Christian Hahnemann, who claimed that the medicine he had been taught to practice sometimes did patients more harm than good. The word “homeopathy” comes from the Greek words homeo (“similar”) and pathos (“suffering”). It is based on the principle that a disease can be cured by smaller doses of a medicine that, at full strength, creates similar symptoms to what the patient is experiencing.

Modern medicine often addresses a single symptom and not the totality of symptoms, whereas homeopathic physicians take into account all symptoms, including how the patient is reacting to the symptoms. Modern medicine is based on killing, suppressing, or blocking symptoms. Homeopathy works by allowing the body to handle the symptoms and then restoring balance.

For example, to treat allergies, a conventional pharmacist likely will dispense an antihistamine like Claritin or Zyrtec in which the active ingredient is designed to calm down your body’s immune reaction to allergens like pollen or animal dander. A homeopath, however, might prescribe Histaminum 15C, a remedy that is made from purified chemicals called histidines, which come from living substances, such as plants. Rather than blocking the action of histamine, one of the body’s natural chemicals, as a conventional allergy medicine would, this homeopathic remedy works by gently helping our immune system reduce the histamine load on the body without any drowsiness. Most patients notice a difference in their symptoms within the first 10 to 15 minutes after taking the remedy.

All homeopathic remedies are derived from plants, minerals, and animal sources and are prepared in minute dosages. They can be used during pregnancy and breastfeeding; they don’t react with other medications and substances like alcohol. Homeopathic remedies can be dissolved in water for animals and babies, and most have a pleasant taste, so children accept them with ease.

There are limits, of course, to what homeopathic medicine can do—Homeopathy alone is not for life-threatening emergency situations. It can be used for the side effects of chemotherapy or radiation, but not alone for cancer. Serious health disorders need to use multiple approaches to get the best results. But we have found that homeopathy and other alternative medicine work well for chronic diseases and certain diseases where there are no modern treatments available.

There are many misconceptions about homeopathic medicine, including that it’s merely a placebo therapy. But infants, children and animals—living beings who can’t “overthink” themselves well—get results from using our remedies. And, scientific double-blind randomized clinical trials, many of which have been recorded and repeated, also prove homeopathic medicine’s effectiveness. A few years ago, the Swiss government affirmed that homeopathic medicine works and is safe to consume.

One misconception about our pharmacy, especially from first-time customers, is to assume that everything in our store is homeopathic. However, we are a completely integrated pharmacy and also offer a few safe prescription medications. It’s just that we have more than one option for treating illness.

The Litvak family in front of the pharmacy in 1950

“Alternative medicine” is an umbrella term used to describe many of the health sciences that are not classified as modern mainstream medicine. Homeopathy is only one of the sciences that falls under alternative medicine. We also offer flower essences (commonly used for emotional problems), Western and Chinese herbs, professional nutritional supplements, essential oils, and natural skin care and household products.

Throughout the years, the alternative medicines industry has been challenged. As recently as April, the FDA announced it was considering enforcing more regulations for homeopathic medicine. (The labs that manufacture homeopathy are already regulated by the FDA.)

Such controversy belies the consistency with which we have run our pharmacy for almost a century. At any given time during business hours, Monday through Saturday, people enter our doors knowing that they can have a free consultation with any of our staff members, all of whom have been trained and certified in a field such as homeopathy, herbology, acupuncture, pharmacology, and nutrition. We also have pharmacists on staff who have received conventional training.

Over the years, our store has definitely changed. The name evolved (from Santa Monica Drug Company to Santa Monica Homeopathic Pharmacy). Cash registers were replaced by computers. Candy and soda was replaced by healthy snacks and beverages that do not cause sugar spikes in the blood and other negative effects on the body. Cigarettes and alcoholic beverages are long gone. The clients have come to ask more about alternative medicines. And we now have hundreds of medical doctors and hospitals that send their patients into the pharmacy to get help. Alternative medicine for many has become their medicine of choice.

When Mary and Norm opened the pharmacy in 1944, their sons were 4 and 7 years old. Santa Monica was a center of aerospace manufacturing. Bub and Pop could never have imagined that their small, family-owned pharmacy would still be in existence so far into the future, or that the city where it was based would become an upscale tourist destination. But they would recognize that, just as they did, two more generations are continuing to find the best ways to cure what ails their customers, no matter what tradition the treatments might come from.

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Many tourists from the top deck stare at the anglers with awe. Fishing is these folks’ art. And it looks much easier than it actually is. The Santa Monica Pier fishers don’t make much. One fisherman said he could make $25 for the foot-long fish he caught that morning, but he’d prefer to take it home to his family.

Fishing, they say, is both recreation and relaxation. For some, it’s an activity to do in-between jobs and on days off from other work. Pier fishing requires incredible patience and the acceptance that the day’s only conversation may be with the ocean breeze itself. Along with their coolers, and their buckets of shrimp and mussel bait, the fishers bring portable DVD players to pass the time until they see their rod shaking.

They’ll all congratulate someone for reeling in fish. “Bravo! Bravo!” Anything outside a legal-size catch, they toss it back. The fishers have to follow a lot of rules, which vary by season, depth of water, and species of fish. There are rules about the size of fish and daily limits on the number that can be caught. Regulations, though, are not all that limit the fishers. Occasionally, a duck snatches a fish as it’s being reeled in. Everyone laughs: They’ve all been there at one point or another.

Fishing is unpredictable, they say. But, as one fisherman put it: Fishing is for killing time before time kills you.

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My dad first introduced me to the morning charm of Perry’s one Sunday a few years back. Since then, he makes time once every weekend to drive over and say hi to the ocean. It runs in our blood: visiting the beach, even if just for a few moments, is a cleanse for our brains. After spending the past year land-locked and studying in Arizona, I found myself more anxious to visit the ocean this summer than ever before.

The Perry’s that my dad and I patronize is a few miles past the Santa Monica Pier heading toward Venice. Sometimes I look around and wonder how a place could be so charming. A few times a week, as I made my summer commute from the San Gabriel Valley to an office in Santa Monica, I left an hour earlier than I needed to—all so I could park my car in a $1 per hour lot, leave my shoes in the car, and go to Perry’s.

Each visit begins the same way: I walk up to the counter and am greeted with a big smile by perhaps the cheeriest guy in this city. He’s patient with me as I stare at the board for minutes, contemplating their extensive menu.

Is it weird to have mahimahi tacos for breakfast? I wonder.

Deciding against it, I end up choosing the King Richard’s veggie breakfast burrito with egg whites.

I settle into one of the red lawn chairs they’ve set up in the sand as I watch the ocean waves and wait for them to call my number. I’m often the first number of the day. They open at 9 a.m. on weekdays, and that’s exactly when I like to show up.

On a Tuesday morning, there are rarely many people at this walk-up, shoe-optional beach café, and that’s a big reason I’m there. Beachfront peacefulness is hard to come by in a crowded city. Santa Monica is full of people and traffic, but it still feels like a real beach community before the day begins. There aren’t even that many cyclists out at that time—just a few joggers and weary surfers. It’s well worth waking up early to catch a moment of small-town charm.

Nothing I’ve found in L.A. beats the combination of crisp morning air, toes in the sand, and a small black coffee as I wait for my breakfast. It’s always a good morning after that.

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His stroll westward across the campus took about 10 minutes—10 minutes in the history of a college in existence since 1929. The shooter walked from the eastern part of the campus—where the science and counseling buildings are—down the liberal arts building corridor and finally to the library—maybe 300 yards total. He walked through the old doorway to the campus and fired dozens of rounds. In that time, and in that space, he murdered three people.

I have taught at Santa Monica College for 30 years, which is not unusual. The average tenure of full-time faculty here is nearly 16 years—more than double the national average for education staff, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those of us who work here have watched hundreds of thousands of young souls walk the campus. Over many years, our schedules repeat, and we tend to stay in the same offices and classrooms; we relive the same sorts of encounters semester after semester—drinking coffee, jangling keys in an impromptu conversation in the parking lot, watching robed students march across a stage. Faced with terror, do these years of shared rituals mean anything? How does a college, a place filled with curiosity and hope, recover from an attack by its opposite, by a shooter who lashes out in white-hot rage?

***

That day, I dropped by my office and left an hour before the shooting. Like many of us at the college, I found myself asking: “What if?”—playing a troubling narrative in my head over and over.

My old office used to be in the liberal arts building, near where the shooter began his rampage. Put up in a hurry shortly after World War II and updated with mixed results, the liberal arts building has been scheduled to be torn down in the near future—for over a decade. If you worked or studied at the college—as so many now-prominent Angelenos did when they were first finding their way—you had a memory centered on this building. It contained the English department offices and the charismatic (and Dickensian-named) Dick Dodge, who taught Dustin Hoffman and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some 20 years ago, I taught Monica Lewinsky in Liberal Arts 136 (but that’s another story).

The building houses the mailroom, which still draws faculty, staff, and campus gossip. When I was lucky enough to get a full-time job at the college in 1988, my windowless office was just off the hallway in room liberal arts 110—the information booth, I called it with some frustration, since I kept my door open and students would holler in, asking for directions to admissions or the bathroom. The shooter walked down that hallway, past that door, clad in black, his semi-automatic spraying bullets, ripping up the walls and ceiling.

Farther down the hallway was the desk once occupied by Jim Prickett, who was the English department secretary and taught three classes each term. He regularly carried forth about American history and sports, a crowd hovering around his desk. He had an insightful mind, a quick laugh, and a sweet, self-effacing nature. We elected him president of the faculty union, unprecedented for a part-time professor. Too soon, sadly, cancer took his life. The college re-dedicated a beautiful garden in his honor on May 16, 2013. From the garden you could see up to where Prickett would lean against the doorjamb—where, 21 days after the garden was dedicated in his honor, he could easily have been shot.

One of the men who created the garden—who planted the Chinese maples, plotted the sprinkler lines, and anchored the teak benches to ring the jacaranda tree—was Carlos Franco, a gardener at the college for 22 years. He was driving his daughter, Marcela, out of the parking lot when the two were shot. He died at the scene. The life of his daughter ebbed away hours later. On his day off, he had taken his daughter to the campus to buy books. She was going to take a summer course at the college.

***

In moments of crisis, the brain—sifting through trillions of routes beyond understanding—settles on one spot. For me, the gut-punch of my campus’ terror routed my consciousness back to a night that occurred more than 25 years ago, thousands of miles away. My wife, Hanne, and I were on a ferry on the North Sea sailing from England to Holland. To save money we had skipped a cabin berth, and now we were settling in on benches to catch a few hours’ sleep, head-to-head, taking up 12 feet. Before us a riot suddenly broke out—windows shattering, bottles smashing, jagged glass cutting into flesh. “Football hooligans,” as they were called, seems a quaint term for men willing to end their lives for the sake of a bloody brawl. Hanne and I, and 20 other people, were flattened against the wall in a space the size of a basketball court with 150 enraged, bloodied, drunken men.

The ship’s crew in dress whites appeared briefly in the doorway, and padlocked us in. The 2,000 on board were safe; we were trapped. My wife and I watched the mob feed on itself for 45 minutes, until the crew returned to disperse the men with a high-powered hose. And the large ship, impervious to the churning, rolling Atlantic, made a slow arc to return to Harwich, its route altered by raw terror.

An ocean-going ship is a behemoth, but a college is even more massive. Commentators call on colleges to be “nimble,” but year after year, the same courses are offered and the same committees meet in proud, stolid continuity. Psychically, colleges are like massive ships, too. Four or five years of college shape our lives, rig our prospects, tug on our memories.

People in any place—Santa Monica College or a doughnut shop—don’t expect a shooting. Yet according to Mother Jones, there have been over 60 mass shootings since 1982, and schools rank second (after workplaces) as sites of this kind of violence. So despite the permanence, nobility of purpose, and regularity of colleges, their absolute security is illusory. Still it is no surprise that students, huddled over books and laptops in the college library that day, felt as secure as innocent passengers on a ship.

***

The library is a place where “we inventory human capacity, we arrange, we remember, we heal through knowledge,” historian Kevin Starr told a gathering of people at Santa Monica College just after 9/11. Two years after Starr spoke, the new college library was completed and dedicated. Gone were polished card catalogues. Expanses of concrete and glass and rows of monitors proclaimed an era of digital exploration.

The shooter was headed toward the elegant sleek lines of the library when he took aim at Margarita Gomez, a 67-year-old churchgoer and bingo player, and killed her. She was known around campus because she frequently stopped by to collect cans and bottles for recycling. The shooter considered other targets and made his way up the shallow steps toward the library’s automated glass doors.

Some students fled from the library; others shouted “shooter” and ran into the depths of the library, setting off a stampede toward the rear emergency exits. The shooter walked calmly toward the front desk. “I am a police officer,” he said. An alarm from the emergency exit began to sound. Library staff and students working behind the desk rushed into a small room—nine people crammed into that closet-sized space—and shoved a safe in front of the door. They hit the floor before the firing started. Bullets ripped through the door and past their faces. They were trapped, powerless. The shooter fired his handgun into the room. The chamber empty and cartridges spent, he wheeled around and began firing his automatic weapon into the library. He blasted the counter, a metal chair, a row of lights, the cement walls—billows of gun smoke setting off the smoke alarm, which began its persistent, pulsing dog-whistle sound and flashing light.

Librarian Brenda Antrim was in her office upstairs. She heard a hail of bullets and then silence. After a time, she emerged. Seeing two terrified students, she pulled them close and rushed out the front door, where they were secured by dozens of police officers. Antrim served in the U.S. Air Force. She talked herself through a tense checkpoint by the Panamanian military police days after an American soldier had been shot there. Later, while working as a bank teller, she was held at gunpoint. In those moments, the threat of violence was disturbing—but not completely unexpected. But when a shooter enters a library, everything is out of context.

“The library is the heart of the college,” Antrim said.

***

The path of terror for the shooter ended in the library, where he was, according to police, “neutralized”—shot dead by campus police. The terror, however, was not neutralized. Campus leaders improvised a crisis center, providing round-the-clock counseling. Over the following week 221 people received individual crisis counseling, and another 200 received group counseling, from therapists who came to campus from the Red Cross, UCLA Counseling and Psychological Services, and the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health. In those therapy sessions, in conversations, we began to heal. Healing happened slowly and quickly, with anguish and with deliberate thought. With distance, minute piled on minute, and the shooter’s haunting image receded.

For librarian Antrim, the terror of that day recalled the words of the commanding officer of the U.S. Air Force who led her into Panama. He warned her company that they would see combat and death, and that they needed to be mentally tough. “You need to get through this to get past it—or you’ll be stuck living it,” he told them.

One way to get past what happened on our campus has been to honor the memory of those who perished. Memorials sprang up instantly—burning candles, flowers, notes—for Carlos and Marcela, and another near the library for Margarita. Another memorial appeared near the book drop of the library. People were mourning for the library itself.

Constructing narratives can provide a way out of the terror—reshaping memories into narratives that allow for recovery. Soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder can progress if they can make stories that make sense of their experiences. It’s not a neat or easy process. During crisis counseling, a therapist suggested to the library staff that they reframe what happened—and tell a story than isn’t dominated by terror. Out of hundreds in the library, only one person died: the shooter. The staff protected people, kept them safe. The therapist told them, “You provided a safe haven.”

Logic tells us the terror is gone, yet of course logic doesn’t cut it in a shooting. Even on a college campus, where we teach logic, terror holds sway, more than it deserves, long after the incident has passed. Nearly a year later, I have heard dozens of intense stories, from students and from colleagues, about those 10 minutes last June at Santa Monica College.

As a professor of English, I spend a lot of time talking about stories. Colleges exist in part as places to hear and tell stories. When it comes to this event, stories transform the raw experiences—seeing a library peopled only with soldiers, backpacks and laptops abandoned at table after table; seeing blank dead eyes single you out for a target, aim and miss; knowing that leaving a few minutes earlier kept you heartbeats ahead of carnage while your friends were in the shooter’s grasp; and watching a harmless woman gunned down, knowing that you held the door open for her moments before.

I could not stop the terror of a shooter on a college campus. But I was a passenger on a ravaged ship and urge others to listen to the stories. As soul-wrenching as some are, they come from a safe haven—a college, where our minds can be unsafe, take risks, and discover. In the face of terror, go, be brave. That is all we can do—and that is enough.

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Many of the Huntington’s images were first produced to promote Southern California as a place to visit and settle. Tourists purchased images mounted on cards as souvenirs for friends back home. Taken with a camera that had two lenses positioned eye-distance apart, some photos allowed for 3-D views when seen through a special stereoscope. Stereographs were a popular form of entertainment in American parlors from the 1860s through the 1900s.

The landscapes depicted in these photos have been “utterly transformed,” said Jennifer Watts, curator of photographs at the Huntington. “In these photographs, you can see the template that was built upon. They’re sedimentary looks at the evolution of a city.”

The photographs came from Ernest Marquez, a collector whose family owned the Rancho Boca de Santa Monica, a 6,000-acre expanse that included present-day Rustic and Santa Monica canyons, Pacific Palisades, and portions of the city of Santa Monica. Unable to find evidence of his ancestors in the written record of Santa Monica, Marquez began searching for photographic evidence, Watts said. He visited antique fairs, antiquarian book shows, paper shows, and flea markets and, over 50 years, amassed a photo collection of early Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Santa Barbara, San Diego, and Orange County.

Marquez was a sharp, methodical curator, Watts said. His collection features many views of the same place and vantage point, taken over several decades. The collection, for instance, has several photographs looking north from 9th Street at the intersection of Spring and Main streets in downtown Los Angeles. In 1875, there is only a modest building in a wide expanse of dirt crisscrossed by wagon wheel tracks. By 1906, the trappings of a city have sprung up—stores packed next to each other, street lights, curbs, and a street sign marking “S. Spring.” In 1926, an aerial view features tall buildings, parallel-parked automobiles, Pacific Electric Red Car streetcars, billboards for beer and Coca-Cola—a hive of industry eclipsing the placid mountains in the far background. And while you may or may not see the ghosts of L.A. past at that very same intersection today, these photos give you the sense that in two or three more decades the view will be entirely different.

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The two of us had just returned to Los Angeles from a 10-week nationwide tour in support of the debut album that we released independently to showcase our minimalist sound. (We describe it as “cello rock.” Others may call it folk rock.) Boxes full of CDs from our ambitious first pressing were stacked in the corner of our rehearsal space. We sat there brainstorming ways to sell them in an effort to fund our next album. Before we left for our tour, Ed was working as a marketing manager for an independent record label and Ken was doing HTML layout design for a dot-com. We quit those jobs to go on our cross-country adventure with no intention of getting them back.

Ed went to get lunch–and some advice—from his former boss at the label in Santa Monica. Ed returned with an idea: street performing. At first it seemed a little crazy, and we certainly didn’t think that we would be able to support ourselves as buskers, people who perform in public places for donations. But the more we talked about it, the more interesting it became. The Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica wasn’t Carnegie Hall, but it would be a place we could play our music and hopefully make some money doing it.

The first week of January, we sauntered into the Santa Monica courthouse with our passport photos and $75 in hand. The permitting system for busking on the promenade is fairly simple: All you need are photos, a valid driver’s license, and your Social Security number. The city wants to keep track of who is playing at the promenade, and a promenade manager walks the street on the even hours to check permits.

The following Saturday we drove the 13 miles from the apartment we shared in Koreatown to Santa Monica. We parked our Honda Element four blocks away from the promenade and loaded our two carts with a deep cycle marine battery and a power inverter (because you can’t plug your system into a wall outside), two massive speakers, four boxes of CDs, and leftover T-shirts from the tour. With cello and guitar slung across our backs, we began the first of what would become countless treks down Colorado Boulevard to the Promenade.

We picked the first spot that looked available, not even noticing the trash-can-playing drummer who was planning to set up right next to us. The designated performance areas on the Promenade are only 40 feet apart from one another. When you set up an acoustic guitar and a cello right next to Animal, the maniacal percussionist from the Muppets, you are bound to have a bad set.

We soon learned that the most important elements of street performing for a musician are a quiet location and a large amount of foot traffic. In order to prevent any one performer from monopolizing a particular spot, the Promenade requires that you change positions every two hours on the even hours—i.e., 2 p.m., 4 p.m., and so on. The seasoned buskers would finish their noon set at 2 p.m. and head over to a different spot right away to wait for the 4 p.m. slot. You couldn’t say you’ve got “dibs” on any spot unless you were physically standing there with your gear … or wanted to get into a fight. On any given Saturday you could wait up to four hours to play at the most desirable location. We quickly discovered what would become the majority of our busking experience: waiting.

By our first summer, we had learned the ropes of street performing and were frequenting the Promenade up to five days a week. Any more than that and we might have gone crazy. We had two 45-minute sets of material at this point and would cycle through them during the day. This meant a lot of repetition. We were definitely getting our chops up and had to learn some covers to spice up the set.

But we were thrilled to have discovered a way to support ourselves with art. The actual amount we earned on any given day varied—as little as $30 and as much as $1,000. If it rained we would have to pack up our stuff as quickly as possible and accept a loss for that day. Our persistence averaged out our income to a fairly consistent amount. We were paying ourselves $300 a week and putting the rest in the bank account. It wasn’t a lot of money to live off of, but we were used to scraping by. Armed with savings and practice, we were able to record our second album with veteran rock producer Duane Baron at Banyan Tree Studios in Hollywood.

The Promenade had its dark days, of course. We were the literal new kids on the block, and the other performers did not always share in the joy of the large crowds we were drawing and the money changing hands. One day, we were performing near a clown making misshapen balloon animals for children. Apparently clowns don’t like folk music. In the middle of our set he angrily approached us screaming, “You suck! Go home!” He then proceeded to spit in Ed’s direction without regard for the large crowd watching us perform. We stopped mid-song to talk to the clown, who only backed down when the crowd began jeering for him to leave us alone. Once we learned how to ignore the haters and stopped caring that most people were there to shop rather than listen to us, we quickly learned that busking opened up incredible opportunities.

One Saturday afternoon, we were finishing our signature upbeat song, “Analog Girl” when we noticed a familiar-looking man watching us. Dustin Hoffman approached us and introduced his wife and child. He told us how interesting our sound was and asked if we had seen the movie Once about Irish street performers. He urged us to go see it. We did and were inspired.

In 2009, we received an e-mail from the Shirai family, who had been organizing tours to California for Japanese nationals. Mrs. Shirai had seen us at the Promenade in 2006 and purchased 20 of our CDs, which she brought back to give to friends. The family expressed interest in setting up a month-long tour of Japan, offering to cover our travel and housing expenses while booking shows for us throughout the main island.

We ended up completing two successful tours of Japan in 2010 and 2011. The last show of our 2011 tour was the day of the Great Honshu earthquake. Needless to say, we canceled that show and spent the day with our host family about 50 miles from the Daiichi power plant in Fukushima. We huddled around the TV watching footage of the tsunami and the nuclear power plant burning and running outside after each aftershock. When we got home, we organized fundraisers to bring the Shirais to the States. They came here in the summer of 2011 and stayed as long as their visas would allow. It was too complicated for them to immigrate here, so they ended up settling in New Zealand. In 2012, they booked us for a three-week tour down there.

During the 2009 recession, we started to notice that our CD sales were slowing down, along with the economy. We had been performing at the Promenade for years and had sold our albums to most of the locals who were interested in our style of music. Maybe we hit market saturation. A lawyer friend of ours tipped us off to a possible alternative: Downtown Disney in Anaheim. After calling and e-mailing the Disney talent manager almost daily for six months, we were finally called in for an audition. We got the gig.

When we first started, we just sold CDs and were not paid for our time. After three years of playing in Anaheim we encountered a similar problem to the promenade: Our CD sales were in a slump. Working for free at a company as large as Disney started to seem unfair to us, so we e-mailed management and told them that November 2013 would be our last month playing the Downtown Disney district. Almost immediately, we heard back: They asked us to reconsider and told us they would look for some money in the budget to pay us. Now we are independent contractors for Disney and invoice them for each gig at a set price of $400 per show. It’s the closest thing to a steady job in the world of busking—and we still perform there to this day.

It is harder and harder to get noticed these days. Anybody with a laptop can have a band, and the market is crowded with acts. Music labels seem to want to invest less in developing artists, and music studios around L.A. are closing. So busking is one of the few outside-the-box avenues available to make music careers possible. For anyone considering taking up the challenge of busking for a living, we would encourage you wholeheartedly.

Just don’t take our spot.

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He rides a motorcycle, but Jesse Gomez, dressed in a dark, collared shirt and fiddling with his smartphone at Mercado, his Santa Monica eatery, doesn’t strike me as an outlaw. And, I soon find out, contrary to what Bourdain would have me believe, the restaurant business is no longer the Wild West, either.

Bourdain described degenerate kitchen staff and managers serving up nearly spoiled seafood to clueless customers. But at the four restaurants Gomez owns in Los Angeles—his family’s Highland Park restaurant, El Arco Iris; downtown’s Yxta; and two locations of Mercado in Santa Monica and Fairfax—his customers are incredibly savvy. “We can’t put mediocre stuff out there,” Gomez explains. When it comes to food, drinks, and service, today’s diners know what they want and what they’re willing to pay for it.

Although he was born into the business and grew up working alongside his family at El Arco Iris, which his grandparents started in the 1960s, Gomez is a restaurant owner for and of our current, food-obsessed age. He’s a serious businessman who loves the creative side of running restaurants—purchasing the art on the walls, collaborating with architects and designers, and occasionally offering input on a dish. And although he operates restaurants all over town, including a new “Mexican seafood joint” opening in Eagle Rock this summer, he’s still obsessively focused on the details. He loves having his hands in the food, the drinks, the managing of people, and crunching the numbers to figure out how much you can charge for a cocktail if you buy a bottle of tequila for $20. With that smartphone in his hands, he shows me how he can adjust Mercado’s lights and music up and down as we sit in a booth in the restaurant’s still empty mezzanine at 5 p.m. on a Monday evening.

This is technically Gomez’s day off, although he interviewed a potential manager for the new restaurant over lunch, and he treats our drinks like he’s working, drinking water as I sip a blood orange margarita. After living in Los Feliz and Silver Lake for over a decade, he recently moved to Venice. “I got the idea in my head after we opened in Santa Monica and I was here seven days a week,” he says. “I envision, on a Saturday night, working here, and starting my weekend going home, hanging out, and enjoying being close to the water.”

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