Santa Monica Quotes

Santa Monica's only walkable if death is no hurdle. The air's the wrong colour. People put sunglasses on their dogs. It's a hideous place where humans are not welcome and those who stay suffer eight kinds of brain damage.

The Santa Monica Freeway is traditionally the scene of every form of automotive folly known to man. It is not white and well-bred like the San Diego, nor as treacherously engineered as the Pasadena, nor quite as ghetto-suicidal as the Harbor. No, one hesitates to say it, but the Santa Monica is a freeway for freaks.

8 A.M., Winifred Chapman got off the bus at the intersection of Santa Monica and Canyon Drive. A light-skinned black in her mid-fifties, Mrs. Chapman was the housekeeper at 10050 Cielo, and she was upset because, thanks

Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money. But in the mathematics department at Santa Monica College, no one expected to be rich. It was enough to know. She was lucky to spend her days like this, knowing.

I still remember the day my father took me to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books for the first time. It was the early summer of 1945, and we walked through the streets of a Barcelona trapped beneath ashen skies as dawn poured over Rambla de Santa Monica in a wreath of liquid copper.

the full California workup: shopping on Rodeo Drive, a ridiculously overpriced lunch at the Ivy, an afternoon at the beach, and dinner at a quaint outdoor bistro in Santa Monica.

Now I know all city parks are the same. Hyde Park. The bluffs above Santa Monica. The Tuileries. Just paths beneath trees where people walk in varying states of heartbreak. Staggering between divorces and biopsies. And at the edge, one final row of lavender azaleas.

I stood by and spoke out for Amazon when Amazon was attacked by Hatchett and other traditional publishers in the early days. I also represented Amazon as an author spokesperson to the media during the Press Conference launch in Santa Monica for Kindle Family as well as at Book Expo America. Today, authors don't have that kind of loyalty to a distributor of their books. They don't have that kind of loyalty to the publishers of their books and jump around to find the best deal for each book and going back and forth between publishing with a big publisher and self-publishing. Publishing like any industry is built on relationships. When an author is published by multiple publishers and jumps around, it signals to her publishers her lack of commitment to them. It is only human to see this lack of trust. So, my advice to authors who jump around...find a good publisher to land with if you decide to go with a traditional publisher. Be committed to them or it will seem like a betrayal when you are published with another publisher in the same genre. - Advice to Authors by Kailin Gow

This one night we were smoking a joint up on the roof of this apartment over on Santa Monica and Wyatt said, “I love you so much and I don’t understand why you don’t love me.” I said, “I love you as much as I’m willing to love anybody.” Which was true. I wasn’t really willing to be vulnerable with anybody at that point. I had felt too much vulnerability too young. I didn’t want to do it anymore.

Most people new to a city on the ocean would probably go to the beach during the day when there are people around. I, on the other hand, decided to try a midnight swim at the somewhat gamy Santa Monica pier, by myself. That is, until a nearby guard kicked me off the beach for my own safety.

In those two years in the beginning I was happy, and happiness has a way of quickening. Grief marks things. Joy lets them through. Days and months can pass in the blink of an eye. I was happier than I ever remember being in my life. Things changed. Jessica and I moved out. Tobias and I moved in. She got engaged. Then married. And then, he left. We were two years in, six since Santa Monica. What I didn't know then was that we were only halfway there.

I worry that travel is becoming more a form of consumerism, whether you live in Santa Monica or Shanghai, than a real exercise in curiosity, and that as the world grows more open and available, going to another country will seem more like going to a cool ethnic supermarket or trendy restaurant than a true journey into shock or difference.

Never let your past define you.

The Homeric Epic does not have to be discovered inside a book; it begins just west of Fort Worth and extends all the way to Santa Monica.

Before you descend into the Underworld, you must go to Santa Monica.

And then, in front of the fairy-tale lights of the Santa Monica pier, I pull Henry in for another kiss.

„Now they stand along Santa Monica Blvd. with a haunted look on their faces like ghost unsure for their next move

I was an easy birth, and I have never regretted it. Not even for a visit would I return to the womb. I never sleep in the fetal position, but on my back or stomach, legs flung wide. I stay out of hot dark closets. I choose rooms with windows, full of moving air. I like scattered light, a moon, stars, but will settle for anything, even that greenish glow found nowhere in nature of a Santa Monica Freeway sign.

ROBERT MASELLO is the author of many previous works of fiction and nonfiction, most recently the novels Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing under the novelists Robert Stone and Geoffrey Wolff at Princeton, and has since taught and lectured at many leading universities. For six years, he was the visiting lecturer in literature at Claremont McKenna College. He now lives and works in Santa Monica,

I thought back to the day in Santa Monica when I'd gone through Jack's desk, or at least I'd tried to go through it. I hadn't seen anything because I hadn't anted to see anything. It's hard to see clearly when there's sand in your eyes.

On certain days, driving into Santa Monica was like having hallucinations without going to all the trouble of acquiring and then taking a particular drug, although some days, for sure, any drug was preferable to driving into Santa Monica.

LIVE OR DIE': the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death. If you live, you live, if you die, you die. It is like saying 'be yourself, or don't be!' It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic. You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal. Following the model of 'payor die!', 'your money or your life!', it would become ' your life or your life!'. Stupid, again, since you cannot exchange life for itself. And yet there is poetic force in this implacable tautology, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood. In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: 'if you get more stupid than me, you die!

According to the L.A. news, the explosion at the Santa Monica beach had been caused when a crazy kidnapper fired a shotgun at a police car. He accidentally hit a gas main that had ruptured during the earthquake. This crazy kidnapper (a.k.a. Ares) was the same man who had abducted me and two other adolescents in New York and brought us across country on a ten-day odyssey of terror. Poor little Percy Jackson wasn’t an international criminal after all. He’d caused a commotion on that Greyhound bus in New Jersey trying to get away from his captor (and afterward, witnesses would even swear they had seen the leather-clad man on the bus—“Why didn’t I remember him before?”). The crazy man had caused the explosion in the St. Louis Arch. After all, no kid could’ve done that. A concerned waitress in Denver had seen the man threatening his abductees outside her diner, gotten a friend to take a photo, and notified the police. Finally, brave Percy Jackson (I was beginning to like this kid) had stolen a gun from his captor in Los Angeles and battled him shotgun-to-rifle on the beach. Police had arrived just in time. But in the spectacular explosion, five police cars had been destroyed and the captor had fled. No fatalities had occurred. Percy Jackson and his two friends were safely in police custody.

She always felt lucky to be in the presence of such brilliant people. Thinkers. Blake’s colleagues viewed intelligence as a means to an end, and the end was always making more money. But in the mathematics department at Santa Monica College, no one expected to be rich. It was enough to know.

This one night we were smoking a joint up on the roof of this apartment over on Santa Monica and Wyatt said, ‘I love you so much and I don’t understand why you don’t love me.’ I said, ‘I love you as much as I’m willing to love anybody.’/ And then he had this chorus about me having a big heart but no love in it. I kept looking at the words, thinking, This isn’t right. He didn’t understand me at all. So I thought about it for a little while and got out a pen and paper. I wrote some things down. When he woke up, I said, ‘Your chorus should be more like Big eyes, big soul/big heart, no control/but all she got to give is tiny love.

In May 2002, the principal of Franklin Elementary School in Santa Monica, California, sent a newsletter to parents informing them that children could no longer play tag during the lunch recess. As she explained, “The running part of this activity is healthy and encouraged; however, in this game there is a ‘victim’ or ‘it,’ which creates a self-esteem issue.”4 School districts in Texas, Maryland, New York, and Virginia “have banned, limited, or discouraged” dodgeball.5 “Any time you throw an object at somebody,” said an elementary school coach in Cambridge, Massachusetts, “it creates an environment of retaliation and resentment.”6 Coaches who permit children to play dodgeball “should be fired immediately,” according to the physical education chairman at Central High School in Naperville, Illinois.7

That brings us to the third bond,” Elizabeth said, pointing at another set of molecules, “the hydrogen bond—the most fragile, delicate bond of all. I call this the ‘love at first sight’ bond because both parties are drawn to each other based solely on visual information: you like his smile, he likes your hair. But then you talk and discover he’s a closet Nazi and thinks women complain too much. Poof. Just like that the delicate bond is broken. That’s the hydrogen bond for you, ladies—a chemical reminder that if things seem too good to be true, they probably are.” She walked back behind the counter and, exchanging the marker for a knife, took a Paul Bunyan swing at a large yellow onion, cleaving it in two. “It’s chicken pot pie night,” she announced. “Let’s get started.” “See?” a woman in Santa Monica demanded as she turned to her sullen seventeen-year-old daughter, the girl’s eyeliner so thick, it looked as if planes could land there. “What did I tell you? Your bond with that boy is hydrogen only. When are you going to wake up and smell the ions?” “Not this again.” “You could go to college. You could be something!” “He loves me!” “He’s holding you back!” “More after this,” Elizabeth said as the cameraman indicated a commercial break.

SpongeBob SquarePants vs. Squidward Tentacles When SpongeBob SquarePants tried to have kinky sex with Squidward Tentacles, SpongeBob was confused as to whether to suck the octopus's nose or use Squidward's head as a butt-plug. SpongeBob appreciated a challenge and decided to do both at the same time. Now SpongeBob has a lucrative career as a Yoga instructor at Yogis Anonymous in Santa Monica. Gary the Snail runs the Spin class.

One of my favorite album covers is On the Beach. Of course that was the name of a movie and I stole it for my record, but that doesn't matter. The idea for that cover came like a bolt from the blue. Gary and I traveled around getting all the pieces to put it together. We went to a junkyard in Santa Ana to get the tail fin and fender from a 1959 Cadillac, complete with taillights, and watched them cut it off a Cadillac for us, then we went to a patio supply place to get the umbrella and table. We picke up the bad polyester yellow jacket and white pants at a sleazy men's shop, where we watched a shoplifter getting caught red-handed and busted. Gary and I were stoned on some dynamite weed and stood there dumbfounded watching the bust unfold. This girl was screaming and kicking! Finally we grabbed a local LA paper to use as a prop. It had this amazing headline: Sen. Buckley Calls For Nixon to Resign. Next we took the palm tree I had taken around the world on the Tonight's the Night tour. We then placed all of these pieces carefully in the sand at Santa Monica beach. Then we shot it. Bob Seidemann was the photographer, the same one who took the famous Blind Faith cover shot of the naked young girl holding the airplane. We used the crazy pattern from the umbrella insides for the inside of the sleeve that held the vinyl recording. That was the creative process at work. We lived for that, Gary and I, and we still do.

A retired bank vice-president named Harry Breitfeller, who lived in a comfortable duplex in Santa Monica with his wife and other relatives, stepped out on the cement porch a little after nine one morning to pick up the mail. There were half a dozen envelopes, mostly bills, in the mailbox, and a whacking big cardboard carton on the porch under it. Breitfeller picked up the carton, thinking it must be something his wife had ordered, but saw that his own name was on the label.

It’s even possible that Marilyn was found still breathing, rushed to Santa Monica Hospital by ambulance in an effort to save her, and returned to her own bed only after she was dead. There is some testimony to this on the part of ambulance drivers from a company that had transported Marilyn before. Anthony Summers reports the possibility that her unsuccessful rescuers could have been Robert Kennedy, or Peter Lawford, or both, responding in alarm to a last slurred phone call from Marilyn.

But in the morning the beach was filled with tourists and the amethyst was just a rock. The quiet was gone again and replaced with nothingness. The candle had melted all over the deck and I spent a good half hour scraping wax, which was congealing—thinly—in the sun. I decided I would take Dominic for a walk over to the Santa Monica farmers’ market, try to be like other humans on a Sunday. Maybe buy some fruit and be swept away in some bullshit of the day. Maybe I could just be a woman and her dog buying fruit.

Many of us have things backwards. We believe that we have to wait to create the circumstances we want in life and rack up a lot of successes so we can finally relax. Actually, it works the other way around. We should leave where we are and move to where we ultimately dream of living, whether it’s Boulder, Santa Monica, Chicago, or Tibet. Then once we’re there, we’ll figure out ways to fashion a livelihood that will enable us to survive and to prosper from there. Paradise shouldn’t wait, and happiness shouldn’t either.

I didn’t return Mabel’s nine hundred texts because I knew we’d end up like this no matter what. What happened had broken us even if it wasn’t about us at all. Because I know that for all her care and understanding, when this visit is over and she’s back in LA with Jacob and her new friends, sitting in her lecture halls or riding the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or eating dinner by herself in front of an open textbook, she’ll be the same as she’s always been—fearless and funny and whole. She’ll still be herself and I’ll be learning who I am now.

I didn't return Mabel's nine hundred texts because I knew we'd end up like this no matter what. What happened had broken us even if it wasn't about us at all. Because I know that for all her care and understanding, when this visit is over and she's back in LA with Jacob and her new friends, sitting in her lecture halls or riding the Ferris wheel in Santa Monica or eating dinner by herself in front of an open textbook, she'll be the same as she's always been - fearless and funny and whole. She'll still be herself and I'll be learning who I am now.

going anyplace outside L.A. Just bothering to go someplace other than Santa Monica was incomprehensible when I could just wake up every morning at dawn, yank on my bathing suit still on the floor from the night before when I’d yanked it off, hurry down to Hollywood and Gower to catch the 91S bus down Hollywood Boulevard and then Santa Monica Boulevard to Beverly Hills and transfer to the 83 going straight out to the beach untilfinally there I’d be, at 8:00 A.M. or so, able to feel the cool sand get warm as the morning sun glazed over the tops of the palm trees up on the palisades while waves of the ocean crashed down day after day so anyone could throw himself into the tides and bodysurf throughout eternity.

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

Dr. Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for inventing PCR, stated publicly numerous times that his invention should never be used for the diagnosis of infectious diseases. In July of 1997, during an event called Corporate Greed and AIDS in Santa Monica CA, Dr. Mullis explained on video, “With PCR you can find almost anything in anybody. It starts making you believe in the sort of Buddhist notion that everything is contained in everything else, right? I mean, because if you can model amplify one single molecule up to something that you can really measure, which PCR can do, then there’s just very few molecules that you don’t have at least one single one of them in your body. Okay? So that could be thought of as a misuse of it, just to claim that it’s meaningful.” Mikki explained, “The major issue with PCR is that it’s easily manipulated. It functions through a cyclical process whereby each revolution amplifies magnification. On a molecular level, most of us already have trace amounts of genetic fragments similar to coronavirus within us. By simply over-cycling the process, a negative result can be flipped to a positive. Governing bodies such as the CDC and the WHO can control the number of cases by simply advising the medical industry to increase or decrease the cycle threshold (CT).” In August of 2020, the New York Times reported that “a CT beyond 34 revolutions very rarely detect live virus, but most often, dead nucleotides that are not even contagious. In compliance with guidance from the CDC and the WHO, many top US labs have been conducting tests at cycle thresholds of 40 or more. NYT examined data from Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada and determined that up to 90 percent of the individuals who tested positive carried barely any virus.”17 90 percent! In May of 2021, CDC changed the PCR cycle threshold from 40 to 28 or lower for those who have been vaccinated. This one adjustment of the numbers allowed the vaccine pushers to praise the vaccines as a big success.

The first movie star I met was Norma Shearer. I was eight years old at the time and going to school with Irving Thalberg Jr. His father, the longtime production chief at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, devoted a large part of his creative life to making Norma a star, and he succeeded splendidly. Unfortunately, Thalberg had died suddenly in 1936, and his wife's career had begun to slowly deflate. Just like kids everywhere else, Hollywood kids had playdates at each other's houses, and one day I went to the Thalberg house in Santa Monica, where Irving Sr. had died eighteen months before. Norma was in bed, where, I was given to understand, she spent quite a bit of time so that on those occasions when she worked or went out in public she would look as rested as possible. She was making Marie Antoinette at the time, and to see her in the flesh was overwhelming. She very kindly autographed a picture for me, which I still have: "To Cadet Wagner, with my very best wishes. Norma Shearer." Years later I would be with her and Martin Arrouge, her second husband, at Sun Valley. No matter who the nominal hostess was, Norma was always the queen, and no matter what time the party was to begin, Norma was always late, because she would sit for hours—hours!—to do her makeup, then make the grand entrance. She was always and forever the star. She had to be that way, really, because she became a star by force of will—hers and Thalberg's. Better-looking on the screen than in life, Norma Shearer was certainly not a beauty on the level of Paulette Goddard, who didn't need makeup, didn't need anything. Paulette could simply toss her hair and walk out the front door, and strong men grew weak in the knees. Norma found the perfect husband in Martin. He was a lovely man, a really fine athlete—Martin was a superb skier—and totally devoted to her. In the circles they moved in, there were always backbiting comments when a woman married a younger man—" the stud ski instructor," that sort of thing. But Martin, who was twelve years younger than Norma and was indeed a ski instructor, never acknowledged any of that and was a thorough gentleman all his life. He had a superficial facial resemblance to Irving Thalberg, but Thalberg had a rheumatic heart and was a thin, nonathletic kind of man—intellectually vital, but physically weak. Martin was just the opposite—strong and virile, with a high energy level. Coming after years of being married to Thalberg and having to worry about his health, Martin must have been a delicious change for Norma.

I’ve always been very Type-A, so a friend of mine got me into cycling when I was living in L.A. I lived right on the beach in Santa Monica, where there’s this great bike path in the sand that goes for, I think, 25 miles. I’d go onto the bike path, and I would [go] head down and push it—just red-faced huffing, all the way, pushing it as hard as I could. I would go all the way down to one end of the bike path and back, and then head home, and I’d set my little timer when doing this. . . . “I noticed it was always 43 minutes. That’s what it took me to go as fast as I could on that bike path. But I noticed that, over time, I was starting to feel less psyched about going out on the bike path. Because mentally, when I would think of it, it would feel like pain and hard work. . . . So, then I thought, ‘You know, it’s not cool for me to associate negative stuff with going on the bike ride. Why don’t I just chill? For once, I’m gonna go on the same bike ride, and I’m not going to be a complete snail, but I’ll go at half of my normal pace.’ I got on my bike, and it was just pleasant. “I went on the same bike ride, and I noticed that I was standing up, and I was looking around more. I looked into the ocean, and I saw there were these dolphins jumping in the ocean, and I went down to Marina del Rey, to my turnaround point, and I noticed in Marina del Rey, that there was a pelican that was flying above me. I looked up. I was like, ‘Hey, a pelican!’ and he shit in my mouth. “So, the point is: I had such a nice time. It was purely pleasant. There was no red face, there was no huffing. And when I got back to my usual stopping place, I looked at my watch, and it said 45 minutes. I thought, ‘How the hell could that have been 45 minutes, as opposed to my usual 43? There’s no way.’ But it was right: 45 minutes. That was a profound lesson that changed the way I’ve approached my life ever since. . . . “We could do the math, [but] whatever, 93-something-percent of my huffing and puffing, and all that red face and all that stress was only for an extra 2 minutes. It was basically for nothing. . . . [So,] for life, I think of all of this maximization—getting the maximum dollar out of everything, the maximum out of every second, the maximum out of every minute—you don’t need to stress about any of this stuff. Honestly, that’s been my approach ever since. I do things, but I stop before anything gets stressful. . . . “You notice this internal ‘Argh.’ That’s my cue. I treat that like physical pain. What am I doing? I need to stop doing that thing that hurts. What is that? And, it usually means that I’m just pushing too hard, or doing things that I don’t really want to be doing.

Show me." He looks at her, his eyes darker than the air. "If you draw me a map I think I'll understand better." "Do you have paper?" She looks over the empty sweep of the car's interior. "I don't have anything to write with." He holds up his hands, side to side as if they were hinged. "That's okay. You can just use my hands." She smiles, a little confused. He leans forward and the streetlight gives him yellow-brown cat eyes. A car rolling down the street toward them fills the interior with light, then an aftermath of prickling black waves. "All right." She takes his hands, runs her finger along one edge. "Is this what you mean? Like, if the ocean was here on the side and these knuckles are mountains and here on the back it's Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West L.A., West Hollywood, and X marks the spot." She traces her fingertips over the backs of his hands, her other hand pressing into the soft pads of his palm. "This is where we are- X." "Right now? In this car?" He leans back; his eyes are black marble, dark lamps. She holds his gaze a moment, hears a rush of pulse in her ears like ocean surf. Her breath goes high and tight and shallow; she hopes he can't see her clearly in the car- her translucent skin so vulnerable to the slightest emotion. He turns her hands over, palms up, and says, "Now you." He draws one finger down one side of her palm and says, "This is the Tigris River Valley. In this section there's the desert, and in this point it's plains. The Euphrates runs along there. This is Baghdad here. And here is Tahrir Square." He touches the center of her palm. "At the foot of the Jumhurriya Bridge. The center of everything. All the main streets run out from this spot. In this direction and that direction, there are wide busy sidewalks and apartments piled up on top of shops, men in business suits, women with strollers, street vendors selling kabobs, eggs, fruit drinks. There's the man with his cart who sold me rolls sprinkled with thyme and sesame every morning and then saluted me like a soldier. And there's this one street...." He holds her palm cradled in one hand and traces his finger up along the inside of her arm to the inner crease of her elbow, then up to her shoulder. Everywhere he touches her it feels like it must be glowing, as if he were drawing warm butter all over her skin. "It just goes and goes, all the way from Baghdad to Paris." He circles her shoulder. "And here"- he touches the inner crease of her elbow-"is the home of the Nile crocodile with the beautiful speaking voice. And here"- his fingers return to her shoulder, dip along their clavicle-"is the dangerous singing forest." "The dangerous singing forest?" she whispers. He frowns and looks thoughtful. "Or is that in Madagascar?" His hand slips behind her neck and he inches toward her on the seat. "There's a savanna. Chameleons like emeralds and limes and saffron and rubies. Red cinnamon trees filled with lemurs." "I've always wanted to see Madagascar," she murmurs: his breath is on her face. Their foreheads touch. His hand rises to her face and she can feel that he's trembling and she realizes that she's trembling too. "I'll take you," he whispers.

Mason’s thoughts went to what he’d do if his own nine-year-old were seventeen. If Haley needed a ride home, and somehow he couldn’t pick her up, he’d get a buddy to do it. Hire a babysitter to go get her in a taxi. She’d hate that, but young girls weren’t safe on the bus, not safe anywhere now, even in white bread Santa Monica.

He slowed down at Santa Monica Boulevard, edging around a bedraggled old lady who wore a pink Afro wig and a long skirt dragging the pavement behind her. She turned to hiss at the police car and rattle the shopping cart heaped with plastic bags that she was stealing from the nearby Whole Foods market. What lady? What’s your problem?

I'd much rather spend all day on the Santa Monica pier playing Asteroids than delve into the murk and analyze myself. And if you think I haven't gone down to the pier to do that recently, well, you'd be wrong. Sometimes you just have to be twelve again.

They walked off together into the night. There was something ghostly about the misery that pushed its way into districts where some remnants of well-being still remained and where night life was provided for foreigners. Between the exhibition of neediness in the streets and the routine of the night clubs there was no bridge. The music of the entertainment business drowned out the whistles of the rescue cars, picking up people collapsing from starvation in front of doors behind which bands played for pleasure-seeking foreigners and for native Viennese who wrung a profit out of misery. Martha Monica was frightened. But the Italian reassured her. “Don't think of bad people today. Rather think of me,” he said in his amusing accent. Why were these people bad? the girl wanted to know. Santa Madonna! They were just people who made capital out of their infirmities, so she learned. Besides, some of these infirmities were not even real, but simulated. Would she bet him that that fellow over there in a tattered infantry uniform was artificially producing that chronic trembling in his limbs? With the unfathomable readiness of human nature to insult the misery of others in order to lull its own conscience, the smooth-speaking Italian piled proof on proof. In its abundance it sounded plausible, and besides, Martha Monica had no possible way of checking it. Foreigners always knew better than the residents.

This building is reserved for low-income individuals earning seventy grand a year or less.” Eve was stunned. “That’s poverty wage in Santa Monica?” “And all of Los Angeles County,” Gus said. Duncan looked at Eve. “That’s insane. Give me one good reason why anybody lives in Southern California?” “In-N-Out Burger.

Before he would even begin to train me, Chris insisted that I undertake what is called a lactate test—a torturous procedure scientifically designed to identify a person’s level of fitness with relative exactitude. So the first week of May 2008 I visited Phase IV Scientific Health and Performance Center in Santa Monica. My bike was rigged up to a machine called a CompuTrainer, which used a computer to calculate my cycling cadence and watts—the measure of power my legs exerted with each pedal stroke. After a brief warm-up, watts—or pedal resistance—were progressively increased every four minutes until failure. And with each successive four-minute interval, my heart rate was recorded and my blood tested—all to evaluate the level of lactate in my system, an indicator of physiological fatigue.

It was 7 a.m. on 19 February 1979 and sunny in Santa Monica. The three passengers who followed their pilot into the little Cessna 172 were in high spirits, and not just because of the weather. The day before, Norman Ollestad, just eleven years old, had won Southern California Slalom Skiing Championship. His father, Norman Senior, 43, was an incredibly driven and charismatic man who encouraged his son to go right to the edge in life – and then see what was on the other side. Ollestad Senior had driven his son back home to the coast for hockey practice the same evening as his slalom triumph. And now, the day after, he had chartered the plane and pilot to return to the resort of Big Bear so his son could collect his trophy and get in a little extra ski training. The pilot climbed into his seat and put on his headphones. Norman Jnr was stepping into the back seat when his dad pointed up front. Norman couldn’t believe it – he was going to sit next to the pilot! His dad slipped into the back

On Sunday Maya and I went for lunch at the Villa Antigua Santa Monica, a charming old hacienda on the edge of Parque Juarez.

Constraining new high-tech office buildings amounts to reducing the number of jobs that a city can create, because it is quite unlikely that factories will open in the urban core of cities like San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Santa Monica is what I once naïvely pictured all of Los Angeles would be: the palm trees, indoor-outdoor restaurants, views of the ocean, trim green parks. Temperatures sway gently between warm and cool; the air is either muzzy or sparkly. Attractive people lead their Weimaraners on leather leashes.

January 26: Marilyn is invited to attend the Foreign Press Association’s First Annual International Film Festival at the Club Del Mar in Santa Monica and creates a sensation by wearing an Idaho potato burlap bag designed for her by Billy Travilla.

THIS HAPPPENED, not in 312 A.D., but in August, 1971. A retired bank vice-president named Harry Breitfeller, who lived in a comfortable duplex in Santa Monica with his wife and other relatives, stepped out on the cement porch a little after nine one morning to pick up the mail. There were half a dozen envelopes, mostly bills, in the mailbox, and a whacking big cardboard carton on the porch under it. Breitfeller picked up the carton, thinking it must be something his wife had ordered, but saw that his own name was on the label. There was no return address. According to the postmark, the box had been mailed late the previous afternoon in Clear-water, which is about 34 miles northeast of Los Angeles.

February 8: She wins the Henrietta Award as “The Best Young Box Office Personality” at the Del Mar Club at 1910 Ocean Front Avenue in Santa Monica.

JANE WIEDLIN: When Miles Copeland, the president of our record label, said we were gonna shoot a music video for “Our Lips Are Sealed,” we were like, “Music video? That’s stupid. You suck.” We were totally bratty about it. The money he used for the video was, like, left over from the Police’s video budget. It was pennies. They got a guy to follow us around Hollywood. We wanted an old-school convertible, so we rented it from Rent-A-Wreck for $10 or $15. This was the plot: “Get in a car and drive around. Belinda, you sing. Everyone else look cute.” When we needed a grand finale, our big idea was to jump in the fountain at the intersection of Santa Monica and Wilshire in Beverly Hills. I remember thinking, The cops are gonna come any minute, this is gonna be so cool.

Josh Miller, 22 years old. He is co-founder of Branch, a “platform for chatting online as if you were sitting around the table after dinner.” Miller works at Betaworks, a hybrid company encapsulating a co-working space, an incubator and a venture capital fund, headquartered on 13th Street in the heart of the Meatpacking District. This kid in T-shirt and Bermuda shorts, and a potential star of the 2.0 version of Sex and the City, is super-excited by his new life as a digital neo-entrepreneur. He dropped out of Princeton in the summer of 2011 a year before getting his degree—heresy for the almost 30,000 students who annually apply to the prestigious Ivy League school in the hope of being among the 9% of applicants accepted. What made him decide to take such a big step? An internship in the summer of 2011 at Meetup, the community site for those who organize meetings in the flesh for like-minded people. His leader, Scott Heiferman, took him to one of the monthly meetings of New York Tech Meetup and it was there that Miller saw the light. “It was the coolest thing that ever happened to me,” he remembers. “All those people with such incredible energy. It was nothing like the sheltered atmosphere of Princeton.” The next step was to take part in a seminar on startups where the idea for Branch came to him. He found two partners –students at NYU who could design a website. Heartened by having won a contest for Internet projects, Miller dropped out of Princeton. “My parents told me I was crazy but I think they understood because they had also made unconventional choices when they were kids,” says Miller. “My father, who is now a lawyer, played drums when he was at college, and he and my mother, who left home at 16, traveled around Europe for a year. I want to be a part of the new creative class that is pushing the boundaries farther. I want to contribute to making online discussion important again. Today there is nothing but the soliloquy of bloggers or rude anonymous comments.” The idea, something like a public group email exchange where one can contribute by invitation only, interested Twitter cofounder Biz Stone and other California investors who invited Miller and his team to move to San Francisco, financing them with a two million dollar investment. After only four months in California, Branch returned to New York, where it now employs a dozen or so people. “San Francisco was beautiful and I learned a lot from Biz and my other mentors, but there’s much more adrenaline here,” explains Miller, who is from California, born and raised in Santa Monica. “Life is more varied here and creating a technological startup is something new, unlike in San Francisco or Silicon Valley where everyone’s doing it: it grabs you like a drug. Besides New York is the media capital and we’re an online publishing organization so it’s only right to be here.”[52]

Over the past few months, we have introduced a number of great benefits and tools to make us more productive, efficient and fun. With the introduction of initiatives like FYI, Goals and PB&J, we want everyone to participate in our culture and contribute to the positive momentum. From Sunnyvale to Santa Monica, Bangalore to Beijing—I think we can all feel the energy and buzz in our offices. To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices. Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together. Beginning in June, we’re asking all employees with work-from-home arrangements to work in Yahoo offices. If this impacts you, your management has already been in touch with next steps. And, for the rest of us who occasionally have to stay home for the cable guy, please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration. Being a Yahoo isn’t just about your day-to-day job, it is about the interactions and experiences that are only possible in our offices. Thanks to all of you, we’ve already made remarkable progress as a company—and the best is yet to come. Jackie

But most of all, Ethan Overbee liked the things Monique would do for him when he closed the door to his Santa Monica office. It never occurred to Ethan that he made Monique feel like a high-priced prostitute, and that her sense of self-worth was so permanently destroyed she couldn’t even look in the mirror without wanting to throw up.

wearing only a bathing suit interjected, “We would never swim in the Pacific Ocean, Carolyn. The waves at Santa Monica Beach are so lame. You don’t have to worry at all. We just want to roast marshmallows.

Any chance I could interest you in a private star party?

I would think if you understood what communism was, you would hope, you would pray on your knees, that we would someday become communists." -Jane Fonda speech at Michigan State University to raise money for the Black Panthers, Detroit Free Press, 22 November 1969   "My position on the POW issue has been widely misquoted and taken out of context. What I originally said and have continued to say is that the POW's are lying if they assert it was North Vietnamese policy to torture American prisoners." -Jane Fonda, "Who is Being Brainwashed?" An Indochina Peace Campaign Report Santa Monica: Indochina Peace Campaign 1973   "We have no reason to believe that U.S Air Force officers tell the truth. They are professional killers." -Jane Fonda, Washington Star, April 19, 1973

Feel free to use the following mnemonic device to help you remember: “To lay is to get laid and laid.” (This is meant in the stuffiest grammatical sense and in no way implies the kind of smut a Santa Monica police officer might read into it.) “To lie,” then, works as follows. “Today I lie on the beach.” “Yesterday I lay on the beach.” “At times, I have lain on the beach.” None of those acts puts me in any danger of being arrested for lewd and lascivious behavior. But that’s only because I conjugated the verb correctly. I

But even though our old home had physically seen better days, I knew in that moment that we had taken the soul of that house with us to our new home. And as I branched out and left our small town, I'd taken all the best bits of home life - the essence of its soul - with me wherever I went. It's the soul that matters most, after all. And even though over the years I've lived in everything from a cramped dorm room at school to a grand apartment in Paris and finally to our family town home in Santa Monica, I have taken the soul of home with me, wherever I am.

If my tiny studio apartment in Santa Monica were, heaven forbid, to go up in a blazing inferno, the one thing I would rush back inside to save would be my favorite pair of strappy silver slingbacks.

Outside the Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica a hard subtropical rain had been falling for days. It has scaled more paint from the faded hotels and rooming houses... It streamed down the blank windows of unleased offices, loosened the soft coastal cliffs and heightened the most characteristic Santa Monica affect, that air of dispirited abandon which suggests that the place survives only as an illustration of a boom gone bankrupt.

But when it came, all I felt was fear. Fear that he wouldn't be who I'd imagined. Fear that I wasn't ready. Fear that I wouldn't feel the way I was supposed to. Fear that I'd fuck up even this, this thing I was meant for. But what I was not afraid of, maybe, was that it was over. It's hard to be single, but it's also something you can get good at. And I was good at it. It's easy to love the things we are good at. Yes, I wanted epic love. Weak-in-the-knees, movie-kiss-in-the-rain epic love. What I never realized, not up until this very moment, is that I got it - everything I'd been asking for. I'd been on the back of a motorcycle in Paris and across the Golden Gate Bridge at sunrise. I'd been on the beach in Santa Monica at sunset. My life has been filled with magical moments, I was just so busy waiting I didn't see them when they were here.

We chose each other when we were children. We chose each other again when we were fourteen. I chose you, and you chose me. That’s what the parabatai ceremony is, really, isn’t it? It’s a way of sealing that promise. The one that says that I will always choose you.” She leaned against his arm, just the lightest touch of her shoulder against his, but it lit up his body like fireworks over the Santa Monica Pier. “Jules?” He nodded, not trusting himself to speak. “I will always choose you, too,” she said, and, laying her head on his shoulder, shut her eyes.

LA’s 468 square miles of land and 34 square miles of water extend to the Santa Monica Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, include nine lakes, one river, and a million trees. Within its borders are 390 public parks and 15,710 acres of parkland. Surprised? Most people—even some who live in LA—are not aware of the immense connection the city still retains to the natural world. Los Angeles has made nature its own, woven its own unique cultural landscape onto the physical one, and perhaps shaped the tale of Mother Nature into a structure it’s comfortable with—that of a Hollywood blockbuster screenplay. Jenny Price, author of the brilliant essay “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in LA,”writes: “The history of Los Angeles storytelling, if more complicated, still basically boils down to a trilogy. Nature blesses Los Angeles. Nature flees Los Angeles. And nature returns armed.

Should we talk about the elephant in the room?” “I didn’t win you an elephant, but we can go to Santa Monica right now if that’s what you want.

Progress is happening all around us, and an urban mountain lion is the ultimate sign of the region’s ecological health. The plight of P-22 has captured the imagination of Angelinos—and people across the globe—bringing them a glimpse into a wilder world, one that refuses to be contained by the boundaries of endless paved freeways. Even some who fear P-22 and his brethren still cheer him on, sharing the sentiment expressed by Gregory Rodriguez in the LA Times: “I have no illusions that the Glendale bear or P-22 wouldn’t hesitate to dine on me given the right circumstances. But I’m still rooting for them. Deep down I’m hoping that if they can survive at the margins of human civilization without forsaking their wildness, so can I.” Truly, it’s something to celebrate that the city that gave us Carmageddon also has allowed a mountain lion to thrive. Los Angeles now needs to prove to P-22 his journey wasn’t for naught. Let’s give him—and all his Santa Monica Mountain kin—a Hollywood ending by building the largest wildlife crossing in the world in one of the largest urban areas in the country. He deserves as much.

Henry Huntington shaped the system of transportation which, along with other forces, launched the entire region from Santa Monica to Redlands and from San Fernando to Santa Ana, on the road to becoming the great City of Southern California.

the Upfront Comedy Showcase, in Santa Monica—and renamed it the Grand National Championships.

Me? I felt like I was going to throw up just because the bill had arrived at a Santa Monica sushi restaurant.

He hadn't prepared for this. He'd never expected to be reminded of the lust of his youth, to see the woman who had been his very reason for breathing so many years ago. He'd expected to see Joanna and didn't know how the rage and love he felt for her would surface, but this was too much.

Santa Monica Pier.

I'm a child again on the threshold of wonder--from That April in Santa Monica.

Let it go, Madison! Let go of the pain, let go of the yesterday you could never face. Let it go and carry on!

therefore an investment like that is unbeatable. Buildings that I would buy for $500K within the year were $800K and I put only maybe $100K down, so you made 300% on your money. . . . I quickly developed and traded up my buildings and bought more apartment buildings and office buildings on Main Street down in Santa Monica and so on. . . . I benefited from [a magic decade] and I became a millionaire from my real estate investments.

What’s the rent on a studio here?” Duncan asked. “Seventeen hundred a month.” Duncan whistled. “That’s about as much as my mortgage.” “This building is reserved for low-income individuals earning seventy grand a year or less.” Eve was stunned. “That’s poverty wage in Santa Monica?” “And all of Los Angeles County,” Gus said.

Not at All Fun, Actually I mean, I knew there were people living on the streets in Santa Monica. You’d have to be blind not to notice them. Though until tonight I never really focused on them. In fact, I tried really hard not to focus on them. Whenever I saw someone sleeping in an alley or picking through a trash can or trudging along in taped-up shoes, I looked away and hurried past them. Not because I’m one of those spoiled self–centered teenage girls whose idea of unendurable hardship is having a broken fingernail. But because… Well, because seeing those people stirs up all sorts of stuff in me. Stuff I don’t like to think about …

I met Ming at an old run-down bistro in Santa Monica. My friend had been writing her great McLuhanesque horror film for the last nine years—"The Medium Is the Monster." Each time she finished a draft the technology changed and so over the years Ming had developed a hatred of youth and trends that I found immensely comforting.

On a late afternoon in late summer the air-pollution count is 0.37, and sunlight mists the headstone of a star who was born, then died young. Beyond the lines of markers a boulevard growls with traffic and a billboard on stilts announces Elvis Presley in Las Vegas. The distant Santa Monica mountains, blurred with heat and smoke, look as desolate as a photograph of the moon.

I lived various places, Hancock Park, Beachwood Canyon, Studio City, and lastly in Nichols Canyon, not far from where I was staying. West Hollywood is known as an LGBTQ+ area of Los Angeles. Rows of queer bars run along Santa Monica Boulevard, mostly catering to cis white gay men. Rainbows line the streets.

What’s your constraint?” I said, using some newly acquired memoir-writer lingo. He ignored the question. “I’m a career yearner. Women rule me. Of course, some of the material was covered in my first memoir, but this book more specifically parses my search for atonement in women.” Everyone in L.A. knew that Spade was a big-league, serial pussy hound. L.A. County was a veritable body dump of his exes. Maggie had bolted out of town not long after last year’s book fest, taking a teaching gig in a faraway state. An editor I knew was still haunted by a brief fling she had had with Spade back in the ’90s. There were literary ladies stretched from Santa Monica to San Francisco whom he had famously romanced, rolled, and rooked over the years. I didn’t know much more about his pursuit of women, other than it had left a high body count.

Is it unethical to lie writing obits? All those accomplishments and stellar qualities, were they fudged like dating profiles and resumes? (said by Henry Davis, protagonist of "Stoner Ghosts of Santa Monica")

Melrose Avenue, Santa Monica - Dialogue on a terrace. SHE: You are jealous ? Are you jealous ? You are fucking jealous! . . . Let me say . . . You 're twenty and I am forty-two, and I'll give my fucking ass to fucking anybody . . . Do you know that? * He gets up, crosses Melrose for no reason, comes back, kneels down in front of her (younger, but as theatrical). HE: Do you love me? Do you love me? SHE: Yes . . . Yes, I love you . . . The Italian kneads his meatballs. An Indian is playing a video game and its shrill soundtrack provides a backing to the conversation. The woman herself speaks in a shrill, hysterical voice. It is pleasant in Los Angeles in November, on the Melrose terrace, around the middle of the night. Everyone is smiling somewhere. No passion. A scene American-style. The waiter takes the car keys and drags off the woman, who shows off her black-stockinged legs and pretends to be mad. A black man gets up and, as he passes, says to me: ' Too much love! ' Gliding along the road that runs beside the coast in a black Porsche is like penetrating slowly into the inside of your own body.

Before me a scholarly man, of European culture, head of a literary department in one of the great universities of the West. He speaks of it with bitterness, as do almost all his colleagues. Culture is not what it was and he has not the slightest regard for mass culture. He comes from New York and, deep down, he despises California, his colleagues and the decline of standards. He gets 60-80,000 dollars a year and does not have many students or friends. He has lots of ideas, is sincere, proud and awkward. His secret is his python. I see him plunge his gloved hand into its glass case and stroke the reptile's head, which shoots out a voracious tongue and uncoils itself, still famished though it has just devoured a rat. We discuss the diet of snakes. A tortoise slumbers by the fireside in the glow of an artificial wood fire. It is Sunday in Santa Monica. Towards four, the sun drives away the mists of the Pacific. But the snake knows neither night nor day; he is immortal and poisonous and, in the words of the poet, he dreams on the hills of the sky. Which is something his master does not do, he whose reptilian brain identifies with the snake's, and who stares long and hard into his face, even though ordinarily he is incapable of looking people straight in the eye. A perverse couple, the somnambulism of the intellectual mingling with the inner night of the reptile.

Ashley sat in the bar of the boutique hotel, admiring the gorgeous tiled light fixtures hanging from the high ceiling above, the colorful Mexican plates displayed on shelves, the framed chalkboard on the wall indicating live music later that night. Being in Tulum made her feel so far away from her five-bedroom mid-century modern house in Santa Monica, with its floor-to-ceiling windows facing west, and sleek but slightly uncomfortable gray furniture. With its closets full of more shoes than she could ever wear—the garage boasting designer cars and every toy and gadget her two daughters could ever want—its backyard home to a pool and hot tub she hadn’t so much as dipped a toe in for months.

Kahala Elementary was a well-funded little haven of progressive education. Except for the fact that the children were allowed to go to school barefoot—an astonishing piece of tropical permissiveness, we thought—Kahala Elementary could have been in a genteel precinct of Santa Monica. Tellingly, however, Kahala had no junior high. That was because every family in the area that could possibly manage it sent its kids to the private secondary schools that have for generations educated Honolulu’s (and much of the rest of Hawaii’s) middle class, along with its rich folk. Ignorant of all this, my parents sent me to the nearest junior high, up in working-class Kaimuki, on the back side of Diamond Head crater, where they assumed I was getting on with the business of the eighth grade, but where in fact I was occupied almost entirely by the rigors of bullies, loneliness, fights, and finding my way, after a lifetime of unconscious whiteness in the segregated suburbs of California, in a racialized world.

I slumped in my seat, pierced by sunlight magnified by the windshield glass.  What was I fighting?  Everything.  I was fighting where I was, who I was, where I was going.  I’ll be here now, I thought.  I’ll be here, not moving, going nowhere in gridlock on the Santa Monica Freeway.  My heartbeat slowed, my muscles relaxed, and my mind, which had been working hard to be elsewhere, focused on where I was, alongside accumulated debris piled against the concrete barrier: a pair of torn trousers, a doll without a head, and a single sneaker that had lost its laces.  The shoe had been run over until it was tire-black. I got out of the Jeep and picked up the shoe.  It was just a running shoe, but I held it tenderly, examining it in one hand and then turning it over to examine it in the other.  I felt every wound as car after car had run over it, crushing its beauty, rending it into a vague semblance of charcoal canvas.

Mann’s outspoken writing and politics put him squarely at odds with the new regime. His books were among those burned by the Nazis on May 10th 1933, cited as being decadent and ‘against the decency of the family and the state’. He fled Germany and travelled through France, Spain and Portugal before settling in the US, where he died in Santa Monica, California, in 1950.

As the late sun descended into the ocean, it seemed to trail ragged strips of black cloud with it, like a burning red planet settling into the Pacific’s watery green rim. When the entire coastline was awash in a pink light you could see almost every geological and floral characteristic of the American continent tumbling from the purple crests of the Santa Monica Mountains into the curling line of foam that slid up onto the beaches: dry hills of chaparral, mesquite, and scrub oak, clumps of eucalyptus and bottlebrush trees, torrey and ponderosa pine growing between blue-tiled stucco houses, coral walls overgrown with bougainvillea, terraced hillside gardens filled with oleander, yucca plants, and trellises dripping with passion vine, and orange groves whose irrigation ditches looked like quicksilver in the sun’s afterglow. Then millions of lights came on in the canyons, along the freeways, and through the vast sweep of the Los Angeles basin, and it was almost as if you were looking down upon the end point of the American dream, a geographical poem into which all our highways eventually led, a city of illusion founded by conquistadors and missionaries and consigned to the care of angels, where far below the spinning propellers of our seaplane black kids along palm-tree-lined streets in Watts hunted each other with automatic weapons.

Evan was born on June 4, 1990, to a pair of highly successful lawyers. His mother, Melissa Thomas, graduated from Harvard Law School and practiced tax law as a partner at a prominent Los Angeles firm before resigning to become a stay-at-home mother when Evan was young. His father, John Spiegel, graduated from Stanford and Yale Law School and became a partner at Munger, Tolles & Olson, an elite firm started by Berkshire Hathaway’s Charlie Munger. His clients included Warner Bros. and Sergey Brin. Evan and his two younger sisters, Lauren and Caroline, grew up in Pacific Palisades, an upper-class neighborhood bordering Santa Monica in western Los Angeles. John had the kids volunteer and help build homes in poor areas of Mexico. When Evan was in high school, Melissa and John divorced after nearly twenty years of marriage. Evan chose to live with his father in a four-million-dollar house in Pacific Palisades, just blocks from his childhood home where his mother still lives. John let young Evan decorate the new home with the help of Greg Grande, the set designer from Friends. Evan decked out his room with a custom white leather king-size bed, Venetian plaster, floating bookshelves, two designer desk chairs, custom closets, and, of course, a brand new computer.

From kindergarten through senior year of high school, Evan attended Crossroads, an elite, coed private school in Santa Monica known for its progressive attitudes. Tuition at Crossroads runs north of $ 22,000 a year, and seemingly rises annually. Students address teachers by their first names, and classrooms are named after important historical figures, like Albert Einstein and George Mead, rather than numbered. The school devotes as significant a chunk of time to math and history as to Human Development, a curriculum meant to teach students maturity, tolerance, and confidence. Crossroads emphasizes creativity, personal communication, well-being, mental health, and the liberal arts. The school focuses on the arts much more than athletics; some of the school’s varsity games have fewer than a dozen spectators. 2 In 2005, when Evan was a high school freshman, Vanity Fair ran an exhaustive feature about the school titled “School for Cool.” 3 The school, named for Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken,” unsurprisingly attracts a large contingent of Hollywood types, counting among its alumni Emily and Zooey Deschanel, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jack Black, Kate Hudson, Jonah Hill, Michael Bay, Maya Rudolph, and Spencer Pratt. And that’s just the alumni—the parents of students fill out another page or two of who’s who A-listers. Actor Denzel Washington once served as the assistant eighth grade basketball coach, screenwriter Robert Towne spoke in a film class, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma talked shop with the school’s chamber orchestra.

Reggie hired James Lee, an up-and-coming partner at Lee Tran & Liang, as his lawyer in the case. Lee had begun his career as an LAPD detective; when he started studying at Stanford Law School, the Palo Alto campus was so quiet it gave him insomnia. Evan and Bobby still retained Cooley LLP, who responded to Reggie’s letter in May 2012, as their lawyers for Snapchat. The ensuing discovery and depositions cost Snapchat significant time and money, but perhaps most importantly it weighed heavily on Evan at a pivotal point for the company. On April 5, Evan, Bobby, and their attorneys from Cooley, along with Reggie and his attorneys from Lee Tran & Liang, filed into a conference room in Cooley’s offices in downtown Santa Monica. Outside, tourists strolled up and down Santa Monica Boulevard, stopping in the trendy neighborhood’s upscale shops, restaurants, and bars; they might walk down the palm-tree-lined street to the beach or the famous pier. Inside the conference room the temperature was more frigid. Cooley’s Mike Rhodes began deposing Reggie, attempting to establish that Reggie had accomplished little since graduation: “What is your current employment, if any?” “Well, currently I’m working in the South Carolina attorney general’s office.” “And how long have you worked there?” “I guess about a month at this point.” “And what is your position?” “It’s basically an intern/ clerk position.” “Is that a nonpaying position?” “Yes, it is.” “And again, what was your approximate start date?” “A few weeks ago. Probably about a month.” “So early March?” “Yes.” “And what were you doing, if anything, for employment prior to that date?” “Well, I was applying to law school.” “Were you working?” “No.” Reggie became distracted midway through answering a question about which lawyers he had spoken with. A naked man had chosen the sidewalk across from the Cooley office as his performance stage for the day and was gesturing at Reggie through the window. The lawyers hastily closed the blinds and continued the deposition much less eventfully.

It’s even possible that Marilyn was found still breathing, rushed to Santa Monica Hospital by ambulance in an effort to save her, and returned to her own bed only after she was dead. There is some testimony to this on the part of ambulance drivers from a

Mulholland was the backbone of Los Angeles. It rode like a snake along the crest of the Santa Monica Mountains from one end of the city to the other. Clewiston knew of places where you could stand on the white stripe and look north across the vast San Fernando Valley and then turn around and look south and see across the Westside and as far as the Pacific and Catalina Island. It all depended on whether the smog was cooperating or not. And if you knew the right spots to stop and look. Mulholland had that Top of the World feel to it. It could make you feel like a prince of the city and that the laws of nature and physics didn’t apply. The foot came down heavy on the accelerator. That was the contradiction. Mulholland was built for speed but it couldn’t handle it. Speed was a killer.

Clear the way for good things to start happening to you…

When what you own starts to own you, it’s time to let go.

She spent her day acutely aware of being in the moment. She didn’t judge; she merely saw what was happening—the light was red, and the cars were jam-packed all the way to her turn off—and then she let it go.