Here in Los Angeles, we know what a riot is.
A riot is when you are scared to go out quite literally unless you are a rioter yourself.
A riot is Watts in ‘65.
A riot is all L.A. County the night of April 29, 1992, after the appalling Rodney King verdict.
A jury that day acquitted four LAPD officers we had all watched on videotape brutally beating Altadena motorist Rodney Glen King to within an inch of his life.
When the verdict came down, I was, as it happens, getting my hair cut at Marie Jones Foster’s Turning Heads salon on Glenarm Street in Pasadena. So far as I know, I was the only man — certainly only White man — who got his hair cut there, for random reasons involving friendship and a work colleague. The staff and the clientele was otherwise Black. The TV was on in the shop, and we watched the news. Everyone was in shock.
“Um, Marie,” I asked of the proprietor, a grad like me of Blair High across the street, and the wife, now widow, of the great UCLA track star Greg Foster, an Olympic hurdles medalist, “can I ask a weird question?”
Clip, clip. “Go ahead.”
“I actually have a meeting for the newspaper tonight at the L.A. NAACP office, over on Crenshaw. I was gonna hop on the Pasadena Freeway right now and go. Should I?”
She spun my chair around. “Larry, you are married. You have a baby girl. No. No, no, no. Call ‘em and tell ‘em you can’t make it. Ladies — am I right?”
“Marie — there is no way you are letting that man right there drive to Crenshaw tonight.”
The riots lasted six days and nights. Sixty-three people died, and more than 2,000 were injured. There was over a billion dollars in property damage.
That was a riot.
You know what was not a riot? The protests this summer against ICE. They did turn occasionally violent, in the sense of violence against the police and federal agents, with boulder-throwing and other untoward actions. But they did not turn randomly violent, in the manner of burning down Koreatown businesses, of pulling Reginald Denny from his truck, and shootings of innocent passersby . Not a single regular Angeleno felt unsafe on the streets.
Anyway, the L.A. riots of ‘92 became somewhat iconic, styled as the Los Angeles uprising. Glen King, as he was known to his friends, asked, as calm approached, “Can we all get along?”
So now there’s a basketball team called the LA Riot. Here’s how they announced themselves: “The LA Riot isn’t just a team. It’s a movement. A rebellion. A cultural takeover. And it’s making its debut in the heart of Los Angeles this August.”
The LA Riot is not exactly a competitor to the Lakers and Clippers. It’s part of a league called Big3, in which three-on-three, half-court basketball games are played, with backing from hip-hop musician Ice Cube. Many of its players formerly played in the NBA. In fact, the LA Riot features former Laker great Dwight Howard.
Probably pretty fun, going to such a game. But I’m just saying — how incredibly L.A. it is, naming your squad the Riot.
It reminds me of the attitude Los Angeles Assemblyman Isaac Bryan had this week in an interview with KQED about the Texas gerrymandering causing the likely California gerrymandering: “This is not a turn-the-other-cheek moment while they continue to send blow after blow to the foundations of democracy. Where I’m from in Los Angeles, when they go low, we squabble up.”
He’s quoting L.A. rapper Kendrick Lamar there.
If you’re also from L.A., you have to like the swagger.
Wednesday at random
In the Words Never Before Spoken before category, I would have formerly placed these: “South Pasadena — so hip!” I mean, the Rialto Theatre and its midnight “Rocky Horror Picture Show” screenings had their day. That was a long time ago. But the word that some extremely hip L.A. impresarios are set to open the Sid the Cat Auditorium on the site of the old South Pasadena Elementary School near the charming library is the best news for local pop music fans in ages. There is currently almost no regular local venue for the kinds of acts — Bright Eyes, Phoebe Bridgers plus her boygenius cohorts, plus Big Thief — that Sid the Cat, which works with Pappy & Harriet’s in the desert, books. Plus: Sid’s Bar, in an old classroom. Plus, an outpost of the Michelin-touted Villa’s Tacos. Plus, right down the block from Matt Molina and Joe Capella’s hot new restaurant Cannonball, which the other night was packed with every foodie in L.A. What a riot!
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com