LABJ’s LA Stories
Tough Times
Overheard on a recent evening at the Hollywood Bowl following the singing of the National Anthem, in which both the American and California flags were in spotlights:
“I’m surprised that California flag is still up there,” the audience member said. “I would have thought it would have been taken down and sold to pay off the budget deficit.”
Howard Fine
Rx for Error
Now here’s a guidebook for the rest of us.
Research conducted by the Institute for Healthcare Advancement has found that doctors often fail to communicate with their patients by assuming they know too much.
Medical literature given to patients is often at the 11th grade reading level, rather than at a 5th grade or lower level that many patients have. And doctors love to use jargon such as “otitis media” and “myocardial infarction” when simple terms such as ear aches and heart attack will do.
“The end result is negative medical outcomes, unnecessary extra visits to the physician and crowded hospital emergency rooms,” says Dr. Gloria Mayer, president of the La Habra-based nonprofit institute.
Seeking to combat the problem, the institute is publishing a series of “What To Do for Health” guidebooks on such issues as pregnancy, children’s health and sexually transmitted diseases all at a 3rd to 5th grade reading level.
Laurence Darmiento
Teardown Turnabout
The preservation-minded City of Santa Monica is spending $400,000 to raze most of what’s left of the historic Marion Davies estate.
The sprawling turn-of-the-20th century Georgian revival-style property on the Pacific Coast Highway was rendered uninhabitable after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake, and the city has been searching for $17 million to overhaul historic property.
“People get in there and start breaking stuff, and when they do it lets the elements in and that leads to more problems,” said Anthony Antich, a city engineer. “It’s like a domino effect, one problem leads to another.”
Media mogul William Randolph Hearst built the mansion and what was known as the North House in 1928 for the actress, who was reputed to be his mistress. After World War II, the main mansion was knocked down and in 1959 the state bought the property and leased it to the city.
For the next 30 years, the North House was leased to the Sand and Sea Club, until the earthquake rendered it uninhabitable.
The house has been designated a Santa Monica landmark and it qualifies for the National and California registers of historical places. The city hopes to turn the remaining portion of the structure into a visitor center.
Andy Fixmer
Precocious Picks
Chris Lahiji, a 19-year-old from Santa Monica, has been so busy trying to become a mutual fund manager self-publishing a book on under-followed companies, running a Web site and reading 12,000 annual reports that he hurt his grade point average.
A sophomore finance major at Santa Monica College, Lahiji is angling to become mutual fund manager for Frontier Equity Fund, a poorly performing small-cap mutual fund manager based in Milwaukee. So far, the fund has not taken him up on the offer.
“Before, I was saying I was going to be the LeBron James of the stock market skip college and go straight to the pros,” said Lahiji, who started analyzing the stock market at age 11 and claims to spend eight to 10 hours a day giving free investing advice from his Web site.
Instead, Lahiji has been on a self-promotional media joyride, touting his “Lahiji Tiny Fund,” a package of small public companies that he said has gained 130 percent since its inception in November. (The S & P; 500 is up 9.7 percent since November, the Nasdaq Composite up 26 percent.)
Lahiji said he has survived the stock market decline, making $40,000 from an initial investment of $2,000 in 1999.
Matt Myerhoff
The Roving Eye
Dark Shadows
‘Stark’ can describe both the shabby-to-chic transition of the late Coconut Teaszer as well as the Sunset Strip club’s new look.
Long home to grungy rock-and-roll, the Teaszer is no more. In its place is Shelter, which offers diners a chance to take a $40 prix fixe menu (plus two-wine bottle minimum) in a relaxing, post-apocalyptic environment.
The conceit is a nod to the vision of the 1981 Mel Gibson film “The Road Warrior.” Waitresses wear shredded, tight-fitting clothes and sport Mohawk hairpieces. Filling out the scene is a combination of Venetian plaster, torn and spray-painted fabric pieced together on walls and furniture, candlelight and a fireplace mantel with holes said to be from a real gunfight at Teaszer.
“Our outfits are very sexy. We look like warriors,” said Chanell Oliver, head waitress.
The dinner club’s owners, Sam Nazarian and Reza Roohi, opted to do a quick, $300,000 face-job that included plastering the outside of the building to look like a bomb shelter rather than shut down for an extended renovation and risk having the liquor license lapse after taking over the club in May. They planned to hire Philippe Starck, who designed the ultra-hip Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood, next year as part of a fuller $2.5 million renovation.
“When the Teaszer was here it was disgusting,” said Roohi. “We want to revibe this and change it on a regular basis.”
Nazarian, a hotel and real estate developer who owns the boutique Viceroy Hotel in Santa Monica, also founded a film production company last year.
The new theme has already started drawing the entertainment crowd, according to Roohi, who said Shelter had been frequented by actors Tobey McGuire, Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Michael Thuresson
