1. THE ELECTRONIC MAIL

Subject: A Tree Falls in a Forest Date: Sun, 20 March 2004 17:17:29 -0800 From: Ford Timelord, ESQ To: colec@lacitybeat.com

Hey Mister Po-Mo Copy Chimp:

As someone having, let us say, a vested interest in your fish-wrap, I have been following the arc and curve of your work in that rag and I have to say it is quite a giggle. You, sir, are no George Will and your weekly so-called “news” paper has the Ghost of H.L. Mencken going down on St. Peter and wiping the effluvial paste on his Pearly Gates. Forget Jayson Blair, Stephen Glass, and the current cock-ups at USA Today, because everything published in CityBeat has been a lie. Everything. The medium is tired and corrupt and so are you. Quit wasting the city's time on lies and start dealing with real issues. A tree falls in a forest and doesn't make a sound unless it is used to build an outhouse. What I am trying to tell you is this: You are part of the problem, but you are not the entire problem. To go public and expose the fraudulent and inept journalistic practices of the paper is something I wrestle with daily, but such whistle-blowing is not that simple. I cannot drop the dime, for I am the dime. Perhaps a day of reckoning and the subsequent meting out of justice is exactly what is needed to make CityBeat readable. Which is to say, after the entire staff does time in a federal women's prison, taking remedial journalism courses from a doyenne who couldn't cut it in the real world, and has been relegated to eking out employment in the bowels of the jurisprudence-industrial complex. Failing that, if you want a quick primer in not only the ways of news gathering but also the ways of the world in the modern Infotainment Age, and a chance to see what time it really is, I suggest you meet me at the Denny's in Tujunga next Wednesday at 3 a.m. You will know my face when you see me.

Veni vidi vici, Ford Timelord, ESQ Ford Timelord. I always hear the name summoned by schizoid paranoids who call in on late-night talk radio, on programs whose de rigueur topics of discussion are black helicopters, secret Mason handshakes vis-à-vis the New World Order, and interstellar anal probes by bi-curious visiting space aliens. Timelord is rumored to be the master capitalist's master capitalist, and his MetaMediaCorp has controlling interest and influence in everything from Clear Channel to Tribune Corp. to Spearmint Rhino to Andy Gump Sanitation (“… A tree falls in a forest and doesn't make a sound unless it is used to build an outhouse …”). He originally made his empire 20 years ago in private security, capitalizing on the paranoia of uptight middle-class America as it bunkered itself in gated communities in places like Diamond Bar and Agoura Hills. If the graveyard shift on AM talk radio is to be believed, this guy's holdings are as ubiquitous as lug nuts in a Pick-Your-Part. The talk-radio chatter said Rupert Murdoch is his boy. Michael Powell is his bitch. Jenna Jameson, Ruth Seymour, and Sandra Tsing Loh his toe-bound geisha concubines. Etc. It is also rumored that Timelord is the pharaoh at the top of the media pyramid of which CityBeat is a block of stone, albeit somewhere at the bottom of the edifice. Was the e-mail really from the modern Charles Foster Kane? If one of the four L.A. CityBeat readers was taking that much time and effort to wind up a member of its staff, I suppose I could be bothered to meet this person at a chain coffee shop in Tujunga. At the very least, it would be good for, to borrow a phrase, “a giggle.” 3 a.m. at Denny's? Why not? It's not like I would be doing anything at that time of morning, anyway, besides maybe listening to the radio. This is how it will begin: my tenure as CityBeat's reluctant ombudsman.

2. THE DENNY'S IN TUJUNGA

Foothill Boulevard at 3 a.m. is a still-frame from an industrial 16 millimeter military film on the kinder, gentler, and non-destructive effects of a neutron bomb that wiped out the populace but left the stucco standing. Andromeda Strain in the northeast San Fernando Valley. A bag lady waits at a bus stop. A couple of vatos congregate outside a taco cart and ponder the likelihood of greasy carne asada wrapped in a fusty corn tortilla possibly preventing tomorrow's hangover. A donut shop is open, and the fluorescent tube lights blast the spackle in the faux brick of an adjacent video store. At Denny's, I grab a seat at the counter. In the corner booth, a trio of twentysomething Goth Latinos in leather, Joy Division T-shirts, pancake makeup, and 40-weight eyeliner gossip sotto about a rumored civil union of Morrissey and the guy from the White Stripes. The only other customers are also seated at the counter, a couple of rent-a-cops: ex-LAPD chuckleheads who are loudly reminiscing about a moving-violation-cum-head-kicking somewhere out by Lakeview Terrace or Pacoima. There is no sign of any Ford Timelord. I am not surprised. Upon closer scrutiny, however, I notice blue Timelord Security patches professionally sewn on muted gray uniforms. Shirts and slacks neatly pressed. Aviator sunglasses. ID badges that read “Briseno” and “Powell,” respectively. Great. I continue to wait for service and the promised arrival of Ford Timelord. A nice Korean woman takes my order of coffee and what passes for a piece of pie. A la mode. Before the victuals arrive, one peace officer says to the other, “Are you ready?” and they leave a couple of sawbucks on the counter, guzzling one last slurp of jake as they exit. One of the security dads – Briseno – stops at my stool and pokes me in the kidneys with a nightstick. “Are you the guy who works for that piece of shit newspaper that printed the lies about how the LAPD can't keep the city safe from Osama during the Oscars and the MTV Awards?” “Excuse me?” “He's the guy,” Powell confirms. “Grab your sled and let's go, Rosebud,” Briseno barks. “What?” “Xanadu.” “‘Xanadu'? What's ‘Xanadu'?” “It's goddamn Orson Welles, isn't it?” Boom. Quicker than you can say “Franz Kafka,” I am collared. I protest. “Are you coming peacefully, or is it time for the old ‘angel-dust chokehold'?” Powell asks. I cease any protest and am dragged out of the restaurant. The Korean woman looks away, like she has seen variations of this scenario played out one too many times by the likes of Kim Jong Il and his commie goon squad. The Goths also avert their eyes, and stare deep into their butterscotch malteds, wondering why it is the gone-to-seed hipster in a sport coat being hassled by “the man” and not them, this time. I overhear one of them whisper, “If it were us, we'd be hogtied.” I catch the outline of their mascara in the reflection of the chrome steel canisters, rimmed and smeared with dripping Reddi-Wip.

3. THE BUBBLEGUM MACHINES

The Timelord Security's company vehicle/squad car is a black-and-white late-model Crown Victoria. The sedan's bubblegum machines are in full song, sirens shrieking like an after-hours gay disco. We are driving through the San Gabriels – for half an hour I am tossed around in the backseat like quarks in a burlap sack – and we are now on Pearblossom Highway, in the flatlands of the Mojave Desert. The police scanner is silent. Turned off. Behind us, the rising sun is a pinhole prick in a black curtain. I ask where we are going. “Up the river, Prufrock,” Powell proffers. “What river? We are in the middle of the desert.” “We are swimming in the river of Life,” Briseno says. “Oh, I get it. Cops with a sense of metaphor. Don't tell me: You've read Siddhartha when you were waiting on a court date for that ‘excessive force' charge. Copy that. Umm, where does this proverbial river of life drop us off?” “The Timelord Estate. Or, as we like to call it, Xanadu.” “Okay. Where's ‘Xanadu'?” “Trona.” “I am not sure I understand.” “Listen, Ring Lardner, maybe you are not meant to. For the time being, all you need to know is that we have the same boss-man. And he wants to have a word with you.” “Okay, but why does he live in Trona?” “San Simeon has been done already,” Powell sneers. The rent-a-cops keep talking. I tune them out and look out the window, trying to sort out, and make sense of, this entire surreal scenario. “The boss says your paper wrote all of those lies about that fox on Fox News.” “I don't know if they were lies …” “If the boss says they were lies, they were lies. What was her name?” “I think you mean Ann Coulter.” “She is one hot broadcast babe. She can speak into my microphone any time.” I cannot tell for sure, but I think Powell is rubbing himself. “Hey, newspaper boy: You think she is hot?” “Umm, sure. If you think lock-step über-Aryan women in leather marching boots and swastika armbands are sexy.” “Works for me,” Powell says. “I'd bang her,” Briseno confirms. Powell reaches over and turns off the AM radio. The only sounds are that of the sirens, underscored by the Crown Vic's gunned engine, with all eight cylinders screaming and pinging in revolt, yet somehow acquiescent. Contrails of sound whistle past the sedan and wrap themselves around yucca trees. They laugh again. I don't get the joke.

4. XANADU

Ford Timelord's digs is a hidden oasis on the outskirts of a forgotten mining town in the most hostile quadrant of the Panamint Mountains. At these very hills, the Manson Family set up camp to wait out the impending race wars that were contrived to bring down society. But that was more than 30 years ago. Nowadays, in the hidden sanctuaries of Trona, everything is far more civilized. Security codes are punched and sundry gates swivel, pivot, and retract, unveiling a mega-opulent oasis that makes the Taj Mahal look like a speed lab in a Fontana trailer park. We are in the compound: the Timelord Estate. “I'll be dipped in dog shit,” I mutter. “It's like a really bucks-up Batcave.”

“Keep quiet, Kerouac.”

In the circular drive is a cherry, immaculate Bentley, replete with vanity plates that read COYOTEGOD. I take in the magnitude of Timelord's compound.

Through arches and under frescoes, I follow my escorts to the study of Ford Timelord. Back on Pearblossom Highway, the rent-a-cops had confirmed the paranoia of the late-night AM radio New World Order crowd, saying that Timelord is the guy who owns everything. And everyone. That also made it clear that, in the scheme of MetaMediaCorp, at best, I was an unpopped pimple on his posterior, and CityBeat, the paper I represent, a pustulant chancre. A wet cold sore.

Ford Timelord wears a simple, smart suit and wing tips. He is tall, thin, elegant, understated, and bespectacled. He waves his hand (which is bereft of any jewelry), and dispatches his security minions away. He offers me a Napoleon Brandy. I, of course, accept. He tells me he is into his fifth snifter.

“I suppose you are wondering why I have gone to all this trouble to bring you here,” he exhorts.

“Umm, I imagine as a device to move along the story. Beyond that, I am sensing that I am a vehicle for some watershed mea culpa from you.”

“Well, those are certainly part of the reasons. But my motives are more … philanthropic, I suppose.”

“Philanthropic, how? If you are feeling humane, why don't you just follow tradition and buy a museum like oil barons or music-biz executives?”

“That's too much bother,” he sighs, “and that's why you are here. I don't want to be bothered any more … with any of it. I'm tired. Exhausted. And I'm in a contemplative mood. And when I'm feeling reflective, I want my feelings documented. So, please, drink your brandy and ask me questions about the nature of the business we both traffic in.”

“Don't you have an armada of personal assistants who can take dictation? I'm hardly the guy … I don't know shorthand, and I'm a very feeble typist.”

“I didn't choose you based on words per minute. I choose you because there is a subtext to your otherwise unreadable prose. In your heart, you know this is all bullshit. Did you bring a notepad?”

“What is bullshit?” I fumble for the notepad and a Flair Paper Mate.

“You know very well what is bullshit,” he exhales. “Creativity, honesty, and originality in your field of endeavor are finished. Modern journalists lack a sense of purpose, except for the constant manufacture of product. Face it, critical analysis – print, electronic, whatever – is just another cheese-log factory. The constant churning of info fodder for an entire population whose eyes have become bigger than their bellies. And I am complicit in its obsolescence. Its usefulness is in inverse proportion to its pervasiveness.”

I stop scribbling. The room grows silent, like a cell phone in a fish tank.

I break the quiet: “Back at the Denny's, your henchmen bagged on CityBeat's Dennis Romero feature on Al Qaeda cells operating in Los Angeles.”

“Lies.”

“What do you mean, ‘lies'? That is all very plausible.” I am flabbergasted.

“Right. And a seven-headed baboon is going to fly out of my poop-chute. You don't think that maybe there was an ulterior agenda at work here? That maybe that entire story was bought and paid for by lobbyists for private security firms like mine and the Justice Department's? You are forgetting that I made my first fortune in Timelord Security. If there are two things I know, it is alarm systems and the media. Next question.”

“Okay,” I say. “What about Mick Farren's piece calling out Ann Coulter and the ‘stiletto conservatives' and her revisionist history re: HUAC and the McCarthy hearings?”

“More lies. Mick Farren? Are you going to listen to that old toothless Bolshevik? McCarthy would have smacked him around like Mike Tyson with a case of blue balls.”

“Well, why publish him in your newspaper?”

“I own the rights to his back catalog. Science-fiction books. Really great stuff if you like psilocybin in your Caesar salad, but completely mothballed right now. Once Farren finally carks it, I'm hoping it'll be the Philip K. Dick ‘paranoid-drug-addict-sci-fi-writer-dies-Hollywood-buys-the-screen-rights-to-entire-body-of-work' story all over again. I keep him busy because I have a soft spot for the old git.”

I am stunned.

“Fine. I suppose you are going to debunk Dean Kuipers's feature on the state-sanctioned legality of medicinal marijuana being selectively upended by the DEA?”

“And more lies. Wake up and smell the bongwater, ‘dude.' All bought and paid for,” he sniffs. “You don't think that OSH and Home Depot might have a vested interest in selling halogen grow-lights and fertilizer?”

“Well, yeah but … .” I am exasperated, and I haven't slept. I ask about the story concerning Rocketdyne's soiling the water table with perchlorate, and he just laughs.

“‘Pffft. Pffft. Attention, please! Fact-check on Aisle 9! Pffft. Pffft.' Too funny…”

And so it goes, and with the expedience of a martial-arts expert, Ford Timelord summarily dismisses every CityBeat cover story (“Lies!”), with the exception of one: Natalie Nichols's piece on Jane's Addiction.

“She was right about one thing: Even though nobody cared, they did get back together.” He then muttered something about a blind squirrel and an acorn.

And then the conversation took a turn for the morose.

“So you are saying you are complicit in ´´ killing modern journalism,” I say. “How did you kill it? Why did you kill it?”

“Why? Because I am the mother of all fiscal libertarians. Because that is what people like me do. I strip-mine any industry I can get my avaricious little mitts on. Print media is just another blank canvas in the art of the deal.”

“Couldn't you just have left print media alone?”

“Like that would have made any difference. My, you are green,” Timelord chuckles. “Allow me to put this in terms your generation can grasp: I am Pac-Man, I gobble things up. It cannot be helped.” Using the hand that is not holding the brandy, he moves his four fingers against his thumb, thrice, and mutters, “Gobble, gobble, gobble.” Then he says: “The '80s were all about distressed properties. Been there, did that, bought the mineral rights. The '90s were the apotheosis of self-help and all that woo-woo me-me shit. I couldn't produce infomercials fast enough. Now, in this, the new millennium, capitalism has a new face.”

“What's that?” I ask, marveling at how, after all those brandies, he managed to say apotheosis without slurring or adding any extra S's.

“Media consolidation. Or, more saliently: ME.”

Ford Timelord then takes me on a roller-coaster ride on why L.A. CityBeat is one of his holdings.

“At first it was a tax shelter, but now it is more of a cat toy for me, I guess,” he says. “I don't know, what's the phrase? ‘Hire the Handicapped, They're Fun to Watch'?”

I think about the CityBeat office on Wilshire. The sun has been up for a few hours, and soon – just before the crack of noon – the offices will be a buzzsaw of activity: proofreading, Roget's Thesaurus banging open and shut and back open again, fax machines and printers whirring, jamming, and humming, multi-user dungeon role-playing, Web-based pari-mutuels, Quark Xpress crashing, day trading, et al. From here at Timelord Estates, it is three hours to Los Angeles as the crow flies, but it could be on another planet. Yet, there is a direct through line from Wilshire to Trona. And Mr. Timelord proceeds to spell it all out for me. He explains the taxonomy of CityBeat:

“Okay: Way back in 1996, before the Age of Osama and while we all prospered under Clinton – a rather delicious irony, that – my New Times ‘alternative' newspaper chain came to Los Angeles and bought the L.A. Village View, which was the No. 3 alt paper in town. The New Times immediately fired the entire editorial staff, keeping only some of the chicken blowers …”

“Chicken blowers?”

“Chicken blowers. Advertising people. Look at the circulation of a newspaper as a chicken. It is the chicken blowers' job to pump hot air into it and turn it into a turkey. Once you've got a chicken blown into a turkey, it is then time to sell an ad.”

He furrows his brow. “Keep writing, and keep quiet. So where was I? Okay, we kept some of the chicken blowers, and hired a couple of L.A. Times guys to run it as the editors. Then, during that same year and while we continued publishing the View, our New Times bought the Los Angeles Reader, the No. 2 ‘alt paper' in town.”

“That's the one Richard Meltzer wrote for, as I recall,” I interrupt.

“Correct.”

“He and I share the same literary agent.”

“Good for you. I'm sure that and $80 will get you a massage in Koreatown. Full release, even. Stop interrupting me.”

He shakes his head.

“At the time,” he continues, somewhat wearily, “among the editorial staff of the Reader were Steve Appleford, Natalie Nichols, Andy Klein, a couple of freelancers like Mick Farren and Chris Morris, and other names familiar to CityBeat readers. I fired everyone except for Andy Klein.”

I raise an eyebrow, but keep writing.

“After the Reader published its final issue,” he continues, “the View and the Reader were combined into my New Times Los Angeles. That lasted several years, until 2002, when my L.A. Weekly and my New Times agreed to a deal where my money-losing L.A. New Times would agree to shutter itself if Village Voice Media – another one of my holdings and owner of the Weekly – shut down my Cleveland paper, where the New Times had a competing weekly – plus a payment of several million. Are you getting this down?”

“Barely.”

“Stay focused, then,” he harrumphs. “It wasn't long before federal prosecutors started investigating a possible antitrust case against my Weekly and my New Times. Eventually, both companies agreed to a settlement that essentially led to the creation of my CityBeat. The Weekly and New Times were forced to put up for auction all the assets of the shuttered New Times, including computers, business files, desks, the rights to everything ever published in the L.A. New Times, etc. … so each of my CityBeat copy chimps is currently sitting at an old New Times desk, typing on an old New Times computer.”

He laughs at the symmetry: “I've often called my L.A. CityBeat the revenge of my L.A. Reader.”

“But besides Meltzer, wasn't the L.A. Reader rather superfluous and pointless? And what does that make CityBeat?”

“Stop making value judgments. It's all pointless, my boy, which is hardly the point at all.” His breathing becomes slower, louder, and measured. He is tired. “Look: We live in a monolithic culture, where simulations have replaced actual archetypes. CityBeat exists as a perceived alternative to the perceived alternative. But that's the joke: There is no alternative. My L.A. Times? My L.A. Weekly? My CityBeat? It's all simulations of the same fucking newspaper. And they are all filled with lies, lies. Damn lies and more damn lies … .”

And then the wheels begin to turn. I ask him if it isn't time for CityBeat to clean up its act, and if there wasn't a need for an alternative voice nowadays when voices of dissent were going unheard.

“Give me a break,” he croaks. “Dissent is just a different flavor of cheese log. Besides, the so-called alternative media stands a better chance of breaking a brand-new anvil than it does a real news story. I'll give you a for instance: My CityBeat guys were so close to the mother of all scoops, and they never even knew it. CityBeat's first cover story was on Osama bin Laden, yeah? And then a couple of months later, they do a cover feature on Tommy Chong doing time in the hoosegow for selling hash pipes and rolling papers off of his website. Hey, Woodward! Are you still with me?”

“I'm still with you.”

He pours two more drinks.

“Well, I don't expect the government to make the connection. Tom Ridge, George Tenet, and those half-baked half-wits masquerading as foreign operatives and special agents make F Troop look like the Bolshoi Ballet. But Christ's sake, man, an office of so-called professional stringers doing an exposé on bin Laden and Chong and not making the connection … .” He laughs and powers his eighth helping of Napoleon Brandy.

“The connection?”

“Yes, the connection. Tommy Chong? Bin Laden? Look at the beard: They're the same guy.” Then he laughs again, cracking himself up. “Those of us in my inner circle have been howling about this ever since the DEA snagged poor Tommy. The government has Osama in a cell in Taft Prison on a possession with intent to distribute, and they don't even know it. I'll probably tell Cheney next time we go skeet shooting … after the election, natch.”

“Can I quote you on this?” I almost whisper.

“Go ahead. Run it. Word for word. It's the truth, but the only people who will believe it are already so fed up with humanity that they won't even care. Print what you want. Just remember: I own you, punk. And your pals.”