Yet another unfortunate change in Northridge, this time at CSUN. I went for my walk last night, and when I got to the orange grove, I saw that the Bistro had been demolished. Kaboom, wiped out, completely gone. I wrote about it's coming demolition a few blogs ago, when I saw that it had been enclosed by a blue screened fence. The university has been planning a hotel at that location for at least five years, and I guess they finally got their wish. I can't think of a worse place to put a hotel than at the corner of Zelzah and Nordhoff. I imagine the semi-well-to-do residents of the ridiculously named Sherwood Forest are none too happy about the development. CSUN: "Wham! In your faces, residents! A big ass hotel, right in the middle of your beloved orange trees."
Note: I don't dislike Sherwood Forest the neighborhood, only the name. We lived there, across from Cupid's (also now gone) before it was called Sherwood Forest. When I first heard of that name about ten years ago, I thought "where does the Sheriff of Nottingham live?"
Mom and I once met Robert Blake while pushing past the Orange Grove Bistro, an encounter you can read about if you search my blogs. We met him and both of us immediately thought "not guilty". Talk about doing jury service. But that's when the Bistro was seated low on the east side of the grove, unobtrusive and fitting in with the landscape. Nowadays, CSUN doesn't give a squat about the neighbors or their surroundings or the traffic, or all the electric scooters ridden by oblivious young people so lacking in the awareness of basic pedestrian safety that it's only a matter of time until someone is killed.
Well anyhow, I'll shut up. I was just sad to see the Bistro go, even though I never ate there. It started out as a lunch club for CSUN faculty, at a time when the campus (if not the University) was slow-growth managed. It was planned to blend into the landscape, not dominate it. Now, CSUN is all about money, and it is slowly destroying what surrounds it, just like UCLA destroyed Westwood Village.
Me? I'm glad I rediscovered Reseda during the time I worked for Pearl. I still love Northridge, even though it's not what it used to be, and I still love the campus, on which I walk twice nightly. But I don't love the now-corporate University called CSUN. I liked it better in the 70s and 80s, and best when it was SFVSC.
I have a couple of movies. The first one is "The Thousand Plane Raid"(1969), about a massive daylight precision bombing of Germany by the RAF and United States Air Force. Christopher George stars as an Air Force Colonel who convinces his superior officers that a daylight raid will end the war more quickly. When given the green light, he has to whip his pilots into shape. The storyline features the common "wayward pilot becomes a hero" subtheme. It's a good flick, with superior aerial combat footage featuring some incredible B-17 shots at ultra-low altitude. You can tell when some of the edits use models, but when they show the real plane it's pretty awesome. The acting is okay, sometimes so-so, but the movie holds your interest all the way through. What really got me, about a third of the way through, was when I remembered seeing it with my Dad in the theater way back in 1969 when it was released. He took me to every World War 2 film in those days, and this one may even have been a pre-release screening for the production executives and cast, and if so it would've been at Deluxe Laboratories or 20th Century Fox, because Deluxe did the processing when my Dad was still Vice President of West Coast Operations. Anyhow, check it out if you like WW2 movies and B-17s.
The other movie is "The Voice of Terror"(1942), a Sherlock Holmes flick from Universal starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, the best Holmes/Watson team. They're updated in the modern day in World War 2 England, chasing a radio broadcasting pro-Nazi propagandist who has a perfect English accent. They think he may be a British Nazi sympathiser, and they run into a whole gang of Nazi saboteurs who are running British trains off the rails.
My Mom was in a train wreck in a town called Piqua, Ohio. It happened right after the war ended in May 1945. The train was carrying troops just returning from Germany. The derailment was rumored to be sabotage. Fortunately, no one was killed though many were injured. Mom said it was one of the scariest things she'd ever experienced.
I was just in Vons but I walked out without buying anything because a pint of ice cream is now seven dollars.
Do you ever go on Facebook and feel like everybody is speaking some suddenly awakened hive-mind language and you're the only one not in on the joke? Me neither. I get the joke but I still can't stand the Facebook hive mind. It's too smug and smarmy, like everyone's a pretend secret agent and itching to show their credentials.
Well anyhow. ///
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