From time to time, you can forget that this is a weather town. When the weather is beautiful, the weekenders come out — the visitors decide that it’s worth running the gauntlet of the PCH and shop in Malibu hums. When the weather turns any which way (such as frosty this week), we all bundle in at home, light the fireplace and the streets are empty. It makes it often a very difficult place to be in business. Lately, I’ve been hearing groans from the retail community, but it’s not terribly surprising because many are catering to only the high-end visitor, so many of them just die in the winter.
Some try to straddle the line, part for the visitor and part for the locals, which makes it surprising that Kitson — a very hip, trendy retail chain, often considered the home to starlets and paparazzi — is closing its doors. It’s been in a Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization since earlier this year, but they apparently couldn’t make it work, so they’re closing down all 17 stores, located in California, Nevada and Oregon, shutting down their website (shopskitson.com), selling everything and turning off the lights. There are two Kitson stores in Malibu: Kitson and Kitson Kids, both in the Malibu Lumber Yard Center, which is operated by WP Glimcher — the master leaseholder — but the Lumber Yard is owned by the City of Malibu.
They’re not the only ones. The 650-acre Malibu Golf Club, which has a beautiful 18-hole golf course, clubhouse and restaurant up in the hills above Malibu, also went into Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier, which is intended to allow them time to reorganize. At some point, U.S. Bank — which held the financing on the project — started to foreclose on the $47 million dollar loan, which was in default, and the Golf Club filed in bankruptcy. Since then, apparently everyone is suing everyone else, alleging all sorts of nasty and nefarious conduct, so we probably will not be playing golf in the Malibu hills in the near future.
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Since Paris and San Bernardino, everyone everywhere is on edge about terrorism. Just today, Tuesday, Dec. 15, the Los Angeles Unified School District received some sort of an electronic threat, and took the safer path and shut down the entire system, which has one-half million students and many campuses with many buildings, which are now being searched, one by one, for possible explosives. Time alone will tell if there really is a bomb somewhere or if it was just a kid who wanted not to take an exam.
I think that the thing that has us all most rattled is how an American-born individual who graduated college and worked a job for five years could secretly hate hard enough to leave behind his six-month-old child and then go into a room with his wife and systematically kill people that he worked with every day — the same people who had thrown him a baby shower only a few months before.
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Maybe the only answer is just to carry on, but if you need some distraction this weekend, I’d suggest you go onto the Malibu Film Society’s website and get some tickets for either the Friday, Dec. 18 movie “The Danish Girl” or the Saturday, Dec. 19 movie “Carol,” which has already been nominated for some Golden Globe Awards. Both are playing at the Malibu Screening Room, located at the Malibu Jewish Center at 24855 PCH, and both are probably award contenders this Academy cycle.
Sometimes it helps just to think about something else.