W. P. Hatter asks, “Where is Malibu’s patriotism?”

I found myself asking the same question when our family moved here and our youngest child started school. A few weeks into the semester my wife noticed the American Flag flown at the campus was so shredded, faded and neglected as to be nothing more than a fluttering rag. What lesson were the children being taught when they pledged allegiance to this symbol of disrespect? When she bought and donated a beautiful replacement to the school she was ridiculed as “The Flag Lady” by the principal and ostracized by staff and parent leaders alike. I wonder if they now fly the stars and stripes with newfound pride and honor?

Long May it Wave!

Christopher Carradine

Malibu? You want to go to Malibu? You can’t get there from here. At work in El Segundo the choices of a route home are rapidly diminishing, forcing me to think of renting a motel and only coming home on the weekends. The tunnel under the runway is down to two lanes. If you try to go around the airport by using Pershing drive, you will find Lincoln Avenue closed to left turns from Culver Boulevard. due to the construction of Playa Vista condominiums. Go through Venice on Nielson Way and it’s down to one lane because of sewer construction and the building of those idiotic traffic-calming islands in the middle. Take the always congested 405 to the 10 west and before you get to the McClure tunnel, traffic is backing up because they just closed one lane on PCH until Memorial Day to build yet another sewer. That must be the world’s best sewer as it’s going on three years building. Try to get around that mess by getting off at 4th Street and you will find it also is down to one lane for construction of God knows what. Get off the 405 west at 26th Street so you can take Sunset to PCH and you will find a big backup at San Vicente because of–you guessed it! Construction. No matter where you travel, Caltrans is making your trip a nightmare. And it changes so rapidly that any route you pick is liable for instant closure.

Road construction and repair is, of course, essential. The roads are generally in very good shape and everyone would complain if they weren’t maintained, but one wonders, is all that really necessary? Are they taking into account that by doing this they are inconveniencing thousands and costing millions? Probably some thought is given but not nearly enough. Alternate routes should be planned and closures announced in advance. Do they have the optimum configuration at the construction site or do they just close off anything they happen to want to because it’s easier? Does anyone force them to look hard at these issues? I don’t think so. Consideration should even be given to building new bypass routes or reconfiguring alternate routes for easier access. The reduction of PCH in Santa Monica to two lanes each way was done slyly and with almost no notification. The first I knew of anything planned was two days before when a sign was put up with those obnoxious, ubiquitous words: “Expect delays Sept. 27,” as if that ended their responsibility. And was it just for Sept. 27 or forever? The first published account was in The Malibu Times and Surfside News on the evening of the 27th after the closure. It almost seems as if they were doing that on purpose to avoid any controversy.

I suppose this is wishful thinking but what we need is for someone to organize a commuter’s organization to lobby for commuter’s rights. I envision a group similar to ARRP organized by some ambitious but angry commuter that would ensure road repairs are undertaken with full consideration of all factors. Minimum agony to the commuting public. We do pay the bills, you know.

Lawrence I. Ivey

The Brush Fire Season’s drawing close,

And more deadly than before —

Because of forces who may use,

The conditions–and much more.

Wind and weather play a part,

As always they must do.

But now we have another threat,

To potentially come through.

Be alert, when on the roads,

When in the fire season.

Prepare your property and such,

With calm, and proper reason.

For the danger now is greater,

Than in previous past years.

And with the brush fire season close,

Danger could be near.

H. Emmett Finch

Retired firefighter

So we’re supposed to be getting back to normal, they say. Don’t be afraid to fly, to go into tall buildings. Keep up consumer confidence so the economy won’t tank, support the airlines and the stockbrokers.

I want to help New Yorkers, but Mayor Rudy says to stop sending blood and stuff. They’ve got enough and it’s just getting in the way.

I’m not afraid to fly, I just don’t have anyplace I want to go right now. I still feel like I should be staying close to home. Of course I’m always willing to do my bit for the economy–well, not a new car or a refrigerator–so I went to Bloomie’s, flashed my plastic and left with a few gifts and a new wallet. No money to put in it, but I’m doing my part for America. I also donated to the garden center, schlepping home bags of shredded bark, some fall bedding plants and three bags of daffodil bulbs.

Few things feel more normal than fall gardening. Birch and red bud trees are turning yellow, Virginia creepers are blazing red, maples are crimson and orange, smoke bushes are deep purple. Even the California buckwheat blossoms have turned to rust and golden blooms tip the rabbit brush.

I spent half a day potting up herbs and chrysanthemums, deadheading lavenders and harvesting poppy and salvia seeds. There’s nothing so life affirming to me as the feel of warm sun on the backs of my legs. So what if I looked up every time a plane flew over.

While I dig in the dirt, I’m sorting out my priorities.

Spending three hours at a specific plan meeting to make sure the county doesn’t rezone our canyon –probably a waste.

Spending three hours with my tush crammed into a second-grader’s desk on Grandparents Day –worth every minute.

I resolve to keep in touch with old friends, spend more time with family. Stop hassling the New York publishers for not sending the book I was supposed to review this week.

In my newfound spirit of volunteerism, I drove three hours to Sequoia National Park to help pot up to 2,500 baby trees. It seems these seedlings were being stored bareroot in a cooler that malfunctioned, raising the temperature overnight from 35 degrees to nearly twice that and forcing the trees out of dormancy months before they could be planted outdoors. Nothing like saving native trees to get one back to basics, though they’re much too tiny to hug.

Driving east out of the San Joaquin Valley into the foothills, Highway 198 cuts through granite that looks like a cubist painting, past silver olive and deep green lemon groves. Water levels in the lakes and rivers are lower than 70 percent of normal this year. At Horse Creek, a sign warns against fishing and diving from the bridge though there isn’t a drop of water below.

The park entrance is a few miles past Three Rivers, surely the most patriotic little town in California. Every house, store, barn, roadside mailbox and even a few tractors sported flags. The park nursery, a makeshift greenhouse and shadecloth-covered potting area, is a short hike down from the visitor center, where we met Melanie Baer-Keeley, a U.S. Park Service horticulturist in charge of the nursery and the park’s revegetation program. A veteran of the Theodore Payne Foundation in San Fernando Valley, she helped Bob Sussman set up his Malibu nursery specializing in California native plants.

In short order she organized two dozen raw recruits into teams of potters, damp soil shovelers and wire screen cutters (to fit inside the bottom of the deep plastic pots). Those with strong arms and backs loaded trays of pots into a pickup. Another team would off-load and stack them in huge wire-bottomed beds, where they will be watered and cared for alongside other species waiting to be planted in the forest later in the fall or early spring.

We separated the seedlings– Giant Sequoias, Jeffrey and Lodge Pole pines–which were soaking in huge buckets of wet polymer, and gently placed each one in its prepared pot, filling and tamping the damp soil around the long roots. We had to be careful to keep all the green needles above the pot rims to catch the sunlight and to firm the soil around the roots. We worked from 9 a.m. to 3:30 p.m., taking just a short lunch break, sometimes trading jobs to use different muscles.

By quitting time, there were more than 1,000 baby trees, row upon row of two-inch green tufts that could some day tower 100 feet tall, replenishing the forest. Awesome.

I vowed to go back and help plant them in the ground, maybe hike up into the Giant Forest where the biggest trees in the world are. I think I’ll take my grandson, camp overnight at Powisha and explore Crystal Cave. It would be good for him to see what was here in the land of the free before our ancestors arrived. Kids don’t always understand the concept; having to do pretty much what they’re told restricts most of their freedoms.

But seeing those majestic trees, actually helping the seedlings take hold, might give him a sense of why freedom is worth protecting.

It sure helped me set some things straight.

Chatting with a longtime Malibuite mom at a local market, she reminded me that being involved in Malibu politics is like being a football coach. You have to be smart enough to understand the game, and dumb enough to think it is important.

The absurdity of our time in Malibu’s history is that we have bigger dreams but shorter tempers, a wider Pacific Coast Highway, but narrower viewpoints. We have bigger dwelling and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. Malibuites drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too annoyed when someone differs with them, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have amplified our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often. We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new Malibu neighbor who we didn’t want to build there in the first place. We talk of cleaning up the MOSS (emphasis added) in Trancas Creek, but pollute our souls. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We read more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We invented the telephone, but can’t get open space conservative Mona Loo to stop ringing it at dinnertime. No, Mona, I won’t vote to give the City Council a $15,000,000 Blank Check–so stop calling.

The politics of articulating your opinion against Malibu Tax Increase Measure K should resemble the second oldest Malibu profession. I have, however, come to realize that it bears a very close similarity to the first.

And that is all I have to say.

Tom Fakehany

Indigo is one shade above blue in the color spectrum. It is also the name of Indigo Ranch recording studio run by veteran recording engineer and record producer, Richard Kaplan and his wife, Julie Kaplan. The two recently celebrated the 25th year anniversary of the studio, nestled high in the mountains of Malibu.

Kaplan says the name Indigo was inspired by his first partner, the British band The Moody Blues.

“There’s a lot of history to Indigo Ranch,” Kaplan says. “We first opened our doors in the 1970s and have been booked since then. Artists are drawn to come here and they keep coming back.”

Along with a string of gold and platinum records that have been engineered and produced at Indigo Ranch comes a diverse client list that includes artists and bands such as Limp Biskit, Korn, Sting, Lenny Kravitz, Neil Diamond, Marvin Gaye, Motley Crue, Kenny G, Neil Young and Slipnot–to name a few.

Artists make the drive through the thin windy road leading up to the ranch to use Kaplan’s extensive variety of vintage equipment, which includes the world’s largest collection of guitar effect pedals, an original Beatle’s microphone and a 1931 Steinway model B piano.

Whether it’s the equipment or the expert engineering that attracts artists to the ranch, it’s the chemistry of the land and the comfort of working in an “at home atmosphere” that really intrigues them. “Artists seem to discover a musical freedom here that stretches their talent,” says Kaplan.

Kaplan explains that the “Chumash used this land to hold music ceremonies and celebrations. It could be fate that we chose to continue to use the property as musical grounds.”

The past year included projects such as the completion of Machine Head’s latest album, with engineer assistance by Kaplan, and Wasp’s “Unholy Terror” album, engineered by Kaplan. This year brought international acts. Latin group A.N.I.M.A.L recorded at the studio.

Julie Kaplan and 15-year client and friend Charlie Sheen collaborated as guest artists contributing background vocals to Norwegian heavy rock group Far Out Fishing. Martin Sheen has also recorded voice-overs in the studio for the movie “JFK,” the additional 41-minute dialogue for the new release of “Apocalypse Now, Redux” as well as National Geographic and Discovery Channel projects.

Many bands also recorded music videos at the ranch.

With a record that passed the platinum mark, rap core group Limp Biskit found it irresistible to include Kaplan’s old cars parked out on the ranch in their music video. Alternative-metal band Korn, with a double-platinum record, also filmed their music video “Blind” on the grounds.

Kaplan also assisted the band Machines of Loving Grace in rigging an extension cord to a portable recorder to record the sound of a guitar as it fell off the mountain. Kaplan explains the band wanted “to capture the ‘realness of the sound.”

That video also incorporated special lighting effects that reflected the silhouettes of band members over the mountain that surrounds the ranch. “It was a pretty cool effect,” says Kaplan.

Kaplan says it always fascinates him to recall past experiences he and Julie have shared with artists during recording sessions at the studio.

“For a long time Neil Young would have three days out of every month booked out to him so he could use the studio during the ‘Full Moon Cycle.’ Sometimes he didn’t even use those days, but he liked to have them reserved,” says Kaplan.

During Korn’s early recording sessions, band members signed a cardboard pizza box shaped as a record album. The band members pretended they were signing a platinum album. “Julie and I realized the band’s potential, so we saved that pizza cardboard and we now have it framed in the office next to Korn’s platinum record–the real one.”

Assistant recording engineer, Kevin Bosley says Indigo Recording Studio is like “Band Camp. People come here and feel like they’re walking into a home instead of a business, because they don’t leave after recording each day,” he explains. “They stay overnight, sometimes for weeks. They take over.”

Despite the long, rich history of the couple’s experiences at Indigo Ranch, the two are giving up their mountain recording retreat. The property is for sale.

With an interesting 25 years at Indigo, Kaplan says, “Future plans will include greater focus on producing.”

My husband and I recently visited Malibu. After hearing how beautiful your community was, we were not disappointed with your views, homes and hospitality. One of our stops included Michael Landon Park overlooking the Pacific Ocean. This was such a pretty park. However, it had the filthiest public restrooms I’ve ever been in. The facilities were strewn with garbage, the toilets were clogged and the smell was unbearable. My husband noticed the same conditions in the men’s restroom. I’m sure many visitors stop there and encounter the same mess we did. Hopefully this will notify the proper departments to maintain their restrooms more regularly and thoroughly, then the image of Malibu and Michael Landon can be kept intact.

C. Stockwell

Colorado