Every Thursday morning, we have an editorial meeting, and we make up a log of all the upcoming stories for the next week, and then we assign reporters to cover the stories. But there is always one entry for which we make no assignment, and that’s the entry in the log that’s just titled, “Breaking story??”

You might think in a town as small as ours, with perhaps fewer than 12,000 people, there wouldn’t be that much breaking news. You’d be very wrong because more often than not, there is that story, and it happens on Monday or Tuesday. Sometimes it’s just political news, more often it’s the weather and occasionally it’s a category three — a breaking news story.

Monday morning was a category three event, and at slightly after 9 a.m. the phones began to ring. Our photographer, Jan Crane, and her husband, Kevin, passing by the Pier, seeing a construction crane had just fallen, grabbed their cameras and went to work. I was out the door within seconds but not before four more calls from other people passing by the scene who called us on their car phones to alert us.

In the few minutes it took me to get to the accident scene, somehow the TV helicopters had already gotten the word, perhaps listening on the police scanners. It was only a matter of minutes before an entire armada, every news channel on your TV dial, began to hover over the Pier, followed a few minutes later by the ubiquitous TV trucks with their aerials that extend.

I put on my press pass and started shooting pictures right away because I knew from past experience it was only a short time before the sheriff would rope off the scene and start throwing us out. You could also see this one was going to be tense.

It was the posture of the firemen and the paramedics that said the operator, trapped inside the cage, was hurt, and no one was sure how badly hurt, but it could be bad. No one said it, but those cages where the crane operator sits are heavily reinforced to protect the operator if something falls or if the crane topples. If the operator was hurt, that might have meant something had collapsed or something had penetrated the cage, which lay on its side, under the body of the crane. The operator was down in the cage and couldn’t be seen, except for his arm. People around and above him were trying to cut him out with special tools, some holding an IV bottle connected to his arm, which might have meant they were afraid he would go into shock.

Meanwhile, the rescue workers were trying to secure the scene, to make sure there weren’t any hot wires someone could touch and to begin to get some wood under parts of the crane so the boom wouldn’t fall any farther if the rest of the prep kitchen building, which was holding up the boom, suddenly collapsed.

You could feel the tension rising. There were just wisps of conversations I overheard.

“He seemed like a young kid.”

“He seemed to be losing feeling in the lower part of his body.”

“He was still trapped.”

“They must have been thinking about the possibility of fire.”

I didn’t see anyone with any kind of a cutting torch, just a portable band saw and the large scissors for cutting steel, the “jaws of life,” and a few large, specialized tools whose use was impossible to figure out.

With each minute more emergency trucks and personnel materialized — fireman and lifeguards in yellow slickers, paramedics in gray-blue, state parks people in brown and TV crews in the everything.

After an hour or so, they brought in an emergency evacuation helicopter, which meant they were getting close, and firemen kept pulling off pieces of metal, which looked like they came from the cage. Then he was out, onto a gurney, into the evacuation helicopter and off to UCLA, leaving exhausted rescuers behind and a swarm of reporters and investigators crawling over the scene trying to find eyewitnesses, and I went back to putting out a newspaper.

Recent events at Malibu High School have caused parents, teachers and students to have a heightened sense of concern about student safety at our school. Yes, we live in a wonderful community, but we have all seen recent examples of violent tragedies occurring in upper middle class communities and we know that Malibu is no exception. It can hit us too.

One of the ideas brought up at a recent town meeting was the idea of bringing trained dogs to campus for unannounced visits. These dogs are trained to locate illegal drugs and any weapon. They are amazing animals. Many parents believe that the threat of the dogs making a surprise visit would make students more wary of bringing anything illegal onto campus. That has to make our campus safer. I completely agree, and the Malibu High School Governance Council recently unanimously endorsed the idea.

I am asking for your tax deductible donations to help us bring these dogs on campus and make our campus safer. You can make your checks payable to Malibu High School. The cost is approximately $4,000 a year for two visits a month. We can have more visits if there are more funds.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to call me. Thank you for your consideration.

Michael D. Matthews

principal, Malibu High School

In response to James Scott, I disagree. What efforts have you made, as a volunteer, to help the community obtain better services and value from a local business monopoly? The dismissal of Nidia Birenbaum from the Telecommunications Commission by Hasse was not only cowardly, but also rude and mean-spirited, done for ulterior personal political motives, in concert with Peacock and Chanel because Birenbaum would not go along with Hasse’s “program” calling for disloyalty to Keller and Van Horn, and concession to Falcon Cable’s business interests which have been adopted by Hasse to serve his desire to control the governmental channel to promote himself and his selected candidates for the next election.

If Peacock is a “good” city manager, then why has he not put the cable franchise out for bid, as he promised the council he would, and as would be proper to gain the benefit of competitive bidding for citizens who are overpaying for poor service from Falcon. Have Peacock, Hasse, and Chanel made their deal with Falcon, and Birenbaum was “in the way?” Why did Chanel edit the commissioner’s report that made recommendations for citizens that were not in Falcon’s best interest? When Birenbaum civilly objected to censorship, she was screamed at and then dismissed. So much for democratic dialogue. It’s OK as long as it is not detrimental to vested interests.

If Peacock is a “good” city manager then why did he say the public record (tape recording) of the last commission meeting “does not exist,” when witnesses saw the recording being made and Chanel announced that copies could be obtained from the City Clerk? Is it because Peacock acted out a temper tantrum and did not want evidence of his verbal abuse to be presented just as his “job performance evaluation” was coming before the council? He runs this town, but not well, or for the citizens, nor according to the council’s directions. That is why Hasse is so mutually obedient with Peacock. A complaint to the sheriff’s department will intitiate an investigation (there are at least six witnesses to be interviewed) for grand theft/destruction of public property.

Hasse is a carpetbagger. He recently came from out of town, (Chicago where his mom is a councilmember), got Keller and Van Horn to appoint him to two commissions and obtained support from Remy O’Neill, Joanne Segel, Nidia Birenbaum and others and has deliberately cut off all ties to those supporters after the election, in a backstabbing obsession for control of the city and as a steppingstone for his political ambitions. As for his “list”, he repeatedly claims he is the only councilmember who does anything; another self delusion as demonstrated by the reasonable preservation of the best of Malibu since Walt and Carolyn began as volunteers against the nuclear plant. He has refused to attend informational meetings with the land conservancy, while secretly meeting with major developers to “cut a deal.” At least Jennings was up front about his development viewpoints. Hasse cannot be honest about himself, so how can he be honest with others? Birenbaum’s dismissal is an example, not just because it was done, but by the way it was done. How obvious. How shameful. Only the citizenry ultimately loses when good volunteer efforts are dismissed and loyalty is disregarded. Hasse should be recalled from office before he is able to finalize his current objective of controlling the upcoming election to empower his personal agenda that now serves the aggressive development of Malibu.

Sam Birenbaum

Buying the Fast Frame business in Cross Creek, says artist Chris Cavette, was like a homecoming. Although his life has taken a circuitous route, his roots were always firmly planted in art and in Malibu.

“At 19, I went from Malibu Beach to Fort Ord, then Fort Lewis, where it rained every day. Then Vietnam for a year,” he says. “When I got out, I moved into a trailer in Latigo Canyon, and I started to paint again.”

The son of two artists, Cavette grew up drawing and painting but didn’t take it too seriously. “I guess it came too easily. When you’re young, you don’t value what comes naturally.”

So he focused on music for about 10 years, playing rhythm guitar and singing with a small rock group that played locally and toured.

“I lived on Point Dume in a bus with my dog. He couldn’t go on the road with me so I had a dog sitter,” Cavette remembers. “The bus had padded walls so I could play and sing and not bother anybody.

“We traveled across the country in a line of station wagons — mine broke down more than once — and we played the Malibu Beach Club and the Holiday House, in the old days before it was Geoffrey’s,” he says.

“For 10 years I waited tables at Alice’s. I just barely made a living, so then I figured I’d do something more productive, like acting. Right,” he laughs.

His acting career was not a stellar success. “I did about a year of going out on interviews. I got a lot of callbacks and wound up getting one commercial,” he says. “It got so frustrating.”

Between interviews, he needed to eat a little something, keep up his strength. So he turned to picture framing because he wanted to be around art. “I went back to my art roots, started painting again.”

He got a job selling frames at a Fast Frame store, which he says made perfect sense. “It was costing me an arm and a leg to frame my paintings.”

Like most artists, he remembers the first piece he ever sold. “When I first was selling picture frames, I asked the store manager if it was okay to put one of my pictures up in the gallery,” he says, allowing that he had no idea how to price it. “I put $300 on it. It was the first one I thought was good enough. It sold the first week.” After that, he says he put up another, and it just took off from there.

Then, last summer, he had the opportunity to buy the Malibu Fast Frame. “My father helped purchase the business. Now I have all the frames, and I got an art supply store along with it.” He plans to expand the art supplies, which he says are mostly student-grade supplies. “Serious artists want better brushes, Kolinsky sable.”

And all this seems naturally to have turned his thoughts to teaching, which he thinks would be rewarding. He’s been asked to have classes and is planning some three-hour workshops after the first of the year. “Watercolors, I know,” he says. “I know I can teach that, but I would get someone else to teach oils. I’ve talked with Bobbie Moline Kramer, an oil painter who teaches at California Art Institute, about teaching here. She has a great way of teaching. She tells students, ‘Warm versus cool, bright versus dull, light versus dark, if you have those in every picture … ‘

“My approach is a lot of water, a lot of color and big brushes, so you get a nice juicy wash. That way, you won’t have a tendency to pick at the painting like you do with a small brush. Watercolors are not exact,” he explains. They were originally meant to take an impression of a scene quickly, which the artist would then take home and do again in oils.

“The first thing you do is a value sketch. It’s a map showing the degrees of light and dark, which is fundamental to watercolors,” he says. “With oils, you can go back and put white paint on top, but watercolors can’t go on top. You have to mark off the light areas with frisket.”

But it’s more than just technique. Cavette says he likes to paint outdoors rather than from photographs because the time of day, the temperature, the light all affect the way one sees colors. “You are responding to your feeling,” he says, pointing to a large painting of a tree brushed with orange and deep reds. “The tree wasn’t orange, but it was so hot, I was out there three hours sweating, so I saw it in those hot colors.”

Many kids have talent, Cavette says, but they don’t always value what comes easy to them. He admits that he didn’t.

“It’s a God-given talent. Each one of us has a special one, but it’s our job to search it out. If I stay in shape, I can paint forever. I really do have a passion for art. It’s such a satisfaction. It’s like meditating.”

The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal I can think of. When the Lilly’s Coffee Shop 8 a.m. coffee group gets together they occasionally have to originate their discussions. On a recent visit I found them talking about the gender of the city of Malibu. They weren’t sure which it was. Should it be masculine or feminine?

One group headed by the candid Doug O’Brien, if I recollect accurately, concluded that the city of Malibu should be referred to in the masculine gender because:

1. In order to get their attention, you have to kick them in the butt.

2. They have a lot of data but are still clueless.

3. They are supposed to help you solve your problems, but half the time they are the problem.

The opposite group led by the commentator Ray Vogue determined that the city of Malibu should definitely be referred to in the feminine gender because:

1. No one but the creator understands the city’s internal logic.

2. The aborigine language they use to communicate with each other is incomprehensible to everyone else.

3. Even your smallest mistakes are stored in their long-term memory for later retrieval.

4. Malibuites find themselves spending their paycheck on accessories for it.

I don’t know who is accurate on this issue of gender and certainty I don’t want to claim a position on such an impressionable topic. Maybe the city of Malibu has no gender. Maybe the government of the city of Malibu is really intended to teach us that not everything in nature has a function.

Tom Fakehany

Just when you think you have seen Caltrans exhibit a new level of blundering, that state agency has come back to surprise us with another outrage.

You know those curb medians they said were unsafe and tore out? The ones they promised to reinstall to prevent unsafe U-turns? The ones that they’re going to reinstall after Malibu citizens pointed out the foreseeable problems?

Well, they are not going to put the medians where they need them the most, along Zuma Beach.

The paving contractors tell me that Caltrans ordered them to repave PCH at Zuma with drainage to only one side of the street. Installing the curbs on the flat pavement would cause water to pond!

Brilliant job, Caltrans. Now tourists will continue to make those death-defying U-turns trying to grab empty parking places at the beach.

And how about those lane closures in Santa Monica? Here’s an amazing fact: the lanes are closed so that Santa Monica can dig a tunnel for the sewer line deep beneath PCH. This tunnel will be 60 feet below the surface, meaning the tunnel could have safely been drilled below the property along PCH, with the drilling pits located in the beach parking lots.

Or, Caltrans could have ordered Santa Monica to use subway-style construction methods in which decking is used to maintain all traffic flow over a tunneling site. Santa Monica’s engineer says that would be too expensive.

Why didn’t Caltrans or the PCH Advisory Committee set up by Assemblywoman Sheila Kuehl demand this alternative? Was it even considered? I asked this to Caltrans last week but have had no answer.

The answer is that Caltrans approved the Santa Monica Project without any substantive changes aimed at maintaining full traffic flow. Santa Monica’s outlook on this, and I quote exactly from an engineer working for that city, is “well, you moved to Malibu. Shouldn’t you expect such problems?”

With engineers like those in Santa Monica and at Caltrans, I guess the answer is yes.

Hans Laetz

I had a chat with a friend whom I met

Who had just returned from a trip to Tibet

In a world beset with hunger and strife

He set out in search for the meaning of life

It was a perilous journey

Filled with hazards and trauma

‘Til he finally found

The much acclaimed Lama.

My friend asked the question,

He could no longer wait.

The old man seemed to hesitate.

“As simplistic,” said the monk, “as it may seem,

Life is like a mountain stream

It starts at the top, then I’m sorry to say,

That it’s downhill all the rest of the way.”

My friend returned home depressed and dejected

The answer was far from what he had expected

Saddened to see my friend in a slump

I said “life’s more like a fountain

With a recycling pump.”

My assessment renewed him,

(I don’t want to seem flip.)

But if he had come to me first,

I could have saved him the trip!

Geraldine Forer Spagnoli