July 10, 2007

Commie tries to get housing in order
A break in art "theft" and more

FRANK MICKADEIT
Register columnist

Commie Girl resurfaced yesterday. Doing the Lord's work, or about as close as she gets to it, helping to launch a Web site that hopes to become a major advocate for affordable housing. www.fourstory.org.

I well remember some years back when she spun off a string of unprintables to describe her frustration at being unable to buy the modest home she was renting in a "Floral Park-adjacent" neighborhood in Santa Ana. This, even though she'd held a (mostly) respectable job at the same employer for years. As she noted yesterday on her inaugural blog, the median single-family OC home now goes for $894,990.

"I couldn't afford a one-bedroom townhome that smelled like cat pee," she says.

It's that kind of writing FourStory promises to bring to its "non-boring" site. There's even a fiction area, which gives us Chapter One of a novella by a writer named Gary Phillips and introduces a whole new genre in American letters. " 'The Underbelly' is a serialized mystery that, while fiction and, we hope, entertaining, nonetheless incorporates issues of gentrification, tenants' rights and smart growth."

Tell the truth, Rebecca. If you were still at the Weekly, wouldn't you have just a little fun with that?

Correction: Barbara Coe is NOT part of the new lawsuit filed against Minuteman Jim Gilchrist by the Minuteman board that fired him. Coe was on the board, but decided not to join this suit. According to Deborah Courtney, one of the litigants, Coe "took too much heat" from immigration reformers during the first legal action.

It didn't take long to develop a lead in the mystery behind the huge Syd Hoff print that hangs, uncredited, in dozens of Mimi's Cafes.

You'll recall his niece, Carol Edmonston, had found what she thought might be a photograph of the original in a 1996 article in Elle Décor magazine. But she wasn't sure because her uncle had told her he had painted it for the legendary Café Society nightclub in New York and she thought he said it was a mural, not a work on canvas – which is what appeared in the magazine.

I got an email from Elle Décor's editor, Margaret Russell. She'd read the column online and contacted designer Randolph Duke, whose home had been the subject of the layout.

Duke, she said, "believes his Syd Hoff painting was an original canvas and that he sold it to a local Hamptons antiques dealer some time ago. … I had styled the photo shoot 12 years ago, and I still remember how fabulous that painting was in Randolph's house."

Duke, she says, has promised to do some research and try to provide details.

Loose ends from Nebraska. … I'd speculated that UCI had better watch out or Tennessee was going to steal baseball coach Dave Serrano. As Youngman reports, Tennessee has hired another guy, so Serrano appears safe, for now. … Nice note from Greg Pivovar, the Omaha lawyer who owns the classic memorabilia shop across the street from Rosenblatt Stadium. He says column has made him rethink how he feels about letting the bulldozers have their way with the 1898 building. He had been resigned to it. Jerry Lawrenceof San Juan Capistrano wrote to ask me for dimensions of the store because he wants to memorialize it in a scale model.

Chuck Dobson, president of the Santa Ana chapter of the UCI Alumni Association, says it is working with the city, state, the UC and the Friends of the Zoo to bring an anteater to the Santa Ana Zoo. More than $300,000 of the required $500,000 has been raised. "We hope the kids visiting the zoo will think about going to college when they see the mascot of a major university," Dobson says. "Even if some of the kids go on to CSUF, the project will still be worth it......unless they are good baseball players."

I can bag on clients like Caronaand T-Rack and not hear a peep, but take a shot at the Santa Ana Zoo and I get a note from Mike Schroeder.

"Hey, why are you whacking the Santa Ana Zoo? I love that zoo. It was one of the things we could afford to go to when I was a kid. In the children's petting zoo, I used to watch the billy goats eat not just my pop corn, but the paper container it came in. You could ride this huge turtle. (I think he means tortoise. F.M.) I think that you need to join the Friends of the Zoo."

Hey, Schroeder, you sitting up in your big office in the Xerox tower overlooking the zoo – I think you need to pay for the other two-fifths of the anteater.