In a Laguna Beach shopping center, a short distance from the usual tourist haunts, Jean Paul's Goodies exerts its peculiar charm on a corps of dedicated customers. Peculiar because baker and counterman Jean Paul, as crusty as his bread, delivers all the smiling service of the stereotypical French proprietor. A faded sign announces that unattended children will receive an espresso and a free puppy. There are no wood veneers here, no forest-green counters, no subtle lighting. Jean Paul's has frankly linoleum floors, wire racks to hold the "goodies," and a line of customers waiting for his strong coffee (served in one-size, environmentally unacceptable Styrofoam cups) and his fabulous croissants.

And even if those weren't so fabulous, many of those folks would be here anyway, as a matter of principle, because the alternative is a Starbucks 50 feet in one direction, and another Starbucks in the supermarket 50 feet in another direction. It is said that anyone who shows up at Jean Paul's with a Starbucks cup is immediately ordered to leave.

Laguna Beach has long had a testy relationship with chain stores. There were screams of outrage when Subway announced plans to move in (it succeeded) and more when Long's Drugs looked into taking over a long-empty spot on Broadway (it stayed out).  As a result, the town is largely lined with tchotchke stores for tourists, rather than the sorts of places you might actually buy your child shoes, for example. So you can imagine the unhappiness when the lone but popular Starbucks across from Main Beach sprouted a sibling just a block and a half away, and somehow grew to five locations within the city. The ubiquitous-Starbucks joke that was so funny in the movie "Best in Show" suddenly loomed as a threat.

There used to be another chain coffeehouse, this one only semi-ubiquitous, in one of the Starbucks locations near Jean Paul's, but it packed up and left. Lagunans pat themselves on the back, sure it was their staunch support against the evils of chainery that caused the closure. For whatever it means, this morning there was one lone customer leaving the Starbucks that replaced the other chain store, while Jean Paul's had the usual line of regulars.

Now that Starbucks has announced plans to shutter 600 stores, there is a certain amount of fervent hope in Laguna that this latest store near Jean Paul's is among those marked for closure--a victory for the discriminatory consumer.

Wonder how many neighborhoods are wishing, despite the loss of 12,000 jobs chainwide, for the loss of a Starbucks — or fearing it?

Tired of walking down the street and chewing gum at the same time? Looking for new things to do with your hands when tomorrow's handheld cell phone ban kicks in?

This Christine Rosen essay in The New Atlantis may give you a new reason to fight the power. Bearing the giveaway title "The Myth of Multitasking," the piece focuses with singleminded concentration on the possibility that when you're doing lots of wonderful things at once, you're doing all of them poorly:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, one sensed a kind of exuberance about the possibilities of multitasking. Advertisements for new electronic gadgets—particularly the first generation of handheld digital devices—celebrated the notion of using technology to accomplish several things at once. The word multitasking began appearing in the “skills” sections of résumés, as office workers restyled themselves as high-tech, high-performing team players...

But more recently, challenges to the ethos of multitasking have begun to emerge. Numerous studies have shown the sometimes-fatal danger of using cell phones and other electronic devices while driving, for example, and several states have now made that particular form of multitasking illegal. In the business world, where concerns about time-management are perennial, warnings about workplace distractions spawned by a multitasking culture are on the rise. In 2005, the BBC reported on a research study, funded by Hewlett-Packard and conducted by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, that found, “Workers distracted by e-mail and phone calls suffer a fall in IQ more than twice that found in marijuana smokers.” The psychologist who led the study called this new “infomania” a serious threat to workplace productivity. One of the Harvard Business Review’s “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2007 was Linda Stone’s notion of “continuous partial attention,” which might be understood as a subspecies of multitasking...

Multitasking might also be taking a toll on the economy. One study by researchers at the University of California at Irvine monitored interruptions among office workers; they found that workers took an average of twenty-five minutes to recover from interruptions such as phone calls or answering e-mail and return to their original task. Discussing multitasking with the New York Times in 2007, Jonathan B. Spira, an analyst at the business research firm Basex, estimated that extreme multitasking—information overload—costs the U.S. economy $650 billion a year in lost productivity.

Read the whole article.

There's some intuitive sense in the argument against the kind of permanent distraction level built into the multitasking culture. But there's a bigger context to the fad: the decline of specialization, and the rise of an amateur, Renaissance-person approach to work.

This shift may be the kind of thing you see more clearly in the field of journalism — where a thousand Mayhill Fowlers bloom and specialized work is being either outsourced or phased out entirely — than you see in, say, neurosurgery. I know I was appalled, upon my arrival at this very newspaper, to discover how rigid the practice of 19th-century division of labor was here. I just hadn't realized there were still places running on industrial-era production models. That has been changing quickly (if 15 years too late) even during my brief tenure, and I suspect you'll see the same thing in many jobs. This means you have more opportunities to learn new skills, to work in fields outside your own and, as Steve Martin advised, to criticize things you don't know about; but it also means you no longer have the leisure to focus on a single task for a great length of time.

So the ability to handle multiple activities, to manage rapid shifts in attention, to organize many different elements that used to be done by different people — to multitask, in other words — will carry more value. A great chunk of specialized skill and artisanship is being lost in the process, but that's not the result of advertising or media exuberance. It's a fundamental change in the way work gets distributed. Most people aren't very good at multitasking, but that's probably because most people weren't very good at single-tasking.

My alma mater has an excellent Drew Carey video examining the anti-free-trade palaver of the candidates and the MSM, and wondering why that same hatred never gets leveled against the real enemies of the proletariat: machines.

Sorry for the late hit, but what really grabbed me was a montage of foreigner-bashing in the media that included this old cover of Time that does for Indians what Der Stürmer did for the Jews. Maybe you have to put it into historical context: Way back in 2006, overpaid magazine editors just didn't have our modern sense of human rights. At least now we know the only sub-humans are fat kids.

(Also, anybody know what movie that is with the giant scorpion robot and the decapitating robot? That looks like something I'd like to see.)

Update: Producer and L.A. Times contributor Ted Balaker informs me that the robot movie is the Jim Wynorski joint "Shockwave" a.k.a. "A.I. Assault" — which was apparently too far ahead of its time for mainstream audiences to appreciate.

For your weekend reading pleasure, here's the NEA's new report "Artists in the Workforce: 1990-2005." While the percentage of self-identified artists, as a portion of the toal workforce, remained constant over the 15-year period, the report suggests a surprisingly robust creative community. Sez NEA Chairman Dana Gioia:

There are now almost two million Americans who describe their primary occupation as artist. Representing 1.4 percent of the U.S. labor force, artists constitute one of the largest classes of workers in the nation—only slightly smaller than the total number of active-duty and reserve personnel in the U.S. military (2.2 million). Artists represent a larger group than the legal profession (lawyers, judges, and paralegals), medical doctors (physicians, surgeons, and dentists), or agricultural workers (farmers, ranchers, foresters, and fishers).

With plenty of state-by-state and profession-by-profession breakdowns, it's an interesting study. Read the full report.

Either that or nobody can afford to take a day off in this economy. The May Day march is a total bust. People are finally starting to arrive (police estimate 8,500), but for most of the day It looked like Omega Man outside the L.A. Times building this afternoon.

Well, maybe it looked like Omega Man would have looked if Matthias and his followers had a Latin band and sold hot dogs wrapped in bacon. In fact, if you're around downtown, you may want to try and bargain down the price on some unsold bacon dogs. No matter how much you pay, you'll be participating in a crime, as this fairly stunning Drew Carey video about the war on bacon dogs makes clear.

Kishore Mahbubani of the National University of Singapore explains why China sees Tibet quite differently than the West:

Chinese history records dominion over Tibet as far back as the 13th century. China's control has ebbed and flowed -- but this is equally true in many other parts of China. Central control by the capital has never been consistent, shifting with the strength of the central government. But this much is certain: China has been in control of most of its territories longer than some Western nations have existed.

More important, the Chinese recall that the latest efforts to separate Tibet from China came as recently as the 1940s and 1950s, when British and U.S. agents were seen to be encouraging Tibetan independence while the new People's Republic was still weak.... Virtually no Chinese believe that Western governments have a strictly moral interest in Tibet. They are convinced that their efforts are only the latest efforts to dismember or derail China.

Author Carolyn See navigates Santa Monica sans car, and columnist Joel Stein finds a place for thoughts that aren't even well-formed enough to be blogposts: the tumble and the twitter.

The editorial board encourages Congress to extend unemployment benefits, urges California to fight proposed federal fuel emissions rules, and says there are small signs of a thaw in Turkey-Armenia relations.

Readers discuss McCain's disability pension and whether it raises questions about his ability to serve as president. L.A.'s Anthony Filosa says, "I'd like to remind The Times that Franklin D. Roosevelt's significant disabilities did not affect his ability to successfully lead this country through some of our most tumultuous times and be remembered as one of our greatest presidents."

And Long Beach's Barbara Hubbs hopes that "McCain is donating that money to the disabled veterans who were not able to put their lives back together."

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer has resigned.

"I look at my time as governor with a sense of what might have been," Spitzer lamented.

On behalf of all who sigh in relief that what might have been wasn't, I wish the family the best. Spitzer showed no quarter to his enemies and should expect none now, but for what it's worth I oppose demand-side as well as supply-side applications of force in regulating prostitution. And I hope this vast shame will prove instructive to the parties involved and to the voters of the Empire State.

Will the entire ed board weigh in? Reply hazy, try again.

The young woman came to my door at around 7 p.m., a good time to catch working people at home on weeknights. She was from South Central, she said, the mother of a young son — she showed me his photo on her cell phone just to prove it — who was working her way toward college. By selling magazines, she said, she could get a scholarship to turn her life around. Her story was laid on so thick, with so many rehearsed appeals to the heartstrings, that before very long it started to sound like ... a scam.

It was.

Magazine crews have been around since the Depression, but with laws restricting telemarketing they've become more common than ever — so common, in fact, that I seem to get a new crew through my neighborhood two or three times a year. The magazines they peddle are legitimate, but offered at prices that are usually far higher than you'd pay by subscribing directly. What's more, buyers are lucky if they ever actually receive the magazines they purchase. One favorite technique of the crews is to tell people who turn down their magazines that they can win points toward a scholarship if the homeowner will simply give a contribution to their organization. This gives the impression that the salesperson is working for some kind of nonprofit: In fact, he or she is working for a sleazy, for-profit, fly-by-night operation that seldom keeps its promises to the naive young people it lures to sells its magazines.

Magazine crews were the subject of an in-depth report in the New York Times last year. So many salespeople have been abused while traveling around the country in crews that support organizations have been set up for recovering crew members and their parents; two such groups can be found here and here. The best way to discourage them: Politely say no and close the door.

Nobody ever calls San Francisco the place where boys will be boys, but the Fog City's board of supervisors has decided to spare Mayor Gavin Newsom an umpteenth public humiliation for his affair with a subordinate earlier this year. Reports the S.F. Chron:

San Francisco supervisors voted down a measure Tuesday that would have barred city managers from engaging in sexual relationships with their employees — a thinly veiled swipe at Mayor Gavin Newsom's admitted affair with a staffer, who also was his campaign manager's wife.

The measure failed with an overwhelming 10-1 vote, with only Supervisor Chris Daly, the legislation's sponsor, voting in favor of it.

"It is common practice in the corporate work setting where managers ... are held accountable and these types of relationships are not tolerated," Daly said.

Let the record show that Chris Daly has at least once in his life alluded to the "corporate" model as the right way of doing anything. But he's onto something interesting with his comment. In fact, the private-sector non-toleration of these types of relationships is a custom more honored in the breach, though employers are probably more attentive to and scrupulous about such matters now than ever before in history. And since political office involves tools of coercion the rest of us can only dream about, there's an argument for holding city officials to the strictest possible standard.

But Daly's stunt — a fun flipside to the old, equally valid, argument that Bill Clinton was guilty of a workplace indiscretion that would have ended the career of any private-sector chief executive — mainly reminds us that the culture has settled into a pretty sane groove with regard to workplace sex. In the early days of sexual harassment awareness (which, lacking any solid marker, I date to the recording of Frank Zappa's "Sexual Harassment in the Workplace" in 1981), quid pro quo and hostile-work-environment categories both got a lot of criticism — the former because, as Paul Wolfowitz most recently discovered, it can be hard to define in a consensual relationship; the latter because male hysterics like David Mamet terrorized the nation with visions of men devoured by shrieking, frantic womenfolk — but both are bright lines that have held up pretty well. You and I may differ on whether we think such behavior ought to be illegal, but that it's frowned upon (and in some respects always was frowned upon) is a sign of mental health.

In a strictly legal sense, Daly's on the right track: the policing of sexual behavior under asymmetrical power dynamics is a potentially boundless pursuit, and Newsom is as good an experimental subject as any. (An affair with a subordinate is an indiscretion; an affair with a subordinate who's also the wife of your friend and campaign manager, well, that's the mark of a man who's really trying.) In reality, Americans, and not just San Franciscans, have stopped far short of the absurdum, and still prefer to leave latitude in cases where neither party is objecting to the encounter.

Read our Mayor Newsom transcript.

On the front page of our paper today you'll see a glorious full-color photo of Jay Leno handing out donuts on a picket line. You can find it on our site. On the front page of The New York Times you'll find a shot of Tina Fey rocking an earnest look among some other group of picketers.

Now, before you say I'm just letting my plutocratic need to batten on the blood tallow of the proletariat get the best of me, let me affirm that I am very happy the WGA strike is on and I hope the work stoppage lasts for at least one full calendar year.

But I mean, if Jay Leno's aims are the same as those of the writers on strike, then who can be considered management in this situation? Yes, yes, I'm sure he has a WGA card or some such thing, but it's The Tonight Show With Jay Leno. He's the boss of the show. He's the person who is ultimately responsible for attracting viewers. He's the one responsible for making sure the program brings in more money than it spends. He answers if the product fails. He's the one responsible for making sure new shows come out and get seen, and he will be, or should be, fire if that fails to happen.

There's a word for that kind of person. It's "boss." Not a union boss — a real boss. Are we supposed to believe nobody under the level of NBC-Universal chairman Bob Wright can be considered management? If Jay's labor, who's management? This is a real question, not a rhetorical question.

Elected officials, or at least those who are Democrats, never actually get Labor Day off. Politicos have to take that day to demonstrate their labor bona fides and line up their support for future campaigns.

In Los Angeles, that means serving up scrambled eggs, hash browns, bacon and sausage (pictured here are Assemblyman Paul Krekorian and U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters, among others) to union members at the annual Labor Day breakfast at the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in downtown Los Angeles, then either attending the Labor Day Mass that follows or scooting down the Harbor Freeway to the rally and parade in Wilmington.

It can be an awkward balancing act. Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa counts labor as his strongest political base but represents management in current talks with city unions. Los Angeles County Federation of Labor leader Maria Elena Durazo handled it perfectly:

"Today our mayor is a strong mediator," she told labor activists at the breakfast. "He makes sure workers have a fair shot."

She called Villaraigosa "a true partner in rebuilding that middle class," then, mixing plaudits and pressure, added: "This is how we are going to judge the mayor of Los Angeles."

Villaraigosa noted that leaders of the city unions applied some pressure of their own.

"We're in negotiations right now and they pinned me when I walked in!" he said, referring to the pin of the new Service Employees International Union Local 721. "Holding me accountable! Man, I love that!"

Outside of City Hall and labor circles, it has been little noticed so far that the SEIU has reorganized itself to boost the clout of its public employee members. Until just over a year ago different bargaining units represented workers in the city and county of Los Angeles; now the same SEIU local -- 721 -- represents employees in cities and counties around Southern California.

In Los Angeles, SEIU Local 721 is part of a six-union coalition that is bargaining as a bloc on contracts that expire Sept. 30. In a tight budget year, a breakdown in negotiations and a city labor strike is theoretically possible. But unlikely. The elected Democrats at Monday's labor breakfast were not looking for trouble, especially as the fundraising and campaign seasons heat up -- for the February 2008 presidential primary, the ballot measure to loosen legislative term limits, the June supervisorial primary, and the big event in next November.

Recent feedback from our readers...

David Bright of Dixmont, Maine, replies to "Paging Dennis Kucinich" by Paul Thornton:

Dennis Kucinich is one of a very few members of Congress who is an member of the AFL-CIO. It would be highly unlikely that he would cross a labor picket line.

My advice to UC Berkeley would be to resolve its labor issues with its employees first, then go looking for commencement speakers.

Responses are still coming in for Michael McGough's Opinion Daily "So what's illegal?" Writes Joe Hale of Atlanta, Georgia:

One reason many Americans may be ambivalent about enforcing immigration laws is because lots of Americans broke Mexican immigration laws by sneaking over the border into Texas, California, New Mexico, etc in the 1840s.  And before that the Spanish violated the borders of the Comanche, Apache, Ute, etc.  If you go back far enough, everyone comes from somewhere else.

Fiery responses to Sonni Efron's "Can we make them hate us less?" From beautiful Coronado, Tom C. Stickel writes:

I was amazed to read Sonni Efron’s concluding editorial claims that stated: “the bigger battle against Islamist fanaticism” has “data that suggests we have already lost”.

Following the Efron logic, where do we pragmatic American’s now surrender? What country or Islamic government will be the location for us to sign our official surrender documents? Efron’s suggested no mas fighting of “Islamist fanaticism” is so remarkable that I wonder if Efron now believes American Christians and Jews need to convert to Islam immediately to save ourselves? Is our certain defeat (as seen by Efron) the end of our Western civilization?  Please, now that Sonni Efron has declared us the loser to our Islamic radical enemies in this battle of cultures, when will Efron be so kind as to illuminate all of us on what our children’s future will look like under Islamic law? Is the L.A. Times soon to write a number of feature stories by Efron on how we should plan on living our lives under Islamic law? Inquiring minds want to know!

Hey, Sonni Efron, when passing out the white flags of surrender, skip sending one to me!

A few years back, I spent several months talking to mid-level tech workers about what was then a new trend: their jobs getting outsourced to India. Most of the people I interviewed were middle-aged white guys with big suburban houses, gas-guzzling SUVs, and families to feed. Most had never finished their college degrees. Out of work for months on end, they spent a lot of time driving their kids to school, surfing the web, watching TV, seeking like-minded unions and politicians, and hanging out in Starbucks complaining to journo-types like me. Usually, they insisted on paying for my four dollar latte. They were nice, and rather sad. I felt bad for them.

I have no idea how many of them ever found jobs.  But a recent feature in West Magazine about offshore tutors for high school kids offers a glimmer of hope—for the next generation, at least.

So much of the outsourcing story in America has been about work and wages lost. But low-cost tutoring from Indian companies like Growing Stars and TutorVista offers middle-class and struggling families in the United States access to one-on-one instruction—at a relatively inexpensive $20 an hour—that used to be available only to the rich. This kind of outsourcing could help my interview subjects’ kids excel in school, earn diplomas, and stay more competitive in the workforce.

As Don Knezek, chief executive of the Washington D.C.- and Eugene, Ore.-based International Society for Technology in Education told West writer Scott Kraft,

For years, tutoring was an elitist activity for the elite. Now, the offshore operations are making it available to the middle class. It really fills a need in the nation right now.

Wonder if any of the guys I interviewed have hired Indian tutors for their kids?

There have been many outrages uttered during the past few days around and about these parts, but for my money (literally speaking) the cruelest blow of all came within this dog-bites-tennis-ball story about how former mayor Richard Riordan, in light of the recent Spring Street tumult, still doesn't care for these L.A. Times. The offending (to me) bit:

Riordan once fancied himself as a newspaper publisher. He toyed with the idea of creating a paper that could compete with the Los Angeles Times. Eventually, Riordan determined that the project wasn't viable and dropped it.

"The smartest thing I ever did was not following through," he said. "I was in over my head."

He walked away lighter by a few hundred thousand dollars, but much wiser. "I lost a quarter-million bucks, which is nothing."

Italics mine, to emphasize the fact that WHERE THE HELL WAS MY CUT, HIZZONER? Barely four figures for basically four months' solid work on my part, during which time I was literally begging pathetically for scratch, while the consultants peddling last century's business models just kept the meter running? The rich are different from you and me ... they think we don't need money.

L.A. Examiner prototype editor Ken Layne (disclosure: Layne is reportedly my bandmate) comments:

It was fun to make a pretend paper with Dick Riordan. My only real regret is that I didn't take at least $100,000 of that $250,000 for myself. When Antonio Villaraigosa wants to start his pretend paper, my fee is $50,000 per month.

Tamar Jacoby and Mark Krikorian continue to carve up the immigration debate today, asking who dares call it amnesty, and who can afford a war of attrition.

And what would a debate be without ringing commentary from You, the Fabulous Little People? Brent R. Forster, who needs no introduction because he introduces himself, speaks up about Operation Disemployment:

"[T]urning off the magnet of jobs is essential to reducing the demand" I have never read when eliminating jobs actually benefited the people...have you?  People who come to make an honest living, must be accepted, it's the American way.

Dear Californians my name is Brent R. Forster, I live in Arlington, VA and I am providing a rebuttal to building the fence and solution to the "immigration problem".  Walls are medieval tools, built to confine animals or to protect the state from the enemy.  Usually when they are destroyed, the destruction is celebrated.  I would also assume the wall would not blend well with the California landscape and probably force the Mexicans to travel through, and destroy more remote undisturbed terrain.

My solution would be to learn how to absorb the "immigrant worker" into the local and federal economy.  Instead of building a fence to keep people out, work with the Mexican people to let them in! Develop a way that the American people and Government can be compensated  along with the Mexican people and maybe you can save another pointless destruction of beautiful environment and wasting millions of tax dollars.  This country was built by immigrants, know matter how may generations pass must tax paying Americans are immigrants of this land.

Monitoring the border is still essential but, it should be done with technology and less conventional tactics, like building a fence.  If a man or woman wants to work and a "magnet of jobs" exists then learn how to control and profit not reject

B

Meanwhile, Greta Anderson of the Center for Biological Diversity says, "'Our Wall' is not my wall...