That's what the Jewish Journal calls Joyce Brooks Bogartz, owner of the Malibu Beach Grill, a kosher restaurant on the land side of PCH across from the Malibu Pier. Locals are split on the place. Some just can't forgive the way long-time tenant (and wildly popular - did you ever have their garlic mashed potatoes?) Malibu Chicken was forced out. Others take a c'est la vie approach and say the food at the new place is pretty good.

But this post-punk Gidget is the kind of 'Bu Jew who is as comfortable around Chabadniks as she is with surfers.

"Having a kosher place, you can only be so risqué in your appearance," she said.

Situated a quick jaywalk across Pacific Coast Highway from Surfrider Beach and the Malibu Pier, Malibu Beach Grill is a kosher oasis in a town renowned for breathtaking seaside vistas, A-list celebrity sightings and new-age crunchiness. And nearly two years after the controversial ouster of Malibu Chicken by building owner Chabad of Malibu, Malibu Beach Grill is well on its way to carving out its own niche with an eclectic menu that can best be described as California fleishig (meat).

But the road to winning over the locals wasn't easy.

A Mel Gibson joke here would be overkill, right? Yeah. Anyway, here's the rest of the story.

The ferris wheels arrived yesterday, huge hunks of steel in kindergarten colors. They trundle in on special flatbeds, stick-straight and not too promising. Big men with big tools hammer and pry and cajole and jiggle and suddenly, voila! A ferris wheel unfolds like origami. This one look bigger than some from previous years, which is good in so many ways. Bigger ride, bigger thrill, of course. But best of all, a clear view into Jerry Perenchio's precious private golf course. Oh I can hardly wait.

And so it's gone. Paradise Found, the little trailer on the bluff, has vanished into the dumpster. It took six guys just under six days to dismantle it. We hear the new owners plan to put in something sleek and modern, all slick glass walls and stern, clutter-free interiors. Not at all like the former owner, but then again he was nothing like the person who came before him. I wonder how long the new people will last, and who will come next.

This week, it's all about the Chili Cook-off here in Malibu. It's our countdown to the end of summer traffic and the start of the Christmas shopping season.
The Malibu Kiwanis have been busy. Someone pulled that wonderful homemade Chili Cook-off sign out of storage, cleaned it up and it's standing again at the corner of Webb Way and PCH, the way it has every August for years. (Click for a larger version.)

The ticket booths are taking shape and an amusement park's worth of rides has arrived. There'll be trinkets for sale, a petting zoo, games of chance, a raffle, and stands selling the kind of carnival food that makes those nervous nellies at the Center for Science in the Public Interest clutch their blood pressure cuffs in alarm.

And then there's the Cook-off. It's nice to imagine the dozens of chili experts out there, amassing their spices, prepping their gear and making one more tiny tweak to their chili. It'll be ever better, white plastic spoon in hand, flimsy paper napkin at the ready, to dig in and taste it.

A famous rock musican owns a chunk of land in a famous canyon here in Malibu. He tied up the development rights and unless something goes terribly wrong, this particular place will always be rural. There's no house on the property, just a shambling red barn. There's a patch of lawn where sometimes you see kids playing ball or a woman in a straw hat reading or a coyote sunning himself. This summer, someone planted a garden. Tomatoes and peppers, watermelon, rhubarb and corn, a big patch of sunflowers playing host to honey bees. Lately there's been this monarch butterfly hanging around, punch-drunk on pollen. It smells good there in the afternoon, sweet and loamy. The bee-sound gets inside your head, slows your thoughts, slows time until suddenly you've been there an hour, pressed beneath a shaft of sunlight like a specimen.

Way back in 1969, the Adamson family gave Pepperdine University a gift of 138 prime ocean-view acres near the base of Malibu Canyon. The school had been outgrowing its downtown campus and, after the Watts riots officials were, well, determined to move. Donors added cash and additional acreage to the Adamson's gift and the building began. The site was graded, Malibu Canyon Road was re-routed and in 1971, the stoplight went in.

The place has been growing ever since.

Pepperdine isn't part of Malibu proper - the city limits gerrymander around the campus by mutual agreement. The university gets to develop its land to its heart's content under the less-stringent LA County building code, and Malibu city officials don't have to fret about an ever-changing student body mucking up their elections. The campus has a nice library, an art gallery, a performing arts space, a great swimming pool (the annual membership runs into four figures) and, when a bad accident at that aforementioned stoplight shuts down PCH, provides a much-needed shortcut.

Apparently Malibu can be a challenge to kids living far from home so the Graphic, Pepperdine's college paper, recently published this a handy little survival guide.

PCH may seem as odd as Oz must have seemed to Dorothy at times, but instead of Munchkinland, it’s an oceanic wasteland filled with unique restaurants and hangouts.

Malibu, like most places, offers an array of things to do minus the pedestrian paths.

The demolition continues.

Check out the photos for why, in Big Wind country, trailers are the first to go. These are flimsy little dwellings. Their skins peel off like an old sunburn and you half expect to see chewing gum and twine binding them together.

A closer look at the strata, and the history of Paradise Found unfolds: the original beige metal trailer, two separate applications of aluminum siding, one horizontal and one vertical. The final redwood shell. Now we're down the to chassis and a tree stump.

Oh. And the view

Remember Paradise Found, once the nicest trailer in the Cove? Now it's a tear-down. A friend who has lived here since she was a kid remembers it in an even earlier incarnation, before the deck was built. The original owner planted the ficus tree you see in the first picture. It anchored an old-fashioned cutting garden, bright pinks and yellows and reds. The second owner swathed the tree in redwood decking. The third owner, well, see for yourself.

I have violated the Prime Directive and I am paying the price. About fifty cents a pound, which is what sugar costs here in Malibu. I hung a hummingbird bird feeder near the top of a dry canyon (are there any other kind in August?) where I spend a lot of time and suddenly, I'm a pusher.

I started small. One of those dinky little feeders you can get at Target. I washed it, filled it (one part sugar to four parts water), hung it from the eaves of a weathered barn and waited. Nothing. Days went by. All I saw were a bee or two, the occasional ant. Then one day, while I was working in the barn, there was this sound, a zoomy, whirring, whooshing sound I couldn't quite place. Outside, its tiny talons curled around the red plastic perch, was my first hummingbird.

A miracle, I thought. I still do, but now I've got a lot of asterisks attached to that word. Some bird books call them "nature's little jewels." Nature's little MiG's is more accurate. Hummingbirds, I have learned, are cranky birds, ferocious and fearless and territorial. From that first day on, they fought over the feeder, dove at each other full-speed, flew eyeball to eyeball in looping arcs and drove each other, literally, into the ground. Alarmed, I bought a second feeder and a third. I thought to ease the pressure, spread the wealth. But instead, more of them came.

I now host two jumbo feeders (down from three - tough love) and go through almost ten pounds of sugar a week. They know the sound of my car and they're waiting for me when I arrive. I can hear them in the trees and scrub around the barn, making that scritchy little sound that passes for birdsong. If I'm slow in hanging the fresh food, they do a few overflights, then hover and drink right from my hand. It's remarkable having the breeze from a hummingbird's wings ruffle your hair.

It's just plain weird when, at dusk, they're as thick as mosquitoes. Ten, twenty, thirty of them at a time, Anna's and Allen's and Rufous and some I still can't quite figure out. It's last call, just moments of daylight left and they don't have time to fight. They fly in formation, hover at the feeder and actually take turns. Then all of a sudden, they're gone. Silence.

Thursday is news day here in Malibu. We're that rare American city that still has two newspapers. Free weeklies, it's true, but newspapers nonetheless. There's the Malibu Surfside News, a tabloid with a slow-growth bent, and The Malibu Times, a broadsheet that's generally thought to be pro-business. Both take their role as the community watchdog quite seriously and for that, we here in Malibu are grateful.

You don't look for Malibu news in the L.A. Times. You're not going to see it on TV. If you really want to know what's going on here, if a city council vote seems more important than Britney's manny (she hired a male nanny; the tabs dubbed him a manny; now you know what I read while waiting in line at Sav-On) you follow the hometown press. Our papers are locally-owned and fiercely proud of it. The letters pages are a public forum. People write in to complain, correct, chastise and cheerlead. Conversational threads can continue for a month or more. Barbra's addition (too big!), Cher's wall, (too tall!), a dog bite, traffic, the loss of a beloved grocery store (Cooke's Family Market - another story for another day).

Unless the L.A. Times takes an interest in an Australian company's efforts to park a liquefied natural gas terminal off the Malibu coast, our news about that will continue to come from the Malibu Times and the Surfside News. So far, they own the story. Ditto for a fight brewing between city residents enraged by a public works plan floated by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

Our local press isn't perfect. From time to time, depending on the crime or crisis or bureaucratic bungle, the stories can leave you wondering whether the reporters attended the same event. It's not that they get it wrong, though that happens. (One year, the editor of the Malibu Times goofed and urged his readers to vote "yes" on a state proposition he passionately opposed. The Surfside News, for its part, recently skipped the fact-check process on a local man's claims to fame and attributed to him numerous honors he no doubt aspired to but had failed to actually achieve.) And it's not an Orwellian war-is-peace Fox News thing, either. I think it's that they work with fewer resources, fewer filters. They write for their readers and not for the layers of editors above them. Hell, there are no layers of editors above them. What goes to press is the news that matters to Malibu and the way it's written reflects each newspaper's sensibility.

So today is news day in Malibu. We're in for typos and misspellings and bumping headlines, hurriedly-written stories and lots and lots of real estate ads. There'll be evidence galore that Malibu is rich and famous. But we'll also see, in the raw grief of an obituary, a tart letter to the editor, a desperate "lost dog" notice, a home-drawn ad by someone betting her life savings on a small business, the heart of a small town.

OK, I'll admit it. When I heard a new surfing mag aimed at women was hitting the news stands, I was skeptical. Maybe even a teensy bit hostile. I still miss the late great Wahine, the first monthly put out by women and for women. The publisher was a lifelong surfer. The editor was a former LA Times writer. Wahine was a great magazine and its readership was devoted. (Full disclosure - I wrote for them sometimes.) Something went wrong, however, some kind of spat with advertisers that spun out of control and the next thing you knew it was aloha, Wahine.
A mishmash of wannabes with "surf" or "surfing" or "surfer" hitched to the word "girl" came and went. Some were stand-alones, actual titles for sale. Others got bundled into the boy mags. They weren't awful. They were OK. They were allright, really. What's not to like about getting women who surf out into the public eye? But they weren't fulfilling.

And now we've got Wet. It's a large-format quarterly put out by Nothing is Written Publishing with an address on PCH. Publisher/editor - Ben Marcus. The vibe is a little Surfer's Journal, a little Longboard, a little bit Elle. It doesn't leer. It doesn't talk down. The writing...well, the writing is fine and it's bound to get better. It's got a lot of good photos and a few really great ones. Fun pieces, like Rochelle Ballard's wry rundown of her scars and breaks and bruises. All in all, a very good debut. Can they keep it up? That's the question we all face, isn't it? Wet is smart and stylish and its heart is in the right place. We'll see if that's enough.

There was a time when this was the nicest trailer in Paradise Cove. Right on the bluff. French doors and skylights. A wraparound deck. Views of Catalina on a clear day, of Santa Monica on all but the foggiest days. Queen's necklace at night, that string of light and shadow that shimmies on the surfline, traces the slow curve of the shore.

Paradise Found, the trailer was called. The owner, an econ professor at CSUN, had the name carved into a sign out front. He had a picnic table and some deck chairs, a ping pong table and a hot tub. He loved the view so much, he tiled his walls and ceilings with mirrors. Wherever you looked it was the sea, the sky, the sun, the sea. Not soothing. Not comfortable. A feng shui nightmare, truth be told. But that's how he liked it and everyone here liked him and that's just how things were at Paradise Found.

He put the place on the market a few years ago and sold it for half a million. A week into escrow he couldn't bear it and he backed out. This year he sold it for a rumored $1.4 million and this time the sale went through. A family from Phoenix bought it, sent around a friendly note to everyone in the Cove about how thrilled they are to be here. They came and spoke at a community meeting. They seem really nice.

Yesterday, this chain link fence went up. A portapotty was delivered. A bunch of guys with a boom box tuned to talk radio are taking the place apart. We'll follow the process here. Photos and updates. Soon Paradise Found will be stripped down to a bare chassis and then we'll see. We'll see what takes its place. What changes take place. And what bits of our friend's paradise might still be found.

"Darwin in Malibu," a play at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor is pretty good, says Newsday.

Playwright Crispin Whittell doesn't tarry long on that easy route to "Darwin in Malibu." Although Gary Hygom's shingled, earth-tone set for the U.S. premiere at Bay Street Theatre re-creates an oceanfront deck that suggests the Hamptons, the shirt Hal Linden sports in his role of Charles Darwin gives him away as a Malibu tourist. What's drawn him to the West Coast is uncertain: perhaps a girl, Sarah (Anna Chlumsky), who kisses him chastely on the cheek and serves him a banana smoothie, or his fascination with faults - the geologic sort that cause earthquakes as devastating as the one that jolted religion upon publication of his "The Origin of Species" in 1859.

Remember Malibu resident Jamie Gold, the newbie poker player (and talent agent) who credited his game face and his $12 million win in the World Series of Poker last week to spending time with, well, liars, in Hollywood production meetings? Another Hollywood type claims Gold promised him half his winnings. A judge has signed a temporary restraining order preventing Gold from touching even a penny of his loot until a September 1 court hearing.

After two weeks of gloomy mornings, a sunrise. Ironically, it was Santa Monica that was socked in with fog today. But at 6:31 a.m. here in Paradise Cove - which does face east, despite what many well-meaning (and more than a few irate) letter writers told me yesterday - the sun cleared the horizon.

I don't mean to bore you with yet another photo of dawn here in Malibu, really I don't. Two in a row? Zzzzzzzzzzz. Just because I can't seem to get over the view doesn't mean others should suffer through my obsession. So enough of sunrise. Enough of this view. For a while, anyway. In a few months the planets will have spun and the earth rotated enough that the sun will seem to rise straight from the sea. And that'll be worth another look.

We've got our share of civic organizations here in Malibu. Their seals and emblems cling to the city limit signs like starfish. (Or sea stars, as a marine biologist friend prefers they were called. Sea stars? I think you've got a losing battle there, Josh.)

Each has its own fundraising event that takes a starring role on the city calendar. In the weeks leading to Labor Day, it's all about the Malibu Kiwanis Club's 25th Annual Chili Cook-off and Carnival. And raffle. This year, the Kiwanis are giving away - well, selling for a $100 ticket, but that includes the gift tax, which the Kiwanis I spoke with said they've paid, so it really is only a hundred bucks if you win - a cream-colored PT Cruiser convertible. As of yesterday, fewer than 400 tickets had sold. Pretty good odds.

Over the weekend, a rented chain link fence went up around the vast, empty lot along PCH where the cook-off takes place. It's a dry and weedy expanse dotted with dog poop and gopher holes, and has broken more than a few developers' hearts. (Another story for another time.) Now, as ticket booths go up and bales of straw get delivered, as the P.A. system takes shape and parking attendants practice their smiles, it serves as a real-time advent calendar in the countdown to the official - if not the actual - end of summer.

Almost a sunrise this morning in Paradise Cove. That's right, sunrise. We're a cove within a bay and the bluff here faces east. Over at Point Dume, that's the sunset. We'll see the stained sky from here, see the clouds work their way from white to pink to rose to grey. But that's tonight. Here's how it looked on the bluff at 6:45 a.m.
Humans - quiet. Nature - loud. Crows going crazy in the eucalyptus trees, maybe recovering from the long, windy night, maybe just working out issues of hierarchy. Hummingbirds, cranky from the cold, screaming by on their way to flowers or feeders or just looking to warm up with a good fight. It's a medium tide with enough surf kicked up by a storm off the coast of Mexico to keep a steady rumble in the background. Unless that's the start of the morning commute on PCH. Or a bit of both.

From this week's Malibu Times:

SEEKING MEL GIBSON. Reliable 62 year old private driver. Jewish Malibu Alcoholic resident w/23 years sobriety offering an open ear w/safe & professional driving 24/7.

And...

AVOID TERRORIST ATTACK. 20 acre estate FSBO in Missouri includes 7000 sf home, music studio and lake. $650k.

Mel Gibson completed a familiar celebrity rite of passage yesterday when he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor drunk driving charge. He'll serve three years probation for his July 28 escapade, pay more than $1,600 in fines and attend "self help meetings" for a year. (Five meetings a week for the first 18 weeks, then three a week until the year is up.)

In an effort to keep things from going all O.J., the court date was suddenly moved up by more than a month. The AP assigned superstar court reporter Linda Deutsch to the drama unfolding in our little courthouse by the sea.

The abrupt advancement was announced to the news media by the district attorney's office with no time for most reporters to reach the courthouse before the proceeding was over.

Court documents showed that Gibson signed the plea agreement and waived his right to a jury trial Monday but that the paperwork was filed just before Thursday's proceeding.

Audio and video tapes of the incident are still under wraps, which makes the venerable Associated Press and upstart celebrity gossip web site, TMZ, co-crusaders in this First Amendment struggle.

Oh, and the original judge in the case, Terry Adamson? She recused herself. Mel's her neighbor.

A home designed by the son-in-law of Frank Lloyd Wright makes the front page of the Home section of the LA Times today. Set on five coastal acres, it's now the home and and workplace of composer Graeme Revell and his wife, Sinan, an artist. How do you find the place? Read on...

Drive past the tabloid photographers camped outside Brad Pitt's compound on Pacific Coast Highway, get buzzed through a white entry gate, then ramble down the long, sloped driveway, and you'll see it — one of Peters' last creations, part Modernist box, part Buddhist temple. The pitched roof looks Asian in inspiration, sheathed in shimmering tiles, each shaped like a rolling wave and glazed a cerulean blue.

The front door leads to a living room that feels like a temple of sorts, a reverent homage to Mother Nature more than any deity. Walls are spider webs of glass, geometric grids of copper mullions patinated blue with age, each framing an angular window to the Pacific.

Santa Monica City College entered into a 90-day escrow today with the owner of a seven-acre property located next to Malibu City Hall, according to the Malibu Times. If all goes well - and with two bureaucracies involved that's by no means assured - the site will be the home of a small SMCC campus.

Although state law does not require SMC to follow city zoning laws if it builds a campus in Malibu, an agreement between the city and the college forces it to do that. For the purchase to happen, it must be approved by the Joint Powers Financing Authority, which consists of city and SMC officials.

You never know what'll come up when you type the name of our little burg into a search engine. Here - and ignoring the various police log stories of carnage and mayhem involving the Chevy Malibu - is a sampling.

Playbill reports that "Darwin in Malibu," a play about the father of evolutionary theory kicking back on a Malibu beach, and starring Tony winners Richard Easton and Hal Linden, is now playing on Long Island, N.Y.

A bleep-filled "I own Malibu" ringtone featuring a Mel Gibson imitator is in high demand, according to localtechwire.com.

“Huge,” exclaimed Gary Ban, chief executive officer of Oasys, said when asked what kind of response “I own Malibu!” produced. “Absolutely huge.”

A visit to the beach cost David Hasselhoff a $7 parking fee, contactmusic.com reports. Guards at the one-time "Baywatch" location, where Hasselhoff flexed his pecs as Mitch Buchanan for 11 years, didn't quite recognize him.

Hasselhoff shook his head and muttered, 'Man, I used to own this beach', before reluctantly paying the charge."

Malibu resident Jamie Gold took the $12 million prize in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas this week. A serious player for only two years, Gold, a TV producer and former agent, persuaded poker great Johnny Chan to coach him in exchange for some Hollywood guidance. He beat nearly 9,000 hopefuls during a marathon 10-day game of no-limit Texas hold 'em.

He credited his upset victory, in part, to his experiences reading people in Hollywood meetings, according to the story.

"I have a greater sense of when people are telling the truth and when they are lying," he said.

Gold, who has represented James Gandolfini of "The Sopranos" and Felicity Huffman of "Desperate Housewives," seized attention early in the tournament by knocking off opponents and taking a massive chip lead that grew by the day.
Playing a loose, aggressive game, Gold bullied opponents with his chip lead and bewildered them with his style.
He goaded, he tweaked egos, he rattled the nerves of far more experienced players. Once while bluffing, he jumped from the table and mockingly bemoaned how much money he was about to lose on a bad hand, scaring his opponent into folding.

There's more, of course. Britney supposedly wants out of Malibu. Charlie and Denise may have reached a deal. Angelina is said to have had a good visit with her mom. Disney decides to release Mel's film.

And so it goes here in Malibu.

Another legal battle about who really owns Malibu - this time in name only - gets settled in the public's favor.

Note to all the California surfers, fishers and beach bunnies who have long considered the landmark Malibu Pier their own: The name that goes with it is once again safely in public hands.

After a two-week trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles, an eight-member jury decided unanimously that the state Department of Parks and Recreation is the rightful holder of the Malibu Pier name and malibupier.com Internet domain name.

The story, by Martha Groves in today's LA Times, goes on to say the jury ruled unanimously against Stephen Harper, who tried to snag his own piece of the 'Bu after realizing the state had failed to register the name. Now, in addition to the pier itself, the words "Malibu Pier" and the domain name malibupier.com, belong to California.

Chilly last night here in Malibu. People in the Cove have started to shut their windows and tiny pockets of silence dot the night. There goes the sound of the three-year-old twins across the street valiantly fighting their bedtime. There goes CNN as the TV cameraman next door feels the cold. Far-off sounds carry further and you can hear the screech of peacocks on Zumirez Drive as they get rousted by something in the night.

At our local Sav-On, the umbrella and beach chair display just got bumped for school supplies. Kids in swim trunks shy away from that aisle like it’s contagious. Parents gaze at the reams of paper and stacked ring binders and look relieved.

Even at Zuma Hardware (motto: “We carry everything sometimes”) where beach season generally lasts all year long, the bright-colored Adirondack chairs are on sale. We’re edging to the end of summer. Doesn’t it seem too soon?

Here's how it looked in Malibu at about 6:00 a.m. Cool and gloomy. A nice change. Drifting fog or a sturdy marine layer - that's our version of a summer rain.

The local coffee houses fill up earlier. Kids order cocoa. Their parents give in to the weather and get whipped cream on their mochas. Dogs on the patio ignore each other and nap under the green plastic tables.

Only the local real estate agents, a group of regulars who meet each day at the same table, make their usual amount of money-scented noise.

So I ruined Paradise Cove.

Yeah, that's a self-important little sentence and my friends openly mock me for it but the truth is, before a certain story ran in the Home section of the LA Times, life was different here. Quieter. More modest. More, well, trailer-ish.

We bought our place 11 years ago. It was the only thing in Malibu we could afford. Paradise Cove had been through a series of bruising lawsuits about whether the park's owner could evict the trailers and develop the property (the law said no) and prices here were still pretty low. It was considered a risky buy.

Our new neighbors were a mix of retirees, young families, artists, professionals and a few eccentrics. They drove older cars. They didn't have a lot of visitors. Golf carts were few. Installing a berber carpet and painting the awful brown paneling white was considered a remodel. Sure, some brave souls put in drywall, hardwood floors and tiled their kitchens and baths but privately, that was considered money down the drain. Then the real estate boom began and, after a year or so, trickled down to the Cove.

Trailers that had languished on the market started to sell. Prices even rose a bit. New people with real money moved in and did complete shelter-magazine remodels. They'd strip a trailer down to the chassis and in its place would rise a Craftsman house with vintage wavy glass in the windows, or a Tuscan villa with plaster walls and a terra cotta tile roof. It was a good story and I pitched it. I got a deadline, wrote 2,000 words and sold the soul of my beloved trailer park for a freelance fee.

A week after my piece ran in the Times, a camera crew from "Good Morning America" arrived. They interviewed most of my sources, went on the air a few days later and that was that. Trailers started to sell as fast as they landed on the market. Prices doubled, then tripled. Within a year, a trailer in Paradise Cove sold for over a million dollars.

It's not that the new neighbors aren't good people. They are. They have kids and pets and marvel at the good luck that brought them to such a beautiful spot. But for many of them the trailers are second or even third homes and they don't think of Paradise Cove as where they live. It's a vacation spot. It's where they unwind. It's Disneyland with golf carts.

So it's louder here now. People drive too fast. They don't know each other's names. They don't have a sense of the neighborhood, can't quite feel the community, and that's a loss to those of us who have lived here for a while. And while it's gratifying that a risky investment has turned out so unexpectedly well, when a golf cart full of tipsy, shouting strangers races by my bedroom window at midnight, I'm not really sure it was worth the price.

Everyone wants a piece of Malibu, including me. My buying power has proven modest, an aging mobile home on a bluff above the beach. We rent the land. The house sits on metal tripods that shimmy in the slightest earthquake, let the occasional opossum rest in the cool darkness. Their smell moves through the air vents, a pungent musk that can't be anything but wild animal.

When the sun goes down, coyotes light up the canyon with yips and howls, a bloodthirsty aria that alters your dreams. The cats in the house wake up then, drift to an open window to watch and listen long into the night. At dawn, a membrane of mist hangs above the water. Often there's a pod of dolphins gliding by, gray fins piercing gray water backed by gray sky. If you're out in a kayak, they'll sneak up behind you, just a ripple or a splash, maybe a tail, a white flash of belly, to let you know they're there. Get close enough and you smell their fishy breath, feel the salty whoosh of their exhale.

I've wanted to live here ever since I can remember. Even so, when my very proper French mother learned we bought a trailer on the beach, she was shocked into silence. No matter that it once belonged to Otis Chandler, or that it looks like a house and sits on a roomy lot. My home is registered with the DMV. It's attached to a chassis. It has a serial number. Paint it, tile it, call it what you will, it's a trailer. (A 1973 doublewide Meteor, to be precise.)

And then my parents came to Paradise Cove to see for themselves. On the drive through this rustic, tree-filled park to my - yep - trailer, which sits a few hundred yards from the western edge of the continent, they started to understand. By the time they stood on the bluff with its shimmering view of the Santa Monica Bay, they were converts. I heard my mother on the phone that night. "It's 1,400 square feet," she told my brother. "Yes, a kitchen and two bathrooms." On a drive to Santa Monica later that week she pointed to a cottage on the sand, easily worth many millions. "Much narrower than your house," she said in disdain. "And such traffic."

That was 12 years ago. A lot has changed in Paradise Cove since then and some of it is my fault. Not in the general we-are-the-world kind of way but in a very specific cause-and-effect kind of way. I wrote a home remodeling story about Paradise Cove and I ruined my neighborhood. Just the thought of it makes me woozy. One little story in the LA Times and suddenly we're on Good Morning America and NPR and in the New York Times and the real estate agents' phones are ringing off the hook and...

But that's another story for another day. Tomorrow, actually, as this is the first post to one of LA Observed's satellite blogs. Here in Malibu. Photos and thoughts and news about this little city, history, interviews and essays and sometimes, maybe, even something useful. Like, did you know there's no swimming at Surfrider Beach? It's surfing or sunbathing and that's all.

Until tomorrow, anyway.

And then my parents came to Paradise Cove to see for themselves. On the drive through this rustic, tree-filled park to my - yep - trailer, which sits a few hundred yards from the western edge of the continent, they started to understand. By the time they stood on the bluff with its shimmering view of the Santa Monica Bay, they were converts. I heard my mother on the phone that night. "It's 1,200 square feet," she told my brother. "Yes, a kitchen and two bathrooms." On a drive to Santa Monica later that week she pointed to a cottage on the sand, easily worth $3 million. "Much narrower than your house," she said in disdain. "And such traffic."

That was 12 years ago. A lot has changed in Paradise Cove since then and some of it is my fault. Not in the general we-are-the-world kind of way but in a very specific cause-and-effect kind of way. I wrote a home remodeling story about Paradise Cove and I ruined my neighborhood. Just the thought of it makes me woozy. One little story in the LA Times and suddenly we're on Good Morning America and NPR and in the New York Times and the real estate agents' phones are ringing off the hook and...

But that's another story for another day. Tomorrow, actually, as this is the first post to one of LA Observed's satellite blogs. Here in Malibu. Photos and thoughts and news about this little city, history, interviews and essays and sometimes, maybe, even something useful. Like, did you know there's no swimming at Surfrider Beach? It's surfing or sunbathing and that's all. Until tomorrow, anyway.