Contact Culver City Times Managing Editor Justin Scupine at CulverCityTimes@gmail.com.

Contact Culver City Times Publisher Eddie North-Hager at enhager@enhagermedia.com.

CulverCityTimes.com - Record, Share and Appreciate

The name of this site was not undertaken lightly. At first we used the name “CulverCityLiving.com.” But I have a perfectly unreasonable pet peeve about gerunds. Those “-ing” words feel so bland, squirmy, and over-used. The phrase also had weird convalescent-home undertones that I didn’t quite want to put my finger on.

To try to improve the name, I talked to my friend Ted, who has a knack for cutting right to the heart of matters. He suggested, almost instantaneously, “GoCulverCity.com,” a name that stuck for weeks. It was action-oriented and easy to spell. The best thing about it was that it had a positivity that I think people are attracted to and want to embrace. The name reminded me of the story of first encounter between John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Lennon visited an art exhibit of Ono’s at the Indica Gallery in London. In the middle of the gallery floor stood a ladder that led up to a magnifying glass on a string and a white canvas attached to the ceiling with one tiny word written on it. Lennon climbed the ladder, and when he peered through the magnifying glass, his heart leapt to discover that it read, simply, “Yes.” Lennon would say later that the fact that the message was a positive one drew him to Ono and invited him to discover more.

On the other hand, the sentiment “Go Culver City” (the exclamation point was implied) seemed blunt. While this site is dedicated to recording what makes our city unique and great, the phrase sounded thoughtlessly boosterish. What was worse, it sounded as if the site might be designed to drive tourists to Culver City. And while people throughout Los Angeles and world are most welcome here, the site should primarily be by the people of Culver City and for the people of Culver City.

I briefly flirted with the name “YourCulverCity.com.” I liked this name because it expressed that one of the most important and necessary aspects of this site is: You. I can’t possibly cover everything that is happening in Culver City. You have to help do that.

So become a member. Post your pictures of our city – of our parks and plays and pets. Describe your experiences at restaurants, bars, music venues, and galleries in the city. Let people know about your events. Record the extraordinary and the mundane. Capture our times.

That’s when the right name hit me: Culver City Times. My wise and patient publisher, Eddie North-Hager, had suggested it to me early on, and I had rejected it because it sounded too much like a newspaper. And as long as CNN.com, Google News, and the NYTimes.com exist, you aren’t really going to come here for your real news, right? Still, what is news?

At best, this site will be a shared record – in pictures, words, video and every way we can think of – of how Culver City looks and feels at this time. It will be devoted to what goes on in our community – the events, of course, but also the great assets that are always around us but that we are often to busy to appreciate.

This idea was driven home when – about the time I was first thinking about this site – I watched a video on You Tube of a bunch of scenes from Laurel and Hardy’s movies that showed them walking around the streets of downtown Culver City. Of course, it was fascinating to see how much the storefronts had changed on Main Street. But then they showed some footage of “present day Culver City” and even though the video was only a couple of years old, Main Street had changed significantly from that version too. Which is to say that time is fleeting and appearances mutable, perhaps by definition.

It’s a common trap to think that the present is a sort of apotheosis and that the world around us is, for the most part, done changing. But of course this is not the case. The changes that have come over Culver City in the last 90 years have been unbelievably dramatic, and there is little reason to believe that this kind of change will not continue. I really wonder what our Culver City will look like 100 years from now.

It's been almost a year since I started my stint as editor of this site, and I discover that I have changed a great deal as well. Writing the site, I have had the chance to talk to many people and get to know some of them well

Past, present, and future: With this site we can record, share and appreciate our times – our Culver City Times.

Justin Scupine,
Editor
Culver City Times