"There Are 8 Million Stories In The Naked City."

     This post's title is taken from the first half of the closing line in 1948's The Naked City.

    I have always loved reading newspaper columns. The 750-word form has long transfixed me, ever since I first read Jimmy Breslin in the New York Daily News in the 1970's. Breslin seemed to be writing for an audience of one--The Man in the Street--and his columns read like short, short stories.  They were stuffed with sharp detail; real locales, hustlers and hookers, politicians and policemen, and Breslin never wasted a word. 

     We are lucky in Los Angeles to have Times columnist Steve Lopez, one of the finest at his craft. I tracked down a reprint of a column he wrote about Wal-Mart in late 2003 after the Times had done a three-part series on the retail behemoth. Lopez wrote about the real cost of that $8.63 polo shirt and you can read that column here. 

     I mention all this due to Sunday's 60 Minutes segment concerning Lopez's relationship with Nathaniel Ayers, a homeless Los Angeles man. I have read Lopez's columns on Nathaniel, who is a musically gifted paranoid schizophrenic and now the writer's friend.  The columns brim with honesty, respect, humanity and empathy, and are emblematic of a storyteller of the first degree.

     If you missed 60 Minutes this week, here's the segment.

     Those millions of stories in the Naked City?

    This is one of them: