In the ’80s, after I’d cycled through ambitions of being an actor or poet, I settled on what I wanted to be when I grew up: staff writer for the LA Weekly. I was raised with the Los Angeles Times and with the idea that journalism was a service, not an art, that journalists were read but not heard. The LA Weekly, which I discovered as an undergrad at UCLA, exploded all that. I loved how it wedded newspaper convention to narrative and personal experience with ease but also with dedication. Its writers illuminated so much about a city I thought I knew and strove to make sense of the world at large. The Weekly’s chorus of distinct voices became my spirit guides. I came to feel I knew the people behind the bylines, even though we’d never met.
Marc Haefele, who died Nov. 11 at 82, was one of those bylines that I finally met in person — to my great delight — after joining the staff in 1997. We hit it off immediately. Marc was the quintessential alt-paper writer, a seeker who came of age in the ’60s, a humanist by nature but also an iconoclast who went against the grain more often than not. Marc had enormous curiosity and an eclectic résumé that enabled him to write authoritatively and eloquently about pretty much everything, from the Los Angeles government to Renaissance art. He fit the part of New Journalist — burly, with a bushy beard and a gruff, commanding voice, but also kind and thoughtful.
