“I love the simplicity of this, even if it has a slight totalitarian-cult-looking-to-take-over-the-world look to it.”
—Wikipedia Concept - Brand New
September 2011
70 posts
“Huntington Park isn’t a “contract city” and Tarzana is a neighborhood in Los Angeles. Neither community depends on the county in the way Cerritos, Norwalk, Malibu, Santa Clarita, West Hollywood, or other “contract cities” do. The Board of Supervisors isn’t an abstraction for them or the nearly two million residents of the county’s other “contract cities.” The character of the supervisor who represents their community may actually mean more to them than who their mayor is. What goes unnoticed by the Times - or is judged beneath notice - sometimes gets a lot of notice outside the borders of downtown, the Valley, and the Westside. The political map that will reshape power on the Board of Supervisors isn’t political theater for the rest of the county. It’s the shape of things to come.”
—Not Unnoticed | Where We Are | SoCal Focus | KCET
“I’d like to make it very clear that I’m not creative and I’m not trying to express myself. I’m an explorer, I’m trying to discover things, discover the phenomenal world by examining it, by looking at it, by playing with the materiality, pushing it around, shoving it, throwing it in the air.”
—Ed Moses: I’m Not Creative. Really - Page 1 - Art Books - Los Angeles - LA Weekly
“Today, even the Girl Scouts must pay royalties for singing songs around the campfire. “We in Western society are going through a period of intensifying belief in private ownership,” Lethem writes, “to the detriment of the public good.”
—Can You Patent a Sandwich? - Food - GOOD
“It’s here! Our extraordinary cultural extravaganza—some might call it an Artmageddon—has descended upon Southern California. Pacific Standard Time kicks off in Los Angeles this weekend with 60 exhibitions, over 100 gallery shows, seven fairs, and at least one parade. There’s no way one person could see it all. But you’ve just got to try, right? So get out there and be a part of L.A.’s finest art moment. As George Herms put it beautifully at this week’s opening event, “Beauty is your duty.”
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And I’m pretty excited.
Toyota is paying for the new Melvins record →
nytimes.com
Gives new meaning to jamming econo.
The Paranoid Style
STEVEN J. ROSS
on J. Hoberman’s history of movies in the age of McCarthy.I Married A Communist, RKO Pictures (1949) Lobby Card
J. Hoberman
Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War
The New Press, March 2011. 432 pp.
In March 2003, shortly after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, I was interviewed by a Fox TV news anchor whose first question was, “Don’t you think that Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon are traitors for opposing the war?” When I suggested that the Constitution gives every citizen — be they a president or an actor — the right and obligation to voice his or her opinion about the future of the nation, the reporter looked at me in disbelief. In her mind, patriotism equaled whatever the leading Republican said it was. The idea that two movie stars could openly oppose the president was simply scandalous.
In Army of Phantoms: American Movies and the Making of the Cold War, J. Hoberman, the Village Voice’s longtime movie critic, raises the question of what it meant during the Cold War years to be a patriotic American, and in particular what it meant for the movies. This is part of a three-volume study that will chronicle “American politics from 1945 though 1990, as filtered through the prism of Hollywood movies — their scenarios, back stories, and reception.” What is chronologically the second volume in this trilogy, The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties, was published earlier, in 2003. This book, in effect the prequel to that volume, covers the years from 1945 to 1956.
The Cold War was not the first time movie industry leaders courted or clashed with politicians. Studio leaders have always been afraid of Washington; afraid that politicians would one day heed the cries of cultural conservatives and establish tight federal censorship over the industry. Industry heads responded by gathering powerful political allies. As early as 1916, the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors Association gave money to any politician — Republican, Democrat or Socialist — who openly opposed film censorship. Louis B. Mayer took the Hollywood-Washington connection a step further in the late 1920s by fashioning the first permanent relationship between a studio (MGM) and a party (Republican). In the 1930s, Warner Brothers curried favor with the Roosevelt administration by producing films sympathetic to FDR’s agenda. During World War II, Hollywood showed its loyalty — and staved off a long-lingering federal antitrust suit — by making films that fueled domestic patriotism and planted the seeds of the myth of the “Good War.”
“And then, I don’t know, three or four months later, it felt like, he came back to us and said, “Can you send me 7,500 bucks?” [Laughs.] Yeah! And so the whole thing cost $15,000, which is fucking nothing!”
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Louis C.K. walks us through Louie’s second season (Part 2 of 4) | TV | Interview | The A.V. Club
Oh man, that is nothing! (not for the budgets I work with, but still shockingly low)
“The IRS is auditing $419 million in tax-exempt bonds issued by Vernon in 2009. If you’re counting, that’s the third major investigation of possibly corrupt practices by the Vernon city council this year.”
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I spent a few hours in Vernon for this first time ever a few months ago. What a bizarre place.
“Not one objective analysis of sports-based economic development has ever confirmed the pie-in-the-sky numbers routinely embraced by stadium developers, team owners, and city council members. According to Mark Whitaker, a policy analyst for the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, the economic benefits of AEG’s stadium deal would be “minimal,” largely due to the “displacement effect.”
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uh huh
“A football stadium proposed for downtown Los Angeles may not generate the economic benefits predicted by its backers,” reports the Daily News. No surprise there.”
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duh.
