The best way to keep graffiti off your wall is to paint a nice mural, which is exactly what LA shopkeepers the Antonio family did several months back, paying $3,000 to local artists. No more graffiti but an “an even more menacing monster reared its ugly head…City Hall bureaucracy.” They were threatened with a $1,000 fine “and/or six (6) months imprisonment” for “excessive signage.” From the LA Times: “You know, of course, what happened next. Whitewashing that wall was like sending ants an invitation to a picnic. The taggers have been back almost daily, treating the wall like a fresh canvas.” (via.)

The Best Fireworks Display is Seen From a Plane Flying into LAX Sometime Between 9 - 10pm

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Independence day is my favorite holiday. Partly because it’s not in the winter, so there’s no seasonal affective disorder. Another reason is you don’t need to celebrate it with your family. It is the first guaranteed easy day of summer. Plus it means my birthday is just a few weeks away.

Last year to the day tomorrow, I was flying into Los Angeles. The cheapest flight I could get was on the 4th in the evening. I thought I would be missing the parties, but what I got was so much more.

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From my window I looked at the beautiful infinite motherboard of lights that is the city as seen from the air. And just above it, little ripples of hundreds more colored lights. The firework explosions were all so tiny, and yet I could see them go off above every city subdivision. And all of it was happening at once.

There was the Glendale fireworks and the Long Beach celebration over there. You could see another firework show above Malibu and Culver City, and Westwood, and everywhere else. A firework show for every neighborhood, and from my vantage point, I could see them all at once. It was one of the most beautiful and amazing things I’ve seen in my life; made even more special by that fact so few people will have the chance to experience it.

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If this were a short story or a better crafted essay I might have played up my disappointement in missing all the Independence Day barbeques, or emphasize that the day has some sentimental significance to me besides what I’ve already written. But it is just a blog post so I’ll state the point here more directly, and even use a tired cliche to finish this post: the best things come when you least expect them.

Enjoy your holiday!

Images by Yoon Lee.

Posted by Joanne on Jul 3, 2008 | Link

US education centers are indeed examining their structures after the tragedy in China. NYT has a good story on this. “The movement really began in California in 1933, when 70 schools collapsed around Los Angeles in the so-called Long Beach earthquake and a mob sought to lynch a city school-building inspector.” Very interesting point here: The main challenge in bolstering resilience to such geophysical shocks…is not the structural engineering…it is not cost, either… the big challenge lies in overcoming social and political hurdles that still give priority to pressing daily problems over foreseeable disasters that may not occur for decades, scores of years, or longer. In some developing countries there is a tendency to ascribe earthquakes and their consequences to fate.” (Previously.)

LA county’s most watched news program, (and less celebrity and fluff-saturated) is in Spanish. “If immigrants took Schwarzenegger’s advice and flipped off Spanish stations in favor of English-language news, they wouldn’t have nearly as good an idea of what was happening in their adopted city, state and country.” - Joe Mathews for WP. (via.)

Oliver Stone’s Prescient SFnal Scientology Critique


“Why should this reality be public domain? What’s so great about it?” asks a Clara Bow-bobbed Kim Cattrall in the 1993 miniseries “Wild Palms.” “Tony wants a new and improved reality: controlled by Mimecon and sold straight at 7-11… A world where we don’t have to be afraid to leave our dreams open at night.”

“Wild Palms” isn’t dark enough to be “Twin Peaks” and it isn’t campy enough to be “V,” but the show holds up as a odd document of early 90s speculative fiction (the film is set in 2007.) Producer Oliver Stone might not be known for his futuristic vision, but he certainly is paranoid, and that’s what every dystopic fiction needs. Said EW at the time:

“It was dreamlike and hallucinatory. I put my friends in it. I put famous people in it. I didn’t care about the story. It was a tone poem.” [Writer Bruce Wagner] hangs a right onto La Brea. “Then Oliver saw it.” Oliver Stone knew Wagner from purchasing the film rights to Force Majeure (a movie Stone still hasn’t made), and the Palms cartoon struck a special conspiratorial chord with the JFK director. ”It was so syncretic,” Stone says. (Syncretic? ”Look it up,” he says.) ”It was such a fractured view of the world. Everything and anything could happen. Maybe your wife isn’t your wife, maybe your kids aren’t your kids. It really appealed to me.”

Like much of early-90s science fiction, the focus is on televised holograms. A corporate body, with some zen-relgious pretensions and Hollywood ties — not unlike L. Ron Hubbard’s sect — is experimenting with bringing TV to life. These “New Realists” — insisting they are just Buddhists in practice, freeing the mind from the body — work with a narcotic drink “Mimezine.” Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s idea of corporately-distributed hallucinogens in “The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch,” and William Gibson’s virtual worlds (Gibson even makes a sheepish cameo as himself in the first episode,) the most surprising thing about Wild Palms is it is actually pretty good.

wppp0.jpgIt was originally a Bruce Wagner-penned comic in Details magazine that eventually spawned a book, “The Wild Palms Reader,” containing timelines, secret letters, and bios of all the characters, as well as contributions from scientists, sci-fi writers (Gibson, Thomas Disch, Bruce Sterling,) musicians (Genesis P. Orridge, Malcolm McLaren, Lemmy from Moterhead) and others like Mary Gaitskill, Jane Pratt, and ex-CIA Operative E. Howard Hunt. To hype the program, ABC offered 900-773-WILD (75 cents per minute,) offering tips and storyline cues. It was ultimately a flop, and still is, unfairly. Maybe it’s just to early for cult-classic status? Or maybe the miniseries format is just too awkward in length, which is why only PBS still airs them (”V,” for that matter, isn’t as cult-y in popularity as it seems it should be.)

Kathryn Bigelow (”Strange Days”) directed some of the episodes, and Ryuichi Sakamoto composed the creepy minimalist soundtrack. James Belushi plays Harry Wuckoff, a patent attorney, offered a job with the “Wild Palms Newtork” — Channel 3 — run by Senator Anton Kreutzer. Sen. Kreutzer used to be a sci-fi writer, his motto is “everything must go.” In addition to virtual programming, the “Fathers” have been kidnapping children since the 1960s. Wagner doesn’t even try to conceal the resemblance of “Synthiotics” to “Dianetics,” but Scientology was more benign in those days (Tom Cruise had only just begun his studies.) One doesn’t have to be Theresa Duncan to doubt this script could ever be filmed now.

In addition to the virtual worlds and Scientology send-up, the joy in watching “Wild Palms” is its naive perception of what the world of today would look like. Oliver Stone appears as himself, talking about “recently released” documents that prove his film JFK was correct and alluding to the “late” Jack Valenti (who did in fact die last year.) There are no cell phones and nothing like the Internet or email, and people smoke freely indoors, but the looks and feel of people’s homes is what seems most “off.” The utilitarian office tables and chairs, beige walls, and Times New Roman fonts show just how far we’ve come with design, in that future-speculating set designers couldn’t even imagine a world where college students decorate with IKEA and Trader Joe’s enables gourmet-enough hors d’oeuvre for the most casual get-togethers.

Ironically, the wardrobe stylings are what give the series a modern look—mostly because early 90s looks have yet see a revival on the runways. Those boxy silhouettes and monochrome jewel-tones are exaggerated with a Jetsons-spin. In an early scene, Cattrall wears a beautiful burgundy satin dress with an unusual Grecian-inspired satin draping, but just about everything she wears could easily be in Proenza Schouler’s next collection. That being said, I can’t really see a future in menswear for the Edwardian collars and neckties Belushi wears.

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Posted by Joanne on Mar 20, 2008 | Link

Film Review: “Confessions of a Superhero”

People call Washington, DC, “Hollywood for ugly people” but the two cities are alike not just because they are one-industry locales. Both places are made up of outsiders. The difference is in how people arrive. You U-haul into DC with a full suitcase, fresh out of college, find a high rise apartment, and have a research assistant job or internship lined up already. The mythic Hollywood welcome — by Greyhound, of course — well, he most likely left a broken home, maybe straight out of high school. He’s got a vague idea of how auditions work and probably still lives in his car.

If you’re on Netflix, you’ve probably seen a recommendation for “Confessions of a Superhero.” Go watch it. It’s not what you think. It exposes the melancholy underbelly of its quirky subject matter, and might be the best documentary yet about the “Boulevard of (Broken) Dreams,” (I have yet to see “Los Angeles Plays Itself.”)

“Yeah, I’m SAG,” the say, as they rationalize their gigs as acting practice, but working as a superhero can be as demoralizing and time-consuming as a temp job. The four would-be actors are unfortunately stereotyped (the obsessive geek, the formerly homeless guy, the small town ex-cheerleader, and the bitter older guy.) but something special comes out in these contrasts.

The major difference between Washington and the LA is that the city of quartz is in love with its myths. As David Denby wrote in his review of the Black Dahlia, “Los Angeles, spreading out, broods over its history until it rots. Events from decades ago—a famous murder, a Hollywood scandal, a corrupt real-estate deal—serve as the basis of L.A. novels and screenplays, and the movies made from these fictions become part of the city’s sense of itself, and that, in turn, gets fed into new novels, screenplays, and journalism.”

And outsiders love the myth too. We want to believe that in five years everyone in the film (well, everyone except the abusive bitter husband) will “make it,” even if just in a perpetually running ad for Claritin-D, and imagine they’ve moved out of their cramped apartments into Pierre Koenig case study houses (because everyone outside of LA pictures the upper middle class in houses like that.)

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Posted by Joanne on Mar 10, 2008 | Link

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