Archive for the &;Los-Angeles&; Category

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Las Vegas is LosAngeles

November 6, 2009

So why did I read The Movable Buffet so religiously? Because having gone there at least once a year since 1988 for the Consumer Electronics Show (and for the late, unlamented COMDEX) I&;ve come to love Las Vegas, although my wallet and sinuses could probably not handle it for more than a week at a time.  Like the ice caps melting, I&;ve watched the casino gaming pits where I play blackjack shrink, with the real estate taken over by an army of slot machines for a generation of Americans who prefer to interact with screens rather than a boisterous table of degenerate gamblers. Las Vegas was built on millions of people from Los Angeles coming to gamble in the desert, whether they stayed at the palaces on the strip or did a Las Vegas turn around, gambling all night and driving back without sleeping. (The first time I drove to Las Vegas I saw five dead bodies on the side of the I-15 from two separate accidents where the drivers fell asleep). Las Vegas and Los Angeles share a lot, including thousands of former Angelenos &;native&; Las Vegans are always begging to go home.  Meanwhile the &;What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas&; encourages tourists to treat the city as their toilet, although it contributes to some surprising local industries. Las Vegas and Los Angeles share a temperate to boiling climate and a sprawling aesthetic, but with magnificient parks just a few minutes away.  Then there&;s  In &;n Out Burger, minimalls, a love of bling and money, a sprouting of magnificent cities out of nothing, jammed freeways but troubled real estate markets, entertainment stars and wanna-bes, luxury and poverty almost side-by-side, gangbangers and pointless violent crime killing the best of our youth (here here, there there), insane people, and both Bugsy Siegel and O.J. Simpson!

   Las Vegas holds up a mirror to Los Angeles.  But it&;s not a funhouse mirror anymore.

Tags:CES, COMDEX, gambling, Las Vegas, Los-Angeles, Movable-Buffet, O.J.-Simpson Posted in Las Vegas, Los-Angeles, Uncategorized | 1 Comment &;

Axl Rose onDiversity

October 27, 2009

October 25 I went to the U2 show at LA&;s Rose Bowl.  It can be summed up in two words: hypnotic and inspirational. But when Slash took the stage with the Black Eyed Peas, it reminded me of the Rolling Stones/Guns n&; Roses concert I attended exactly 20 years ago, October 18, 1989 at LA&;s historic Coliseum. Axl Rose could probably be described as the anti-Bono, and he wasn&;t exactly auditioning for the part of UN Goodwill Ambassador, played unofficially by AIDS-fighter Bono and officially by Angelina Jolie.

In fact as soon as Rose took the stage he offered this impassioned defense of himself and his song &;One in a Million&; against criticism that he was a racist, just because it was about &;police and niggers and immigrants and faggots.&; &;I don&;t give a goddamn fuck what color you fucking are, as long as you&;re ain&;t no goddamn thief drug selling piece of shit. &;I used the word fucking nigger but that don&;t mean every black man is a fucking nigger, that means if you go downtown and some fucking asshole wants to charge you fifteen dollars for free parking kick him in the fuckin nuts. &;I don&;t give a shit about gay people either but I don&;t need some faggot trying to rape me. &;Immigrants? I don&;t care what goddamn fucking country you&;re from, you&;re in America just act like it. &;You want to call me a racist shove your head up your fucking ass. Either the audio cut out early, or my aging memory is going, but I remember his stirring conclusion: &;Anyone who thinks I hate niggers can suck my dick.&;

Tags:angelina-jolie, Axel-Rose, axl-rose, Bono, Guns'n'Roses, LA-Colisseum, memorable-LA-concerts, Rolling-Stones, Slash, U2, U2-Rose-Bowl Posted in Los-Angeles, Music | 1 Comment &;

The Dodgers and theNavy

October 22, 2009

Now that the Dodgers have gone down the drain, again, I can share my highlight of their season. OK, it&;s a fat guy&;s delight, but my son and I enjoyed sitting in the All-You-Can-Eat right field section for the first game of the National League Championship Series at Dodger Stadium. Getting to our seats was a bit difficult, not because larger-than-life LA characters were blocking the aisle, but because a huge group of sailors and Marines were lined up outside the entrance. They held up their burden and made a gateway for us. Later, they unfurled the flag they brought.

My dad was in the Navy.  My mother lived in a Brooklyn apartment building and frequently saw Dodgers Pee Wee Reese and Ed Head, who lived there too.  My son wants a jersey, to honor Jackie Robinson (and the Dodgers who broke the color line.) Just wait til next year.

Tags:Dodger-Stadium, Dodgers, giant-flag, Jackie-Robinson, Los-Angeles-Dodgers Posted in Los-Angeles, Sports | Leave a Comment &;

LA Crime Story: Mortgage Fraud Beats BankRobbers

July 9, 2009

Used to be California/LA led the nation in bank robberies, with 357 in 2006 alone.  Perhaps Point Break&;s Presidential bank robbery team (that&;s Patrick Swayze as Bodhi as Ronald Reagan) wasn&;t such a fantasy.

We&;re still up there with these desperate people (A former policeman and Little League coach known as the &;Polite Bank Robber?&; The 180 pound &;Starlet Bandit&; in movie star sunglasses? A father/son bank robbery team, anyone?) but there&;s more people robbin&; with a pen and a calculator these days. According to the LA Times Peter Hong, &;The FBI&;s annual mortgage fraud review says L.A. leads in mortgage fraud, measured by reports from the agency&;s field offices. &;The Los Angeles field office received 9,971 &;suspicious activity reports&; in 2008; second-place Miami had 5,155. The report says fraud schemes include builders offering secret incentives to home buyers, such as falsely inflating a purchase price to make it appear as if a buyer has made a down payment when none was made. If the home forecloses, there is no home equity for the lender to recover. Other schemes the report identifies are scams in which a group uses a straw buyer to intentionally default on a mortgage, then buys the property at a discount from the lender through a short sale; and foreclosure rescue schemes in which perpetrators offer to help a borrower in foreclosure and surreptitiously take over the deed to the property.&; We may not have a football team&;but hey, we&;re number one!

Tags:colorful-bank-robbers, Los-Angeles, Los-Angeles-bank-robberies, Los-Angeles-foreclosures, Patrick-Swayze, Point-Break, Point-Break-live Posted in Crime, crime-and-punishment, Los Angeles in the Movies, Los-Angeles | 1 Comment &;

ForeclosurePorn

June 26, 2009

&;Bank owned home!&; screamed the sign.  I turned the Mustang up the street and joined dozens of other lookie-loos staring at the (mostly) empty Studio City house. The search for a REO has become the new status symbol.  It&;s also pornographic in the voyeuristic allure of going through  a very recently vacated home and staring at the left behind possessions of the former owners, while fantasizing about their lives and what brought them to this.  Sometimes its pretty clear; the Tarzana house I looked at last week turned out to have a $596,000 mortgage&;and a $251,000 second! The banks were still fighting over what they would recover while the moving truck came.   The Studio City house (at least with REOs realtors dispense with calling them &;homes&;) seemed to not only satisfy people&;s pornographic fantasies of the absolute lowest price, but may have belonged to porn people as well, judging (and I&;m not judging) by the framed 8&;10 theatre cards of &;Desire&; and the like, showing a pair getting down.  (Perhaps the home&;s female owner?) At least they managed to break out of the Canoga Park/Van Nuys porn ghetto, before they crashed back down to earth.  I found a Guess watch in the yard and thought of putting it in my pocket.  My son said, &;I wouldn&;t touch anything here.&;  He&;s smarter than me, and it also seemed like bad karma to swipe abandoned foreclosed possessions, so I left the watch, the porno placards and a burned copy of The Joy of Sex sitting there.

Tags:foreclosures, losing-houses Posted in Los Angeles in the Movies, Los-Angeles, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;

Park Packed withJobless

June 25, 2009

Balboa Park in Encino was packed this morning.  No special events; just mothers, children, families, single women, groups, you name it. Not really the homeless, either; their recreational vehicles were parked in the lot across the street, camping out for the 77th consecutive day. Jogging around the park, I counted over 200 people before 9:45AM.  I don&;t think they were going to work, either.  It was the reserve army of the unemployed, on the march  jogging strolling biking dog walking fishing.

Tags:Balboa-park, Encino, LA-unemployment, Marx-in-2009, outside-LA Posted in Encino, Los-Angeles | Leave a Comment &;

L.A. Film Noir not: The BlackDahlia

April 2, 2009

I love LA, and I love films set in Los Angeles, from Bladerunner to perhaps the most typical genre, film noir.  I finally saw Black Dahlia today on HBO, and it was as bad as they say.  Worse, even. It was one big acting lesson for the wooden juvenile leads, Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johanson.  Watching Hartnett struggle to show grief and shock when his partner plunges to his death was a painful movie moment indeed. The director was in love with mood shots and voiceover, both of which can be overdone. Then there&;s the father daughter make out scene, not too much of a homage to Chinatown.  Not a surprise to learn that it was an over-the-top but past his prime Brian DePalma, bhind the violence and leering sex. &;She looks like that dead girl.  How sick are you?&;  The line reading was so great that it repeated in the voice over.  &;You&;d rather fuck me than shoot me.&; And the script&;well, the real Black Dahlia, of the dead woman found cut in half in 1947, is considered an iconic LA crime, although who know why compared to the thousands killed in &;gang-related&; violence over the last   There&;s not much to hang your hat&;or the script-on, so a plot has to be invented, so the filmakers tapped the James Ellroy novel.  But the A and B lines about a mob tie-up, girls reading for Hollywood screen tests and a Hollywood gothic family don&;t make much sense or cover incoherence with screaming and overacting and grand guignol. LA Confidental still rules, for three reasons: 1. Actual great acting, particularly the way under-utilized Guy Peerce, but also the world-weary Russell Crowe and Oscar-winner Kim Basinger.  2. Curtis Hanson, really a great, understatted director who can work in any genre and make you care even about a chick flick, In Her Shoes.  3.  A well-written script that uses noir elemetns and period cars, sets and costumes but is not overwhelmed by them&;and deals with a continuing Los Angeles problem, our ambivalence with the LAPD.

Tags:Black-Dahlia, Curtis-Hanson, film-noir, Guy-Peerce, James-Ellroy, Josh-Hartnett, Kim-Basinger, LA-in-the-movies, Russell-Crowe, Scarlet-Johannson Posted in Los Angeles in the Movies, Los-Angeles | 1 Comment &;

An LA Encounter with theT1000

August 12, 2008

Some say every conversation in LA ends with a celebrity.  Here&;s mine.  Took my son to see Batman today at the Sherman Oaks Galleria,.  We were admiring the collection of movie posters when a figure off a movie poster strolled past.  &;Hey, are you Robert Patrick!&;  I told my son, &;That&;s the guy who was the T1000 in Terminator II!&;  (which might just be my favorite LA movie of all time.) He was as friendly as could be; &;What&;s your name, son?&; he said to my boy. In my head, I could hear echoes of the T1000 asking John Connor&;s foster parents a similar question&;before he sliced them to death.

The &;T-1000&;, played by Robert Patrick.

Tags:LA-celebrity-encounters, Robert-Patrick, T1000, Terminator Posted in LAPD, Los-Angeles, SciFi, Terminator-II | Leave a Comment &;

Bladerunner is LA, LA isBladerunner

December 20, 2007

Apocalypse, disaster, alienation, thy name is Los Angeles.   In Bladerunner, &;L.A. has become a pan-cultural dystopia of corporate advertising, pollution and flying automobiles, as well as replicants, human-like androids with short life spans built by the Tyrell Corporation for use in dangerous off-world colonization.&;

In reality&;hey that is reality around here! Los Angeles has been blown up, attacked by aliens, ridden with pestilence, smashed by earthquakes, populated by murderous madmen and become a post-apocalyptic battlefield in films from Escape from Los Angeles to Terminator II, where Schwartzenneger snatches a video-playing boy from death at the insipid Valley mall by LA&;s concrete river. 

Then there&;s The Omega Man (the original, gun-crazy zombie-slaying Charlton Heston version of I Am Legend) and Falling Down, where bespectacled Michael Douglas, fresh from a killing spree, asks &;So I&;m the bad guy?&;  But the ultimate Los Angeles dystopia movie is Bladerunner.  It&;s an art director’s opium dream of LA—the stately Bradbury building is home to a genetic modification engineer and the humanesque ‘toys’ he’s built, the detective lives in a crumbling Frank Lloyd Wright house, the emblematic LA tunnel makes an appearance.   In Bladerunner, just like LA, you’ve got your perfect, highly-engineered specimens.  In the movie, set in 2019, Rutger Hauer’s platinum blonde ultimate soldier nibbles hungrily on equally blonde, impossibly lithe 20-ish Darryl Hannah.  Just like LA.

 Later, Darryl Hannah&;s character Pris, who like her fellow replicants only lives a year or two, complains of her “advanced decrepitude.” She&;s a model LA woman like so many other aging &;blondes&; finding surgeons in the back pages of Los Angeles Magazine, desperately fighting the good fight.  In the movie, there’s an unending parade of beaten-down pedestrians, men in nuns habits, Asians of many descriptions, a Chassidic Jew and other LA types, walking numbly through the rain.  In reality, LA is a dystopia of people from 170 countries who&;ve come here to misunderstand one another, living in stucco houses and dining in minimalls. In the movie, you got your cynical killer cops like M. Emmet Walsh, Edward Olmos and Harrison Ford himself as Deckard.  Just as Robert Patrick&;s shiny fascist LAPD motorcycle officer in Terminator II is a well-observed LA reality, Bladerunner, like the real LA, is loaded with lots and lots  of cops.  The movie has street patrolmen, helicopter cops, car cops, bladerunner detectives.  In LA County, we&;ve got a not-so-gorgeous mosaic of LAPD officers, LA Sheriff’s deputies, California Highway Patrol, Santa Monica/Pasadena/Long Beach police, even LAUSD school police and park police.  

Bladerunner is LA.  Oh sure, they got the predominant ethnic group and the weather wrong.  In Bladerunner, it&;s Asians, in 2007 LA, more than 50% of the population is Hispanics.  In Bladerunner, the forecast is for perpetual acid rain, in LA, it&;s dry smoggy heat, with white particulates from the fires. 

But those are only details.  In its anarchic chaos with its enervated residents, Bladerunner is LA in the dark. We go through life asleep here.  As the late Brion James replicant puts it, &;Wake up. Time to die.&;

Posted in apocalyptic-movies, Blade-Runner, Darryl-Hannah, Los-Angeles, Terminator-II, Uncategorized | 1 Comment &;

Britney Spears: It&;s all LA&;sfault

September 26, 2007

Alas, my City of Angels, does no one respect or love you?  Britney Spears is the latest to diss &;Sodom by the Sea&; (or insert your own pejorative here).  “I HATE L.A., I&;m so sick of that town. I don&;t want anyone to know I&;m here in Atlanta,&; she revealed to a shop clerk and a few million people on a shopping trip to the mall there. She is of course a victim of the town, not of herself.  But blaming &;the dream factory&;, &;would you really want to raise your kids in LA&; (as if Britney might do a better job elsewhere), etc. has a long tradition.  As the late San Francisco columnist Herb Caen put it, &;Knock San Francisco to a San Franciscan and you&;re starting a fight.  Knock LA to someone from there and you&;re starting a conversation.&;

Posted in Britney-Spears, Los-Angeles | Leave a Comment &;

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