Joshua Malbin

Curbed LA (via The Eastsider) says that the Board of Commissioners at the Department of Building and Safety voted to allow the demolition of the Sunset Pacific Motel.

The “Bates Motel” sits at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Bates Avenue in Silver Lake, and the shoe fits. When I started working in City Hall in 2001, it was a universal neighborhood complaint, and no amount of objection from the police and the community could get the motel owner to make it less of a nest of drugs and prostitution. After the city withdrew its conditional use permit in 2003, there was a short-lived attempt by the owner’s children to re-open it under new management. It was taken over for a period by Eastside impresario Dana Hollister, and while it wasn’t quite as much to start with as the Paramour or even the Brite Spot, we locals were excited at the prospect that she might bring a snazzy little hotel and spa to Silver Lake. Whether it was the economy or the Bates’ bones, that project never launched; the current Michigan-based owners sent a lawyer to register an objection at the hearing.A

A police officer working on the case back in 2002 told us that “it was the first time I’d ever seen the prostitutes come to us because they were afraid of the drug dealers.”

Image: Sunset Pacific MOTEL by Meltwater, on Flickr, under a Creative Commons license.

Share on Facebook

Not quite as uncanny as the last one. I just read it as this:

Enough evidence to convict, I rather think.

Share on Facebook

Since 2006, Optic Nerve author Adrian Tomine has been editing a series of English collections of the work of manga lion Yoshihiro Tatsumi. Frederick Schodt (English translator of such famous manga as Astro Boy and Ghost in the Shell)  writes in the introduction to the latest of these that Tatsumi is relatively little read in Japan now, so these collections can in fact be considered a rediscovery.

Tatsumi is apparently most famous as the inventor of the term and concept “gekiga” (“dramatic pictures”) in 1957 to distinguish the serious, adult-themed stories he wanted to do from the rest of manga (“whimsical pictures”), then largely dominated by work for children. A Drifting Life, the latest of his books brought out by Drawn and Quarterly, tells the story of how he and his colleagues developed and changed manga into gekiga.

It starts in 1948, when Tatsumi’s slightly fictionalized stand-in Hiroshi Katsumi is thirteen, and ends in 1960. Alongside the development of Katsumi’s art we see developments in Japanese society and culture, including the many movies that Tatsumi loved, from The Third Man to The Seven Samurai to the French film People of No Importance.

For anyone who’s interested in the early development of manga, the book is a incredible find. For one who isn’t, it’s a bit of a bore, especially since it weighs in at a staggering 800-plus pages.

It’s also not the best way to acquaint yourself with Tatsumi’s work. Where A Drifting Life leaves Katsumi at 25, just as he’s coming to grips with his form, the three collections out so far from Drawn and Quarterly—The Push Man & Other Stories, Abandon the Old in Tokyo, and Good-Bye—give us Tatsumi’s work in his mid-thirties, at the height of his powers.

And it’s amazing work. With a plain drawing style that uses no shading but cross-hatches and recalls film noir, Tatsumi tells modern stories of despair and loneliness. In Good-Bye, for example, the opening story (PDF) describes an iconic photo from Hiroshima that everyone believes shows a the incinerated shadow of devoted son giving his mother a back massage—until the son steps forward to tell the photographer that it’s really his friend’s shadow there on the wall, not his, and the friend was in the midst of murdering his mother at his behest. In another story, an old boot fetishist plots how he can die trampled to death by women, since his times with booted prostitutes are the only happy moments in his life. In a third, a horny young man wanders around at night, visiting peep shows and masturbating unhappily.

Highly recommended. You can read most of one story from The Push Man here (PDF) and a part of one from Abandon the Old in Tokyo here (PDF).

Share on Facebook

Soundsuit, Nic Cave (source); Iranian snipers march in ghillie suits (source)

Share on Facebook

If there are lessons for writers in Infinite Jest, this must be among them:

If you put into your work everything you know in your head, you’d best also put into it everything you know in your heart.

Share on Facebook

1. The “Defund ACORN Act” passed by 173 Republicans and 172 Democrats, prohibits “Federal funds from going to organizations that commit fraud against the government.” Apparently, this has the potential to cast a wider net than just ACORN. Can you think of any organization anywhere that has ever committed fraud against the government? Rep. Alan Grayson (D-FL) suspects that there may be a few others out there, possibly one or two in the military-industrial complex. If you can think of one and you can back it up, log it here.

2. You probably aren’t surprised to hear that “both conservative and mainstream media reported allegations by Republican Party operatives and politicians without seeking to verify these claims or to provide ACORN with equal opportunities to challenge the accusations of voter fraud”, but Peter Dreier at Occidental College’s Urban and Environmental Policy Institute just had to prove it. Here’s his report.

3. Jono Shaffer, a veteran SEIU organizer (who can be seen leafleting in the background of the restaurant action scene in Bread and Roses — jump to 4:50), denounces the Congressional vote against ACORN. He’s right to be angry. For chrissakes people, even Dianne Feinstein voted against the thing.

I run into Judy Chu here and there, and while I still have a good deal of staffer’s reticence to schmooze electeds, much less harangue them, I think I’ll have to enter the brave new world of disgruntled constituents* if I see her anytime soon.

*I am not Judy Chu’s constituent. Ssh.

Share on Facebook

Vaguely argued prediction.

Specific evidence:

As evidence of the link between health care and racial attitudes, we analyzed survey data gathered in late 2008. … We find an extraordinarily strong correlation between racial resentment of blacks and opposition to health care reform.

Interestingly:

No such relationship between racial attitudes and opinions on health care existed in the mid-1990s during the Clinton effort.

Via Yglesias, even if he thinks it’s “counterproductive” to talk about it. Commenter JD over there has this to say about the change since the 1990s:

See Martin Gilens’s book “Why Americans Hate Welfare” for a good analysis of how this worked with welfare. There too, the association was not originally there: the right managed to yoke existing racism to welfare in order to piggyback on existing resentment among whites. The result was that, as more people came to associate welfare with blacks, antipathy to the program rose. So too here: just yoke healthcare to providing services to blacks (or the pro-black policies of a black president) and voila, instant white opposition.

Yes this is the laziest post ever.

Share on Facebook

Just added a new story to the story page. It’s about how one wishes everybody else on the subway would just go the hell away. Thanks to Nick_o_cavE and DAM 27 for the ideas when I blegged awhile back; I messed around with both of them and ended up incorporating one.

Share on Facebook

To many, Steven Soderbergh’s is the face that launched a thousand indies, but he’s much more impressive as the redemption of old, big, star-struck Hollywood.  I’m glad he takes the time between his major motion pictures for his experimental confections; I suspect that the linguistic investigations of Schizopolis or the cruddy longeurs of Bubble expand the palette that he brings to blockbuster cinema.

I think he shares with Tarantino an enormous wellspring of inspiration, but while Tarantino’s is his mind’s own Video Hut of Alexandria, Soderbergh’s is more of a living cinema sketchbook or laboratory. I simply no longer want to see those experiments. Full Frontal was the last straw, and its unfortunate fascination with the slippage between the lives led and lives played by Hollywood types, not all that clever a riff on Pirandello to begin with, ruined Ocean’s 12 when it was imported into that movie.

(Schizopolis underwhelmed me because I’d seen its famous “Generic greeting” scene done before — but I could never remember where. The blog While Seated jogged my memory: I’d gone to see Chicago’s Neo-Futurists perform Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind in 1991 in Chicago.)

But when he’s on, he’s on. Ocean’s 11 is, for me, the purest cinematic pleasure, drum-tight in the action and just loose enough to be sexy or funny without dropping the plot. Out of Sight is a slow and sexy crime story that maximizes the given resources of Elmore Leonard and George Clooney and even draws a shapely performance out of Jennifer Lopez. The Limey is probably the best evidence for my hypothesis about Soderbergh’s experiments informing his genre treatments: ruthlessly edited down, it’s a no-frills, sharp-angled story that relies much more upon the play between Terrence Stamp’s quiet anger and Luis Gúzman’s chatter than Lem Dobbs’ much-abused script.

Like no other director, Soderbergh has made the use of stars part of his art. That’s what makes the characterization of The Informant!‘s Mark Whitacre and his giddy, high-wire performance by Matt Damon so surprising and so much fun. Soderbergh’s great at exploiting star power — viz. Clooney — and to the extent that that’s been coaxed out of Damon previously, it’s been either his headstrong youthfulness in Ocean’s 11 or the reticent hawk of the Bourne movies. (Parker and Stone drew what is perhaps the canonical take.)

There’s seemingly no reticence at all in Mark Whitacre, the title character who moves from a “white hat” at the beginning of the movie, exposing himself to great risk in order to bring ADM to hell for its price-fixing scheme, to something altogether more complicated by the movie’s end.  Not only does he run off at the mouth to anyone within earshot, often with compromising information, his internal live-encyclopedia monologue comes up as a voice-over:

Whitacre’s ever-interjecting consciousness adds a note of frenzy–of monkey mind–to an already-frenetic performance. Marvin Hamlisch’s loopy and anachronistic score reinforces the mania of Whitacre’s personality. The movie is serious enough about the ADM scheme and the various powers that conspire to refocus the investigation on the whistleblower instead of the crime. But Whitacre’s characterization, ranging from chipper and corn-fed to not sane, shapes the work and gives it its real artistic stretch.

The most impressive feat of The Informant! is that it takes us up this close to its protagonist but manages to hold back critical information about his actions and intentions. We get inside his mind without getting inside his plan. (Significantly, his first voice-over, presented originally to the audience but revealed to be a speech to his young son, clues us in that his mental monologue is very much a performance.) Done poorly, this could come off as unfair or selective on the part of the director. Instead, it’s exciting, allowing us intimacy with Whitacre from the beginning yet still leaving plenty of room for suspense and revelation. The storytelling gives us an unreliable narrator verging on a kind of first-person free indirect style.

The polar bear anecdote isn’t the only Whitacre ramble about deception and perception in the animal kingdom. Whitacre tells us how the colors of poisonous butterflies are adopted by their benign cousins to scare away birds. And he tells us (talking to his son, in the first monologue) that our breakfast orange juice and maple syrup conceal good old corn. Every act of looking is looking at a lie.

Link to screenplay by Scott Z. Burns.

Share on Facebook

Where The Wild Things Ought To Be

Where The Wild Things Ought To Be, from We Love You So via /film.

Share on Facebook