feliz cumpleanos los angeles!

Today marks the 225th birthday of our fair metropolis. I was delighted to discover recently that the northwest corner of the original settlement, El Pueblo de la Reina de Los Angeles, is walking distance from my apartment.

Over the weekend, the Los Angeles sky was bedecked in its birthday finery.

This post at LAist has some additional birthday links, including LA City Nerd's excellent 225 ways to celebrate LA. Turn Here features video tours of local neighborhoods (via Apartment Therapy). I also love this collection of old LA postcards (via blogging.la).

Happy Birthday, baby!-

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sunday short stack

"I didn't want to work. It was as simple as that. I distrusted work, disliked it. I thought it was a very bad thing that the human race had unfortunately invented for itself." - Agatha Christie

• California historian J.S. Holliday (The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience; Rush for Riches: Gold Fever and the Making of California) has died in Carmel at the age of 82. Ghost Word links to Holliday's archived lectures at the Bancroft Library.
• The San Francisco Chronicle previews the fall fiction season.
• Ed Champion points to video of Woody Allen interviewing Billy Graham.
• Kim Cooper's research for "The Horrifying, Bizarre, Unnatural History of Sunset Junction" is kickass (via LA Brain Terrain).
• Order a subscription to Good Magazine and 100% of your money goes to the charity of your choice while you get writing from Neal Pollack and Gary Shteyngart (via Toilet Paper Blog).
• Salon's Audiofile serves up a selection of BBQ mixes.
• Slate provides an overview of the new generation of gypsy music.
• If you have any photos that match the theme "Why They Hate US," upload them to stay free! daily's new Flickr project.
• CUNY's Hunter College has settled with a student whose suicide attempt led to her dorm expulsion for "violating the housing contract."
• USC's Brad Pasanek has compiled a database of eighteenth-century metaphors of mind (via boing boing).
• Holly Myers looks at the death trilogy of Gus Van Sant in n+1.
• This secretive Bansky warehouse event in LA appears unmissable.

orange-flowers, swallows, and regret

Autumn Rhythm, Jackson Pollock

By all these lovely tokens
September days are here,
With summer’s best of weather
And autumn’s best of cheer.

- Helen Hunt Jackson, September

September: it was the most beautiful of words, he’d always felt,
evoking orange-flowers, swallows, and regret.

- Alexander Theroux

There comes a time when autumn asks,
"What have you been doing all summer?"

- Anonymous

My favourite poem is the one that starts 'Thirty days hath September' because it actually tells you something.

- Groucho Marx
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various curatorial probes

LA Weekly profiles the singular Center for Land Use Interpretation and their "institutional autobiography" Overlook:

Basically, CLUI is a relentless curiosity machine focused on the intersection of humans and the Earth’s surface, particularly in America since the Industrial Revolution. It compiles and cross-references enormous amounts of information in its public digital and paper databases, then explores aspects of the landscape normally hidden from view — ranging from the Nevada nuclear-test site and bullet-ridden police-training mockups of suburban strip malls to the subterranean world of “show cave” architecture and the decaying art-ruins of ’70s earthworks. These slices of de-tourism are then presented as exhibitions in one of CLUI’s handful of nationwide facilities (or venues like last year’s Whitney Biennial), as one of its exemplary small publications, or as a public program — most notably in the form of a guided bus tour of the region in question.
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she was wearing a golden fish

Revel in R. Crumb's portrayal of The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick.

"There was some kind of time, but it was a different kind of time...A dream time, where the deeds of heroes occur."

Via Ed Champion

wu orleans

This collection of remixes from dj BC that mash the Wu-Tang Clan and dixieland classics is brilliant. You can download the entire album or listen to a few mp3s, such as "When the Meth Comes Marching In" (the harmonic pairing of Louis Armstrong and Method Man) or "Dirty Brass" (the Dirty Dozen Brass Band takes on ODB's "Got Your Money").

Via Boing Boing

naguib mahfouz (1911-2006)

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, the only writer in Arabic to win the Nobel Prize for literature, died on Wednesday in Cairo aged 94, doctors said...

"He came to this world only to write," Egyptian writer Youssef al-Quaid told Egyptian television.

"He was the most famous writer in Egypt ... He had an incredible ability to create and create all his life."

Mahfouz, a prolific writer best known for his Cairo Trilogy, became a literary force when he moved beyond traditional novels to realistic descriptions of Egypt's 20th century experience of colonialism and autocracy.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1988 for works which "formed an Arabian narrative art that applies to all mankind."

Update: The Elegant Variation has a thorough collection of links on the death of Mahfouz.
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the prestige

I saw The Illusionist last week, and while it was worth the price of the ticket, I imagine it won't be nearly as good as the latest offering from Christopher Nolan:


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this week's netflix

Match Point: This is the first Woody Allen film I've seen in awhile, and it was entertaining enough, possibly because it didn't feel like a Woody Allen film. (I watched Manhattan for the first time a couple of years ago and did. not. get. it.) The story of social climbing and dangerous infidelity took its time without running overlong, maintained the dramatic tension, and featured pretty, rich people up to no good.

Junebug: This story of the clash between the urban and the rural played out within a single family is an excellent example of how independent films can take more risks and be simply more interesting. I'm sure this film resonated deeply with throngs of city dwellers who have left behind families with whom they no longer have much in common. While all of the acting was solid (I totally missed Will Oldham as an art scout) and I don't want to take anything away from Amy Adams's performance, I'm not quite sure how her role as an chatterbox mother-to-be caught the attention of the academy and led to her Oscar nomination.

Caché: After reading an article in Los Angeles magazine where Steve Erickson called this French exploration of paranoia and isolation "one of last year's best films," my expectations were fairly high. Erickson pointed out that the premise of the film - a couple receives an anonymous video in the mail that contains hours of surveillance footage of their home - was already covered by David Lynch in Lost Highway, to more unsettling effect in my opinion. There is one shocking scene in Caché that is Lynch-worthy, but for the most part, the characters' lack of affect was contagious and left me feeling detached and unmoved.

Transamerica: I don't know why I was reluctant to see this film, afraid perhaps that the focus was too involved with the idea that Felicity Huffman was supposed to be a pre-op transsexual man and not involved enough in themes to which I could relate. Boy, was I wrong. Whereas Caché left me feeling somewhat empty, this film left me so full of emotion, I couldn't tell what I was feeling. All I knew is that I was a richer human being for having seen this film. Felicity Huffman was robbed at the Oscars.

Shopgirl: The script of this film, adapted from a Steve Martin novella, was decent enough, featuring Claire Danes as a lovelorn shopgirl (Mirabelle) seeking her destiny in romance and the glove counter at Saks. Jason Schwartzman (Jeremy) showcased his usual smart & scruffy charm as one love interest while Steve Martin (Ray) played the other older sugar daddy suitor. While I enjoyed the film, what I couldn't quite understand is how Steve Martin played his role. I haven't read the book, so I can't speak to its adaptation, but I could not figure out Mirabelle's attraction to Ray. Either she was more of a golddigger than I gathered or more desperate than I understood, but would it have killed Ray to smile? To say something funny or smart? But who knows? Having never had my student loans paid off by a lover, I may be underestimating the allure.
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scenes from sunset junction 2006

Hank Williams III and Lux Interior of The Cramps...
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sunday short stack

"Pain or damage don't end the world, or despair or f*cking beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man and give some back." - Al Swearingen, Deadwood

• Bid to name a character in new books from Lorrie Moore, Carl Hiassen, and Chris Ware, among others. (I think I'm more excited at the prospect of a new Lorrie Moore book.)
• Pluto's moon Charon makes a case for the reversal of her life partner's demotion (via stay free! daily).
• Five hours of color footage of Eudora Welty from 1975 has been found in the NEA archives.
• Geeks Who Drink explore the new Google tool that compares search trends by location.
• Read the heartbreaking tale of how John McNally discovered the inscribed book he had sent to Ursula LeGuin was for sale on-line (via Tod Goldberg).
• The Onion AV Club looks at 14 Movies from Two Ages of Theremin Music (via Futurballa).
• Bitch Ph.D. reprints a reader's story that makes me both thankful for this week's Plan B ruling and leaves me wondering how much positive effect it will have in certain areas.
• Jonathan Lethem interviews Bob Dylan for the cover of Rolling Stone and catalogs Dylan's "stray gems" (via Rake's Progress).
• Look inside the home of Alain de Botton (via bookslut).
• Campaign for the American Reader posts an adapted version of political philosopher Eduardo Velásquez's essay on Fight Club as "the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since ‘Death Wish.’"
• According to The Sun, Justin Hawkins (of The Darkness), Tom Chaplin (of Keane), and Pete Doherty (of Kate Moss) are bonding together to create a supergroup from the ashes of rehab (via Wit of the Staircase). I'll believe it when I see it.-
  

an absolute disjunction

Michelle Huneven interviews Claire Messud in the LA Weekly, upon the release of Messud's new novel The Emperor's Children:

So you didn't exactly set out to write a 9/11 novel.

I was confronted with this problem. In 2001, I was writing this novel set in New York in 2001. Even though I had to start it again, it was already so present in my mind, it wasn'’t a novel set in 1999, it was set in 2001. People have said, Oh, you'’ve written a 9/11 novel, but I was trying to write an August 1914 novel. In August 1914, everybody was punting up and down the Thames River and eating strawberries and having picnics, and then, a few months later, they were in uniform and being sent out to the front - — an absolute disjunction.

On the same topic, NPR asks "Can Fiction Help Make Sense of Sept. 11?" Of the texts I've read that have approached the subject, including Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Twilight of the Superheroes, I felt Benjamin Kunkel's Indecision captured the complete sense of unreality that followed the crash of the first plane. Kunkel's characters might have seemed callous as they speculated on what was happening, but I remember the same lack of recognition as to how irrevocably our world had just changed.

Update: George Saunders's "The Cats of 9/11" appeared the day of this post.
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she must have been drunk when she did it

In honor of Dorothy Parker's birthday this week, a link to a recent Bookforum article about Parker's bequest to the NAACP and Lillian Hellman's distress in her role as executor.

On the face of it, Hellman seemed pleased about King, publicly applauding Parker's "strong feelings about civil liberty and Negro rights" and saying she was "very impressed" by such a noble bequest. But in private she was fuming. King irritated her—apparently he reminded her of southern preachers from her childhood—but what upset her most was her friend's betrayal. Having managed to acquire control of Hammett's literary estate, Hellman had also expected to inherit Parker's; indeed, she believed she was entitled to it. As literary executor, she would be expected to make all decisions but would not benefit financially; proceeds from sales of the work would go to King, the new owner of the copyrights. Within a year of Parker's death, the civil-rights leader was assassinated and the estate became property of the NAACP, an organization for which Hellman had no respect whatsoever because she considered it timid and ineffectual. Ignoring the fact that King had been a vigorous thirty-six at the time of Parker's demise, Hellman continued to berate her friend and hold her personally responsible for the fate of the coveted copyrights. In a gloves-off mood, she didn't mince words with playwright Howard Teichmann: "That goddamn bitch Dorothy Parker. . . . You won't believe what she's done. I paid her hotel bill at the Volney for years, kept her in booze, paid for her suicide attempts—all on the promise that when she died, she would leave me the rights to her writing. . .But what did she do? She left them directly to the NAACP. Damn her!"
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for unbelievers, believers, and the unbelieved

Boing Boing points to Signs of Witness, "the interactive site that tracks putative signs of the supposed apocalypse end times." Some of the posts cover reports of the Virgin Mary appearing in chocolate and statues of Hindu gods drinking milk, but today's post is probably the most convincing:

So the other day I got up and saw an article about how global warming was melting the ice caps, increasing the likelihood of hurricanes, making diseases like the Black Plague primed for a comeback, pushing tropical diseases north, helping to cause oceanic dead zones and likely to increase heat related deaths severely as time goes on…The SAME DAY I saw an article about how pesticides are found in almost all water systems now, and ANOTHER ONE with a study showing how babies are harmed by exposure to small amounts of pesticides and herbicides. Then later that day I read that there are a variety of toxins now found in cow’s milk, across the west, due to a massive leak into the water of a rocket fuel byproduct. Then I read that the US Government is starting new experiments–and breaking a treaty to do it–with biowarfare agents. Then I read that Russian nuclear weapons that went missing…are still missing. Then I read that a global mutant-flu pandemic is still expected…Then I read that the govt has failed to find a place to bury the nuclear waste we’ve been building up…and it’s starting to leak. And that night I heard that the Iranians are definitely building nuclear weapons and the USA is pushing toward attacking them.

And all this was in one day. So who needs magical manifestations of the end times. This is all about…what WE do.

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true crime

I'm very excited about this forthcoming Brian De Palma adaptation of James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia:



You can read more about The Black Dahlia mystery here and here. I had no idea Woody Guthrie was once considered a suspect.
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