Friday, January 27, 2012 / 12:51 pm
Reason No. 147 Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Arts Commissions
They would have denied the Watts Towers if they’d had the chance.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: art | Richard Serra | Anita Garouni | folk art
You know what I hate? Besides the rest of it? Arts commissions!
“But Commie Girl!” you’re whining in your usual fuddle, “Arts commissions are full of people who care about art and want to beautify our city! How could you take your usual shiv to them?”
Easy! Arts commissions are full of stuck-up bureaucrats enforcing their staid aesthetic; they’ll approve just about any twisted hunk of metal if it’s got the name “Serra” attached; and they would have denied the Watts Towers if they’d had the chance. They don’t get folk art, and never have. In Fullerton, the arts commission that oversees the small percent of developer money that must go to public art has approved hideous statues of girls doing rhythmic gymnastics, and I think that in itself should DQ all arts commissions for good.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Friday, January 27, 2012 / 6:00 am
Why Ron Paul Is Wrong About Everything Ever, Foreign Policy Edition
Libertarians like his foreign policy stance precisely because he has none.
by Tony Chavira
Tags: 2012 election | foreign policy | why Ron Paul is wrong about everything ever
Except for Milton Friedman, who felt that Americans had the right to propel the free market forward at the cost of annihilating the rest of the planet, most libertarians are vehemently anti-intervention and anti-war. At their ideological core, they believe that America should leave the rest of the world alone to do whatever it wants. We have no moral responsibilities, no allies, and no business in other countries. And Ron Paul believes this as well, more or less.
Taking an anti-war position should be an easy decision for Ron Paul, considering that wars cost the government so much money. End wars and you can cut away at the defense budget, thereby reducing the role and might of all government. Aside from that, taking a stance against endless war is a great rhetorical device. Our government used it to start World War I and it worked like a charm.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Thursday, January 26, 2012 / 6:00 am
This Job Is a Solid Killer
African Americans in wartime, as depicted on stage and screen and in the funny papers.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: race | Red Tails | movies | stage | comics
This past weekend I was watching the big budget Captain America: The First Avenger on our newish flat screen TV. Set in World War II, I’d seen it in its 3D glory at the cineplex last year, but enjoyed the movie so much I rented it on DVD. For years we’d had this Sony Trinatronic. That much used machine finally gave up the ghost a few months ago, and a trip to the Best Buy in Culver City yielded the bad boy we got now, a Samsung LCD 40-incher. Not only does it deliver a bigger, crisper picture, it’s less than half the weight of the Sony, reminding me just how far we’ve advanced technology-wise.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 / 2:15 pm
AAARHR! Attorney/Bassist Joe Escalante Explains the Big Media Lawyers Are the Real Pirates
Perhaps you didn’t know nor care too much about SOPA/PIPA. But you ought to.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: SOPA/PIPA | online piracy | Joe Escalante
Perhaps, like me, you didn’t know nor care too much about SOPA/PIPA (Stop the Online Piracy Act, and the other one), but believed your friends on the left when they hyperventilated that it would be the end of the Internet, and thus the world. (And like me you noticed their keening wails when every one of the Republican candidates stood onstage in South Carolina and was better on the issue than our own beloved President O). But believing them wasn’t the same thing as caring.
Leave it to Joe Escalante, who managed to make a lunchtime radio show about copyright and intellectual property law fascinating, to explain the problem both concisely and harrowingly!
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Tuesday, January 24, 2012 / 9:09 am
Earth Justice: Ann Calhoun On Duty
Cloth bags vs. plastic: did you think about germs?
by Donna Schoenkopf
Tags: recycling | Ann Calhoun | paper vs. plastic | earth justice
Ann Calhoun, vigilant citizen, wordsmith and smart ass has a blog that reports the various goings on in her hometown of Los Osos, California and its environs, which include San Luis Obispo.
Does she get mad? You BET she does. Can she rant like nobody else? Uh huh!
This time she takes on the insidious forces that put profit before the health of our planet. And, boy, does she make mincemeat out of the liars and fakes who are on the wrong side of this issue.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Monday, January 23, 2012 / 1:06 pm
FourStory President Tony Chavira Emerges as Radio Personality
He waxes eloquent about the city, its infrastructure, and why things are so screwed up.
by Nathan Walpow
Tags: Tony Chavira | electric power | infrastructure
FourStory associate editor Tony Chavira (who's also the president of Four Story, Inc., the nonprofit we grew out of), has joined the list of regulars on KTLK radio's LA360. He'll be the resident urban issues expert. The show's hosted by Klaudia Aresti and runs Saturdays at 10 a.m. at 1150 on your AM dial.
This past Saturday, Tony explained why a bunch of overloaded power poles came down in last November's mother of all windstorms. Listen here.
permalink | comments
Monday, January 23, 2012 / 8:10 am
Pissed On, Pissed Off: War is the Soul-Killer
When your good, sweet kids come home from fighting a war, very often a small but essential part of them is dead.
by Jim Washburn
Tags: Afghanistan | veterans
One of several downsides to not being famous is that you can be reading the Times at breakfast, become perturbed enough at the news that you launch into a long screed about it, and your spouse doesn’t even look up from her iPad. Then a week later you’ll watch Bill Maher say nearly the same thing to an adoring audience on HBO, and your spouse of course thinks Maher is being the cleverest guy ever.
This happened the other week when the footage broke of the Marine snipers in Afghanistan urinating on their dead targets. It was shameful, and certainly bad PR—the Afghans don’t get trickle-down economics—but, reading about it, I felt the story deserved some context.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Sunday, January 22, 2012 / 10:40 am
They Might Be Giants
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Johnny Otis | Etta James | rhythm and blues
So my 25-year-old, still at home son has a job, praise Jesus. It’s in Compton and as he doesn’t have a car, most mornings, he has to be up and out of our Mid-City house by 7 AM for his bus and train rides to get there by 9 AM. But on Saturdays he has to be there at 7 in the morning so my wife and I trade off driving him to work. Thus I was on one of the three freeways taking him in this past Saturday and listening to KPFK rebroadcasting two of the many Johnny Otis Show recordings in their archives. Johnny was also remembered on Bill Gardner’s Rhapsody in Black show the night before on KPFK. Gardner had worked on Johnny’s show, who was 90 at the time he died last Tuesday at home in Altadena.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Friday, January 20, 2012 / 4:29 pm
You Need a Little of This
by Donna Schoenkopf
Tags: Barack Obama
You've had a hard day.
Now you're home, in front of your computer and have stumbled onto these very words. You're looking for a little something to wind down the day.
A little something sweet and good and groovy.
Read more ...
permalink | comments
Friday, January 20, 2012 / 7:43 am
Gingrich and Grandiosity
by Donna Schoenkopf
Tags: Newt Gingrich | 2012 election
I am old enough to remember Newt Gingrich in action, back in the day.
He was and is a very, very clever liar. He drops a lie, coats it immediately with some kind of clever extraction of some kind of well-known truth, and then folds them together into a puffed up Big Lie Souffle. It is always smooth and easy to swallow, so Low Information Voters just gulp the whole thing down. In one sound bite.
