Tuesday, February 14, 2012 / 8:55 am
Happy Valentine’s Day, Baby!
Love is for suckers.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Valentine's Day | Hammett | love
On this Valentine’s Day, a tip of my fedora to those lovelorn saps in crime and mystery stories, men and women, who got caught up in circumstances beyond their control, blinded as they were by lust and love.
As the Right Reverend Deuteronomy Springer observed in The Black Mass of Brother Springer by Charles Willeford, desirous as is of lucre and the one he calls Merita, “Money is the root of al goodness.”
“It scares me and I sweat down the back – God, I must be going screwy! It’s my father-in-law’s wife, it’s a woman, and me thinking things like that! The narrator in Cornell Woolrich’s short story, “Kiss of the Cobra,” reflects.
Then of course there’s the hardest Valentine of all from Dashiell Hammett’s classic detective novel the Maltese Falcon. Private eye Sam Spade lays out several reasons jail awaits his client Brigit O’Shaughnessy for killing his partner Miles Archer, who he disliked…while maybe he loves her. “The sixth would be that, since I’ve also got something on you, I couldn’t ber sure you wouldn’t decide to shot a hole in me some day.”
Yet there’s all kinds of love that can go wrong as insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter observed in Joseph Hansen’s Death Claims to the two proprietors of an antiquarian bookshop.
“If Peter killed his father for insurance, why hasn’t he tried to collect it? What’s he doing?
“Having the horrors someplace, Dave said. “Murder takes some people that way. Doing it is one thing. Living with it is another. Thanks for the drink.” He went out through the dusky shop.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
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Tuesday, February 14, 2012 / 7:00 am
Damn LAPD Drivers!
Cops get in too many car accidents, and I yack about it on the radio.
by Tony Chavira
Tags: police force | LAPD | government | LA360
Recently, the L.A. Times reported about just how accident-prone our boys and girls in blue happen to be:
At any given moment in Los Angeles, scores of police cars are out on the streets — either rushing to calls for help or prowling around in search of trouble.
Despite the training cops receive in how to speed safely through traffic, they are an accident-prone bunch. Police were involved in traffic accidents more than 1,250 times in the last three years — an average of about one a day.
Most of the crashes were minor, but some resulted in life-threatening injuries or totaled police cars, or were the result of the officer violating traffic laws, according to LAPD records. In at least two incidents, the driver of another car was killed.
Last Saturday, FourStory pal Klaudia Aresti had me on her morning radio show, L.A. 360 on KTLK 1150 to chat about (a) why the accident record seems/is so bad and (b) what can ultimately be done about it.
Read more ...
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Monday, February 13, 2012 / 12:04 pm
Comfortably Ignoring Society’s Problems
Addressing inequality head on, since 1865.
by Tony Chavira
Tags: Mitt Romney | race | disparity | slavery | progress
The blog, Letters of Note, posted a fantastic old letter from Mr. Jourdan Anderson, a freed slave living and working in Dayton, Ohio in 1865, in response to his former master, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, requesting that he return to Tennessee and get back to work on the farm.
Read these highlights from the letter and jump for joy:
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Monday, February 13, 2012 / 5:00 am
Rural Life: Report From Chigger Lake
Life (and death) in the country.
by Donna Schoenkopf
Tags: environmental | affordable house | dogs | laundry | good diet | concrete floors | outdoor shower | compost pile | drought
I'm living on thirteen beautiful, hilly acres in Oklahoma. I live in an affordable ($50,000), environmental (simple rectangle, southern wall a row of 6 sliding glass doors looking down my hill, passive solar in the winter, breezy in the summer) house of glass and steel and concrete that I designed and helped build. I've been here for four years. I am a 68 year old retired school teacher who wants to learn how to do all kinds of things—building, fixing, planting—by myself. I like to experiment just to see what will happen.
I don't have a lot of money. And I do want to keep everything here as natural as I can because I am, above anything else, striving to live lightly on the earth.
Here's what's been going on.
The Fabulous Outdoor Shower
My outdoor shower is going through an awkward period. It had been lush and glorious because it was surrounded by waist high grass and sunflowers that were taller than the house. Then I mowed. That left it naked and kinda ugly.
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Saturday, February 11, 2012 / 12:10 pm
Bureaucrat of the Week: Lisa Jackson of the EPA
She’s making environmental history despite the Koch Brothers!
by Donna Schoenkopf
Tags: bureaucrat of the week | EPA | Koch Brothers | environment | Lisa Jackson
You know why all those Republicans deny climate change, don't you?
And you know why they also hate the EPA, right?
The Koch Brothers, that's why.
The brothers who own the second largest corporate conglomeration in the United States of America have all their vested interests in things that rape the earth.
Oil and gas, Georgia Pacific lumber, a slew of toxic chemicals. I could go on and on but you get the idea.
Republicans didn't just come up with the idea that climate change didn't exist. Nor did they have some sort of revelation from on high. They got spoon fed these ideas by their funders, the Koch Brothers, who want to protect their vested interests and make that known to their lackies, the Republicans who take their filthy lucre.
But We the People have Lisa Jackson! Ta Dah!!
She is the most effective Environmental Protector we've ever had. She's dealt with mercury and auto emissions, two biggies that have been fought for years and years by corporate interests.
Her core concerns are air, water, and toxic contamination. She focuses on children, the elderly, and low income neighborhoods.
She's done more in her three years on the job than the EPA has done in its history.
She's an adopted child, a math genius, a chemical engineer, and has a fistful of magna cum laudes from prestigious places of learning.
Here's to Lisa Jackson, our Bureaucrat of the Week!
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Friday, February 10, 2012 / 12:31 pm
Highways Win, Transit Loses: Republicans Pick Favorites Again
Apparently, you only get rewarded in America when you’re motivated by profits.
by Tony Chavira
Tags: transportation | republicans
The NY Times published a harsh article this week slamming the transit bill currently weaseling its way through the House of Representatives. Why is it so bad, you wonder?
¶It would open nearly all of America’s coastal waters to oil and gas drilling, including environmentally fragile areas that have long been off limits. The ostensible purpose is to raise revenue to help make up what has become an annual shortfall for transportation financing. But it is really just one more attempt to promote the Republicans’ drill-now-drill-everywhere agenda and the interests of their industry patrons.
¶It would demolish significant environmental protections by imposing arbitrary deadlines on legally mandated environmental reviews of proposed road and highway projects, and by ceding to state highway agencies the authority to decide whether such reviews should occur.
But the bill was only the tip of a horrific iceberg of anti-transportation legislation led and approved by non-other than our own wacky gang of short-sighted, anti-environmental capitalists, the House Republicans. Yonah Freemark posted a little breakdown of the other slick proposals our ingenious elected officials brought to the floor for legitimate (or just rhetorical) consideration, which make these environmentally destructive provisions look child's play. Let me explain a few of them:
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Wednesday, February 8, 2012 / 2:12 pm
Thinking About the GOP Field With a Lump in My Breast
What a bunch of boobs.
by Rebecca Schoenkopf
Tags: Newt Gingrich | Rick Santorum | Mitt Romney | Ron Paul | women's health | Planned Parenthood | feminism! | gop | breasts
Almost 15 years ago, my big sister Sarah called me with very important news.
“I just want you to know,” she said. “Being 30? I have never felt like more of a woman!” It was heartening news for a 25-year-old me.
And now, with my right breast sore and a large lump behind my nipple, I have never felt like more of a woman either.
Planned Parenthood will see me Friday morning – thank you, Planned Parenthood – but until then, I can sit here and be angry, or I can sit here and be angry and think about the GOP.
I have seen a lot of articles wondering why women don't like Newt Gingrich. Really, media? You have to ask?
It's not the cheating – Democratic women still love Bill, mostly, much of the time.
It's not Newton's policy choices. What, besides the moon colony and shutting down the government when he doesn't like his seat on Air Force One, have most folks even heard about?
It's that every time a wife gets sick, he is Mr. In The Wind. You'd think the “character counts” (no blowjobs) folks would feel a little squicky with a track record of callously leaving wives to die cold and alone. And it turns out, at least, the women do!
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012 / 3:39 pm
Right Wing Evangelical Talk Radio
Relentless, ruthless, and not at all Christian.
by Donna Schoenkopf
Tags: right wing | evangelical | talk radio | Nelson Mandela
Yesterday my television went out.
This was a serious predicament because I live out in the boonies, and the only human contact I have for days on end is the telly. I rise early, anywhere from 4:30 am on and the first thing I do is turn on my teevee and have a delicious cup of coffee.
I watch MSNBC unless Joe Scarborough gets under my skin with his hogging of the microphone and his pronouncements from on high but I usually weather the storm. When I absolutely can't take it anymore, I turn on CSPAN and if that isn't doing the trick I might succumb to a couple of minutes of HGTV or Fox just to see what mischief they're up to..
But yesterday! The teevee went out! Completely!
I called DISH and got an appointment for the next afternoon. But that meant I would have to survive on EVANGELICAL RIGHT WING TALK RADIO for a whole day.
(No, reading doesn't replace the human voice. I tried. And music irritates me in a few minutes. And sports? Fuggedaboudit.)
In my case, it was AFR (American Family Radio) or nothing. It's the only talk station I can get out here. It originates in Ada, Oklahoma, population 16,907. Ada is over the hill and down Killer Highway 177 for thirty-seven miles.
Here's a little of what I was listening to for those endless hours.
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012 / 3:29 pm
Injustice’s Jukebox: Phil Ochs
The sorry arc of an American true believer.
by Jim Washburn
Tags: Phil Ochs | folk music | 1960s | Bob Dylan | There But for Fortune | injustices jukebox
I owe a lot of my upbringing to Thrifty Drug Stores. Along with the usual drugs, notions, sundries and the best selection of 5-cent ice cream cones in the neighborhood, Thrifty had a wide selection of paperback books, more of the monthly Marvel comics titles than most racks, and a bin of discounted record albums.
At age 12, in 1967, I’d read an interview with the Hollies’ Graham Nash that Simon & Garfunkel had dedicated a song to Lenny Bruce. That was the first I’d ever heard of Bruce, but it was enough to make me plunk down 95 cents for The Essential Lenny Bruce at Thrifty, which turned my little head around.
The discount record rack was always crowded with whatever the labels were trying to unload. There was a lot of 50 Guitars style dreck, but also mono copies of Magical Mystery Tour, the obscure Play the Electric Bass with Harvey Brooks album and Phil Ochs Live at Carnegie Hall, which was one of the better 77 cents I’ve spent.
I’d heard Ochs’ “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends” and liked its honky-tonk piano and sardonic lancing of our already indifferent society. Carnegie Hall was just folkie Phil and his guitar, singing topical songs about migrant farm workers, sundry US invasions of tropical islands and how much liberals sucked.
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Tuesday, February 7, 2012 / 1:16 pm
The Artful Writer
FourStory’s serial mysteries take inspiration from his chunk-a-week storytelling.
by Gary Phillips
Tags: Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
Big ups to Charles Dickens on this his 200th birthday. Not only has he made this world richer with his iconographic characters like Oliver Twist, Ebenezer Scrooge, Mr. Micawber, Uriah Heep, Fagin, Lady Dedlock, Luke Honeythunder, Mrs. Havisham, Mr. Murdstone, Mulberry Hawk, the Artful Dodger, Pip and a on and on, but he knew how to spin a yarn. Most of his books were written in serial form and sure, like any writer, he didn’t always hit his mark, but that is far out-shadowed by his storytelling abilities, and the techniques still in use today form the chapter cliffhanger to his sub-plots that wound their way back to his main story. A poor kid haunted by his childhood poverty who infused his works with the triumph of the underdog against impossible odds, how cool is it that h he also invented slang words like sawbones for a doctor, turns of phrases like “Bah, humbug,” and the social issues he dealt with as well.
Reading Great Expectations for the first time in my high school English class, I was struck at how real he made a scene be, how it came alive on the page. Yeah, I suppose he padded it out some, writing as he did for a few shillings a word, but he set the stage for some high brow stuff and the penny dreadfuls, the pulps, the sci-fi and romance and mystery genre writers to come along many years later. He was a writer of and for the working class.
Happy birthday, Mr. Dickens.
