LA and then Oregon
August 17, 2009
First, my annual trip to Los Angeles to see friends.
I spent my holiday at the Venice Beach House, a b b not more than 20 yards from the beach. It is a delight, quiet, well-kept, clean with attentive staff and wi-fi in the rooms. I have never been in a better place in LA outside of my in-law's house!
For those of you tracking my health, I am proud to say I hit the beach and/or the nearest 24 Hour Fitness every day I was in LA. Good for me!
Monday during the day, I fulfilled a long-term dream; I drove the entire length of the new Exposition Line, a streetcar line under construction in Los Angeles that will eventually go from USC to Santa Monica. Phase One will take the line to the Westside Pavilion. There is some argument about the alignment for phase 2. A bunch of Nimby's in a nice neighborhood want to prevent the streetcar from running through a beautiful and undisturbed right of way, abandoned decades ago, where the line ran decades before the homeowners who are now fouling up the gears of progress.
By the way, Google Maps, God bless them, shows abandoned streetcar right of ways as railroad tracks on their maps. This substantially helped me on my tour.
Alas, the Santa Monica end of the right of way is frequently broken up by buildings and parking lots. That is a shame, and it's going to be expensive to recreate what LA once had. Probably, the alignment will have to be fiddled. If only America's love affair with the car had not destroyed the rail transit system.
That night, dinner with N and C, old family friends from Berkeley who now live in Manhattan Beach. Their daughter, A, was born two days before our daughter Rae, in the same hospital. We ate at a delightful place called Melange; I had sturgeon. I love sturgeon. Don't bother telling me it is a bottom feeder. I still like it (besides, Columbia River sturgeon are farmed...)
Tuesday was lunch and a hike with JP, an old friend of mine from the Byte.com days. Our politics differ widely, but we enjoy each other's company and I look forward to spending a few hours with him each summer. Dinner with CW, the founder and head of a Internet comedy site in which I participate. Always fun to see him; we had a good Mexican meal in Venice.
Wednesday was a four-mile hike from Palos Verdes to Redondo Beach with JS, another friend of long standing. After the hike, we ate, as always, at the Redondo Beach Brewing Company. Again, the conversation is worth a million dollars. It's the shortest 90-minute walk I take each year.
Finally Thursday, Neal Vitale and I saw Paper Heart (and I must say, I agree with his tepid/negative review) then had dinner at The Tasting Kitchen (reviewed here by someone else). As always at dinner with Neal, it was amazing. Then off to the airport.
Friday, Vicki and I took off for Portland, where we stayed, again, in a turn-of-the-20th century Craftsman house on the Willamette River near John's Landing while visiting my parents for the weekend. Our girls came too. We enjoyed ourselves and, as always, it was nice to see my parents.
A lot of time away, and now school starts (for teachers) in a week. Well, that's the calendar for you--it just keeps rolling along.
Who's Funding The Taliban?
August 17, 2009
Coming from Chicago, Barack (by speaking with people with personal recollections of how things were, or how they still are if one knows where to look) should be very familiar with how this works even if Big Al had been gone for about 36 years by the time Barack made it to town.
Who Is Funding The Taliban? You Don't Want To Know
Holbrooke is totally out to lunch and always has been. Now he's going to "look into" who is providing the funding. There was "kind of a feeling" as to the money's source. Kind of a feeling where? Who had it? Why did they have it? What was their interest in making it seem the funding was unofficial rather than official and governmental? If they aligned what he does with his formal responsibilities and title he would be: Special Envoy In Charge Of Making Sure That Everything Richard Holbrooke Does Or Says Is Reported Favorably, Completely, Fawningly, and Rapidly In The New York Times. Error in article, the spending rate is $1B every 7.3 days (and perhaps less) based on recent $50B supplemental.
Briefs
- Not news. Republicans lie. Dick Armey fact check: MoveOn did not run Bush-Hitler ad
- If this is true, he should be put back in the private sector (and possibly prosecuted for violating the conflict of interest statute): Eric Holder's Conflict of Interest
- Coffee With Cleaver
- Teabaggers Bring Guns to Cohen Health Care Event
- Late Night: Media Plays "Let’s Pretend"
- How the White House's Deal With Big Pharma Undermines Democracy
The answer to the "How soon" question in the last paragraph is about negative 16 years (in other words, it happened in about 1993, or earlier) - Anti-Defamation League Condemns Limbaugh: "Deeply Offensive"
- The Downturn is Over for Wall Street, but Main Street's is Still Going On
- Tortured Logic. He works for you; tell him what to do.
- George Bush - Ghost Buster
- Afghanistan Mission Creep In Action
- I Am An American Conservative ****head
- Let's mark this moment in the health debate as it happens
- Government tracking what are arguably viewed by the public as "private" sites for the use of their members only: AF Used Twitter To Track NY Flyover
- Waiting For The Federal Reserve's Next Apology
- At a Crossroads on Afghanistan
T. Friedman "sharing" with and "lecturing" IDF general staff. Why does the NYT still pay Friedman and publish his material? - Mom Tased During Routine Traffic Stop; Police Force Children To Be Abandoned Outside In Freezing Weather
- A Political Fragging
- Pan Am 103 Cover-up Charges
Neal Vitale Reviews: District 9
August 17, 2009
4 stars out of 5
Peter Jackson protege Neill Blomkamp has made a film that is captivating, powerful, and wildly imaginative, but often nearly impossible to watch. In District 9, an alien spacecraft has gotten stranded over Johannesburg and its occupants - over a million so-called "prawns" - have been put in a government camp (District 9). The story focuses on the attempt by the corporation managing the area to resettle the aliens outside the city, to diffuse the rising resentment and tensions among the local residents, and to unseat the Nigerian crime gang that holds sway over the camp. What ensues is stomach-turning in its graphic gore and wash of bodily fluids, but fascinating. District 9 incorporates elements from a wide assortment of sci-fi, thriller, and horror movies - from Frankenstein to The Fly, RoboCop to Alien, Escape from New York to Blade Runner - and overlays themes of racial (species?) discrimination, corporate malfeasance, immoral genetic research, and illegal thuggish brutality. While the resulting film has more than a few loose threads still hanging when it ends, it is a terrifically entertaining - if nearly nauseating - piece of work.
Neal Vitale Reviews: It Might Get Loud
August 17, 2009
4 stars out of 5
Davis Guggenheim, best known as the creative force behind Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, has crafted a highly engaging portrait of three renowned rock guitarists, each quite different in age, training, and approach, united by their common love of the instrument and its power. It Might Get Loud mostly looks at the trio individually, combining deep archival photography and video with modern-day interviews and visits to key historical locales for each, but also weaves in footage from a "summit" of the three in January of 2008. Featured are an elegant and courtly 65-year-old Jimmy Page, of Led Zeppelin and Yardbirds fame, the quiet 48-year-old Edge (nee David Howell Evans) from U2, and 34-year-old stripling Jack White (The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and, most recently, The Dead Weather). While this is a film that will mostly appeal to music aficionados, there are lovely moments of transcendence. When the three are together, Page starts playing the chords to "Stairway To Heaven." Edge and White simply stop, stare, and smile - neatly summing up my reaction to It Might Get Loud.
Neal Vitale Reviews: Paper Heart
August 17, 2009
1 star out of 5
For me, Paper Heart conjures an admittedly jaded view of film school - a project is enthusiastically described and sounds intriguing in class, but watching the finished product is sheer torture. Nicholas Jasenovec and Charlyne Yi collaborate on a documentary exploring the meaning of love, traveling across the United States for interviews on the subject. But some characters play themselves (Yi, Juno's Michael Cera), while others (Jake Johnson as Jasenovec) are actors cast in the roles, adding the ambiguity of whether we're watching an actual documentary or a film about making a documentary. The cleverness of this conceit, though, quickly wears thin, and a few cute bits of childish animation add only occasional, brief sparks of interest. Yi, at the center of Paper Heart, is singularly unappealing and charmless, and the investment of 90+ minutes for this film feels like time misspent.
Neal Vitale Reviews: Julie & Julia
August 17, 2009
4.5 stars out of 5
Julie & Julia, from director/screenwriter Nora Ephron (Sleepless In Seattle, You've Got Mail), is a delicious and satisfying treat. Based on two books, Julia Child's memoir "My Life In France" and Julie Powell's chronicle "Jule & Julia: My Year Of Cooking Dangerously," the film interweaves the two storylines to excellent effect. Meryl Streep (Mamma Mia!, Doubt) is a wonderful Child, arriving in Paris in the late 1940s and learning to cook at Le Cordon Bleu as a way of finding something to do with herself. Child's mannerisms and speech lend themselves to exaggeration - Dan Aykroyd's classic "Saturday Night Live" skit from 1978 (featured in this film) is a good example. But Streep's performance is neither campy nor overplayed, and the picture of Child that emerges is engaging, a strong-minded sensualist with a flinty cast. Amy Adams (Enchanted, Doubt) is equally good as Powell, a young woman in post-9/11 Manhattan, stuck in a job she hates. She finds personal gratification by challenging herself to cook every dish in Child's first cookbook, "Mastering The Art Of French Cooking," over the course of one year, and blogging about her efforts. Ephron nicely balances success and failure in the two stories, and creates a film both sweet and tart, rich but never cloying.
Letters: Greedy Newspaper Execs, Automatic Plant Watering, A few from Craig, Dan Grobstein File
August 17, 2009
Richard Dalton notes: As if there aren't enough problems in newspaper publishing. Tribune Execs Want $70 Million Bonus For Bankrupting The Company
Need to water your plants while you're away? We like Mr. Drip.
Craig Reynolds had a few notes this week:
- Subject: Arizona GOP Runs Doctored Cigarette Photo of President Obama -- Politics Daily
- Sure you paid for it, but its not yours: Court Rules Consumers Never Have the Right to Copy DVD Movies
- Mobile phones get cyborg vision
- Sony moves to standardise e-books in format challenge to rivals [ed. note; we bought my mom a Sony e-book reader and she loves it]
- To a Mother Concerned About File Sharing
- Netflix Prize: It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over
Only one Dan Grobstein item this week:
- OPINION | August 09, 2009
Op-Ed Columnist: Is Obama Punking Us?
By FRANK RICH
While it's unlikely that the chorus of President Obama's most strident doomsayers will be proven right, there is growing cause for concern that the president is not the reformer he promised to be.
End of August 17 Column
August 17, 2009
Heading for LA, then Portland
August 09, 2009
What a week! Leaving for LA tonight to see my good friends down there, briefly in Orinda next Friday (time for my weekly session with my trainer!), then to Portland for the weekend to see my parents. Details to follow.