July 26, 2006 – 11:53 pm ·
I’d like to know what’s up with the white plastic. I mean, I know what’s going on at Sunset & Vine in the old “Earthquake” building, but why the white plastic? Is that to keep the dust from demolition from spreading across the intersection like so much asbestos fallout? It’s interesting.
In an effort to find answers, I turn to that oasis of Los Angeles real estate info, CurbedLA, for an answer and get this:
It may look like a giant condom, but the Sunset-Vine Tower is just undergoing some internal reworking. An email tipster says: “That’s CIM and Kanner Architects at Sunset + Vine Tower. Right now, within that “giant condom,†demolition is under way. The project will feature 63 market-rate apartment units. Construction schedule is unsettled at this point. The exterior will have a new curtain wall that will make the tower more transparent than the old black glass building.”
I’m just glad that I’m not the only one who thought it looks like a giant condom.
And as long as we’re talking Sunset & Vine, might as well be listening to it. This is a tune from the latest Charlatans album, Simpatico. I’m a HUGE Charlatans fan, going all the way back to Some Friendly. And yes, they’re still together, and still putting out decent music. This is the instrumental with which they close out the album.
The Charlatans UK: Sunset & Vine (224kps mp3)
July 25, 2006 – 12:59 am ·
I guarantee you my script is better. From Variety:
ROME — The world preem of Brian De Palma’s James Ellroy adaptation “The Black Dahlia” will open the 63rd Venice Film Festival in competition on Aug. 30.
Based on the 1947 L.A. murder of aspiring actress Elizabeth Short and focusing on the investigation by two former boxers turned cops, “Dahlia” stars Scarlett Johansson, Hilary Swank and Josh Hartnett, all expected to make the Lido tubthumping trek. Largely shot in Bulgaria, pic was produced by Art Linson, Rudy Cohen, Moshe Diamant and Avi Lerner. U will release it Sept. 15 Stateside.
July 23, 2006 – 9:13 am ·
Seems ipowerweb loses my site for half a day yesterday. Anyone trying to access the site through normal means comes up against a brick wall. Sorry about that. My hosting company is probably melting in the heat.
If you’re trying to get at counterinvasion.com, you probably ran into the same thing. But in this case it has nothing to do with the heat. I shut down counterinvasion.com last week.
Two years ago, my friend Sara and I discover that Los Angeles is peppered with tiny mosaic Space Invaders. A little research reveals that this guy was responsible, and upon learning how many there were (over a huindred) we set upon a trek to spot every single invader in Los Angeles. The website is supposed to document our search. And it goes very well. We’re always going out on the hunt in different parts of town, photographing and cataloguing the little suckers.
And then this happens. The invaders are all gone. So after letting the site founder for a year, I’m closing it down. I’ll probably port it all over to this site and keep it going for posterity, but I can barely afford to pay my gas bill these days. Don’t need to shell out clams for an old site that no one visits.
It makes me kinda sad. We had so much fun hunting those guys down. It was a terrific bit of pop culture kitsch. But that’s the ephemeral nature of street art. Good things go away. And all good invasions gotta fade into mist.
July 21, 2006 – 11:50 pm ·
The night before, I’m up until 3:00 AM, spinning vinyl, tweaking mp3’s, setting the last details of my set in place. And at 8:00 A.M. I roll out of bed and drop the first track onto my turntable. Almost exactly an hour and a half later the last notes of the complete mix die away. Finally, I’m confident I’ve got the right collection of tunes for the set. Blearily, I stumble off to work, CDs and records tucked safely in my record bag.
I’m too tired to stress about the performance for most of the day. But as the time draws near I get a little apprehensive. The first half of the set is on vinyl. The second half is on CD. I’ve not spun anything on CD in a long time. What if the players don’t have pitch control? What if they’re too squirelly and I end up threading together train wreck after train wreck? What if the roof collapses?
When it’s finally time for me to go on, my hand shakes a little as I set the needle on the record. But then the smooth tones of Blue Six pour like honey out of the speakers and within moments I’m settled in.
The set is flawless. Too bad you weren’t there…
July 19, 2006 – 12:09 am ·
When it comes time for a break, most of my coworkers at Amoeba step outside and have a smoke. I don’t. In the interest of balance, when I take a break I do cancer research.
.
.
.
Sorry it’s been quiet around here. But between the jobs and the writing I’ve had very little time in the past few days to come up with something funny to say. Actually, the truth is I’ve had plenty of funny things to say. Just no time to pass them along. So just imagine something really funny. And then imagine that you read it here during the past week. That’ll help out a lot.
Also, I’m spinning tomorrow night at Amoeba. That’s right, it’s Mandala time again. I’ve been staying up very, very late trying to come up with a playlist that works.
Come by between 7:00 and 8:30 to say hello. I’ll be the one on stage, sweating bullets.
July 14, 2006 – 12:58 am ·
I’m at home. It’s past midnight. I’ve had a few glasses of Dry Creek Zin. It’s been a long day. Today, I work on Blood & Mist, I nap, I stop by the store for some fresh tomatoes, some basil and some garlic, I work on a client’s website, I walk around Hollywood with my neighbor and chat about new beginnings and bad boyfriends (hers, not mine,) I dig deep into my mp3 collection for some tracks to play on an upcoming DJ set, I rip audio samples from the Wargames DVD (“Would you like to play a game?”) and finally I’ve settled onto the couch to incorporate some edits into the draft of the last script.
I’m working from a dog-eared hardcopy of the script that I’ve marked up in red ink. On nights that I hadn’t crawled into bed with a volume of Scott Westefeld’s trilogy, I’d sprawled out with this thing and scribbled suggestions in the margin. Now, as sleep tugs at my eyelids, I’m on autopilot.
In the script, Berea has just asked one of the residents of the nursing home where she works the thousand dollar question, which is, “Where are you gonna go when you die?” The resident in question, one EDNA GOODMAN, replies, “Heaven. Of course. To be with my husband and son.”
There’s something scrawled in the margin. And I’m just gonna have to trust that I was in a better state of mind when I scrawled it. So into the computer, I add, a line to Edna’s dialogue.
“Where you gonna go when you die?”
“Heaven. Of course. To be with my husband and son. To sit with them on a bench with white paint.”
.
.
.
Let the Academy be the judge.
July 12, 2006 – 12:17 am ·
What was he thinking? What did Materazzi say to Zidane that was so nasty that could provoke a normally collected ball-player into turning and delivering a nasty head-butt? What could he have said that might elicit the attack? Well, The Independent provides a clue here, and states that Zidane will tell us all later this week. But for now, all we can do is speculate. It was still a great set of games, and now that the Italians have done their thing and rained all those kisses on the big, brassy trophy my DVR can finally take a much-needed rest.
I’m tempted to cancel Comcast right now (having really only gotten it for the competition in the first place) but that means surrendering all those games I’ve got recorded. And I’m truly interested in checking out what’s on the tube these days. There are a few shows right now I’d be foolish not to spec for. I mean why not? The other day I notice that The Sci_Fi Channel is in the midst of a vampire marathon. The Forsaken, Dracula 2000, John Carpenter’s Vampires. Seen it, seen it, seen it, and I have deep scars to prove it. But then Slayer comes on, starring Casper Van Dien, which is sort of a Predator meets Dracula kind of thing. Bad dialogue. Crappy action. Inelegant plot.
Exactly the sort of thing that inspires me.
So I’ll be keeping cable. Perhaps not Comcast. Co-workers are urging me to switch to DirecTV. But I’ll try it out. But the moment I feel it’s getting in the way of life–that is, the moment I cancel on a date because Meerkat Manor is on–it’s going right out the door.
Anyway, here’s one more World Cup picture for now. I’ll post some more in four years. This is Thierry Henry after missing a shot on goal. Kinda sums up France at the moment:
July 9, 2006 – 12:13 am ·
Interesting article over at downhillbattle.org (whose t-shirt I love and wear regularly) about iTunes and the accounting behind their “artist-friendly” business model. Before I got the Amoeba job I used to use iTunes to get some of my music. I don’t think I’d go back. DRM issues aside, my main gripe is the sound quality of the downloads. There’s too much high frequency. Too little of the earth-shaking rumble. It’s a fine music library tool, simple and effective, which combine to form “elegant” in my book, but I would never be satisfied with the piping nasality of their proprietary compression nightmare.
The article is here, and it gets into the specifics of money distribution to illustrate just how little each artists get from a sale. It’s not necessarily anti-iTunes, but it does try to make the point that Apple isn’t as kind to the artist as it once claimed to be. They do make the point that Apple’s improving a little, and that quality indie distribs like CD-Baby have a foot (or two) in the iTunes doorway.
. . .
And as long as I’m poking around on the Internet and showing you shit, check out this nifty little exchange between Adam Carolla (of Love Lines and The Man Show fame) and Ann Coulter. She is very late calling his show. He is not exactly accomodating.
Later.
(is “nasality” a neologism?)
Stuntman, purveyor of stolen art and man of letters, Michael Keefe, weighs in on some excellent recent music releases. Included in this batch are reviews of new music by RHCP, The Sounds, As Fast As, Buzzcocks and Hank III (who could beat up Billy Ray Cyrus any day.)
Check em out here. Or caress the link in the sidebar to the right.
July 6, 2006 – 12:57 pm ·
This has been chasing back and forth across the Internets. Alaska senator Ted Stevens is an outspoken opponent of Net neutrality, supporting a problematic idea wherein Internet pipeline providers (such as Comcast and AT&T) can charge big internet companies who use a lot of bandwidth for that privilege, a policy which makes as much sense as plumbers who lay pipe charging homeowners for the right to use that pipe. Recently, he explains why he voted against an amendment containing provisions to protect net neutrality.
Blah, blah, blah. What’s so great about this is the way he articluates his understanding of the web, which is uninformed at best.
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.
…
They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.
It’s a series of tubes.
And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.
Now we have a separate Department of Defense internet now, did you know that?
Do you know why?
Because they have to have theirs delivered immediately. They can’t afford getting delayed by other people.
Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.
via BoingBoing
July 2, 2006 – 12:14 am ·
I know, I know, second World Cup post in a row. but how could I not write something about the extraordinary game between Brazil and France? They meet in Germany today for the first time since the controversial 1998 World Cup Final. And guess what? France put on what is easily the most beautiful display of football in the tournament so far and take Brazil 1-0.
The England-Portugal game of earlier today is like watching two bricks bang together. The France-Brazil game is like ballet. A joy to watch. And on top of everything are Zinedine Zidane and Thierry Henry.
Wow.
July 1, 2006 – 11:55 am ·
For the second time in two days, a World Cup game goes to Penalty Kicks. It’s an unfortunate way to decide a game, but man, is it a nail-biter. Thanks to an incredible performance by the Portuguese keeper England is denied their chance at the title. They’re going home. And Portugal is moving on.
If Brazil wins today, we’re gonna see an interesting and highly symbolic match-up between the Mother Country and its upstart colony.
The World Cup continues to fascinate me.
June 30, 2006 – 11:41 pm ·
I’m always going on about how glad I am that I learned English from the ground up. I can’t fathom the difficulty one must face trying to learn our sloppy, fickle, inconsistent tongue when one comes from, say, Poland or Mexico or Saturn.
To that end, I’m adding a new category to Hollywoodland. WORDZ will be the category where I dump the posts that marvel at the English language, that point out oddities of usage and that make fun of the malapropisms that riddle everyday usage. In short, it’s a place for me to flex my word snobbery.
I apologize in advance.
But here’s an example, taken from something I read in Gourmet Magazine last week.
Bob claimed that he was cleaning his gun when it accidentally went off. But his story didn’t jive with the autopsy report, which stated the victim’s body was riddled with forty-two bullet holes.
Jibe. The word is JIBE. I can’t tell you how often I see people use the word JIVE when they mean JIBE. I know it sounds weird, and I can understand why people go the jive-way, but look it up.
It’s also a sailing term, but it means something different. In sailing, to jibe is to shift the direction of the sailboat such that the boom swings from one side to the next, usually coldcocking someone and sending him into the drink, whereupon he is eaten by sharks.
June 29, 2006 – 8:59 am ·
As long as I’m posting movie art, check this one out. I’ve been getting substantial traffic to the site from people looking for info on this movie. Diane Lane looks pretty great.
June 27, 2006 – 1:35 pm ·
The Descent is on its way to American theaters at last. And the ad campaign is taking a bold Philippe Halsman approach. Check out the one-sheet:
A coworker tells me about this poster yesterday, describing it as a weird, interpretive dance image. Real artsy. One look, of course, and I realize there’s no interpretive dancing going on here. The art department is channelling this earlier Halsman photo:
Very cool, and to its credit, gives away nothing of the film’s plot. And this isn’t the first time the image has been used in film art. Remember this image?
More subtle.
The Descent comes out on August 4th. Go see it. Or find a place to buy the import DVD.
