голова болит секс голова болит секс

Here’s an audio/video mixtape from some of the best MJ mixes I’ve heard recently. How many times can we say “RIP Michael?!”

SIDE A : The MJ Warm Up

Track 1. Come On Come On Come On/Lemme Show You What It’s All About: Love the five-part Minding Michael podcast series from Qool DJ Marv Aural Memoirs & da Buttamilk Archives. Featuring the MJ hits I had forgotten along with those beloved pop standards, this podcast is not to be missed. My favorites are Part One, “A Good Time,” for its melancholy, and Part Three, “Grab Your Belt Buckle/Music’s Taking Over” for the disco hits that make you move even when you’re sitting down. “Roughly 75 percent of these songs, I’ve never played in public,” Qool DJ Marv wrote about Minding Michael. “This is my translation of Michael as a fan and DJ, as a boy who grew up with stronger together black family vibes and Black is Beautiful all up in my head, and as a man who still embraces that exuberant idealism by perpetuating it and sustaining it through the magic of the music in the mix.” (Ranging from 47 mins. to over an hour long)

Track 2. Shake It, Shake It, Baby: Eclectic Method’s The Michael Jackson Video: Don’t be deterred by the Peter Jennings intro to this MJ memory lane video mix. For my money, the highlight comes midway through the video when London-based Eclectic Method mashes up “Blame It On the Boogie” with “Black or White,” and then moves seamlessly into “Rock With You” on top of “The Way You Make Me Feel.” Favorite parts of this video show not one, but TWO Michael Jackson videos that stream simultaneously. Shows just what a versatile dancer and performer Michael really was! (4:51 mins)

Track 3. You Can’t Run Away From/This Love I Got: Can’t even remember hearing Jackson Five do “Ready or Not Here I Come,” but you can groove to it here on Norwegian DJ and Producer Teddy Touch’s Memories MJ Tribute mix. Love mixing freestyling and beats with MJ’s classics. (40:04 mins)

SIDE B (The Flip Side)

Track 4. And Don’t Go Around Breaking Young Girls’ Hearts: If you like it when Michael Jackson goes all electronic on you, check out this Billie Jean remix from Philadelphia’s DJ Apt One. Guaranteed to make you move! (6:06 mins)

Track 5. Let Us Realize that a Change Can Only Come/When We Stand Together As One: Believe it or not, there are a handful of viral music videos out there that feature performances by inmates from the Cebu Provincial Detention and Rehabilitation Center, a maximum security prison in the central Philippines. (The prison management has inmates do choreographed dances there for exercise.) The CPDRC did a Thriller video remake in July of 2007, and a “We Are The World” Michael Jackson Tribute just days after Michael passed away. Neither performance needs any introduction. (4:26 and 3:39 mins)

Track 6. Never Can Say Goodbye: DJ Ayres did this Michael Jackson Mix for The Rub, a party that creates long lines around the block of Brooklyn’s Southpaw the first Saturday of every month. The mix is a great chronological history of Michael’s music from “Maybe Tomorrow” (the ’70s) to  “Butterflies” (2001). (53:47 mins) –AFS

Abbie Fentress Swanson is a freelance radio radio reporter (and music addict) based in Brooklyn, New York.

Uber-media critic Howard Kurtz has gotten it coming and going in the past month. First, CNN got lambasted for mis-covering the Iran election and protests. In an age where Twitter is fetishized, a hashtag (or searchable ID) called #CNNFail became all the rage.

This article on MediaBistro links to video of Kurtz’ own coverage of Twitter. Despite calls to mention #CNNFail in his Washington Post Column, Kurtz didn’t…so NYU professor and media critic Jay Rosen led a charge to make Kurtz accountable. As a media critic, mind you, Kurtz’ entire conceit is give-no-favor journalism.

Now Kurtz is under fire for failing to look at the dynamics of race and privilege in reporting.

In a recent column asking whether black reporters have gone soft on Michelle Obama, Kurtz said:

They [the beat reporters assigned to the First Lady] are all African American women. Perhaps this gives them a richer cultural understanding of Obama as a trailblazer. Indeed, most write with enthusiasm, in some cases even admiration, about the first lady as a long-awaited role model for black women.

I will give Kurtz credit for speaking to a variety of voices, from Harvard-based academic and producer (Eyes on the Prize) Callie Crossley to Newsweek editor John Meacham to the black women-on-Michelle Obama-beat (including Allison Samuels, who I know personally, in disclosure). But Kurtz fails in two ways. First, he says the black women covering the First Lady are both biased and ineffective: “None of the beat writers has been granted an interview since the inauguration.” Second, he throws in the words that “the White House press corps remains predominantly white,” but he does not even attempt to explain how newsrooms are engines of “social replication”–where likes promote like–and of scrutiny and tokenism inhibiting the success of non-white employees. (Check out Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s seminal work, among others.)

One of the tropes of American life is that whites seem raceless, by default; and that only non-whites have racial attributes, and thus distinctions and biases. This presumption-of-transparency when it comes to whiteness is particularly dangerous in the newsroom. At the same time, for example, that my now-cancelled show “News and Notes” was scrutinized for any bias towards then-Senator Obama, one of the people constantly reminding us not to be biased would use the phrase “my friend Karl Rove” without the slightest sense of irony.

Was the disconnected chit-chat about Rove/Obama a racial failing, a political failing, a journalistic failing, or all three? Sometimes its hard to parse the reason because all these issues fall under an “intersectionality” of interests. (Thanks to Professor Kimberle Crenshaw for her work on intersectionality.)

Among the many issues of media favoritism that stands out in my mind is one concerning former President George W. Bush. As we all know, being vetted for offenses concerning alcohol and drug use is a part of the race for the presidency. And we also know that George W. Bush had an alcohol problem in the past.

Fine, you say.

But although the outcome of the elections may have been the same, at least one reporter played a critical role in covering up Bush’s actions… thus preventing what could have and should have been a robust discussion of responsibility early in the race.

As the American Journalism Review puts it:

In July [2000], [Portland Maine] Press Herald reporter Ted Cohen, 49, discovered George W. Bush’s 1976 drunk driving arrest in Kennebunkport, Maine–a story that mysteriously eluded the national media, which claimed to have combed through every inch of Bush’s background.

But his editor, a man named Andrew Russell, told him it was not a story.

I won’t comment further, except to say that Russell later regretted his decision. So did a lot of voters who we reporters promise to inform, so they as voters can decide.

So what’s the big picture here? It’s fairness and favor. And as if the fates were making a broader point to Kurtz and all of us who care about journalism, the Washington Post is now engaged in a much broader, more troubling controversy. In essence, the Post promised lobbyists and folks with $25,000 to a quarter of a million dollars paid access to newsmakers. Now the Post is apologizing, and Kurtz noted it in today’s CNN broadcast. That story is all over the ‘net and the NYT reports here, perhaps too gleefully.

Again, big picture: I would argue that reporters of color face a constant scrutiny about our motives that actually inhibits favoritism; and that white, heterosexual reporters, especially men, see themselves and their actions as neutral even when they are not. You may find a black reporter talking about her “sista-girl” circle in an article on Michelle Obama… but I’ve never seen an example in the mainstream media of a black reporter signing off on a program that broke one of the fundamental tenets of journalism–that paid access for lobbyists and journalism don’t mix. (Some of the pay-to-play antics of traditional African-American media outlets will be another story for another day…)

Of course, Kurtz went on CNN today to criticize the Washington Post. Who isn’t chiming in? But I wish Kurtz would do a deeper investigation of the fig leaf of white neutrality; and take a harder look in the mirror as well.

=======

Farai Chideya is a broadcaster, author, novelist (Kiss the Sky) and the founder of PopandPolitics.com

Farai’s disclaimers and IDs:
I used to work for Newsweek, which is cited in Kurtz’ article on black women reporters.
I know Newsweek reporter Allison Samuels.
I used to work for CNN and sometimes still appear on their air.
I don’t think #CNNFail was smart because it could have been #MSNBCFail and #FoxFail as well.
I wrote a seminal book on race and media titled Don’t Believe the Hype: Fighting Cultural Misinformation About African-Americans.
And I am a black woman, last time I checked.

Michael Jackson seemed crushed under a weight of identity: black/man/star/brother/father/son. Add philanthropist/media-victim and -manipulator/accused pederast/primate owner/fashionista and dancer. Owner of, and now perhaps a returnee to, Neverland.

Back in 2003, I wrote a piece asking what happened to the brownskinned boy who stole my heart and those of girls my age across the world. Why did he shed his color, and the sincerity of his smile?

As people gathered today on Twitter to share stories, sift the real news from the fake, and mourn, I saw reporter Lisa Ling post, “RIP Michael Jackson, My First Boyfriend.” I felt the same way. It wasn’t just a childhood crush. Over time, I felt like I was one of millions of people who wanted Michael Jackson to succeed. MTV at first refused to play his videos because black artists, no matter how successful, didn’t fit their idea of their format. Of course Michael, with the help of Quincy Jones, went on to become the King of Pop and the king of music video.
In the intro to Thriller, Michael says “I’m not like other guys” and “I’m different”… and then proceeds to transmogrify into a werewolf.

Pop cult from “Twilight” to “Harry Potter” has taken feelings of alienation and packaged them for wide consumption. Michael was one of the first masters of our modern era to do that well.

But what he could not seem to do is seize control of his own transformation and find his own center as a man, not just a creator. After all, the trope of successful transformation is that the hero becomes something else, but can return to his or her human emotions if not human form.

John Landis, the director of “Thriller,” has called Jackson a “tragic figure.” And that brings me, personally, back to race. Race added a very specific prism to the failed transformation of Michael Jackson. His plastic surgery bordered on pathology and racial caricature. His need for the spotlight brought him, arguably, into clashes with both the law and public opinion. I am thinking specifically of the charges of his treatment of children… others’, and his own.

Would he have felt freer to pursue his own alternative identity if we had not also wanted him to be what he could not seem to be… an adult black man who provided fodder for the fantasies we cherished when he was a child?

In the prelude to the Thriller video, Michael Jackson speaks to the black, bobbysox-wearing girl who is his love interest and says, “You know I like you… And I hope you like me the way I like you.” Sigh.

We always loved you, Michael. I hope you found peace in just being you, whoever you were, and despite what we all wanted you to be.

=====

Farai Chideya’s new novel Kiss the Sky, is about a black rock star struggling with fame. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com.

This article is also cross-posted on The Grio.

Thinking,
Hoping the best for his family,
F
=======================

You were my first. Back when the other kids were swaying to nursery rhymes, I wanted to rock with you. I had everything I needed — a portable stereo and an album of you singing with the Jackson Five. According to my mother, I would drag around my little stereo, and I would put you on, and I would dance. Nothing else in the world could have made me happier.

I remember you. Your lips were full and your nose was wide and your face was brown. This only rates mentioning because it is no longer true, so untrue, in fact, that sometimes I wonder if I imagined you as you once were. I’m sure at night, as a child, I dreamed of the boy with the afro who sang and spun on his heels like a miniature James Brown.

I wish that boy had become a man. That wish seemed reasonable all the way through “Off the Wall,” when your nose grew narrower and hair more lank, but you were still visibly black. With every subsequent album your relationship to your original appearance grew fainter and fainter, until you were no longer even an echo of yourself. But the further you fled from black masculinity, the more international crowds lionized you. Today you are a grotesque.

And an alleged child molester — that too? If we can believe what we see in the camera lens — that this pale alien being (recently parodied in “Scary Movie 3″) was once cute little Michael — then we can believe anything. The danger for us is that we will judge you by your appearance. The danger for you is that you have set up a situation, with your reckless behavior around your own children and others’, that we cannot help but judge.

In his book The Hip Hop Generation,” Bakari Kitwana relentlessly outlines America’s broken promise to black males. Mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines and unbalanced enforcement of drug laws have helped make prison a waystation or home for many more black men than white. In Los Angeles and Cincinnati, frustrated youth up-end their own neighborhoods to draw attention to police brutality. The global economy undermines the fortunes of lower-skilled workers, many of them African-Americans. The military, in many cases, remains the only way out.

This social warfare has hardened many black men, aiding and abetting the culture of hypermasculinity that permeates hip hop. It’s hard to be a sister and be down with the bitch/’ho lyrics, hard to be down with men who spout rhymes full of anti-female fury. Commercial hip hop may appeal to young women who can pretend that the men are calling out someone else, but to an older head like myself it sounds as if they are speaking my name. I cannot listen to it. I cannot dance.

But I long to take the floor with the same childish glee that I did when you and I were together. I desperately want you to be there for me, to reassure me that things aren’t so bad that the primary options open to black men are hatred of black women or physical and mental disintegration. I would like to think that you, the shadow Michael who never had a chance to grow up, wouldn’t treat me the way those other men do. But I’m the furthest thing from your mind.

In your absence, the absence of a Michael I can relate to, I have only questions. Why does America destroy and pervert black men? Were you squeezed between racism and perfectionism until your very soul compressed? And what about those without your millions of dollars? What options are left for them?

I feel — and I know it cannot be true, for I still breathe — that if you cannot exist, I cannot exist. If there is no room for a loving black masculinity in the world, I fear there is little room for the black feminine as well. You, Michael Jackson, are not all black men, and for that I am grateful. But your decline says more about America than we can bear to hear.

====

Farai Chideya’s new novel Kiss the Sky, is about a black rock star struggling with fame. She is the founder of PopandPolitics.com.
This was posted on Alternet.org on November 26, 2003.

For the extremists who believe my father is a hero, it is imperative you understand what he did was an act of cowardice. To physically force your beliefs onto others with violence is not brave, but bullying. Doing so only serves to prove how weak those beliefs are. It is simply desperation, reminiscent of a temper tantrum when a child cannot get his way.

More controversially, Erik von Brunn also said:

I cannot express enough how deeply sorry I am it was Mr. Johns [the slain museum security guard], and not my father who lost their life.

It may well be that nothing could have stopped James von Brunn, and that no one–friends or family–could have reached him. But there are some people in hate movements or who are extremists/supremacists who can be reached… I offer my experience below.

It’s normal to want to close ranks when we see extremism turn deadly. Here in the U.S. we have had, back to back, the murder of Dr. George Tiller, who performed late-term abortions, and a guard at the U.S. Holocaust Museum, both by dangerous, alienated men who made no secret of their (multiple) hatreds. If you want to raise your fear factor even higher, you can turn on the television and see coverage of the slaying of an anti-Taliban cleric in Pakistan…. or remember that the President-select of Iran is also a Holocaust denier.

But some of the most enlightening moments in my life have come from talking to men and women from hate movements, and I’ll tell you why.

Let me start with a story. One winter many years ago, after a blizzard that closed workplaces and schools, I drove from Washington, DC, to a park-n-ride lot in Frederick, Maryland. In that lot were piles of fresh, white snow and exactly one other car. I walked to the car and met the Roger Kelly, the Grand Dragon of a local klaveren of Ku Klux Klansmen. Make that Klansmen and -women. I specifically connected with him in order to speak to one of his followers about her role as a woman in the hate movement.

She was not the first Klanswoman I’d spoken to, but the first I’d met face to face. And so we, two women, one black and one white, stood eye to eye in the cold and I got as much information as I could about her life and beliefs.

Life had not been kind to her. She was worn out, with some missing teeth, lined skin, scraggly hair. I bet she was much younger than she looked. To her, being a part of the Klan — which of course not only rejects racial equality but espouses anti-Semitism — was part of her attempt to save America (and her family) from what she saw as the social, ethical, religious, and economic ravages of a racially mixed America.

While I certainly did not cotton to her views, I looked into her eyes and saw not just a member of the Klan, but a member of the human race. I do not say that with sentimentality. Humans are wonderful, transcendent… genocidal…loving…hateful. We are human precisely because members of our species can be all of these things. We are often fearful, which the Klanswoman was. She found solace in a place where she was validated for her fear and anger.

Yet another time I talked to a female leader of an armed, racist skinhead compound in the West… by phone… and revealed only at the end of the call that I was black. I asked what she would have done if she had known (or even asked) first. She said, “I wouldn’t have talked to you.”

That would have been a shame. I learned so much from her. She’d left her wealthy, priveleged family (whose name is in the Social Register) after feeling alienated and ignored. Judging by pictures I later saw of the skinhead leader, she was youthful and vital–the physical opposite of the Klanswoman I’d met. She’d spoken to me proudly over the phone of winning an athletic competition at an Aryan Nation gathering. In some ways, she seemed the gleaming, Amazonian superhero of hate. But inside, there was still that wounded girl who told me that she joined the hate movement because she wanted a family who loved her. She believed she had found it in white supremacy.

I feel grateful that I had the mix of reporterly curiosity and youthful bravado (or perhaps foolishness) that allowed me to do this reporting. It forever changed how I look at extremists, and how to I listen and talk to them.

I listen with an ear for degrees of hate-in-action. Sometimes I will go to white supremacist sites and blogs to see what’s being discussed. (You better believe they are reading broadly as well.) I read up via organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center on incidents and demographics of extremist groups. But I also, in some circumstances, will talk to hate-mongers themselves. I listen for subtext. The narrative of supremacy is domination. But the meta-narrative of the lives of many supremacists and extremists is a longing for belonging.

So, when we as a society begin to tune out or shy away from people who already have borderline extreme views, these people often turn deeper into their fears. At a time of social and economic upheaval like ours, there will be many people whose genuine need for security and community will go badly awry. Social isolation helps fuel paranoia. Paranoia is the best recruiting tool that supremacist groups have.

IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER:
I am not asking people to “hug a Klansman.” That may get you a beating, or worse. Some of the Klan groups in Maryland had murdered black people… and white rivals. I became convinced I could talk to these particular racists in Frederick face to face after interviewing musician Daryl Davis, author of Klan-Destine Relationships: A Black Man’s Odyssey in the Ku Klux Klan

. He played rock, country, and blues in local bars, and found out that his fans included white supremacists. One of those supremacist-fans was Roger Kelly, who Davis first observed and later, of all things, befriended. I met Kelly in the snowy parking lot years after he’d met Davis. And then years after Kelly and I spoke…he renounced his membership in the Klan. (I guess having a black friend and being in the Klan was just too much cognitive dissonance.)

If this were a movie (and someone should make a movie about Davis and Kelly), you would cue music and do a little fist bump of joy. While I believe listening to the nuances of extremist dialogue can prevent some deadly incidents, it will not prevent them all. We cannot listen to extremists with the expectation that they will change. We can listen with the expectation that we will change. Perhaps if we become less fearful, we will remain in dialogue with people who are on the margins… but not yet at the barracades of hate. 305 online download

I tweeted a garbled version of the breaking news, and then many voices chimed in online, most voicing outrage and some demanding military action.

Outrage is more than justified.

But the calls for military action seemed to come out of a void… a void where the only response to provocation and injustice is to start what we have no clear vision of finishing: that is, another war, on another front. Twenty years ago Afghanistan handed the Soviet forces their rear ends on a platter, in a conflict that is often equated to Vietnam. If a nation is willing to expend countless people to win a war; willing to accept mass casualties; then it is almost impossible to crush that nation militarily. North Korea is a very different military and government model than Afghanistan, but it too has already shown a willingness to let families die of famine (well over a million in recent years) rather than play ball with other nations.

The New York Times points out that both the US and the UN are considering sanctions against North Korea for its recent nuclear tests. But it also runs this telling quote:

“Our response would be to consider sanctions against us as a declaration of war and answer it with extreme hard-line measures,” the North Korea’s state-run newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, said in a commentary.

In other words, North Korea is spoiling for a fight. The sentencing of Lee and Ling may not be an attempt to guard against conflict, but rather to provoke it. (Note that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton , in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, already tried to apologize and broker a release… before the sentence came down.)

Why look for battle? To be seen as a “big man” in international affairs is no small thing. Many have defied the U.S. with fewer means to more than scattered applause from some quarters. Yes, some people were rooting for the Somali pirates who captured the U.S. vessel.

So: a nuclear equipped nation is spoiling for a fight with the world’s only superpower, a superpower which finds itself overextended militarily in Iraq and Afghanistan. Two journalists are held in breach. Two young women are away from their families and lives, potentially for years, for doing their jobs.

It’s rare that Americans are put in this position, directly in the line of fire. Journalist Chauncey Bailey was killed in Oakland, California, in 2007 while investigating a possible murder cover up. Some American reporters have been wounded and died in Iraq. (I think of the moving writing of Michael Weisskopf of Time magazine, who tossed a grenade thrown into the vehicle he was riding in in Iraq out… saving his life and others’ but losing his arm.) But the people imprisoned or killed for “committing” journalism are usually not American or even Western. Countless Iraqui translators and reporters have been killed, often working as stringers for Western media. Latin America has seen journalists killed covering narcotrafficking, government corruption, and crime.

Groups like the Committee to Protect Journalists work on these issues every day. (Their website, linked above, runs the headlines “Tiananmen anniversary, obscured” and “Fifth Somali Journalist Killed this Year.”) Few people outside of the media industry even know that groups like the CPJ exist.

Of all the questions that come to mind when looking at the case of Lee, Ling, and North Korea, the one troubling most people I know (personally or in the Twitter-verse) is: What do I do? What do we

do? What can we do?

The first thing we can do is to inform ourselves, to get to know more about North Korea than its name. We need to learn more about the possible regime change in North Korea and how it could hinder diplomacy; what recent and past North Korean actions (from the nuclear tests to famines

download live free or die movie

to the 1953 armistice with South Korea, which the North says it now will not honor) say about this government and its desires; who is negotiating on behalf of the U.S.; and how movements like the call for action in Darfur have or have not worked in addressing human rights issues.

On that last score, two more phrases come to mind: celebrity and social networking. Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), perhaps the most followed person in the Twitter-verse, chimed in to say, among several things, that he was exploring ways to network a coalition of supporters. I do believe it matters than Laura comes from an already well-network family. (Her sister Lisa Ling does or has worked for outlets including Oprah and ABC; Lisa and I briefly overlapped at ABC). I do believe it is critical for celebrities and other people who connect the media to the masses (i.e., most of us) get their talking points ready. And those talking points must include an actual depth of knowledge about the situation.

So: what do we do? We listen, we learn. Let me repeat that: we learn. We learn about the situation; the diplomatic interventions; and who can help. Whether we are journalists, celebrities, news consumers, even diplomats, we can constantly refresh our knowledge of the situation and strive to help from a position of educated power and compassion.

To the speedy freedom of these two journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee; to a renewal of our interest in and championing of brave journalism as well as brave journalists.

If you are still following me, or if you are not, I am talking about guilt.

This scenario–interviewing the mother of a murdered child–happened when I was a cub reporter twenty years ago. I made note of the room, the way we were seated (bereaved to the left; police information officer to the right). I noticed, and will never forget, that the mother of the murdered woman kept picking at her fingernail beds and that they were raw to the point of bleeding.

I teared up but did not cry as she described how her daughter dated this controlling man; how she ended their relationship and then started a healthy one; and then how, one day, the man who was her ex walked up to the home she shared with her fiancee and shot the couple dead.

So: I showed feelings during my interview. Was that bad? I don’t think so. Sympathy. But on the knife’s edge. Control is important too.

The movie “Broadcast News” uses actor William Hurt as a perfect example of journalism gone bad. (SPOILER ALERT). During a one-camera shoot, after his main interview, he asks the cameraman to turn the camera on him and he effortlessly produces tears. They cut that into the “reaction shot” of what looks like a two-camera shoot.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “one camera shoot” versus two, just think of it literally. We are now much more advanced (and film and cameras are cheaper) than the ’80s, ENG-cam broadcast news heyday. But imagine a one-camera shoot. You have one man behind the camera. (S)he can either shoot the subject; the interviewer; or the scene (commonly known as “B-roll”). If the interviewer and subject are seated next to each other, (s)he can shoot both talkers at the same time.

What you cannot do, and what “Broadcast News” explored and exposed, is have a tight shot of the face of the person being interviewed and get the simultaneous reaction of the reporter.

A facial tight shot is money. We react to the mirroring effect of seeing someone else up close. Thus, once we figured out the economics of shooting television, we moved towards two-camera shoots, where you can alternate close-ups of different people; or multi-camera shoots, where you can freely intercut different perspectives on the same narrative.

I bring this up only because–and I wish I remember who said this–the ultimate discretion of the journalist is what to leave out. What we often leave out is any trace that a journalist has feelings.

Too much evidence that the reporter is reacting to the subject/narrative is “soft” and sentimental. No evidence at all and the reporter might as well be… well, a camera. Or a microphone.

So where do those of us who practice journalism find the space between feeling and telling?

Think and hold that… more soon.

bedtime stories online download

Despite Taken’s (2009) action-packed, hyped-up trailer featuring an angry, vengeful father who is on a fast-moving, butt-kicking warpath to find his daughter who is taken, this action flick actually begins at an agonizing snail’s pace. Not surprisingly, the most exciting moment of the film was actually experienced in the beginning of the flick—making viewers wait impatiently for the action to commence.

For an action flick, Taken begins slowly by showing father and ex-CIA operative, Bryan Mills, (Liam Neeson) reminiscing about his daughter’s childhood. The audience is led through a series of uneventful scenes that depict a somewhat pathetic Mills trying to make-up for lost times and rebuild his relationship with his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace). He has even given up his career, which kept him away from his family, and moved to be closer to his precious Kimmie. Although it appears as though no love is lost between Mills and his daughter due to his absent years, he struggles with playing second fiddle to his ex-wife’s new husband and new money.

And just as the movie starts more closely resembling a drama, the foreshadowing begins as Mills is characterized as an overprotective and paranoid father who is extremely concerned about his 17-year-old daughter traveling abroad without parental supervision. Kimmie tells her father, “Mom said your job made you paranoid.” To which Mills blandly responds, “I was a “preventer” of bad things from happening.”

The pace (finally) begins to quicken as the viewer waits wearily for the daughter to be “taken.” Although the kidnapping was not a surprise, Mills’ timing and sideline involvement added an interesting flip on the standard abduction scene. It is only after poor Kimmie is captured that the viewer gets what they’ve been waiting for–the angry, taking-no-prisoners Mills who not only vows to get his daughter back but threatens her kidnappers. In the most memorable line of the movie, Mills says, “I don’t know who you are but if you don’t let my daughter go, I will find you and I will kill you.”

The rest of the movie unfolds at a slightly faster pace as Mills begins his strategic rampage to get his daughter back within a key 96-hour timeframe. In true ex-government operative style, Mills swiftly unravels several clues from the beginning of the kidnapping. He cleverly re-traces steps, obtains CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) level evidence and produces the best translation ever of barely audible words recorded digitally.

And although a bit unbelievable, Mills enlists minimal help to track down his daughter’s kidnappers. He calls a friend or two from his ex-CIA days to provide background information on the country of the abductors, which end up providing more harm than good.

Liam Neeson is at his most believable as an adoring father. In several action scenes, he single-handedly takes out seven and eight men by himself, which seems a bit unlikely for a 50 to 60 year old man, even one who is an ex-CIA agent. It’s like casting Jason Bourne of The Bourne Identity with a graying, middle-aged Matt Damon. It just doesn’t work.

Taken does provide some small plot twists and turns, but not enough for the viewer to forget what the next step in the story was going to be. The movie is predictable, but thankfully not embarrassingly so.

And Taken, like all good action and adventure flicks, has the foreseeable, fairy-tale ending in which the girl is rescued and brought to safety before any real harm is done. And any retribution or repayment of the harm and violence caused in the process is all but forgotten. Despite killing over 20 people, torturing others, stealing cars, destroying several homes and buildings, Mills manages to keep the audience rooting for him – after all he is the good guy.

In one of the major fight scenes between Mills and a leader of the kidnapping ring, the point of the movie is given. While pleading for his life, the bad guy says, “Please understand, it was all business. It wasn’t personal.”

Mills says blankly: “Well, it was all personal for me,” and then shoots and kills the guy.

Before his daughter’s abduction, killing and fighting bad guys was just his job. However, the kidnapping of his pride and joy made Mills life worth living as he risks it to save his daughter—because well after all, it is personal.

"We Gotta Go Back, Kate!"

The time has come. January 2009 has loomed large for months; people all across the land have been looking forward to this moment with anticipation and hope for a new direction. Americans of varied races, creeds, ages, and beliefs are glued to their TV sets, rushing to Twitter, Tumblr and blog sites to spew their speculations, questions, and reactions.

Yes, my friends, the time has come: Lost is back.

Probably more than any other television show, Lost attracts a uniquely curious, insatiably voracious, unwaveringly devoted, and most of all, spoiler-wary viewer. (To wit, even Pop + Politics’ Managing editor, Tricia Romano, an avowed Lost devotee herself, wouldn’t allow me to send her this text till the very last minute.)

With that in mind, here’s a no-spoiler alert: you may safely read on. We’re merely here to apprise you of information that’s already out there — plus a little tease of what’s to come — without ruining all the fun.

As with all Lost content, many video clips have already gone viral: there are the two Season Five ”sneak peeks” as well as the trailer with the now-ubiquitous song by The Fray. And, there’s also something to be learned from the text at the Lost page at ABC.com.  So. Here’s what we (and by “we” I mean anyone with internet access) know:

• “They” are onto Kate and Aaron’s mother-son ruse. Some shadowy lawyers showed up at Kate’s door, demanding a blood test. She refused and abruptly took Aaron “on vacation.”
• The unlikely pairing of Jack Shephard and Benjamin Linus are desperate to recruit members of “the Oceanic 6″ to head back to “the island” with them.
• The “remaining survivors” are feeling the effects of the island’s space-time-continuum upheaval.

Without revealing too much more, I can confirm that the following elements are all present in the premiere:

• Plenty of bare-chested Sawyer sequences.
• Calm-voiced reasoning from Juliet.
  
• Numbers and figures that will have you rewinding your DVRs repeatedly.
• Flash-forwards.
• Flashbacks.
• Answered questions.
• Unanswered questions.
• A few new nicknames from Sawyer.
• At least one holy-sh**-no-way-that-can’t-be-possible revelation.
• Science-wonky explication that inspires much head-scratching.

As for whether Kate will respond to Jack’s now-famous plea: “We have to go back, Kate! We have to go back!” Well, that’s for me to know, and for you to find out.  Feel free to speculate in the comments section below. See you again the morning after the premiere.

This Inauguration will remind a lot of people of a lot of things, but to me it calls up Burning Man, the big annual freakfest/science experiment/music fair in the desert. I love it.

One of the reasons being a Burner has been so important to me, and so mystifying to some people who know me as a serious journalist, is that it’s one of the few places or things that I don’t try to over-intellectualize. It is the smell of sulphur and and the sensation of sunblock applied during a morning that is already blisteringly hot. I take it for what it is, and I look around and see a group of people become an entity in and of itself. I would say a “crowd” but that makes it sound too stupid; and “smart mob” makes it sound too smart. But there’s a moment when people become something bigger than themselves…. a quickening.

That’s happening right now in Washington, DC. There’s the woman—a woman, not a girl—dancing to Britney Spears inside the Elephant and Castle restaurant at 12th and Pennsylvania. She doesn’t seem drunk… maybe she’s good at faking it, but I think it’s the irrational exuberance of the crowd taking over. The streets are shutting down and the parade bleachers are going up. There is a hush on the blocked streets that is urban magic.

Meanwhile—and I will expand on this—I am feeling a bit left out. One of the things being a reporter, and a political reporter at that, has done to me is to take the shine off of hero worship. So while I feel the quickening and the pulse, I am not quite dancing to the same beat as the millions of people who are in ecstasies over the mere possibility of a black President, let alone the fact that he will be in office in about half a day.

Am I distant from the moment because it’s my job to be, and is that a good or a bad thing? I’m still trying to puzzle it out.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, today is Hill’s big day on the hill. The proceedings are being streamed live. The Huff Post has continuous updates. The NYTimes is liveblogging the whole affair.

The L.A. Weekly Trashes Years of Its Hard Copy Archives

Warning: If you are not a Los Angeles or Southern California resident or unless you have some perverse interest in the sausage-making that goes into local alternative newspaper production, you should probably skip this post. But as a new year dawns and I arouse from Xmas vacation and semi-hibernation, I have taken a vow lifted from Michael Corleone — today is the day I take care of all lingering family business.

When the L.A. Weekly and I parted ways two month ago, I promised a more detailed report. Here it is. It’s more like an autopsy on a paper that once was.

I thought many times about spending the time to write this over the past few weeks. In the end, I wondered, who cares? And worse, this can come off as sour grapes.

I can’t really answer the first doubt. As to the second question, let me be very clear. I lost most interest in the Weekly a couple of years ago when it was taken over by the New Times chain and I made it a very small part of my professional and personal life. I wrote the income from it out of my personal budget and diverted all Weekly checks into a retirement fund.

Indeed, I was so turned off by what I saw happening that I visited my Weekly office exactly three times in the last two years, mostly to pick up accumulated checks in my mailbox. During election week in November, I was given a layoff notice with a generous settlement.

They had lost interest in me and I was too expensive. With very few exceptions, I had long lost interest in them, too. It was a miracle, in fact, that I had lasted the two years since New Times took over the Weekly. Fair enough.

Attached to my initial severance package was a gag-order non-disclosure agreement. It was a rather awkwardly and amateurishly written passage, penned most likely by an HR hack rather than a competent lawyer. I told management at the time I would sign it if they insisted, but that I intended to immediately violate it and call their bluff in public.

They knew I meant it and were wise enough to rescind it. Most everyone else who has been cut from the Weekly in the past months has, unfortunately, been silenced by the NDA’s and that’s one more reason that edged me toward typing out this essay.

And yet, I still hesitated to write my version of what’s gone wrong at Weekly. That is, until I was provoked into doing it by a Facebook request two weeks ago from Weekly Publisher Beth Sestanovich to join her in a FB cause titled Don’t Let Newspapers Die. I thought this a bit too much. This was like getting an invitation from Carmela Soprano asking you to join the Don’t Marry Gangsters cause. I had joined the Facebook save-the-newspapers group in any case long before Sestanovich’s invite. I had joined it precisely to help save papers from the likes of publishers like her!

Now, I like Sestanovich as a person. She’s an affable, warm manager. But she had no background in newspapers and was no match for the destructive forces she would eventually face when she was brought in some years ago to preside over L.A. Weekly. If I remember correctly, she had come fresh from managing an automobile purchasing web site – hardly the sort of background that properly prepares one to face the rough and tumble of the current media environment.

Under Sestanovich’s tenure, dozens of Weekly staffers — from managers to editors to writers to production people– have been slashed from the payroll. And one important clarification: Sestanovich is not the villain here. She’s merely the tool – and a reluctant one at that — for her own bosses, the New Times group (now known as Village Voice Media) which is the corporate force that has corroded the Weekly. Sestanovich pre-dates the Weekly’s takeover by New Times and she has been kept on precisely because she has been an efficient transmission belt of corporate policy: downsize and demolish.

The paper has fired, pushed out or let go its top deputy editor who managed most of its cover stories over the last five years. It fired its managing editor — and with no intention to replace her ( this is a first in newspaper history I think). It fired its dazzling News Editor — and my friend Alan Mittelstaedt– and has shrunk and twisted its news gathering operation which took more than a decade to build into a competitive and credible local watchdog. The paper’s two prize-winning investigative reporters quickly bailed to other papers. Other long-time staff writers have been fired. Others have chosen exile. The Weekly’s fact-checking department has been abolished. Its copy editing department has been decapitated. It design staff decimated. Its free-lance rates — once competitive with any other publication in town — have been chopped and the overall free-lance budget has been almost obliterated. Writers’ rates that once topped a dollar a word have been cut by half or more (for the few writers who can still squeeze out an assignment).

More to the point, the 30-year-old Weekly’s heart and soul has been scooped out by a corporate management that seems hell-bent on a suicidal tack. The Weekly once distinguished itself by being, alone with the Village Voice, the only major metro weekly in America willing to focus on national and international coverage beyond the local boho bar scene. It had a real and substantial editorial budget. The Weekly was read avidly for 30 years by an audience that relished not only its excellent cultural, film and music coverage, but primarily its bold and prominent political writing– including a rich menu of commentary and opinion. Its reporters were, not infrequently, sent across the country and sometimes around the world to write 10,000-word cover stories that could be found nowhere else. It now boggles the imagination when I remember –in a different era—reporting from South Africa, El Salvador, Cuba and from within various national presidential campaigns—for the L.A. Weekly. And these were not just second-rate self-absorbed wannabe writers who were on the road. I’m in great company when I note that those of us who wrote those stories also worked for The New Yorker, Harper’s, Vogue, and the Sunday magazines of the Los Angeles and New York Times. We wrote for the Weekly because we chose to write for the Weekly – certainly not because we had to.

That’s all stale history. All that has now been banned by New Times management. The Weekly must now conform to the same cookie-cutter format that limits its other 16 or 17 papers across the country to sticking to local, mostly sensationalist, often quick-and-dirty hit pieces. No one, we’ve been told, wants to hear the opinionating and bloviating anymore of political pundits writing about national (and god forbid) international issues that supposedly mean nothing to L.A. residents (Unless, of course, the piece is something like this turgid, under-reported and tendentious piece placed in the paper by none other than the guy who now effectively owns it!). Nor, we’re told, did the readers really want the Weekly’s ballot and candidate endorsements even if they became a cherished voting guide for tens of thousands over several decades.

Weekly readers were informed, quite simply by its out-of-town owners, that they have been wrong, wrong, wrong for the last 30 years. They might think they like opinion and commentary and national news and sober and thorough investigative reporting, and all with a progressive tinge. But they’ve been wrong. Dead wrong. Instead, they want a smart-alecky, sophomoric, barely edited, thinned out, often reactionary sensationalist stew that displays little or no editorial rhyme nor reason. Yeah! That’s the formula. (Just as an ironic side note: the week I was cut from the Weekly, three of my pieces were listed on the paper’s web site as among the top five most-viewed. One was a straight out editorial — a letter to my daughter about Sarah Palin. The other was an overall analysis of the Obama election. And the third was my list of personal ballot endorsements. Exactly the sort of stories the Weekly decreed no one wants to read).

Perhaps the most iconic moment in the Weekly’s descent was the forced move last year from its birthplace town of Hollywood to a sterile warehouse-like building next to a 405 off-ramp in Culver City. This would be tantamount to moving the New York Times across the river to Hoboken. I’m no softie on the counter-culture, but the uprooting of the paper from its nest on Sunset Boulevard was a clear sign from management that it had absolutely no interest in the ethos, tradition or soul of the paper. It had become nothing more than a widget.

The results of all this? Fairly catastrophic, I would say. And that’s with the full-on debacle yet to come. The L.A. Weekly press run is currently down about 30% or more from its peak of 210,000. That means they can’t even give away as many copies as in the past. The weekly number of printed pages has fallen to just above 100 when in the past it hovered at and beyond 200 (once even touching 352 pages). Even special editions, ones that carry years of tradition and loyalty, like the recent restaurant edition, are but shadows of the past. One of the most savvy of long-time New Times watchers once told me — years ago– “the guys who run these newspapers run them like they already know the shut-down date.” It seems they now might finally get their wish.

This prescient statement was offered to me years before the current newspaper collapse. And even more to the point, the slashing and trashing of L.A. Weekly — now coinciding with that more general collapse– was initiated before the current crisis. Talk about prescient! The Weekly owners began the crisis before it really began. And like most other newspaper suits, they have responded precisely the wrong way; by cutting the real value-added, the core, muscle and bone and not the fat. The rumor is that Weekly management might be on a glide path to moving the entire series of papers onto the Web. That might be a defensible position, if their Web site was something other than this current mish-mosh.

How’d We Get Here?

I write only from my impressions and some might be off a degree or two from the reality of others, but let me give you at least a thumbnail sketch of my version of how things got to this point.

The original incarnation of the L.A. Weekly — in 1979– was a sort of hippy-dippy, shoe-string, pie-in-the-sky operation born from Jay Levin. Jay was an erratic, if visionary, editor who went out of his way to break a lot of rules. From the beginning, Jay wanted the Weekly to be more than an ad venue for colonic cleansing and futons. He spent money he didn’t have to cover the big political issues of our time while simultaneously growing a stable of world-class cultural critics. And it paid off. Within five years, Levin turned the Weekly into a major force in local publishing. It became both an incubator for new, untested writers and a showcase for some of the best writing in the country. I worked as news editor and a staff writer from 1982-1984 and continued freelancing and writing a media column for the rest of the decade. During Levin’s era, the Weekly established itself as the place to turn to for local cultural criticism and breaking major investigative stories on everything from smog to Salvador.

Around the time of the Weekly’s tenth anniversary, Levin stepped back from the role of editor and handed editorial leadership over to former Village Voice staffer Kit Rachlis (now the editor of Los Angeles magazine). Rachlis maintained and grew many of the same traditions that Levin had nurtured. And he added his own particular twist to the Weekly. As the paper continued to grow in size and scope, Rachlis made what might be called a “writerly” turn. With somewhat high-flown pretensions –in my judgment– he filed off both the lows and highs of the previous iteration of the Weekly. The product was more slick, professional, better-edited but flatter, less willing to gamble and risk. But it still made solid and important reading.

Toward the end of Rachlis’ tenure, some new players arrived big time on the alt-weekly scene. Mike Lacey and Jim Larkin, the founders of The New Times, had transformed their Phoenix-based weekly –forged in the heat of the anti-Vietnam war movement– into a growing national chain of metro weeklies. And in 1996 they moved into L.A. to directly confront the L.A. Weekly – more or less the way Michael Corleone moved in on Moe Green’s Las Vegas. Lacey and Larkin bought out and closed two smaller local weeklies and went out of their way to insult the laid-off staff in the process. There are numerous witnesses with harrowing stories of the day Lacey came in and berated (and fired) the staff of The Reader which he had just bought. On the ashes of these publications, they erected the New Times Los Angeles — for which I briefly worked. Lacey and I coincided in our judgment that the Weekly had become too soft. The fledgling New Times Los Angeles was much smaller than the Weekly, but directly attacked the soft under-belly of the Weekly of editor Kit Rachlis. It was meaner, tougher, punchier and less liberal than what had become Rachlis’ more self-obsessed Weekly.

Within months, it was clear that Lacey and Larkin were banking on the perceived talents of their lead columnist Jill Stewart. Once a respected L.A. Times metro writer, Stewart had become a snarling bulldog infected with a rather strange world-view which came to dominate The New Times Los Angeles. Ostensibly some sort of a suburban Democrat, she became an acolyte of The Powerful — swooning successively over Dick Riordan, Bernie Parks and Arnold Schwarzenegger, among others. While the official policy of the New Times Los Angeles was that columnists were to stick to facts and steer clear of opinionating, Stewart used her platform to smear one Latino city councilman as Senor Snort (for alleged coke use) and as she fulminated against public schools and bilingual education and offered up sugary praise for the corrupt leadership of the LAPD, she evoked a vision of a muddle-headed dyspeptic city run by an evil coalition of socialist multi-culturalists who were headquartered, of all places, inside the L.A. Times. One infamous column she wrote mocked those who showed sympathy for Spanish-speaking kindergartners who broke into tears when they were put in monolingual classes. She saw her job as spanking lefty L.A. back to reason.

As bizarre a notion as all this might be, it was really nothing new. Having spent many years living in the Valley, I recognized Stewart’s view as one that permeated suburban homeowner clubs (Indeed, Stewart and I both live in Woodland Hills). For me, this became untenable when she used the power of her column to first more or less plagiarize (from an accommodating ally) and then expand a vicious and unfounded attack written on lefty academic Mike Davis — a smear that cost him an appointment at USC. It was a blatantly political and opportunistic foray lightly and poorly disguised as an “investigation.” I had just won a national award for writing a profile on a local corrupt African-American political leader and was in the midst of another serious investigation when I told my editors I could not operate in an environment as ethically clouded as The New Times. In 1998 I said cee ya.

This sort of unfounded snarling and sniping from the local New Times Los Angeles, as embodied in Stewart’s writing, built no significant audience, never really bit into the Weekly’s readership or advertising revenue and eventually led to the slow, long decline and uneventful quiet folding of the local New Times paper in 2002. Defeated and ignored, it vanished without as much as a whimper. Lacey and Larkin had struck out in Los Angeles.

By this time, the Weekly moved on to a new editor and new ownership. Sue Horton, now op-ed editor of the L.A. Times (and someone I consider a friend), became editor and made her own set of editorial adjustments. She excised the more narcissistic elements of Rachlis’ paper and turned the Weekly into a more earnest, I argued too earnest, more markedly “progressive” paper based on local political reporting. Again, an imperfect but absolutely worthy product. Horton invested in hiring reporters, more than “writers.” And this began to germinate some sort of real newsroom.

Meanwhile, Jay Levin had sold the Weekly and it eventually wound up in the hands of a private equity group headed up by Village Voice publisher David Schneiderman. (Disclaimer: ah yes, your personal Zelig here. I worked as a staff writer at The Village Voice from 1989-1994 when Schneiderman was publisher). The acquisition of the Weekly in the mid-90’s saddled the Voice with a debt level from which it has never recovered. The Weekly was kept fat and happy, but Schneiderman butchered the Voice to feed his new baby. The venerable Voice, founded by Norman Mailer, was downsized from the newstands to a free giveaway. By the late 90’s, it size, its editorial budget, its clout was completely diluted. The paper was little more than a self-parody by the year 2000. Looking at the Voice logo on one of its weekly editions was like looking at an Alfa Romeo badge crazy-glued to the nose of a broken-down Toyota Corolla. That jalopy officially got towed to the junkyard when the Lacey-Larkin management fired the last remaining “name writer” at the Voice this last New Year’s weekend – the venerable Nat Hentoff. He was probably the one reason why half of the paper’s remaining readership even bothered to pick up the rag. But who cares? He’s only written 19 books.

That said, those of us who worked at the Weekly benefited from the bleeding of the Voice. Schneiderman, for the most part, kept his mitts off the Weekly. And when current editor Laurie Ochoa (whom I also consider a good friend) was hired on in 2001, it felt like a rebirth of the paper. She split the philosophical difference between Rachlis and Horton and tried to shape a paper that combined top notch capital-R Reporting and capital-W Writing. It was enough to draw me back on staff as a columnist, writer and editor).

Ochoa was able to beef up the staff in crucial ways and she began to take the Web seriously. News Editor Alan Mittelstaedt proceeded to build a kick-butt news organization that took no prisoners, right or left. Whether you were Chief Bratton or Tony Rap, if you were a DWP exec or a DWP union boss, you were in for equal trouble. Rob Greene, now a member of the L.A. Times editorial board, kept close tabs on the City Council. David Zahniser, now a Times metro reporter, blew the top off the story about the death of union leader Mike Contreras. Jeff Anderson, now on the East Coast, was a tenacious and dogged investigative reporter. A stable of talented professional freelancers, including Bill Kelly and Celeste Fremon, wrote up a storm of stunning news feature series. Christine Pelisek (still hanging in at the Weekly) was on the murder and crime beat. Young reporter Daniel Hernandez (now in Mexico City) left his cushy job at the L.A. Times to defect to the Weekly. After a long, uneven struggle, the L.A. Weekly finally had a completely functional news department that was often way ahead of the Times.

But it was doomed.

Lacey’s New Times group never gave up its jones for L.A. The collapse of his local New Times only redoubled his crusade to somehow triumphantly return to the Southern California market. The rivalry – and eventually the collusion– between Schneiderman’s Village Voice Media group and Lacey’s New Times group began to escalate and mature with L.A. as the epicenter. These were the two biggest alt weekly chains in America and apparently there was only room for one. In 2002, the two chains reached an agreement in which the Village Voice agreed to shut down its money-losing paper in Cleveland and the New Times would shutter its collapsed paper in Los Angeles. L.A. was a much bigger market than Cleveland so the Voice/Weekly group had to sweeten the pot with $8 million in cash – an amazingly stupid business move by Schneiderman. And when a Weekly reporter working on the story called New Times’ Mike Lacey for comment on the cheesy deal, all he got in return was a “Go fuck yourself.” Quite literally.

The DOJ didn’t like this deal very much either. It smelled of anti-trust violations and eventually the Weekly had to make reparations allowing a local throwaway paper here in L.A. enough funding to compete in the marketplace.

Those of us working at the Weekly at the time were also chilled. We sensed, correctly, as it turned out, that this Cleveland-L.A. deal was but prelude to an eventual buy-out or absorption of the Weekly by the New Times. It was something that the staff deeply feared for we knew that New Times owner Lacey had bottomless contempt for the Weekly, for its tone and approach and that — to put it bluntly– he had it out for a newspaper that he had failed to defeat in the previous decade with his own ill-starred New Times Los Angeles.

Barbarians At The Desks

In late 2005, the hammer fell. The merger of the two chains was announced. Not really much of a merger. For a reported half-million dollar bonus, Schneiderman had essentially ceded control of the whole show to Lacey of New Times. Media conglomeration, once a privilege reserved for large dailies and national networks, had trickled down to alt-weeklies (and no surprise, given that the properties in question were worth hundreds of millions of dollars).

Much has been written about New Times honcho Mike Lacey and some of his more off-color antics. I have only met him twice. Once at a group luncheon in 1994 where we shared a few beers and joked about the Weekly. And once again in 1996 when, during an alcohol-fueled one-on-one dinner, he hired me (over the heads of his own editors) as a columnist for his start up New Times Los Angeles (he also sent me a glorious floral bouquet last year when I got sick). But you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that the New Times takeover of the Weekly augured only Bad Times. Really Bad.

It took some time for the DOJ to approve the merger. And into 2006, the new merged company run by Lacey –which took the name of the vanquished Village Voice Media– found its own Vietnam in the Village Voice and was too distracted to screw around with the L.A Weekly. The Voice was bleeding cash and no one could be found to edit what had become a fish-wrapper. As of this date, the paper remains a ghost of its prior self.

The first real blow of the merger didn’t hit the L.A. Weekly until exactly two years ago in November 2006 when several layoffs coincided with the sudden termination of News Editor Alan Mittelstaedt. The O.C. Weekly, also acquired in the merger, began to be sliced and diced around the same time.

Mittelstaedt’s firing from L.A. Weekly made absolutely no sense. Indeed, of all the editors then working at the Weekly, his instincts were theoretically the closest to the new owner’s preference for local news. He was fired simply to make room for the cat’s paw of the new ownership group. More shocking than Alan’s dismissal was his replacement by none other than Jill Stewart. You’d really have to be among the few who actually worked at the Weekly to catch the full brunt of this but I don’t overstate things by saying that bringing in Stewart to be Deputy Editor for News at L.A. Weekly would be like naming Yassir Arafat as Mayor of Tel Aviv. It wasn’t an editorial decision. It was an act of vengeance perpetrated against the Weekly by its new owner. Talk about personal demons and obsessions!

Stewart openly despised the Weekly. And let’s be honest: the Weekly staff openly despised her. I don’t think that is much of a secret to anyone in L.A. media circles. Putting her in the News Editor chair was like dropping a glowing load of Kryptonite onto the Weekly lunch table. Stewart had pretty much disappeared from the local news scene in the previous few years after the The New Times L.A. folded. A syndicated column of hers went pretty much nowhere. She would pop up now and then as a shrill pro-Arnold commentator on local shout radio, wildly riding the claims that the Times had published its Arnold The Groper series out of political bias. Before landing at the Weekly, she had recently been pushed from an unremarkable stint as editor of the equally unremarkable online start-up Pajamas Media (where we overlapped for a few weeks). But For Mike Lacey, Jill Stewart walked on water.

So much so, it was Lacey himself who hired Stewart. Right over the head of and without consultation with Weekly editor Laurie Ochoa (at least as far as I know). This created a de facto situation of dual power at the paper which persists until this day. The News Editor is not really accountable to the editor-in-chief but rather to the corporate owners. Nice work, if you can get it.

Ochoa remains as much a steadying force as is possible under an erratic and penny-pinching regime that shows little visible interest in journalism of integrity. She has done all that she has can to preserve what she could of the staff and spirit of the Weekly. I continued there for the last two years because of my loyalty to her and her willingness to defend –within the possible—the integrity of the paper. But it’s a losing battle. A lost battle.

Jill Stewart gleefully set about immediately dismantling the L.A. Weekly’s news department. Zahniser, Hernandez and Anderson, in varying degrees, pretty much fled with their hair on fire. Rob Greene was mercifully hired away by the L.A. Times 10 months before Stewart showed up at her first editorial meeting.

In their place, laughable “reporters” were brought in to scribble highly ideological pieces that reflected Stewart’s world view. How about a reporter named Zuma Dogg who “wrote” this little ditty? I put that word in quote marks as it was an open secret that it was Stewart who actually wrote most of Dogg’s otherwise illegible piece ( A rapper/ranter, Mr. Dogg had once boasted: “I don’t like to read”). And no matter that this was the same Mr. Dogg who was an eccentric gadfly who repeatedly disrupted local agency meetings for which he was now being paid to report on. The Weekly was giving press credentials to clowns who disrupted the meetings they were to “report” on.

Or how about Stewart commissioning a piece on school board elections by “reporter” Doug Lasken? Though the piece was passed off as non-ideological news, it was actually a poorly-veiled, to not say naked propaganda, rant written by a partisan/activist source on whom many of Stewart’s prior columns had relied. The Weekly was forced to run a retraction on this published slop that said: “The article “Nasty Battle for Classroom Control” [March 2–8] misspelled the names of Alice Callaghan, Neal Kleiner and the Jardin de la Infancia school. Also, two incumbents ran for school board, not three, and Compton is encircled by LAUSD but not part of it.”

Other than that… As L.A. Observed’s Kevin Roderick wrote at the time:

[T]he backstory is what makes it interesting. The piece, and the errors, were by freelancer Doug Lasken. His byline carried no other identifying information, but he is an LAUSD teacher and UTLA activist who helped organize union members against bilingual education in the 1990s. He was quoted then in Jill Stewart stories that railed against bilingual education, and it was Stewart, as deputy editor in charge of news at the Weekly, who asked Lasken to write the paper’s roundup on school board contests. That proved to be a risky proposition since Lasken is inexperienced as a reporter and the bean counters at VVM/New Times eliminated the Weekly’s fact-checking crew. Lasken’s gaffes did not go unnoticed, spurring emails to LA Observed from outraged Weekly staffers and politically savvy Weekly readers.

In any real news organization, a news editor that pulled this kind of miserable, unethical stunt would be summarily fired. I suspect in Stewart’s case, she will eventually be the Weekly’s editor-in-chief.

So What?

What difference does any of this make? Can’t we still get all the information we need from the Web with or without the L.A.Weekly?

You bet. Now more than ever. The Weekly, whenever it formally succumbs, will also go as silently as did New Times Los Angeles six years ago. Only some of us old farts who remember the Good Old Days will, perhaps, bat an eyelash and gather for a nostalgic drink in some Echo Park dive.

The tragedy lies elsewhere. For nearly 30 years, the L.A. Weekly had been a crucial launching pad for budding local (and sometimes national) writers. It was a place you got started, where you found your voice, where you made your chops and maybe even a name. That possibility is just about completely foreclosed. The Weekly was also an indispensable market and venue for more established writers who had important things to say that somehow overflowed the narrow confines of the L.A. Times.

The L.A. Weekly also served an extremely engaged, sophisticated and cosmopolitan and I might add global Los Angeles. I once wrote a piece for The Washington Post noting that Hollywood activists often cared more about South Africa than about South Central. Take it or leave it, there’s an undeniable truth to all this. And a newspaper that fails to understand that vast swaths of Los Angeles are as deeply concerned — if not more than concerned– about Iraq, torture, the White House or even congress than they are about the local school board or the controller’s office is a Los Angeles newspaper that is destined to fail. Look no further than at the corpse of The New Times Los Angeles.

The slow-motion collapse of L.A. Weekly also coincides with a radical shrinking of the L.A. Times, the implosion of The Daily News and the continuing downward descent of smaller papers like City Beat and The Daily Journal. If there was ever a time for an aggressive, irreverent, credible metro weekly to take on the Gray Lady, it’s right now, right here. That requires investment, not layoffs — seriousness and not shoddy, half-arsed ideological crud passed off as news.

I have no doubt that leafing through the Weekly in the weeks and months to come there will still be — here and there– great things to read. The movie and theater critics remain top notch (they are kept on because their work can be inexpensively syndicated to the rest of the chain). And the law of probabilities dictates that an occasional good or even great freelance piece will slip between the covers. But what good work remains will be there in spite of the will of its ownership, not because of it.

A Few Words About the L.A. Times

I said at the beginning that I write this with no bitterness nor regrets. Really, scout’s honor.

That’s true, with one asterisk. I rather deeply resent that I have to do this at all. I’m pissing away a perfectly beautiful weekend morning to slap this together when, truth is, the L.A. Times should have written this story –in much fuller and precise detail– months and months ago.

I’m not going to single anybody out, but heaven knows that the media writers at the L.A. Times have wasted no energy in wallowing in public self-pity about the troubles at their own paper. How is that the fully public, ongoing, extended crisis of the second paper in L.A. and the largest metro weekly in America — the L.A. Weekly– has gone completely unreported and unmentioned? And I might add, why would anyone care about the future job prospects of endangered L.A. Times reporters who don’t have the decency or the professionalism to report on the massacre at the paper next door?

The answer resides in the ingrained arrogance of the Times. Like most big city newspapers it has a written or unwritten policy of ignoring its competitors. Only in print, of course. Not in real life. For as long as it has been around, the Weekly has been consciously snubbed by the Times. I think one half-baked profile of the Weekly was written some years ago and that’s about it. The Weekly could break a verifiable story that L.A. had just detached from the mainland and you could make book that the Times would refuse to cite the story, or its source. The same way the Times pointedly ignored the existence of the Weekly, it also pointedly ignored the reality of the Web. And we see how that hubris paid off.

In real life, as I said, it’s been quite the opposite. The Weekly has gone anything but un-noticed by the Times. It has revamped, retooled and re-positioned whole sections and created whole new publications like Metromix to directly compete with the Weekly. Two of the Weekly’s former editor-in-chiefs were recruited to work at the Times. The current Weekly editor is a Times alum. The Times has repeatedly raided the Weekly staff, poaching its TV, film, music, feature and metro reporters.

In short, the L.A. Times owes a great debt to L.A. Weekly. The least it could do is assign one or two of its reporters to find out what’s really going on inside that other paper across town – before it disappears completely. – + –

P.S. I intend the above to be strictly a personal recollection and in no way an official history. Some dates and timelines might be inadvertently smudged or jumbled. I apologize in advance for any such minor errors. Also feel free to add your own corrections, recollections, objections and comments. I also affirm that this piece was written without consulting any current employee of the L.A. Weekly and therefore trust that no retribution will be exacted against them

P.P.S. I’m reminded by a friend that I omitted one important facet of the Weekly’s history. By the mid 1980’s, the Weekly had become a potent cultural/political force in Los Angeles, frequently sponsoring or co-sponsoring major events that drew audiences of hundreds and sometimes thousands. I’m not talking about concerts or typical metro weekly give-aways. The Weekly galvanized huge live audiences for debates on foreign policy, for conclaves on local organizing, and conferences on national politics. All things rather unthinkable today. I doubt if the current Weekly could pull off a booze-up in a brewery. Indeed, until shortly before the move to Culver City last year, the Weekly organized monthly and well-attended soirees at a classic old-school Hollywood hangout, Boardman’s. Those, too, have faded into history.

Update: Here is Nat Hentoff’s just-published farewell column at the Village Voice. Take all of the geniuses who now run the NewTimes/VVM chain, stack them head-to-head, and they don’t make it past Nat’s navel.

This post originally appeared at Marc’s blog.

]]> http://www.popandpolitics.com/2009/01/09/marc-cooper-an-obituary-for-the-la-weekly/feed/ 3 http://www.popandpolitics.com/2008/12/22/monday-movie-report-when-it-rains-it-snows/ http://www.popandpolitics.com/2008/12/22/monday-movie-report-when-it-rains-it-snows/#comments Mon, 22 Dec 2008 23:08:58 +0000 samantha page http://www.popandpolitics.com/?p=10472

Scrooged, my favorite Christmas movie.

As if the flailing economy weren’t bad enough, it’s snowing across wide swaths of the country, where people aren’t even getting out of the house, for Christmas shopping or movies.

The weekend numbers were down 44 percent from this time last year. Jim Carey’s Yes Man got top honors with $18 mil, followed by another debut, Will Smith’s Seven Pounds, which brought in $16 mil. Kiddie book-turned-flick The Tale of Despereaux took in $11 mil as the family alternative. Looks cute!

The Day the Earth Stood Still came in fourth with $10 mil, and in some sort of holiday… miracle, Four Christmases continued to rack up numbers in its fourth weekend, rounding out the top five with $8 mil.

I go back and forth between adoring (Wedding Crashers, Mr. and Mrs. Smith) and despising (The Break-Up, Fred Claus) Vince Vaughn, but I’m guessing 4XMs would fall into the latter category. Besides, didn’t anyone see the report that watching romantic comedies makes you unhappy? Too much to risk this time of year, as I am teetering on the edge of sanity already.

In other news, more stars are coming out against the strike, which goes to vote in January (results announced on the 23rd). Charlie Sheen has added his name to the list of anti-strikers, which goes against dad Martin’s public position. I would love to be a fly on the wall at their Christmas dinner.

A little shout out to our friends over at /film, who are awesome and made this *amazing* faux trailer for the Thundercats movie we have always wished Hollywood would make. If I could have one wish this Christmas…