Closing Walls and Ticking Clocks

My Must See Movies This Winter:

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 12:22:00 -0500

-The Descendants

-We Need To Talk About Kevin

-Shame

-Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy- I’ve been waiting for this one for months. The reviews have been fantastic. A sure Best Picture nominee.

-Carnage

-The Artist

-Hugo

-A Dangerous Method- Gotta get my Cronenberg fix.

Yes, I’m sure I’ll see The Muppets (based on the remarkable response), Mission Impossible, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and probably a few others, but if you’re going to solidify your chances of seeing the most Best Picture nominees, this list is probably a good place to start.

Tonight, the sports world lost a legend. Not a legend in the...

Mon, 07 Nov 2011 23:43:09 -0500

Tonight, the sports world lost a legend.

Not a legend in the conventional sense. I don’t believe any boxing historian would call Joe Frazier one of the top ten fighters ever (heavyweights, maybe). He lost too many significant fights to be in that category.

He did however participate in one of the greatest rivalries ever, and one of the most significant sporting events of the 20th century. His name will live in sports lore, for his accomplishments, for making the most of what he was given, and for fighting to the last bell. He is truly a legend.

RIP Smokin’ Joe

Thanks for the OSU advice :) I love it here.

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 21:19:46 -0400

Happy to help :)

whereisthecoool: Thank you.

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 22:28:09 -0400

whereisthecoool:

Thank you.

They haven’t had a really great season in the past few...

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 01:18:25 -0400

They haven’t had a really great season in the past few years (5 and 6 were pretty good), but I am definitely going to miss the boys. I grew up with Entourage. It is as ingrained in me as an Angeleno as ”Celluloid Heroes”, “Hollywood Nights”, and “I Love LA”. It definitely did run its course, but I’m going to miss this on Sunday nights.

"Good and evil almost never express themselves as harshly and clearly as they did Tuesday morning...."

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 23:55:00 -0400

“

Good and evil almost never express themselves as harshly and clearly as they did Tuesday morning. People we don’t know slaughtered people we do, and they did it with contemptuous calm. Yet, even as clouds of dust and smoke rose from the rubble, even as family members tortured by hope and doubt took to the streets with pictures and pleas, even as mobs celebrated in Gaza, Cairo, and Baghdad, something shook itself sluggishly to life and that something is a sense of ourselves. Kindness flourished amid the flames: a couple carried a disabled man down 68 flights of stairs, a priest crouched to give last rites as a mighty tower collapsed, and the hand of God closed above him. A man and woman, their hope gone, held each other and leaped. A solitary candle, a flag, a tear. These are the tokens of our renewal.

The United States had a spirit before it had a nameone of faith and freedom, of ambition tempered by piety. We once were a nation of neighbors and friends, we are again today. We once were a nation of hardship-tested dreamers, we are again today. We once were a nation under God, we are again today. Our enemies attacked one nation, they will encounter another. For they underestimated us. Today in our grief and in our rage, our determination and hope, we’ve summoned what’s best and noblest in us. We are again Americans.

”

- Tony Snow, Fox News Sunday, 9/16/01

alexandergrant: Stare greatness right in his face!

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 19:25:57 -0400

alexandergrant:

Stare greatness right in his face!

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Sat, 03 Sep 2011 19:24:30 -0400

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Wed, 31 Aug 2011 21:40:41 -0400

Its just so depressing. I feel like I’m at a minor league game,...

Wed, 31 Aug 2011 15:16:19 -0400

Its just so depressing. I feel like I’m at a minor league game, but then again there’d be happier fans at a minor league game.

Time will show what a great accomplishment this is. To survive...

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 21:17:53 -0400

Time will show what a great accomplishment this is. To survive the steroid era unscathed. Congratulations to Jim Thome. Perhaps the most underrated power hitter ever, but also one of the classiest men in baseball over the past 20 years. Could not be happier for him.

"Max Schumacher: You need me. You need me badly. Because I’m your last contact with human..."

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:42:26 -0400

“Max Schumacher: You need me. You need me badly. Because I’m your last contact with human reality. I love you. And that painful, decaying love is the only thing between you and the shrieking nothingness you live the rest of the day.
Diana Christensen: [hesitatingly] Then, don’t leave me.
Max Schumacher: It’s too late, Diana. There’s nothing left in you that I can live with. You’re one of Howard’s humanoids. If I stay with you, I’ll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You’re television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You’re madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain… and love.
Max Schumacher: And it’s a happy ending: Wayward husband comes to his senses, returns to his wife, with whom he has established a long and sustaining love. Heartless young woman left alone in her arctic desolation. Music up with a swell; final commercial. And here are a few scenes from next week’s show.”

- Network

"I feel lousy about the pain that I’ve caused my wife and kids. I feel guilty and..."

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 00:39:27 -0400

“I feel lousy about the pain that I’ve caused my wife and kids. I feel guilty and conscience-stricken, and all of those things you think sentimental, but which my generation calls simple human decency. And I miss my home, because I’m beginning to get scared shitless, because all of a sudden it’s closer to the end than the beginning, and death is suddenly a perceptible thing to me, with definable features. You’re dealing with a man with primal doubts, Diana, and you’ve got to cope with it.”

- Max Schumacher (William Holden), Network

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Fri, 05 Aug 2011 20:02:27 -0400

No words.

Tue, 02 Aug 2011 10:39:59 -0400

No words.

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Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:14:13 -0400

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Mon, 01 Aug 2011 22:13:50 -0400

MLB Network...

Sat, 30 Jul 2011 23:10:39 -0400

cutting into the Dodger game so I can hear Vin Scully call a HR live? In Columbus? I love you, MLB Network.

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Fri, 29 Jul 2011 23:43:11 -0400

How Los Angeles Lost Its Mojo

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:57:06 -0400

By: Joel Kotkin

Los Angeles today is a city in secular decline. Its current political leadership seems determined to turn the sprawling capitalist dynamo into a faux New York. But they are more likely to leave behind a dense, government-dominated, bankrupt, dysfunctional, Athens by the Pacific.

The greatness of Los Angeles stemmed from its willingness to be different. Unlike Chicago or Denver or New York, the Los Angeles metro area was designed not around a central core but on a series of centers, connected first by railcars and later by the freeways. The result was a dispersed metropolis where most people occupied single-family houses in middle-class neighborhoods. Lured by the pleasant climate and a business-dominated political economy, industries and entrepreneurs flocked to the region. Initially, the growth came largely from oil and agriculture, followed by the movie industry. Defense and aerospace during World War II and the postwar era fostered a vast industrial base, and by the 1980s Los Angeles had surpassed New York as the nation’s largest port, and Chicago as the nation’s leading industrial center.

The region hit a rough spot as the end of the Cold War led to massive federal cutbacks in aerospace. Los Angeles County lost nearly 500,000 jobs between 1990 and 1993. But it bounced back, adding nearly 400,000 jobs between 1993 and 1999. Aerospace never fully recovered, but other parts of the industrial belt—including the port and the apparel and entertainment industries—grew. An entrepreneurial class of immigrants—Middle Eastern, Korean, Chinese, Latino—launched new businesses in everything from textiles and ethnic food to computers. The pro-business mayoralty of Richard Riordan and the governorship of Pete Wilson restored confidence among the city’s beleaguered companies.

Then progress stalled. Employment stayed relatively flat from 2001 until 2005, when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was elected, and then started to drop. As of this March, over the entire L.A. metropolitan area, which includes adjacent Orange County, unemployment was 11.4%—the third-highest unemployment rate of the nation’s 20 largest metro areas.

Why has Los Angeles lost its mojo? A big reason is a decline in the power and mettle of the city’s once-vibrant business community. Between the late 1980s and the end of the millennium, many of L.A.’s largest and most influential firms—ARCO, Security Pacific, First Interstate, Union Oil, Sun America—disappeared in a host of mergers that saw their management shift to cities like London, New York and San Francisco. Meanwhile, says David Abel, a Democratic Party activist and publisher of the influential Planning Report, once-powerful groups like the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce and the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation lost influence.

The machine that now controls Los Angeles by default consists of an alliance between labor and the political leadership of the Latino community, the area’s largest ethnic population. But since politicians serve at the whim of labor interests, they seldom speak up for homeowners and small businesses.

Mayor Villaraigosa, a former labor organizer, has little understanding of private-sector economic development beyond well-connected real-estate interests whom he has courted and which have supported him. He has been a strong backer of L.A. Live, a downtown ports and entertainment complex, and other projects that have benefited from favorable tax treatment and major public infrastructure investments. He’s currently supporting a push to build a new downtown football stadium, though L.A. has no professional football team. His biggest priority is to build the so-called subway to the sea, a $40 billion train line to connect downtown with the Pacific.

But L.A.’s downtown employs a mere 2.5% of the region’s work force; New York’s central business districts, by contrast, employ roughly 20%. “To put the entire focus of development on downtown L.A.,” says Ali Modarres, chairman of the geography department at Cal State Los Angeles, “is to ignore the historical, cultural, economic [and] social forces that have shaped the larger geography of this metropolitan area.”

Moreover, the mayor’s accent downtown is on housing, not manufacturing. And as Cecilia Estolano, former head of the Community Redevelopment Agency, points out, “downtown housing simply doesn’t create the jobs that small manufacturers do.”

Meantime, business-strangling regulations proliferate, often with support from a powerful and well-heeled environmental movement, which Mr. Villaraigosa counts on for political support and media validation. There are draconian moves to control emissions at the port from ships and trucks. Also harmful are the city’s efforts to expand the unions’ presence from the docks to the entire network of trucks serving the port—essentially forcing out independent carriers, many of them Latino entrepreneurs, in favor of larger firms using Teamster drivers.

Such policies could backfire, says economist John Husing, leading shippers to transfer their business to cheaper and less heavily regulated ports such as Charleston, Houston, Savannah and other growth-oriented southern cities. This is particularly dangerous given the planned 2014 widening of the Panama Canal, which will make Southeastern ports far more competitive for Asia-based trade. Mr. Husing notes that L.A.’s port is the largest generator of blue-collar employment in the region.

Even some liberal Democrats are beginning to realize that the current system isn’t sustainable. Writing recently in the Los Angeles Business Journal, Roderick Wright, a Democratic state senator from south Los Angeles, compared the state and local governments with the Mafia. The “vig” that government takes from local businesses, Mr. Wright argued—both in taxes and in the cost of regulation—has undermined job creation, particularly in working-class districts like his. He also warned that renewable-energy mandates recently imposed by the state would boost the cost of energy in the region, already 53% above the national average, by an additional 20% to 25%.

Who will challenge the machine and its ruinous economic policy? It’s not likely to be the city’s enervated business sector. But the city’s working and middle classes might, says Ron Kaye, former editor of the San Fernando Valley–based Daily News. He points to the city’s remaining middle-class homeowners, who are concentrated in the San Fernando Valley but also occupy a number of diverse neighborhoods. “These are the places that reflect the whole idea of L.A., as opposed to the Villaraigosa vision of a city of apartment dwellers,” Mr. Kaye says.

It is uncertain if Los Angeles will experience the Sunshine Revolution it so desperately needs. What is certain is that only when the machine and its masters no longer dictate L.A.’s fate can this diverse and dynamic region resume its ascent toward greatness.

Mr. Kotkin is a professor of urban development at Chapman University. This article is adapted from the Summer 2011 issue of City Journal.