The Other Room

This Tuesday—for the second time in history—LA's always-inspiring Silent Movie Theater will host author Erik Davis and a series of his guests for Occult LA, a "night of talks and films devoted to Southern California's alternative spiritual culture." The time this happened went down topics included local witches, satanists, JPL scientists and their influence on 1950-60s California assemblage and performance art (which is more profound than a lot of us would like to believe, I think). So Tuesday should be very, very promising.

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There's no doubt that these are trying times around here. As mentioned before, my hometown is recovering from it's first (and hopefully last) political scandal in years, Long Beach's economy is in upheaval, with city council candidates not just entertaining the idea of city employee furloughs but picking it up, taking the idea of furloughs out to dinner and chatting endlessly with it from sundown to sunrise. So it's encouraging to see that the local powers that be have the time, resources and money to make things like the orange abstraction you see on my left. Actually, it's not an orange abstraction. It's an Orange Twist by Kathleen Caricof; capitalized and italicized because - as you might guess - it's the title of Long Beach's newest addition to a long line of expensive, bad public art. This particular piece sits idly at the intersecion of Atlantic and 45th and ran the Long Beach Redevelopment Agency $104,000. And yes, it's almost all bad. Don't take my word for it, visit the Long Beach Art Council's map of local public art (don't click on districts 8 and 9 though, as they're apparently no-mans land and you'll get a 404!).

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If you're relatively small hometown makes it into the news, you can be pretty confident it's not going to be anything good. Loyal to that formula, the high-income and relatively insular city of Los Alamitos has gotten its first taste of political scandal since I can remember. Mayor Dean Grose (he's the one in the center of that photo) sent a poorly photoshopped, poorly timed depiction of a watermelon patch in front of the white house with a caption he apparently thought was so funny it was worth repeating (I don't). Now he's resigning from his post. I'm sure you heard about it, if you have you might want to check out this amazing flickr photograph of the soon to be ex-mayor dressed as what looks to be a pimp during a Rotary Club fundraiser. If you haven't, check out what the Press-Telegramhas to say about it by reading on:

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Of course, the Academy Awards are just getting underway as I'm beginning to type this, and I'm going to miss it again. My girlfriend's mom is having her birthday night and—exactly as we did last year—we're going out for dinner while so many other people are at home watching the awards. It's fine, really. I like the awards but I'm not going to miss them sorely if I don't discover who the winners are real-time. We're just about to leave!

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Raw tragedy from the famous and gorgeous Earl Burn Miller Japanese Garden at Cal State Long Beach today, as the Daily 49er reports on an enormous outbreak of a deadly virus that has totally annihilated the garden's gorgeous koi population. More follows below:

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I'll get this out right now: needless to say, there's good cause to be pessimistic about the state of the Times. Even the most casual observer of Los Angeles media must, by now, be aware of that. There's the near-300 layoffs, the slow scaling back of book and theater coverage, the California Section's demise... It's redundant to into this stuff at depth, especially considering our own SoCal Connected, D.J. Waldie, and Erin Aubry Kaplan have said all this with more grace and knowledge than I could ever hope to muster up. Regardless, though, it's worth mentioning the good stuff when it happens, to give credit where it's due and that's exactly what I intend to do here:

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Thanks to a new internship I'm taking up I've started riding the train. I ride the Metro Blue Line from Long Beach all the way to the end of the line and—like a lot of people riding, I'm sure—overhear the occasional noteworthy event. This happened the other day:

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Apparently this is real? In an effort to teach his well-above-median-income audience a lesson about malaria, Bill Gates unleashed an open jar of mosquitoes into the crowd during this week TED (that's Technology, Entertainment and Design, by the way). As he released the critters he calmly informed them that "I brought some [mosquitoes]. Here I'll let them roam around. There is no reason only poor people should be infected."

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As an addendum to last December's history of American stampedes, it seems like 2009 has already seen its share around the world. The most notable of these occurred inside a hotel nightclub in Bangkok as the New Year rolled in. The club—Santika—is one of Bangkok's most popular hot spots. The stampede started from a fire inside the club, which led to a giant mass of people running for the club's only exit and left behind 61 dead. BBC has more:

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