by Chris Barrus
A couple of years ago I caught Sandow Birk’s history of the Great War down at the Laguna Art Museum and was totally blown away. In Smog And Thunder details a fictional historical war between Northern and Southern California with historical paintings, dioramas, topological maps, model war machines, propaganda posters, and an audio CD with war songs, recruitment commercials.
I picked up the book and CD at the show. Now it’s a film…
*sigh*. Admittedly, I’m still embittered from when the New Times organization bought out and shut down the L.A. Reader and Village View back in 1996, but damn…
Los Angeles New Times, the second largest alternative weekly in the L.A. area, is shutting down, silencing a quirky and inconsistent, yet valuable, journalistic voice, while costing the jobs of about 100 employees.
The closure is part of a complex deal with Village Voice Media, the parent company of the L.A. Weekly. Village Voice Media will purchase client lists from New Times, but no hard assets. VVM, in turn, will shut down the Free Times, in Cleveland, turning over client lists to the New Times paper in that city. Privately held VVM, based in New York, operates six remaining papers.
“To me, this is all about making us more competitive, particularly with the L.A. Times,” said VVM president David Schneiderman. “Like most daily newspapers, they have an aging readership and they want our readers. We’re not going to sit around and let them have them.”
The reaction was short and blunt from Michael Lacey, executive editor of New Times newspapers. “Go fuck yourself,” said Lacey, who was reached Wednesday morning at a Santa Monica beachside hotel. He slammed down the phone without responding to questions.
Even more irritating is that the LA New Times article archive is permanently off-line. Should have PDF’ed more. And worst of all, Meredith’s restaurant column now needs a home.
Nice article on the greatest taco stand ever. Absolutely, positively worth the drive up to Santa Barbara.
A federal “No Fly” list, ostensibly intended to keep terrorists from flying is snaring peace activists and dissenters. And while several federal agencies acknowledge that they contribute names to the congressionally mandated list, no one is apparently responsible for managing the list.
Chip Berlet compiles all the 9/11 conspiracy theories – left, right, and off-the-map.
A DVD I’m encoding used a loop of Spiritualized’s “Pure Phase” tone so my entire day has been spent with “EeEeEeEeEeEeEeEe” as my background noise. Instant itchiness.
The reportage on the Iraq invasion has finally reached the meta-report saturation stage, so until something actually happens there’s not much point to forward any more stories. However, this article in the Atlantic looks at the endgame of Gulf War II: Bush’s Revenge. Specifically, it’s pretty certain that the US will be going to war, and it’s also pretty certain that the US will win overwhelmingly.
So then what?
New York Songlines is a way-cool, hand-compiled guide to all things Manhattan. I clicked on a street at random and found the location of Charles Ives’ house and a neo-Polynesian bar called the Tiki Room. Mega cool, but don’t link until you have a couple of hours to burn.
Ken Bereskin points out a cool OS X feature that I didn’t know about:
There are two very strong views about how the Get Info… command should work. The first camp wants to be able to compare the info of different files at the same time, so every time you choose Get Info… a new window is displayed (just like Mac OS 9). The other camp wants the “Inspector” behavior where the info window is a single floating palette that always reflects the current selection.
What to do? Well, in Jaguar, the default is to spawn an info window for each Get Info command but hold down the Option key and the command morphs to “Show Info”, the floating palette version. The crowd cheers – everyone is happy!
NewZoid randomly generates news headlines.
Vote for your faves!
UPDATE 2013-05-11: NewZoid is now called the New Zoid Times