Two Southern California events and one national contest that you might want to know about..

1. THE WIRE

For those of you who are hard core fans of The Wire, the Liberty Hill Foundation is honoring David Simon and Ed Burns at their annual Upton Sinclair dinner this Thursday. The YouTube trailer for the dinner is above. The yearly Sinclair dinner is always a cool and worthy event. (I’m teaching that night or I’d be there.) FYI: The Liberty Hill Foundation is a wonderful organization that helps to fund social justice projects all over Los Angeles.

2. A NIGHT OF TRILLIN

I will, however, be going to this evening with the fabulous Calvin Trillin at UC Irvine’s annual Pereira Distinguished Lecture. It’s a talk, plus a reception that’s open to the public….and it’s FREE.

I notice that WLA commenter Rebel Girl has posted news of the event on her blog. “Pay attention, please,” she says, Trillin is the funniest, smartest, most honest chronicler of our brave, nutty republic you can sit and listen to on a Wednesday night in America.”

My thoughts exactly.

The AFL-CIO WANTS YOU TO CHANGE THE WORLD, ONE VIDEO AT A TIME

The AFL-CIO is sponsoring a contest with the goal of starting “a new kind national conversation” through video. Here are the details:

America isn’t working the way it should. Homes are being foreclosed on at alarming rates…families are surviving without health care…people are being forced to decide between gasoline and groceries…men and women are working harder for lower wages…we are on the brink of economic peril.

Start by thinking about how this impacts you — tell us your personal story. What are you experiencing? What about your family? Your friends? Your neighbors? What is impacting your community? Your school? What’s your vision of America? And, as important, how would you turn things around?

National conversation is good (As long as it doesn’t involve Reverend Wright.)

Click here to enter (or to watch some of the videos already in).

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UPDATE: For those of you who didn’t get to go to the Festival, reading my pal Tod Goldberg’s Festival of Books Primer is almost as good, wa-a-a-ay funnier, and doesn’t require either driving time or sunscreen.
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Yesterday was glorious. Today is likely to be more glorious still. (If you live in LA, you still have time to get over there. Or tune in right this minute to hear good stuff like blogfather Marc Cooper moderating a panel on C-SPAN Books)



My panel, moderated by Jill Leovy (The Homocide Report), with Miles Corwin and brand new author Dashaun Morris, in which we talked about literature based on stories from the streets, could have easily gone twice its length judging by the enthusiasm of the questioners from the audience. (The photo above of me is with Dashaun and his brother, and clearly I look very cheered up by being flanked by two handsome, smart guys.) Dashaun is a former gang member who, after prison, transformed himself into a man with a great deal of worth to say to those trying to understand the problem of gang violence and how to solve it.

But the day was filled with a plethora of terrific panels and author talks, and thousands and thousands of men, women and children who come together at this event—all for the love of books.

Some of the panel and talks I most enjoyed were:

1. Dialogue-wizard Richard Price talking about his new novel Lush Life, a beautifully constructed and fabulously entertaining book that I’m betting will be up for multiple book awards this time next year.

2. The amazing Maxine Hong Kingston in conversation with my good pal LA Times Book Editor David Ulin, a wonderfully inspiring hour of talk about writing as a form of activism and how to convey the complexity of human experience through the interweave of truth and myth.

3. Mega-popular mystery writer Michael Connelly (LAPD Chief Bill Bratton’s favorite crime novelist) interviewing police procedural master Joe Wambaugh about his new novel, Hollywood Crows. Wambaugh entertained the adoring, packed-to-the-rafters crowd with his wild and woolly tales of the art of getting great stories out of cops, and the perils of getting Hollywood actors to do nude scenes. (Wambaugh himself in part produced the movie of his classic true crime bookThe Onion Field.)

So rush over now…..or watch it on C-Span Books, ….or buy the recordings of the panels and talks you wish you could have seen…..or just go out and have fun reading.

Books make the world a better place to be.

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As WLA commenter Reg has pointed out, today Bruce Springsteen has declared his support of Barack Obama for President.

So, are we supposed to care who this or that celebrity endorses the presidential race? Of course not! What do you take us for???
Unless it’s The Boss doing the endorsing. (I see the news is on the front page of the LA Times website. Normally I’d be critical of such celebrity-related pandering. But, in this case…[see aforementioned point.])

Actually, Springsteen’s statement, posted at his own website, and bannered at Huff Post, was very thoughtful and articulate. To wit:

LIke most of you, I’ve been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where “…nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”

At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man’s life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams From My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment.

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

“Still at the end of every hard earned day people find some reason to believe…”

By the way, Hillary Clinton just received the backing of Salsa icon, Willie Colon.

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I realize I was quite slow in posting on Wednesday morning. The truth is I was too sleepy and happy to focus on the rights and wrongs of the world because….

…..I went to see Bruce Springsteen Tuesday at the Honda Center in Anaheim. (BRUU-U-U-UUUUUUUCE!!!!!!!!!)

As anyone reading this blog for a while knows, I’m a bit of a Bruce groupy (and not nearly as sorry about it as some of my friends and family would likely prefer), but, fan fanaticism aside, Springsteen continues to put on one of the great shows in rock and roll.

This was the second leg of the tour for his “Magic” album released last October. The album itself is not one of my personal favorites as it has an oddly pop production aspect to it that either works for you or it doesn’t. In concert however, the enormous strength of the various songs emerges and all objections disappear.

Bruce’s wife, the angel-voice, Patti Scialfa, didn’t do this leg of the tour because, as Bruce said, “Patti sends her love, but we have three teenagers at home and I think I saw a three black helicopters dropping cases of beer in our backyard. The black helicopters could have been my paranoia, but I’m pretty sure about the beer drop.”

Like Mick Jagger at a Rolling Stones concert, Bruce does two-and-half hours of straight cardio that makes those of us also in his age group want to go back stage to ask what kind of vitamin supplements he’s taking, and where we can get a couple of bottles.

As is always true these days, part of the Boss’s show has clear political content. I can’t say how the Bush voter segment of the Orange County crowd took Bruce’s comments about extraordinary rendition and habeas corpus. Yet based on the overall audience reaction, if they didn’t entirely see eye to eye with him, they loved the music enough to overlook any disagreement.

Among the musical highlights were an exquisite version of the 30-year old Jungleland , and Nils Lofgren blowing the roof off the place with his killer guitar solo on Because the Night. But the thing that felt the most like rock history was the stunning duet between Bruce and Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello as they turned the social justice folk ballad, The Ghost of Tom Joad, into a stadium-shredding rocker.

(A fan captured part but not all of it for YouTube below)

I’ll stop gushing now since Jon Stewart already did the best commentary on the Boss’s “Magic” tour when he saw Bruce in performance last fall.

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Television has never seen a better dramatic series than “The Wire.” Period. The Sopranos gave us one of TV’s greatest characters. But if the Sopranos was grand drama, The Wire gave us great literature. I’m convinced that if Charles Dickens was alive today, he’d have been writing for the The Wire.

And he’d have been in good company. In addition to their own considerable gifts for storytelling, producers David Simon and Ed Burns were smart enough to hire a string of the best crime novelists in America to write for the show, and it showed. Richard Price and George Pelecanos are uniquely talented with inner city argot. Dennis Lehane (author of “Mystic River”) has been moving for years toward a form that combines the traditional detective novel with a kind of tragic sensibility.

Most Hollywood-produced cop shows, no matter how large their stable of “consultants,” usually end up with dialog that sounds like….well…..Hollywood. In contrast, The Wire” was consistently able to capture, not only the sound of street language, but its poetry.

Yet, the great dialog wasn’t the reason we watched. (And are still watching. I’ve just started over with Season One)

We tuned in because David Simon and company gave us weekly commentary on modern urban life with a nuanced authenticity rarely seen elsewhere—all packaged in form that was wildly engaging. And Simon did it using a nearly symphonic pattern of narrative layers and interweaves. We saw the wasteful futility of the war on drugs interwoven with the impossible pressures placed on the cops who are asked to somehow eradicate the drug mess…Into those themes was threaded the hypocrisy and compromise that informs American politics….the absurd and tragic state of the nation’s inner city schools….and finally, the profit-driven shredding of the soul of our country’s newspapers.

Stunning. And all presented through the relentlessly human medium of the show’s remarkable cast of indelible characters.

To me it was season four, about the Baltimore school system and the catastrophic affects of No Child Left Behind, that was the best—and the most emotionally devastating.

But this season was brilliant too.

As a new round of buyouts is announced at the LA Times and the ongoing turf battles at City Hall over gang policy manage to fail all concerned….it’s been somehow steadying to know that we’re not unique with our messes. The Wire got there first.

But what about you? Are you a Wire fan? If so, why does it matter to you?

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UPDATE: NOW THAT THE Oscars are over, and in honor of the…um…spirited discussion that’s taken place on this thread, it seemed only right to make sure you all have had a chance to see the following post-Oscar video. (My favorite moment was at 4:45 minutes. J.G., all is forgiven.)

An extremely intellectual friend of mine who lives in DC and is not overly given to popular culture, told me he might break down and watch the Academy awards this year. I was stunned that Academy viewing was a new thing for him and told him so. (I think I also might have mentioned that NOT watching the Oscars means that you hate America.)

I tried to explain that that one could skip the Super Bowl, and still be a good citizen. But not the Oscar broadcast. “And TiVo-ing doesn’t count,” I said. “You have to watch it in real time. And you have to comment on the dresses.”

The dress thing unnerved my friend and he attempted to change the subject by mentioning the new article about China by James Fallows that’s in the most recent Atlantic Monthly. I sensed some dark implication about the Chinese pulling ahead of us economically because we watch stupid awards broadcasts instead of keeping our eyes on the economic ball.

“The Chinese watch the Oscars,” I said. “Hell, they’ve probably found a way to trade Oscar film futures on the Shanghai stock market.” And speaking of futures, I mentioned that this years awards show featured the added frisson of wondering if Jon Stewart’s going to do or say anything unscripted and extremely political that will freak out the conservative members of the audience. “Oscar audiences like funny but they don’t like edgy funny,” I said. “Plus, because of the writer’s strike, Stewart’s had only three days (or may 10 days, but not long) to prepare for his host gig, whereas when Billy Crystal hosts, he prepares for nearly six months.” (No, I’m not kidding. Crystal once told me this in an interview.) “So anything could happen.”

“But I haven’t seen most of the movies,” my friend wailed. “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Picking winners when you have no solid basis for your opinions is a time honored Hollywood tradition. It’s how studio heads decide which pictures to green light.”

Which brings us to…..

WITNESSLA’S 1ST ANNUAL KNOWLEDGE-FREE OSCAR PROGNOSTICATIONS:

(I’ll show you mine, then you have to show me yours.)

Okay, here they are….

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My extremely smart and funny fiction-writer friend, Tod Goldberg has a thing he does every year on his blog called 12 days of lists. I’ve decided to shamelessly steal this idea and tweak it for WLA. From now until New Year’s eve I’ll be posting lists—a new one every day or so. (I urge you to check out Tod’s lists too.

Some of the lists will be political and social justice-y. Some will be far, far more frivolous. Some will be liberal- leaning (like the one below), some not. Okay, here’s the first one:
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This past Saturday night I was at the LA writer-clogged party for Red Hen Press and decided to ask a bunch of novelists and poets (and one composer) which of the presidential candidates they thought would make the best fictional characters. Here’s what they said:

1. MIKE HUCKABEE by Kate Gale

Kate is the editor of Red Hen Press, and The Los Angeles Review. She’s also the author of five books of poetry, the editor of four anthologies and she is now writing operatic librettos that have been performed at such venues as Disney Hall, and the New York City Opera.

Okay, as a fictional character I’d choose Huckabee because he’s the most ridiculous. So many of his beliefs are so completely out of touch with the majority of the American people. I’d use him in a libretto because librettos are all about extremes. In opera people are going to die, they’re going cheat on their wives, do the wrong thing, and generally behave badly. Huckabee would be a great character in an opera libretto.

2. RUDY GIULIANI by Don Davis

Don is a notable film composer best known for the landmark avant-garde scoring of the three Matrix films. Most recently, Don has been composing operas with Kate Gale (above).

Giuliani is the obvious choice. Rudy would be perfect for a James Elroy hard-boiled type of noir novel because he’d be the Mafiosi head of the police department who kicks the shit out of everyone

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The WGA and the studios have agreed to go back to the table to talk for at least one more day (they’ve been talking since Monday). Nobody’s willing to say much about how (or if) the talks are progressing, but, according to last night’s Hollywood Reporter, the fact that anybody’s still chatting at all is a vaguely good sign. The LA Times says that the gap between warring parties still remains wide. If things fail to at least inch forward by Friday, strike watchers predict that negotiations could stall until after the holidays.

In the meantime, when not picketing, stir-crazy screenwriters are finding ever more creative ways to fill their time, and to lower their individual and collective anxiety levels. (When prevented from writing, writers—any kind of writers—are a notoriously nervous bunch.)

The most recent of these strike-fueled activities is a new LA food blog called Food Coma LA, produced by the gorgeous, talented, and extremely antsy….Kelly Fremon. (Yes, she is related to me. She’s my fabulous niece.)

A quick rundown on Kelly—just so you know this post has zero to do with nepotism. (Or, if it does, it’s well-deserved nepotism.) Kelly was listed this year by Variety as one of the “10 Screenwriters to Watch” after her quirky/funny spec script, “Ticket To Ride” was bought and developed by Ivan Reitman (the guy who did Animal House, Ghostbusters and the like). The film will start production next month for Fox’s Atomic division. She’s also writing—or at least was until the strike hit—a remake the French film “Intimate Strangers” for Paramount, with Hillary Swank set to star.

Now, like most screenwriters, Kelly’s going berzerkers with the inactivity. (One can’t picket all the time.) Hence Monday’s blog launch—with much more to come.

So go check out Food Coma, and try out the soup recipe.

Hey, it’s the least you can do to support our city’s striking screen scribes, right? Of course, right.

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In this morning’s LA Times, you’ll find a review I wrote about a book called Blue Rage, Black Redemption, a memoir by Stanley Tookie Williams. He worked on it during the last few years before he was executed in December of 2005.

It’s an interesting book, in part because it describes with authoritative detail a particular portion of recent Los Angeles history, namely the formation of the Crips. But it also provides a case study, of sorts, of how a boy comes to join a gang, or in Williams’ case, to form one, and what it might have taken to steer him in a different direction.

This past weekend, while I was working on the review, I got out the most recent report put together by the LA City Council’s Ad Hoc Committee on Gang Violence and Youth Development. I thought it might stimulate my thinking as I wrote.

I’ll have more to say about the report in the weeks to come, but in rereading it on Sunday, I ran across one paragraph that stopped me cold. It had to do with the way that the committee felt that the city should “reframe the language” used in LA’s various gang plans. Here’s an excerpt:

If we look as if we’re “anti-gang,” we won’t be able to reach the very people we need if we want to eliminate the violence in our communities. Therefore, the Advisory Committee recommends renaming the plan: “A Street Peace and Dignified Community Development Initiative.”

What in the world??? I thought. We want to find better ways to address the gang violence that every single week causes unimaginable sorrow in so many of LA’s neighborhoods and we don’t admit that we’re anti gang?

Yes, of course, there is no room for the kind of demonizing language used by the cops in the bad old days of gang enforcement during the late ’80’s through the mid-’90’s.. “War on gangs”….”NHI—no human involved…” That sort of thing.

But not demonizing gang members doesn’t mean mean we start tiptoeing around and giving gangs any kind of tacit stamp of approval.

No one was clearer on that concept than the man whom they called the godfather of the Crips—Tookie Williams. In the memoir I just reviewed, in the children’s books he wrote, in the speeches he gave via telephone to classrooms full of kids, he didn’t just preach peace in the streets, he preached against kids joining gangs. Pure and simple. He preached against the terrible pain gangs caused.

In fact, on the website that friends and supporters set up for Williams during the last years of his life, Tookie went a step further and apologized at length for forming the Crips. Here’s a clip:

…..So today I apologize to you all – the children of America and South Africa — who must cope every day with dangerous street gangs. I no longer participate in the so-called gangster lifestyle, and I deeply regret that I ever did…..”

How much more direct could the man be?

Listen, I have three wonderful godchildren who are the kids of former gang members, and there scores of homeboys and homegirls whose friendships have made my life a thousand times richer. But am I against gangs? Hell, yes. I’ve been to more than 30 gang funerals. How could I not be?

As Father Greg Boyle said recently when we discussed the subject, “Ask anybody in the neighborhoods most affected by gangs to close their eyes and describe what a healthy community looks like. Not one of them describes a community with gangs in it. Not one.”

Not even, he said, the gang members themselves describe a healthy community with gangs in it.

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P.S. In case you’re interested, you’ll find an excerpt from the review after the jump:
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This video is so good…. it may actually get you out on the picket lines in solidarity.

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