Okay, yeah, we all knew that all the drama about how maybe Eli Broad wasn’t going to put the museum to house his art collection downtown after all, because maybe Santa Monica (or Beverly Hills) was going to be nicer to him….was simply a negotiating ploy in getting what he wanted from The Grand Avenue Authority et al….but we’re happy anyway.

Santa Monica’s fine (and, hey, it’s closer to my house) but no one believed for a second that Broad would have wished to let go of the majestic cache that the 2nd & Grand Avenue spot just south of Disney Hall would give him.

It also helps that the nearly $8 million in lease money he must pay to the Community Redevelopment Agency will be used to build affordable housing downtown—a fact that is much more in keeping with Broad’s image of himself as a socially-conscious philanthopist.

So, now that the soap opera of dealing is over, it is very, very good news that our once moribund downtown area will have another beautiful and architecturally intriguing space that anyone and everyone can enjoy. (Broad has chosen as his architects the New York firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro.)

“This is our gift to the city that has been so good to us.” Broad said in the official release. “We want to make great works of contemporary art accessible to the broadest public, and we can think of no better location than in the center of the contemporary art capital of the world.”

Well, yeah. Exactly.

Monday night, Los Angeles Magazine held a gathering they called a Women’s Leadership Reception. it was co-hosted by Editor-in-Chief Mary Melton and Publisher Amy Saralegui along with City Controller Wendy Greuel.

The women present were an eclectic mix. They were from government (like Greuel, city planning director Gail Goldberg, and longtime California Democratic powerhouse, Roz Wyman) from journalism—(Director of the Annenberg School of Journalism, Geneva Overholser, columnist/radio host, Patt Morrison, KPPC’s Shirley Jahad, KCET exec Val Zavala) —from literature and the arts…from the nonprofit sector and, well, from a lot of varied fields– County Counsel Andrea Ordin, L.A. Conservancy chief Linda Dishman, author Gina Nahai. However, unlike most such gatherings, although all of us knew a few people, no one but perhaps the LA Mag editors who did the inviting, seemed to know a lot.

It took about fifteen minutes of collective shyness before everyone ventured out to talk to those whom they’d not met.

A lot of intriguing and decidedly non-small-talkish conversations seemed to emerge from the mingling (even though accessories were occasionally mentioned).

For instance, I heard from Emmy winning composer Laura Karpman that she was in the middle of writing an “multi-media opera called The One Ten—about…well… the 110 Freeway. It seems that the 110 turns 70 in December of this year. So to commemorate the anniversary, the LA Opera offered Karpman a quirky commission to create an opera about it. (Laura and librettists M.G. Lord and Shannon Halwes blog about their creative process here.)

Wendy Greuel veered easily between topics that included her newest audit (more on that another time) and and the fact she and Wyman were two of the three women ever to get pregnant and have a child while serving in LA public office. (The third was Gloria Molina, said Greuel.)

“I’m glad she took on the DWP,” I heard two different women whisper when they spied Greuel.

Stephanie Stone, the Vice Chair of LA County’s Veterans Advisory Commission, told me disturbingly that according to the most recent estimate, 25 percent—likely more—of the women soldiers returning from Iraq or Afghanistan, have been sexually abused during their time in the service. One out of four.

(I’ll be following up on that story.)

I heard from Elena Stern of Para Los Ninos about the desperate need for psychological counseling among the children living on Skid Row whom her agency serves.

I talked with Literary agent Bonnie Nadell, who was the longtime agent of the late David Foster Wallace, about whether she thought that D.T. Max, who wrote the long, unutterably sad, but relievingly informative story about DFW in the New Yorker, was the right person to do the upcoming biography of Wallace. (She did. She thought he’d be good. And, since she’d known both men for over 20 years, I figured she was in likely the best position to judge the matter.)

Mary Melton also mentioned, when she gave her welcoming speech, that Roz Wyman was the youngest LA City Council person ever. (She was first elected in 1953 at the age of 22.) Mary also said that Roz was instrumental in bringing the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1957, figuring that LA needed its own sports team.

And so it was that, as the longest night of the year unfolded—along with myriad conversations—everyone seemed to settle into the pleasant realization that it was nice (even if merely for a change) for just girls to get together with just girls…in LA. (And a kick-ass group of grrrllls it was.)

Thanks to LA Magazine for making it possible.

After 8 seasons, Monday night was the last night of the series, “24.”

Most times, no matter its popularity, a TV series is just a TV series. But in the case of this TV show, when the series’ main character, Jack Bauer, was referenced more than once on the floor of Congress, and Bauer’s actions were trotted out as an exhibit A in the middle of a panel discussion about torture and terrorism law, by none other than Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, and then in 2007, the Dean of West Point, Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, along with some FBI interrogators and representatives of Human Rights First, traveled to LA to ask the show’s creative team to tone down the torture scenes because of the impact they were having both on troops in the field and America’s reputation abroad. ….I think we can safely say that we’re in some other kind of realm that transcends the “it’s only a TV show” trope.

The series showrunner and exec-producer, Howard Gordon, was on Fresh Air on Monday and had his own answer to the controversy:

“To say that we’ve been some … mouthpiece for some political point of view — it’s not only specious — but I promise you, it is insane. Any fly on the wall and anyone who’s been there would tell you the same. So unfortunately, look — the show is a show for one thing. It’s a thriller in the vein of Bourne Identity or Rambo or Dirty Harry. And the hero finds the bad guy and shakes out of him where the bomb is. And again, the real-time scenario lent itself really well to that. Frankly, for the first five years, I don’t think you could find a single article or op-ed piece that used the word ‘torture’ or described that this was somehow morally repugnant or corrosive or anything. I think what happened was, when Abu Ghraib happened and Guantanamo happened — the show certainly benefited from some kind of post-9/11 wish fulfillment; you had a guy who cut to the chase, who did whatever was necessary, and again there was some wish fulfillment involved — I do think the show experienced some of the blowback. We did understand that the climate had changed, because of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, it had changed. … [A]nd it put us into a conundrum. Honestly, at the end of Season 6 — where Jack had been acting a certain way — we had a choice: Either we renounce the series and admit we’re a bunch of torture-mongering, morally corrosive torture pornographers or we find a way of confronting this issue and this changed world that we’re in. And, in a strange way, it gave us fodder for the seventh season.”

Yes, well…

As a die-hard “24″ fan I have long been ambivalent about some of the show’s script choices, but have hung in faithfully because the delights of the series seemed always to outweigh its unsettling downsides.

(That is with the exception of 2007’s notorious Season 6, which went completely and creepily off the rails, both in terms of its over embrace of brutality, and frankly, in terms of the quality of the writing in general. But then, as Gordon said, it recovered in Season 7 where it articulated some of the moral issues around torture, plus had some very nifty plot twists, so all was forgiven.

Or sort of forgiven. It was somewhat vexing that both Fox and Friends and Glenn Beck—whose moral compasses, such as they ever were, seem to have long ago rusted—became so ooozily enamored of the show in Season 7, that they failed to perceive its ambiguities and still managed to use it as ajustification for torture not a caution against it.)

And, nearly any pronouncement from former “24″ producer, and co-creator, Joel Surnow, was enough to make some of us wonder if we were, oh, I don’t know, risking the health of our immortal souls by watching the show at all. But Surnow is thankfully long gone.

Now the last few hours of Season 8 have taken us into what is, in many ways, the darkest place of all.

In hour 20, we had to watch as Jack coldly executed the latest CTU insider traitor, Dana Walsh. (“24″ has pioneered a whole new class of evil broads—13 female villains in total. They have ranged from the queen of them all, Nina Myers, through the very, very bad first lady, Sherry Palmer, to this season’s Dana Walsh, who managed to project a sort of sloe-eyed, sexy spawn of Satan look that became its own kind of special effect.)

In hour 21, there was the matter of Jack disemboweling the Russian sniper/assassin who killed FBI agent and Bauer paramour, Renee Walker—AKA Jack’s Last Chance for Happiness. Now most of us might honestly have wanted to disembowel the guy too, but most of us also, I trust, would have stopped short of it (even if there was the vague justification of getting the guy’s recently swallowed cell phone sim card).

Hour 22 featured Jack clad in an Imperial storm troopers-like outfit as he prepared to kidnap the divinely Nixonian ex-President Charles Logan who, after seeing the scarily helmeted Bauer approach in the distance, screams in high hysteria to his secret service agent “That’s Jack Bauer, he’s coming to get me!” (A great “24″ moment, as were nearly all of actor Gregory Itzin’s scenes this season.)

Finally, there was the very last two hours—which I am reluctant to give away here if you haven’t yet watched the finale. I can tell you that the poet Rumi was quoted well in a crucial moment of foreshadowing—and that, in the end, everything came down to Jack and Chloe O’Brien—Mary Lynn Rajskub’s sour-faced and fabulously courageous character creation.—which was exactly as it should be.

I can also tell you that, for me anyway, the finale was a worthy two hours with which to cap the best of the eight seasons—complicated, multi-shaded, possessed of the courage of its convictions, and fraught with the knowledge that cleaving to what is just and right and true is the only worthwhile path, no matter the cost (and that there will be a cost), but when the cleaving grows too single-minded and brittle, it has its own soul corroding moral dangers.

So what, in the end did it all mean? Was it only a TV show as its producers say? Was it a pop cultural reflection of our desire for good and evil to be clearly demarcated with bright, shining lines in a manner that real life rarely provides? Or did it start to actually affect in troubling ways the culture it purported to merely reflect in fantastical broad strokes (with no meal times or bathroom breaks)?

Or was it all of the above—and, on occasions, like Monday night, satisfyingly more.

I’ll go with the latter.

What do you think?

DAVE EGGERS’ PRIZES AND QUIRKS ON LAT BOOK PRIZE NIGHT

As most of you know, the LA Times Book Awards were this past Friday night, and the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books took place on Saturday and Sunday at UCLA. 125,000 people were expected at the LATFOB and judging from the crowds I saw both days, it is likely that the book fest hit its mark or more.

But first the awards: the full list of the winners may be found here. (For those of you looking for a good reading list, the lists of winners and finalists are a great place to start. I’ve already downloaded on to my iPod the audible version of the First Fiction winner, Phillipp Meyer’s American Rust)

I was a judge for the category of Current Interest—along with my wonderful and wise colleagues Henry Weinstein and Bill Boyarsky, The three of us read a preposterous number of books, many of which were very deserving. (A few, not so much.)

We finally narrowed it down to the five below, all of which featured excellent writing and reporting and dealt topics of consequence.

“Columbine” by Dave Cullen
“Zeitoun” by Dave Eggers
“Strength in What Remains” by Tracy Kidder
“Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide” by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sharon WuDunn
“The Healing of America: The Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and Fairer Healthcare” by T.R. Reid

The winner was Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun-–my personal favorite and a book I can recommend unhesitatingly to any of you. It’s a great story, meticulously reported, and possessed of the grace and velocity of a good novel.

Eggers also got a newly created Innovator’s Award–which “recognizes the people and institutions that are doing cutting edge work to bring books, publishing and storytelling into the future, whether in terms of new business models, new technologies or new applications of narrative art.”

(For the details go here.)

However, while assuredly very deserving of the latter honor, Eggers turned out not be be your average techno nerd/writer. In the course of accepting the two awards, Eggers blurted that the only way he got any reading done was to completely unplug the Internet at his house. “I only go online twice a day,” he said. Even then, in order to get a WiFi signal, he takes his laptop and drives to the parking lot of a local carpet store, and steals their WiFi.

When he and I spoke later on in the evening, we talked about the unplugging issue and I mentioned in passing that, unplugging aside, I thought that the iPhone app for his magazine “McSweeney’s was particularly good.

Eggers winced. “I’ve never seen it,” (said Mr. Innovation).

Me: “What?! You’re kidding.”

Eggers: (apologetically) I saw the drawing. I mean, I thought the drawing was good.

Me: No really, that’s bad.

Eggers: Probably.

[Here's a demo of the app.]

Yet as a writer, a publisher, and as an innovative promoter of the written word-–from basic literacy to literature— Eggers is very, very good. As LA Times Book Review editor David Ulin said to me after he interviewed Dave Eggers on Saturday at the Book Festival—he’s the real deal.

Every year on the last weekend in April, the Los Angeles Times gives a stupendous gift to the city.

The LA Times Festival of Books, is held on the UCLA campus where around 450 authors will read, discuss, recite, answer questions, spin stories, tell tales.

And its all free.

Whatever your literary pleasure, there’s an event for you. You’ll find:

….noirish and proceduralist mystery writers (Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, T. Jefferson Parker, Elizabeth George)

…..wise journalistic scribes (Marc Cooper, Dave Cullen, Barry Siegel, John Buntin)

….historians and cultural commentators (Reza Aslan, Richard Reeves, David Shields)

….nonfiction adventurers (Sebastian Junger, Chuck Bowden, Deanne Stillman, Amy Wilentz)

…..erudite & humorful fiction whizzes (Tod Goldberg, Seth Greenland)

…..marvelous memoirists (Samantha Dunn, Tim Page, Dinah Lenney, Rachel Resnick, Hope Edelman, Jesse Katz)

…..witty and wonderful poets (Amy Gerstler, Mark Doty, Wanda Coleman)

……a pile of famous novelists—fiction and non (T.C. Boyle, Dave Eggars, Yann Martel, Terry McMillan, Paul Harding, Bret Easton Ellis)

…..plus stellar children’s authors, cooking stars, and the amazing and never-to-be-missed-if-you-can-help it, Father Greg Boyle in conversation with Warren Olney…..and a zillion other cool people and activities.

For instance at 12:30 PM on Saturday, I’m running a panel with:

Peter Schrag, whose wonderful Not Fit for Our Society sheds light on our hot-button immigration debates by looking at the nativist movements and immigration politics of the past.

Miriam Pawel, who has written, The Union of Their Dreams, an insightful and controversial book on Cesar Chavez’s farm worker movement, showing it from angles not seen before, which some which had not been brought to light.

Richard Rayner whose A Bright and Guilty Place explores the dark and light that has always entwined through the history of Los Angeles through a high profile, nearly mythic scandal of the 1920s.

We’re going to chat about what these explorations of the past can teach us about the problems of the present and the possibilities for the future (or something of that nature).

So y’all com’on down.

It’s impossible not to delight in someone who is just so fantastically good.

And for your viewing pleasure, here’s the the Double McTwist 1260 in training.

PS:Cheers for Lindsey Vonn too!

Zach Behrens of LAist hung in to cover Monday’s 11-hour marathon budget committee meeting and reports on what cuts the committee recommended, and which it turned down flat.

Thus far LA’s Cultural Affairs Department, which was scheduled for the ax, was thankfully spared. (The full City Council will look at the budget on Wednesday.)

But, judging by his Tweets, by meeting’s end Zach was getting a little punch drunk. (Can’t say that I blame him.)

On Sunday, the LA Times reported that the Menifee Unified School District, a school district located in Riverside County, has pulled a book from all school library shelves because of its racy content. And what lust-drenched book might the Menifee school folks have found morally problematic? Tropic of Cancer?— Henry Miller’s 1934-published novel that, while a bit long-in-the-tooth now, is still a perennial favorite when it comes to outraged shelf-yanking

Nope, the tome in question is the Merriam-Webster’s 10th edition dictionary. Its offense? It includes somewhere in its pages the term “oral sex.”

Evidently one—count ‘em, one—- parent complained so, rather than choosing a thoughtful and measured response to calm the histrionic parent, the local district officials instead swooped in and purged all the district’s schools of the dictionary. (Without consulting the school board, I might add.)

Let me repeat that. School officials removed the Webster’s dictionary from every library in the district on account of the dictionary’s “sexually graphic” content.

The Press Enterprise has a story which features the district’s explanation for the book banning:

School officials will review the dictionary to decide if it should be permanently banned because of the “sexually graphic” entry, said district spokeswoman Betti Cadmus…..

“It’s just not age appropriate,” said Cadmus, adding that this is the first time a book has been removed from classrooms throughout the district.

“It’s hard to sit and read the dictionary, but we’ll be looking to find other things of a graphic nature,” Cadmus said.

Well, as it happens, I have a rather substantial pile of dictionaries in my personal library, so perhaps I can aid Ms. Cadmus in her search. I don’t have the the 10th edition of Merriam-Webster, but I do have two other Webster’s dictionaries among my array of reference books, both of which are approximately the size of bedside tables. Let me just haul ‘em out and take a look.

Okay, neither of my Webster’s volumes contain the term “oral sex.” (Oral herpes, yes, oral sex, no.)

As one might imagine, they do, however, include the term “sex,” (which would logically seem to be the offending part of the term so objectionable to the Menifee parent). And, in a random (but enthusiastic) search of Webster’s 2nd edition (first published in 1955) I found that it also includes words like orgasm, prostitute, orgy, sodomy—and sodomitical, a word I didn’t previously know existed but toward which I developed an instant affection, so much so that I have now vowed to work it into sentences as often as possible, as in, “My dear Ms. Cadmus, perhaps I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’m rather concerned that the new Supreme Court decision—you know the one I mean, yes? It’s known as Citizens United— is going to have a distinctly sodomitical affect on the democratic process. What do you think?”

I find that my half-century old Webster’s also has a whole pile of other words and terms of which the vigilant Menifee-ites really should take note, things like chastity belt, condom, gonorrhea, pimp (“a go-between in illicit sexual affairs; especially a prostitute’s agent”) and dildo (“a device of rubber, etc. shaped like an erect penis, and used as a sexual stimulator: also spelled dildoe…”)

Frankly, I’d have found many, many more treasures for Ms. Cadmus and friends (really, try it yourself) but I had to stop because the dog was bugging me to go for a run.

Before I put on my running shoes, however, I did take the time to check to see if the good old 1955 Webster’s had within its august pages the word cunnilingus. Webster’s did.

(n [L., lit., from cunnus, vulva, and lingere, to lick] a sexual activity involving oral contact with the female genitals.)

It also had fellatio (n. [from L. fallatus p.p. of fellar, to suck] a sexual activity involving oral contact with the male genitals)—thus providing proof positive that the dictionary purgers at the Menifee Unified School District define the term “logic-phobic, anti-literate jackasses,”—which I did not find in the 2nd edition of Websters but, if it is not included in the 10th edition, I truly hope Webster’s will consider adding in the 11th edition, with a nice photo of the Menifee folks to illustrate.

Sadly, even if Webster should take my suggestion, those being pictured would never learn of the honor because, as my brief search has just demonstrated, if we follow the Menifee action out to its natural conclusion, we will have no dictionaries of any kind in our school libraries at all.

NOTE: More news in a while.

Bob Dylan once called him “the best ballad singer I’d ever heard in my life.” Anyone who once hears Liam Clancy sing Waltzing Matilda or The Green Fields of France will have trouble disputing the assessment.

Irish folk balladeer Liam Clancy, together with his two brothers, Tom and Paddy, and another Irishman named Tommy Makem, first became internationally famous in the early 1960’s when the American folk revival was in full swing. Liam’s emotionally expressive tenor together with the deeply poetic phrasings of Makem’s baritone, were well suited to the time. (Later Makem and Clancy became famous all over again as a duo.) Tom and Paddy died in 1990 and 1998, respectively. Tommy Makem died two years ago. Liam Clancy died Friday in County Cork of pulmonary fibrosis.

But we are left with their music and for that, like many, I am grateful.

(I am never without Makem and Clancy on my iPod. Why in the world would one want to be?)

Here is a nice tribute to Clancy on NPR.