OKAY, FIRST THE BOOKS:

The LA Times Festival of Books takes over the UCLA campus this weekend. All day Saturday and Sunday seventy or eighty thousand people will show up at UCLA to attend author panels and readings scheduled every hour from 10 am until 4 pm on eighteen different stage and lecture halls.

It’s all free. And it’s exceptionally cool, I promise you.

I’m on a Saturday panel at 10 am called “Nonfiction from the Streets” moderated by Jill Leovy (the Homicide Blog) with Miles Corwin (The Killing Season and And Still We Rise) and a new author named DaShaun Morris who has written a memoir about his time as a Blood gangster.

But ours is only one of many panels that are worth checking out.

At noon you can see famous LA mystery novelist, Michael Connelly, interview legendary LA police procedural novelist, Joe Wambaugh. (Damn. I’m going to that!)

At 3 PM LA Observed’s Kevin Roderick moderates an intriguing line up of writers for a panel called, “California, the Great Experiment.”

Come on down and see us on Saturday. Or failing that, just come on down. Whatever else the LA Times does or does not do right, it gives the residents of LA this fabulous gift once a year when the book fair rolls around.

***********************************************************************************

RADIO
Saturday at noon, Miles and I will be on KPFK’s Deadline LA (90.7 FM)—talking about the panel and the book fair.

Bookmark to:

Perhaps in an effort to regain their raggedy collective dignity regarding the memoir hoax, The New York Times returned to the well for a third day of coverage on the story. The most recent article quotes, among other people, Connie Rice.

Evidently in addition to falsifying the narrative, author Margaret Seltzer set up a phony foundation that she claimed was helping “to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens”—but it turned out not to exist.

(This came to light when it was found that the gang experts that faux memoirist Margaret Seltzer said were on her board of directors, had never heard of her.)

Here’s what Connie said:

Constance L. Rice, a co-director of the Los Angeles office of Advancement Project, a civil rights advocacy group, who wrote a report last year about reducing gang violence for the Los Angeles City Council, said that there were 50,000 to 80,000 gang members in Los Angeles County, and it was always possible that Ms. Seltzer worked with some of them. But Ms. Rice said that she did not know Ms. Seltzer or her foundation and noted that, as a white woman, Ms. Seltzer would have likely stood out in most neighborhoods of South-Central Los Angeles.

Ms. Rice said it was just as likely that Ms. Seltzer had taken her inspiration from television and movies. “She’s been watching too much of ‘The Shield,’ ” said Ms. Rice, referring to the rough-edged police drama on FX set in Los Angeles. “All you have to do is go to a couple of movies or watch ‘The Wire,’ ” the Baltimore street drama on HBO. “You could riff off that forever,” she said.

Okay, so much for literary gossip:

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a California Appellate Court ruled —stupidly—on Wednesday that the parents who are homeschooling approximately 200,000 of the state’s kids, may no longer do so without a possessing a teaching credential. The LA Times covered it, but the San Francisco Chron has a longer, better story.

And who do you imagine was (predictably) THRILLED by the ruling? According to the Chron, it’s the director of the CTA, the state’s largest teachers union.

“We’re happy,” said Lloyd Porter, who is on the California Teachers Association board of directors. “We always think students should be taught by credentialed teachers, no matter what the setting.”

Fortunately, the California Supreme Court, not Mr. Porter, will have the last say on all this. Let’s up the Supremes behave themselves.

Bookmark to:

For those wishing to briefly distract themselves from the dreary realization that the Democratic primary battles could easily continue until June 3 and June 7 (when Montana and Puerto Rico, respectively have their contests), Fishbowl LA has an entertaining compilation of the various things being written, broadcast, blogged and snarked about Love and Consequences, the white-girl-turned-gangster-turned-NY Times-reviewed-memoirist hoax.

By the way, if we have to live through three more months of Dem primary brickbat throwing, does this mean that we will be treated to those same three months filled with the cast of Saturday Night Live shamelessly stumping for Hillary Clinton each week? Or now that they’ve convinced a sheep-like press corps that it’s been way too mean to Hillary and way too nice to Barack, will they tone it down?

Just curious.

Bookmark to:

I’ll be on Patt Morrison’s KPCC show (89.3 FM) at around 2 pm talking about the story that broke in the New York Times this morning about a “memoir” titled Love and Consequences by Margaret P. Jones.

The book, which the NY Times reviewed in swoony terms around a week ago, followed by an equally giddy feature a few days later, tells a tale of a badly-abused, half-white, half-Native American Jones who was raised by a South LA foster family and, by her early teens, was dealing drugs for Bloods gangsters. Jones writes about how she received her first gun, a .38, for her 13th birthday, how her foster brother was shot to death by Crips, how she was healed by the love of her foster mother, “Big Mom,” and how “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot.”

Naturally, there was talk of the sensational memoir, published by Riverhead books, being optioned for a movie.

There was only one teensy-weensy problem. “Jones” was not an abused foster kid at all but a upstreet Sherman Oaks white girl named Margaret Seltzer who was educated, not in the failing public schools of South LA, but at ritzy and private Campbell Hall of Encino.

The fraud came to light when Seltzer’s sister saw the author’s photo in the paper and called the publisher to blow the whistle.

Miz Seltzer, who says she….uh… knows some gang members, insists she wrote the book because “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk.”

Right.

The real question is less why Seltzer fabricated the tale (we can kinda guess at that) than why New York literary types were so eager to swallow it unquestioningly, hook-line-and-sinker.

There are, by the way, legitimate voices in East and South LA who grew up during the worst of the city’s gang wars are now (like Seltzer) in their 30’s, and have talent and something important to say. But unlike Seltzer they don’t have private school educations, thus, in most cases, their talent is less readily packaged and still needs more nurturing.

Actually the white Blood girl hoax issue brings up a host of intriguing questions….some of which will likely get discussed on Patt’s show today. So tune in or download later—and let me know what you think.

Bookmark to:

Out of all the homages and the farewell essays pursuant to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto there are two that have stayed with me, one written by my friend Amy Wilentz, who went to school with Benazir, and kept in touch with her over the years. (Actually, Amy knew much of the family and even dated Benazir’s brother, Murtaza, Fatima Bhutto’s father, who was himself murdered in 1966, likely with Benazir’s complicity at least in the cover-up afterward.)

Amy writes in the Los Angeles Times of the last time she saw Benazir, 10 days before Bhutto’s return to Pakistan. It is a close-up and poignant glimpse of the personal woman behind the dynastic juggernaught.

It was nighttime as we spoke in her enormous fortress of a house in a gated community in Dubai. Outside, in the side yard behind walls and barriers, the guard dog barked. In the front receiving room was a little library stuffed with paperbacks, titles such as “Facial Workout,” “The Little Book of Stress,” “Eat to Beat Your Age” and Deepak Chopra’s “How to Know God.”

[snip]

On walls everywhere in her Dubai house were enlarged photographs of Zulfikar Bhutto. As prime minister, Benazir had been notoriously high-handed, but she had an unpretentious manner in private. For an Oxford and Harvard graduate, she was unembarrassed by her addiction to bestsellers, blockbusters and psychobabble books. When I asked if she was frightened of going back to Pakistan, she was matter-of-fact: “For all the lows in my life, those self-help books helped me survive, I can tell you. There’s a focus on the present; don’t worry about tomorrow. … When the time comes that I have to die, I’ll die.” When I left her late that night, she seemed lonely, standing on the doorstep in a pool of light, waving goodbye. She had lost so much in her struggle to become great, to take on what she thought of as her father’s mantle.

And then there is the essay that all Bhutto watchers have been waiting for, written by Benazir Bhutto’s harshest critic, the newspaper columnist who called Benazir the most dangerous woman in Pakistan. I’m talking of course about her niece, Fatima.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

THINGS TO DO, READ, LISTEN TO, CONTEMPLATE….ON A SUNNY LATE SEPTEMBER SUNDAY (AND MONDAY)

NOTE: AT SOME POINT THIS POST GOT YANKED OFF LINE for reasons that remain mysterious. Ghosts in the machine. So I’ve deleted the West LA Book fair part of the post as, sadly, it’s too late for that, and have replaced it with a TRUE must read flagged by WLA poster, “LA Resident.”

*****************************************************************************************

1. DWP RAKES IT IN (SERIOUSLY!)

Feel you’re not earning quite enough as a teacher/writer/registered nurse/university professor? Drop whatever you’re doing and apply for a job at the DWP. The first two paragraphs of this well-researched Daily News story make clear the reasons:

As the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power seeks a hefty taxpayer rate hike, a Daily News review of salary data shows the average utility worker makes $76,949 a year - or nearly 20 percent more than the average civilian city worker.

More than 1,140 of the utility’s employees - or about 13 percent - take home more than $100,000 a year. And General Manager Ron Deaton, who is on medical leave, rakes in $344,624 a year - making him the city’s highest- paid worker.

But while the article is good, the Daily News has gone one better and provided a searchable database that allows you to look up the salary of every single DWP worker—by name or by job.

OKay, I’ll bite. I just randomly looked up “Assistant Communications Cable Worker.” Salary: $73,414.08

(Newsflash, dudes, if any of you owe back child support and have been pleading poorhouse, you’re SOL now!)

But these guys (cable wranglers seem to be guys) are only assistants, so out of curiosity I tried “Air Conditioner Mechanic.” Alright! Salary, a healthy: $82,058.40

Hmmm. What might be further up the food chain? Maybe Assistant Director Information Systems? Yep, jackpot! There are two of them:

ENG,CLIFFORD KAI ASST DIR INFO SYS $149,459.04
TOWNSEND,STEPHEN M ASST DIR INFO SYS $164,325.60

Hey, what’s this? Street Tree Superintendent? Wonder what he or she makes? And what the hell does a Street Tree Superintendent do anyway? In any case, here’s what they’re paid (and again there are two):

DEAL,THOMAS A STREET TREE SUPERINTENDENT $125,885.52
GARCIA,ROBERT STREET TREE SUPERINTENDENT $101,309.76

Then, just for the heck of it, I tried Executive Assistant to the General Manager, which is still further up the food chain, but nonetheless an assistant, when you get right down to it. In any case, at the DWP there are eight such people. Here they are together with their salaries:

ANDERSON,RENETTE D. EXEC ASST TO THE GM $197,065.44
GARRETT,BARBARA KAYE EXEC ASST TO THE GM $197,065.44
PASKETT ALBRECHT,LORRAINE ANTOINETTE EXEC ASST TO THE GM $186,667.20
RAMALLO,JOSEPH MANUEL EXEC ASST TO THE GM $167,478.48
RUBALCAVA,ADRIANA EXEC ASST TO THE GM $176,811.84
SICKLER,ALBERT DAVID EXEC ASST TO THE GM $197,065.44
ULM,DAVID HENRY EXEC ASST TO THE GM $197,065.44
WONG,GARY E EXEC ASST TO THE GM $186,667.20

Amazing. (And not in a good way.)

*******************************************************************************************

2. THE BOSS TALKS:

The New York Times’ A.O. Scott has a nice, up-close-and-personal interview/encounter with Bruce Springsteen that’s fun to read for the Boss-o-philes among us (and maybe even for you nonbelievers). The occasion is a new Springsteen album that is the first with the full E Street band to be released since the post-9/11 “The Rising.”

So why is Bruce’s new album a social issue? Because of the lyric content silly! Springsteen is not a happy camper about some of the things he sees going on in these United States right. He has written about what he perceives on this CD. Some of the songs are plain old, E-Street rockers. But some have a lot more going on, much of it subtly referencing issue like the war in Iraq. For example, below are the lyrics to “Gypsy Biker,” a snapshot of life, riddled with private grief and loss.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

Here we are at the second anniversary of the devastation—natural and man-made—of the city of New Orleans. The storm made landfall south of town at 6:10 a.m. Aug. 29, 2005.

Now, two years in, perhaps the most emotionally vivid account of those terrible days, and of the ghastly failures and neglect that followed, is not written by a news reporter, but by Louisiana-located mystery novelist, James Lee Burke, who sets his most recent book, The Tin Roof Blowdown, against the backdrop of the period during and immediately after Hurricane Katrina.

I recommend the book as a great end-of-summer read, but—because of the interweave of the hurricane into the tapestry of the narrative—it’s also much more than that.

Burke is known for his ability to write about his characters’ struggles against sin and for redemption with a poetic and Faulknerian flair. But, this time, his prose is also laced with torrents of sorrow and rage at what has happened to the city that he often used to describe as “The Great Whore of Babylon.” Now he writes, ““New Orleans was a song that went under the waves.”

He poses the essential questions of the storm’s aftermath, not through political tirades, but through simple scenes occurring offhandedly in the narrative, like one in which Burke’s shadow-haunted protagonist/cop, Dave Robicheaux, comes upon an old man trolling through the rubble of his house looking for his drowned wife: “How come nobody come for us?” the man says, his words soft, directed everywhere and nowhere.

Or to give you another, more empassioned example, here’s how the book opens:

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

Late Wednesday night I heard that the poet, Liam Rector, killed himself earlier in the day. He used a shotgun. His wife Tree Swenson was asleep in the next room.

Liam was bearded, bear-like, quirky, with an extravagant, super-size-it personality. A person about whom everyone whispered, most times with overwhelming affection, other times…well, let’s just say he was an easy target for gossip because he said what he thought—good, bad, and occasionally truly strange. He wanted to provoke comment—and he did. Inevitably. Gleefully.

He was also brilliant, and had enough energy to light two medium-sized cities. Professionally, Liam was a prizewinning poet, who had taught at Columbia, The New School and Emerson College in Boston. He’d also been the executive director of the National Endowment for the Arts, and for the American Academy of Poets.

I met him only recently in the context of the Graduate Writing Seminars at Bennington College which Liam founded and directed. I’d heard about the program from my friend Aimee Liu, the novelist and nonfiction writer, who’d just finished getting her masters degree there. She said she loved the whole two years, that the faculty was stellar, and that she really believed it had kicked her writing up a notch or three. I should just do it, she said. Go. Figure a way.

So, I applied…at my age….(after decades of professional writing and reporting—and, for the past few years, teaching)! Oh, what the hell? I thought. I wanted somebody else to kick my butt, creatively speaking, the way I was doing for my students. I needed to be pushed out of my comfort zone again. I was working on a book anyway, and I hoped to do what Amy had done—shove my writing up a notch or three.

Bennington was the only place I considered. Although the Liam-created MFA program had the reputation for being rigorous, it was also what is called a “low-residency.”. This means you do most of your work through monthly packets exchanged via snail mail with a series of advisors—combined with a ridiculous amount of reading. And then, twice a year, the Bennington people make you show up on campus for ten days—once in the winter, once in the spring.

My first residency was this past June. I flew to Bennington, Vermont, to stay in a drafty, white clapboard dorm, featuring lumpy pillows, dinner napkin-sized bath towels, and showers down the hall. I shared dorm life with 29 or so other poets, novelists, and nonfiction writers—ages 21 to 62. Our newby group included additional So Cal types like novelist, Tod Goldberg, his fiction-writing wife, Wendy Duren, and actor/writer, Rider Strong. Plus there were the returning writers, there for their second, third and fourth residency. For ten days the lot of us did nothing but eat, drink, and breathe literature and writing —all as orchestrated by Liam Rector.

It was glorious.

I particularly remember how, at our introductory meeting with Liam, at one point he roared to us that it was essential for all writers to watch the “Always be closing” scene from David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross —the movie version. And so, off went the lights and we dutifully watched the scene in which the Alec Baldwin character browbeats his already psychically battered salesmen in order to inculcate them with idea that they must “always be closing.”

I took it to mean: Never save your best for later. Give every shred of what you’ve got right now. Take no prisoners. Employ all three of the aforementioned as often as humanly possible, or don’t f*cking bother!

Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark to:

Photo by Yo Venice

If this isn’t the definitive news story on the Theresa Duncan tragedy, it’s getting mighty close.

Just as she promised on WLA’s comment pages, Kate Coe, who knew Duncan, has written an extremely well-reported story for the LA Weekly on the last years and months of Duncan’s life.

Certainly there’s more to report and write, as it doesn’t answer all of the questions. But it answers quite a lot.

Warning: The article isn’t cheery reading.

Here are a few excerpts:

Things looked incredibly promising in New York. Duncan was tapped to write and direct Closet Cases, an animated TV series for Oxygen Media, and a pilot for Left of the Dial, a TV series for VH1. She was awarded a grant for a new film called You Got the Look that would explore “popular myths of the outlaw, sex, glamour, and danger, while engaging notions of femininity and class.” In 2001, Variety announced that Duncan had sold a pitch to Fox Searchlight — Alice Underground — and would “pen the script” about teenage girls who kidnap a rock star. A month later, Variety reported Duncan was in talks with Fox to direct a feature based on Francesca Lia Block’s cult novels, the Weetzie Bat series.

But the reality was not nearly as glamorous as the image. Block’s agent, Lucy Stille at Paradigm, told the Weekly that Duncan was never formally attached to a Block project — the Weetzie Bat “talks” were just that. You Got the Look exists only as a proposal. And Alice Underground failed to materialize at Fox….

Art dealer and gallery owner Christine Nichols, who had known the couple for years, told the Weekly that Duncan sometimes found it hard to see Blake working with anyone but her. Their relationship was so intertwined, Nichols says, “You were either in complete agreement with everything they said or you were an enemy.”

According to Nichols and other friends who spoke to the Weekly only off record, Duncan began blaming her lack of success on the Church of Scientology, saying that the church was influencing “the studios.” Duncan accused her skeptical friends of stealing hair from her hairbrush to send to the Scientology Center, Nichols says, and confided to Nichols, “I really don’t have any friends.”

On her blog on May 20, she wrote that author and USC research scholar Reza Aslan was a “Muslim American seeming Homeland Security agent,” and blamed Scientologists for graffiti and a dead cat in her old Venice neighborhood.

Aslan told the Weekly that whenever he appeared on TV, she contacted him with strange rants. He gave Duncan’s threatening messages to his lawyer because “I wanted someone else to know about this.” Aslan knew her for years, and “she had always said kind of crazy, paranoid things,” but “it just got worse and worse.

(For the record, Reza Aslan is the nicest of men.)

And there’s a lot more....

I had a very close friend in college who was one of the most beautiful, and—in certain ways—brilliant people I’ve ever met. Creative, original, wildly funny …..and empathic to an almost eerie degree. She eventually had a full on psychotic break. Reading Theresa’s writing, and some of Coe’s account, reminds me of my friend when she was going off the rails— but none of us really understood how serious her distress truly was.

She’s dead now too.

What heartbreak. What waste.

*************
UPDATE: The LA Times’ Chris Lee has just now put up another very good piece on the couple that, in many ways, serves as a second bookend to Coe’s, by illuminating more about Jeremy. It will appear in tomorrow’s paper.

Bookmark to:

Much is being written about the suicide of multi-talented Venice filmmaker, writer, and blogger, Theresa Duncan, who killed herself in New York on July 10, followed by the probable suicide of her longtime boyfriend, rising-star artist Jeremy Blake, 35. The police mention pills and a long explanatory note in relation to Duncan’s death. As for Blake, it seems that a week after finding his lover’s body at the NY apartment they were renting while she worked on a promising-sounding new film, the artist simply took off his clothes, set down his wallet, and walked into the sea.

He too left a note—-saying he couldn’t imagine living without her.

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed has been particularly on top of the story.

I didn’t know Duncan; only knew of her. But it cannot be other than terribly confusing, disturbing and sorrow-producing when two people as gifted—and as physically beautiful, frankly— as Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake decide to precipitously and irrevocably remove themselves from this world.

You can find news stories here and here and here.

But, for me anyway, a better way to apprehend at least a sliver of the creative loss that has occurred is to take a look at these witty and wonderful videos produced by Duncan. I found them posted on YouTube.

They are from her “Closet Cases” series.

NOTE: FOR SOME REASON I’m having trouble with video embeds today, so I’ve taken them out. Instead here are the links to the two videos. The first is Closet Cases: Slice of Bread

The second is called Closet Cases: The Dred Case

(I particularly loved the first.)

Post Script:

The New York Post story quotes a friend of the couple, who explains how out-of-character the suicides seemed for both Duncan and Blake.

“Suicide would never be on their to-do list,” he said.

Bookmark to: