In the middle of the panel called MEDIA: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE at Sunday’s LA Times Festival of Books, Marc Cooper made news—or at least mini-news—when he remarked in passing that the Sacramento Bee feels it does not have the staff to adequately cover the upcoming race for governor—at least the So Cal part of the race—so they are looking to partner with the Annenberg School of Journalism in the hope that they can use student reporters can fill in the gap.

Now keep in mind that the Bee has the largest number of reporters covering the state capitol of any California media outlet. So if they’re in trouble covering an issue of state government….even the So Cal part…. this is a sign that spoke loudly to the subject of the panel.

As yet, Marc said, no deals have been struck.

(NOTE TO SAC’TO BEE: as you are a (theoretically) a profit making enterprise, you have to pay any students whom you use. You know that, right?)

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THAT SAME FUTURE OF MEDIA PANEL was one of the festival’s big, sell-out events, with just as many people outside the auditorium, waiting in line in the hope of getting a seat, as those who were already seated.

The panel featured the aforementioned Marc Cooper, Arianna Huffington, Sharon Waxman (of the excellent new site covering entertainment news The Wrap), and Andrew Donohue, editor of the Voice of San Diego (the online newspaper that many see as one of the crucial new biz models). James Rainey, the LA Times media columnist was the moderator.

Before the panel started, the crowd was admonished that there could be “no recording” in the auditorium.

A bit later, Arianna remarked dryly that, at a panel about the future of media, “asking people not to record the session is absurd.” At this the crowd applauded vigorously.

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During the hour plus (the panel ran overtime), much was said on the subject of monitization—which is inevitably the BIG TOPIC for every one of these panels. Among some of the better remarks were the following:

Arianna said, in her deadpan Greek drawl, that the only sure fire content that people are willing to pay for is porn. “People are willing to pay for weird porn,” she said. The crowd laughed.

Cooper followed with, “This is the first time in history when the right to publish is not in the abstract. Anyone can do it.” But we’re not going to know the business model for a while…..The old system is dead. The new system has yet to be invented.” He likened the present cultural moment to three or four decades after Johannes Gutenberg introduced his little invention.

Huffington: It’s time that newspaper editors admit that we cannot go back to the old model when content is behind a wall. If that’s where they go, they are going to fail. Consumer habits have changed.

Rainey: “I kind of liked the old world when Walter Cronkite was involved…. and when we were behind that wall.” He was kidding. Sort of.

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Rainey also asked the other question that is always, always, always front and center during these FOM (Future of Media) discussions, namely: Where is all the great investigative work going to come from?

Cooper, Huffington and Waxman each leaned quickly toward their mics to say that great reporting isn’t going away, and that, in any case, it is produced by individuals not institutions, and that while great work came out of conventional media—there was also a lot of mediocre work too, and many many stories that were missed, and that new media has moved into that gap.

Waxman: “Only when you work for the New York Times, do you understand how much a part of the establishment that the New York Times is.” (Waxman used to work for the NY Times.)

Huffington: “Where were the mainstream journalists covering the whole Wall Street mess? They completely missed that story. And they’re still missing it.”

Cooper: Some of the reporting may come from non-journalists “who are not stupid, by the way. You don’t have to go to journalism school to be a journalist. I didn’t go to journalism school,” he added—which was another big applause line.

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When asked to list the publications she looked at each morning, Sharon Waxman listed all the electronic outlets and news feeds she peruses, then she said, “And I do look at…..” and she paused for thought. Rainey jumped in. “The LA Times?”

Right, said Waxman, as the audience laughed, “the LA Times.”

“Don’t make me beg here,” said Rainey.

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At some point a woman from the audience asked what would happen to longform journalism—what with everyone’s diminishing attention span and all. Was it as good as dead? The panel seemed stymied.

Then Andrew Donohue, who had said little during the hour, spoke up. Well, he said, actually, people will read long narrative or investigative pieces, particularly when they are run as a series. “We regularly run 10,000 word series….and our readership goes up when we do.” The key is, Donohue said, they have to be good, not boring.

(Yep. That’s the key alright—a point with which I repeatedly hector my Lit Journalism students.)
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In the “greenroom,” where all the authors, panelists, and miscellaneous LA literary types hang out during the two day festival, there was much talk and gossip about the same topics as those discussed by the panel—plus the other big subject: the future of publishing.

On that count, literary agent Betsy Amster said she’s a new convert to the Sony Reader, Sony’s answer to the Kindle. “I love it. It makes me feel like reading’s suddenly fun again, like it was when I was a kid,” she said.

Bonnie Nadell (agent to the late and still missed David Foster Wallace, among others) said, as she cruised through the buffet line to grab some fresh vegetables, that people still want to read as much as they ever did. “I don’t see the demand for books going away at all,” she said. I told her about Amster’s new Sony Reader infatuation. She nodded sagely and said that manuscripts are now sent to her and other agents for the Kindle and the Sony reader, and it’s actually pretty great.

The 130,000 plus people who swarmed happily around the UCLA campus all day Saturday and Sunday, purely for the love of reading, seemed to agree: Books are not going away. Not even a little bit.

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PS: THE TWO PANELS THAT EVERYONE BUZZED ABOUT—just because they were so damned funny—-were those that featured my pal Tod Goldberg—plus some other very witty people like, novelist Seth Greenland, cartoonist, Lalo Alcaraz, and the Daily Show’s Larry Wilmore.

And listen: I’m not saying this because Tod’s my friend, I’m telling you the unvarnished truth.

See you there next year.

Here’s round two of our late summer reading recommendations (which, by the way, have been a lotta fun to gather).

Today:

—Sheriff Baca tells you exactly which book can help change your life…..

—Zev Yaroslavsky picks the ultimate tome to read by the pool while fashioning public policy….

—Novelist/writing prof/blogger Tod Goldberg recommends smart, entertaining reading for hot days.

(Plus there’s more from an LAPD Deputy Chief, a well-known criminal justice writer, and an oft-quoted LA community activist.)

Tomorrow we’ll have round three, which will include District Attorney Steve Cooley, LA Times Opinion Editor Nick Goldberg and others.

Overall, it’s a varied list. But there is one thing everyone had in common: They all believe books really matter.

(NOTE: For Summer Reading List Part 1, with Connie Rice, Fr. Greg Boyle, Dennis Zine, David Ulin & Marc Cooper, click here.)

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1. SHERIFF LEE BACA (Sheriff of the County of Los Angeles)

“The most important book I’ve read? The Denial of Death By Ernest Decker

“Reason: This book has all the core ingredients for the purpose of life.”

2. DEPUTY CHIEF SERGIO DIAZ: Chief of Central Bureau of the Los Angeles Police Department

“I just started on Broken Paradise, a novel by an LA-based, Cuban-American writer, Cecilia Samartin. [Chief Diaz is also Cuban American.] It’s the story of two upper middle-class girls who are cousins and who are separated by the Castro revolution. One relocates to Miami and the other stays in Cuba. So far, very compelling writing. I’m not much of a fiction reader but Cecilia’s writing was recommended. (My wife Letty just finished another of Cecilia’s books, Tarnished Beauty, which takes place in a very different context. That one is about a Mexican girl with a disfiguring defect who comes north to LA to get treatment. She really liked that one.)

3. ZEV YAROSLAVSKY: Los Angeles County Supervisor

The book which has become my bible in the making of public policy is The March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman. Her assertion that folly is a perverse persistence in a policy that is demonstrably unworkable, should guide decision-makers in every walk of life, especially in government. I have long recommended this volume to newly elected officials, and I refer to it constantly as a reminder of the “do’s” and “don’ts” in decision-making.

4. TOD GOLDBERG: novelist and short-story writer (Living Dead Girl and Burn Notice: The Fix among others), blogger, and head of the UC Riverside’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts

Something about the summer always turns me toward crime fiction —perhaps the pool just isn’t the appropriate place to ponder the existential conundrums of humanity — but since I live in the hottest place on the planet (I’m pretty sure La Quinta has recently moved a few inches closer to the sun), I often look for summertime reads that will cool me down, at least metaphorically. With that in mind, I recommend Daniel Woodrell’s brilliant novel Winter’s Bone. Set in the winter mountains of the Ozarks, it begins with the vision of frozen meat hanging in trees and only gets more troubling as the novel’s 16-year-old narrator, Ree Dolly, searches for her bail-skipping father in hopes of saving the family house. But, of course, it’s far more than that as Woodrell sends Ree on a knight’s quest that is alternately brutal and poetic. Since Woodrell is that rare writer who doesn’t care about genre, he’s just writing the stories that move him, and Winter’s Bone is a stunner. Plus, it’s about twenty degrees throughout the entire narrative, which is good when it’s 120 outside…

5. JOE DOMANICK: journalist, author (To Protect and Serve and Cruel Justice), Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, and at the Center on the Media, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice

I’ve got two:

1) The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro. Simultaneously the best written biography, most compelling work of public policy and the greatest book ever written about 20th Century New York City when the Big Town was the capital of the world. The perfect study of how genius is corrupted by the arrogance of power.

2) Interpretations and Forecasts by Lewis Mumford. In this collection of essays — on the New England transcendentalists, and on Melville, Aquinas, Marx, the origins of war, urban architecture, the excess of the gilded age, the advent of a world culture and utopia — Mumford writes like a great 19th Century poet about America’s cultural history and antecedents. His essay on Thoreau is sublime, placing him in the context of the coming industrial age, as he looks back on all Thoreau told us we were going to lose as a result.

6. NAJEE ALI: LA activist, founder, Project Islamic Hope, blogger

The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama is my choice.

Obama’s book gave me insight into his political vision and platform. It reads as a political blueprint for a future run at the Democratic nomination for the White House. We all now know how that story ended! I think it’s even more important to read now as we go into November. It helps, as I re-read it now, to give a much more serious look into his thinking.

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THE BE CONTINUED….

Okay, here’s the deal:

The LA Times is being disemboweled. California doesn’t have a budget. Wildfires have attacked Big Sir and Yosemite (and fire season hasn’t even started yet). The economy’s in the toilet. Los Angeles is still the gang capital of the world. And LAUSD is….still LAUSD.

With all of the above in mind, there was clearly only one sensible thing to do: It was time to compile the First Annual WitnessLA Late Summer Reading List.
So I asked a bunch of interesting and varied LA people to recommend a single book that they’d read, were reading, or had read a zillion years ago but still loved, and then to (very briefly) tell why the book was worth the trouble.

The first six very excellent recommendations are below—with a dozen or so great recs to come Wed and Thursday—all offered in solidarity with the LA Times Book Review.

Please add your own suggestions to the list. (I count on you.) (I’ll give you mine later in the week.)

1. CONNIE RICE (Civil Rights Lawyer, Co-Founder and Co-Director, The Advancement Project)

One of my favorite books is Shogun by James Clavell. I was 17, opened it up, and became so utterly transported to warlord Japan that when I finally looked up, eight hours had passed without me moving from the chair or its magical pages.

2. DENNIS ZINE (Los Angeles City Council Member)

I am currently reading (and would recommend) Hollywood Station by Joseph Wambaugh.

Wambaugh, who is a former detective sergeant of the Los Angeles Police Department, depicts the real world workings of the LAPD, and I am enjoying it because it takes me back to my young police days working the Hollywood Division. Wambaugh sheds light on what it’s really like to be on the force while keeping the audience entertained with a quirky cast of characters and suspenseful police pursuits.

3. FATHER GREG BOYLE (Founder & Executive Director, Homeboy Industries)
Bodies in Motion and at Rest by Thomas Lynch.

I’m really loving this book. It’s my spiritual reading, soulful and wise and has this oddly calming effect. He has a great and unique voice that calls you to attention.

4. STEVE BARR (Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Green Dot Public Schools)

I’m currently rereading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. I read it six years ago on my honeymoon. It inspired me because of how resilient we are when faced with our toughest times. We all go through our time of sickness and death of our parents. Dave’s memoir deals with the death of both parents within a month and then how he is left to raise his younger brother. What is magical is the rebound and the hard-to-explain euphoria after dealing with the stress and sadness. Despite the subject matter, much of the book is laugh-out-loud funny and optimistic.

One side note…I have become friends with Dave since falling in love with his work. He shares a beautiful passion for urban public education.

5. MARC COOPER (Author, columnist, blogger, faculty at the USC Annenberg School for communication and Associate Director of its Institute for Justice and Journalism.)

The Dark Side by Jane Mayer.

Forget about impeachment. Neatly tucked in here between two covers is the bill of indictment. All the names, last names, and the hard, cold evidence documenting the Bush administration’s quest to institutionalize torture and abuse of detainees. Don’t read in temperatures above 100 degrees as your blood will already be boiling.

6. DAVID ULIN (Editor, LA Times Book Review, journalist, author)

I’ve just started reading Otto Friedrich’s Decline and Fall: The Struggle for Power at a Great American Magazine, the story of the death of the Saturday Evening Post. It resonates for obvious reasons— as a cautionary tale, or perhaps a talisman—but what’s most fascinating so far is Friedrich’s insider’s point-of-view. He was managing editor of the Post from 1965 until the magazine’s dissolution in 1969, and his portrayal of a publication— and an industry— in crisis is specific and compelling, offering stark parallels to the state of contemporary journalism.

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TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW….

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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 »

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.”

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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.)

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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 »

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:

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