I guess it’s the neighborhood.  I am not sure whether the driver ahead of me on La Cienega was heading to the vegan Real Food Daily restaurant, or perhaps to the Live Nude Girls Girls Girls strip club, since they are right across the street from each other.

I am not the first to note this resemblance, of course.  Not even the first Metblogs author to do so.  Nor the first to think and write about the identity of the thermodynamic mechanism of the formation of an H-Bomb’s mushroom cloud over the course of seconds, and the fire’s formation of one over the course of days or weeks.

One thing I have not seen specifically compared, however, is the scale of the two events.  I figured it was time to grab the back of an envelope.  Just how much explosive power is a megaton of TNT, as the bombs are measured? Well, it turns out that the National Institute of Standards and Technology has actually defined the canonical yield of a gram of TNT as 4,184 joules.  Grams add up to kilograms, kilos to tons, and tons to megatons.  Simple enough multiplication.  What about fires? Just how much flammable material is there in 160,357 acres? What is the energy content of that material when burned? Lots of web sources helped me find approximate values all around, and multiply lots of numbers together.  Sparing readers most of the steps, my not-completely-wild-assed estimate here is that the Station Fire amounted to the same energy yield as 3 megatons of TNT.  Not the biggest H-Bomb built, but solidly in H-Bomb territory.

What does it all mean? I dunno.

Somehow the equivalence, however, makes me think of a point made by Thom Andersen, in Los Angeles Plays Itself, which I had the pleasure of seeing a few weeks ago at the Aero Theatre in Santa Monica, with live questions and answers with the writer/director.  Andersen observes, among many things in his essay-as-film, how often Los Angeles plays the scene of post-apocalyptic disaster, and how well suited to this role are the desolate downtown neighborhoods such as Bunker Hill.  Part of this type casting is, no doubt, a certain Weltanschauung of audiences and producers about Los Angeles.  Andersen notes,

Mike Davis has claimed that Hollywood takes a special pleasure in destroying Los Angeles, a guilty pleasure shared by most of its audience. The entire world seems to be rooting for Los Angeles to slide into the Pacific or be swallowed by the San Andreas fault.

However, beyond the appeal of German words (Schadenfreude comes to mind here as well), there is a whole lot Los Angeles does to choose its roles, and type cast itself.  The first times I ever walked around Downtown at night, I was shocked, perhaps mortified, at what appeared to every examination, to be the ruins of a once populated and great city.  But a city that had been stripped of its inhabitants, leaving only vacated concrete and steel.  I’ve lived in small towns that closed at 9:00 p.m.; somehow I didn’t expect the second largest city in the United States to be one of them.  A slow motion Armageddon is just, like, totally L.A.  Or in a line from Buffy, “I never thought I’d need to learn the plural of apocalypse.”

Andersen continues:

The end of Bunker Hill is visible in The Omega Man. By 1971 it made a good location for a post-apocalyptic fantasy. Charlton Heston plays an urban survivalist in a cityscape depopulated by biological warfare. He has learned to become totally self-reliant. If he wants to see a movie, he has to project it himself. [...]

Thirteen years later, the same plot and the same location reappear in Night of the Comet. In the wake of a disaster apparently brought on by comet dust, a small band of human survivors again battle zombie-like mutants, but the center of the action, Bunker Hill, has been totally transformed.The new Bunker Hill looks like a simulated city, and it played one in Virtuosity.

Was it Hollywood that started the Station Fire, as a means to insist that life must follow its “art?!”

Note: It looks like Mrs. Lulu has snuck into the blogosphere again.

Once again I find myself in a dispute with LA Fitness’ business office.

[EDIT: I am in such strong agreement with Mrs. Lulu's rant here that I'd love to see all our readers share their "my gym screwed me" stories in the comments. I think this is an industry-wide pattern of lying to-- and screwing-- customers. If you have an experience like Mrs. Lulu's, read on & let us know. --Lucinda.]

The second time in my husband’s and my two year membership. The first time there was a problem was when he tried to quit his personal trainer contract after the so-called trial period was up. They simply ignored our written and phone requests and continued to bill my credit card. Even after speaking to one of their reps (not an easy feat to accomplish), two more months of illegitimate billing went by before I disputed the charges with my credit card company and got (partial) satisfaction.

Now the same thing is happening with our regular membership. First, let me explain why we’re quitting, as it will give an indication of the quality of the company’s customer service. This post is not a criticism of the facility, nor of the helpful, energetic and cheerful fitness professionals who work there. We always had a great time with our actual work-outs and classes. It is the corporate division with whom I have a beef. I called them in March to try to re-negotiate our contract when I noticed that they were advertising a special at a lower rate than we were paying. I was told that the special was for new members only, but that if I wanted to save money I could drop the towel fee of $10/mo I was paying for my husband and myself. Towel fee?! I had no idea I was paying such a thing, having never been offered, nor even seen, a towel at my gym. I wasn’t told of this fee when I signed up, nor was it made explicit anywhere on my contract. So, great, I had been paying $20/mo for 20 months for something I never wanted, didn’t know I had, and had never used. Any chance for a refund of part of this? Ha, ha, ha. At that point, I decided to look for another gym.

Now to quit. Chastened and hyper-careful after the above experience, I called to make sure my reading of the fine print instructions for quitting in the contract was correct before I even began the process. Since I had monthly billing charged to my credit card, and we had paid the last month’s dues upon membership (along with an initiation fee
and first month’s dues), we were not able to quit until two months after I started the ball rolling (to use a fitness metaphor). I called in early April and since I needed to provide them with 30 days written notice, my automatic payment for May would be deducted on April 25th as usual. Then we had another month to go since we had already paid for the last month; our membership wouldn’t end until the end of June. The fact that we were traveling most of May and June and couldn’t used the gym was of course beside the point, but okay, I understood that contractual obligations are contractual obligations, without which society and culture would fall apart as no one could trust another’s word; dark ages would inevitably follow, wherein the life of man in the City of Angels would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Btw, I’ve always found it ironic that Tom Hobbes lived to the age of 91 (he must have had a gym membership), but I digress.

But the infuriating part comes next. I wrote a letter stating that I was resigning my “family membership for my husband and myself” effective ASAP. I included the membership number on my contract, signed, dated, stamped and mailed it. Taken care of, right? Wrong. After traveling most of the summer, I last week finally got around to checking my bills carefully. Lo and behold, I was continuing to be billed, but only for one, rather than two, memberships. So I called and here’s what I was told by Christine, the member service manager. My letter was interpreted as meaning that I wanted to cancel for myself but not for my husband. I pointed out that I clearly stated I was canceling for both and she retorted that I should have written two separate letters and had my husband sign the second one. I again explained that I had one contract and that payment was made for both memberships by me on my credit card and that the letter clearly stated I was canceling both. She said that I should have known they wouldn’t read the text of the letter and that she could not credit the charges (but would be happy to cancel my membership now). I kid you not, she said I had no right to expect that my two sentence letter would be read and that therefore I hadn’t really cancelled my husband’s membership. I sent her a copy of the letter and another demand that she credit the charges, but she has not responded. So I again have disputed the charges with my credit card.

Is there a moral to this story? Maybe it’s that jocks can’t read? Or that once fitness becomes a habit, it’s hard to quit? Or that “throwing in the towel” is sometimes for the best? But for me, it’s that we should fight capitalist greed, even in small ways, stand up for ourselves against big corporations, and go see Michael Moore’s new movie.

Let me give the brief plug: we want to make sure that no one has to vote on proprietary DRE voting machines (or ever does voluntarily, for that matter).  There are two glaring flaws in these systems: the source code is secret (so-called trade secrets), and both accidental flaws and deliberate vote tampering is both possible and has likely happened; a voter has no means to inspect the recorded vote before casting it (other than a machine telling them, “trust us, we’ll put the right electrons somewhere”). The right system is an Electronic Ballot Printer, which is basically to say just a computer-assistive device to help mark a ballot that a voter can inspect physically before casting.  The paper is crucial because voters and poll workers can easily and reliably understand both that and why they are secure and accurate.  Using computers is also important though, because it enables independent and anonymous voting by persons with disabilities (especially, but not only, blind and visually impaired voters), enables multi-lingual ballot presentation, and reduces overvoting, undervoting, and other errors in capturing voter intent.

The Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk, Dean Logan, held an all-day symposium yesterday, entitled Technology, Diversity, Democracy: The Future of Voting Systems in Los Angeles County.  This was a really wonderful effort that shows the best of our government officials.  Registrar Logan has a commitment to getting input from the range of stakeholders in this process, while simultaneously understanding well the technical and political issues involved.  The meeting was composed of… well, lots of wonks like me, but ones from the right range of walks of life.  The disability rights community was well represented; as were LA-based voter groups (such as advocates for diverse ethnic and linguistic groups that need ballot access); and a good number of the nation’s top cryptography and political science thinkers about voting were in the mix for good measure.

The Registrar-Recorder staff, many of whom I had the chance to speak with, were well prepared and well-informed in their role of facilitating the symposium.  Unfortunately, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, although scheduled to participate, was unable to attend–it’s too bad because she is really one of the good guys in relation to openness and transparency in government.  It was also nice to hear Election Assistance Commissioner Donetta Davidson speak though, and I was delighted that I happened to have the chance to talk with her at breakfast, before the formal sessions.

This is all a bit technical, as good news goes.  And nothing is announced (or developed) yet, in any case.  But I encourage readers to become informed on this, and bring with the process a dose of optimism that hasn’t been possible for a few years.  Read OVC’s site for background information, and also take a look at the Registrar-Recorder’s website.  Provide feedback to the Registrar-Recorder as this process unfolds (information will be posted over time, and voter feedback is essential to our future democracy).

Addendum: In response to a reader comment below, I think it is worth exhibiting a sample ballot produced for a demonstration election using the OVC Ballot Printer Architecture design.  Something like this would serve as the official ballot that is inspected by a voter, stored for recounts and audits, and so on.

An OVC sample ballot

Geysol Johana Lopez Vazquez Fitness Zone

In this post, I feel I must partially recant my complaints about lack of public communal spaces in Los Angeles.  At least on weekend days (albeit still very little at night, and notably less on week days), my local park is well occupied by families on picnics, and both children and adults engaged in semi-organized sports, especially soccer.  Of possible note is that English is not exactly a prominent language in such communal interaction, but there is no reason why it need be.  Moreover, sometimes our city government does something that is simply nice.  A recent addition to mid-town’s Pan Pacific Park is a collection of outdoor exercise equipment.  I am pretty well impressed by the design of the equipment that relies wholly on gravity mechanisms rather than separate weight stacks–that is, the resistance is against the weight of the exerciser herself, appropriately leveraged (more-or-less).

Accompanying the equipment itself is a sign indicating the importance of fitness and use of the machines, with guides to body mass index, calories burnt and consumed, and so on (some details not shown in below image of only one side of the sign).  The choice of language for the sign is perhaps not the best one for its target audience, but the intention seems admirable still (perhaps the addition of an adjacent Spanish sign would be helpful though).

Exercise in the park

Welcome to The Trust for Public Land Fitness Zone

I would have liked some more depth to it.  It wasn’t only homosexuality that was censored by Hollywood, and it’s not clear that that particular anxiety was the primary one governing the anti-communist, misogynous, racist, xenophobic, imperialist, and puritanical decades of the 1940s and 50s.  A lot of other matters of interest to writers and viewers were equally only mentioned indirectly and in whispers.  OK, so it is just a documentary for HBO, and it hardly needs address the entire political landscape of America through several decades.  But maybe just a little less of the “woe be upon us queers in Hollywood” in the tone would be desirable.  Yes, they are right on the facts, but a bit greater nuance would be nice.

The real flaw of the documentary is precisely that it was made by too damn many Hollywood folks.  What kills it (to the extent it is less good than it should be) is that it tugs at all the same formal cliches that American cinema in general so vacuously engages in.  Music swells to tell us how we should feel about a clip or interview comment we just saw.  Montage skillfully associates the image fragments that we are meant to keep together in our minds.  Even in the direct narration, altogether too many different films are lauded as “the first ever to…” in this sensationalistic tone of bad journalism and breathless advocacy.

I might be happy to settle for so little work in documentary if it were not for the fact that I have also recently watched Slavoj Žižek’s The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema.  I know this is a high bar to set for documentary, and ways of talking about film with intelligence.  Still, it turns out that such is possible.  Moreover, it is possible to do it within a documentary that utilizes and comments on clips of familiar historical films.  The prerequisite, it appears, is that one must make such intelligent films in Ljubljana, not in Hollywood.

Worship/Warship

You gotta grant Los Angeles its geographic or climatic diversity.  LA is not unique in this feature–I was surprised and delighted when I first visited Vancouver, for example, to find that one could visit a northern rain forest within a half-hour drive, and the visual contrast of the surrounding mountains and the central sound is appealing.  We have an equally broad range of features here in Los Angeles, though warmer and drier versions of those.  Still, we manage beaches, flatlands, and reasonable mountains, in a moderate radius, and with lots of differences in vegetation (albeit spread over more square miles than most geographically diverse cities)

One hears an insistence, from time to time, that Los Angeles is no desert.  This is true, since that would require less than 10in/year of rainfall, where Los Angeles gets about 15in/year.  Something interesting to me, however, as a relative newcomer is that this precipitation is strongly bimodal with low-rainfall years averaging 7-8in/year.  So we are only a desert in odd years, it appears.

No desert here

The parks of LA certainly make for a pleasant arid walk in the summer.  Nice parks they are too.  I frequently walk the Runyon Canyon loop, which has quite a magnificent vista of the city, from Hollywood and Downtown, over to Beverly Hills and the Westside on a clear day.  Last week, however, I took a walk around Will Rogers State Historical Park which is a similar trail, but with a bit more view of the ocean.  One delight of the walk was the rattlesnake that greeted us on the trail, but sadly scampered away before I was able to get my cell phone camera out to take it’s portrait.  Readers will have to get by with a bit of cactus.

Dr. Kenneth Anger

Hollywood’s fabulous Cinespia film series has received notice here at Metblogs a number of times in the past.  I finally made it to my first screening there, which happened as well to be my first viewing of films of Los Angeles’ own Kenneth Anger. Delightfully for us movie goers, Anger’s short films were introduced by Dr. Anger himself (and his young friend, Lucifer, sung a song as well).

On Cinespia, I regret that I only got around to making it and posting this near the end of this year’s season.  If you have not been there, by all means make an effort to see one of the last few screenings.  The social atmosphere of the only-slightly macabre cemetery lawn is an absolute delight, especially if you bring a pleasant friend and a picnic basket to the screening.  This event feels distinctively Los Angeles, in the best of ways.

Anger is an interesting film maker, from my brief experience.  Of course, this fascination might be in my genes, since my non-LA father apparently has a dozen different cuts of the short “Lucifer Rising.” I am just trying to catch up with that generation (anger being closer to the generation past him).  Anger eschews such common devices as dialog, plot, narrative, and really even much use of fades, pans, and other cinematic gestures towards the illusion of the camera’s eye.  Instead we get plain montage, with lingering repetitions of leather men, motorcycles, Hitler, Lucifer, flowers, bunnies, scenic skies… that sort of thing.  All set to either acid rock, bubblegum pop, or some other genre of music.  It’s symbolist film, without Warhol’s lingering attachment to hints of storytelling.  While it might not sound such from my description, there is something shockingly compelling in these compositions.  Find them by all means.

In my own experience, I had never actually heard of this category of person until shortly before arriving in our fair city, and do not think I have encountered anyone who quite occupies the categories while here. But boy is there ever lots of talk about necessary defenses against such disparagers. Somehow I suspect a connection to the LA Weltanschauung of circularity and self-reference. Y’know, that Baudrillardian moment we all feel on LA streets and in its cafes.

My first notice of these nefarious LA-haters came in 2006, when I was being pitched on a job in Beverly Hills, while at a conference in Portland, Oregon. I had flown in from that Massachusetts realm of East Coast liberal elites (or really, from 100 miles west of the nattering nabobs of negativism, but it all blurs together with distance). Grabbed by the shirt collar by a recruiter from this BH company, with several similarly to-be-pitched colleagues also in tow, I was given an expected spiel on the virtues of the company and of working there. Far less expected, but making up much more of the conversation, was a set of disclaimers about why “LA really isn’t so bad.” It was curious to me, since I lacked any of the numerous negative stereotypes of whose error we were being informed (nor, I will say, did I imagine the symmetrical mythologized glamor sometimes claimed of LA, although I had at least heard of that aspect). But my recruiter quite thoroughly corrected the presumed misapprehensions, largely enumerating the same items brought up by Lucinda Michelle.

As readers will have figured out, I accepted the offer, and moved to LA for this BH job. That particular gig and I have parted ways, but Los Angeles remains with me, and me in it. While here, I have continued to come across this trope about the unfoundedness of gripes about Los Angeles, from both its natives and those who have “gone native” since arriving. The lengths to which some defenders go in disclaiming perceived criticisms of our city is well nigh absurd. It is not just that they feel it unseemly to criticize our city in too cavalier a fashion, but rather that any comparison with elsewhere violates the deeply held faith that Los Angeles is singular and ne plus ultra in all regards. No! They exclaim: New England has not more seasonal foliage; Philadelphia not more communal public spaces; San Francisco not more techno-hipsters. LA is–and must be–all things more than all other places… to doubt it would be to engage in venal LA-hating.

One must admit that LA is certainly not unique in prompting civic pride, nor even a measure of geographic chauvinism. Every large city has its own sports team and local music scene, which are better than those of other cities–or at least deserving to be so. Almost every large American city has some focal industry, about which locals cloyingly drop the adjective describing just which “Industry” is in question (it is noteworthy, I think, that both food processing and shipping are larger Los Angeles County industries than is its production of culture/media; at least Insurance really is objectively dominant in Hartford). However, there feels like something different in quality about LA’s peculiar egocentrism. It is so much more deeply wrapped in defensiveness than the pride of other American cities (except, perhaps, that of oft berated Cleveland or Newark, maybe Detroit). My cab driver during a recent NYC visit may, indeed, have invoked an insult on his visit to Boston by wearing a Yankees cap, but the Bostonians he spoke with lacked any self-doubt that the Red Socks are morally the better team. Angelenos, the more indignant is their response to a status threat, seem proportionally lacking in confidence in their city.

I think a measure of the defensiveness of Los Angeles comes from the fact that its criticism is largely–primarily even–made by the nativized locals, and in particular by those locals who work in the production of culture.  The enumeration of complaints one should not make of Los Angeles is primarily drawn from a set of mostly comedic mass culture references in which such criticisms are mockingly presented.  This ties in, I think, to the Los-Angelesization-of-everywhere that I have written of in other posts: while LA landmarks become the faux icons of most everywhere else, when Los Angeles itself is the nominal subject of representation in film, television, etc. the creators of those works feel a particular compulsion to distance themselves from the actuality of location with an ironic tone.

I’d put it this way (or quote it, anyway), at least by analogy:

We find the same logic of the error as an internal condition of truth with Rosa Luxemburg, with her description of the dialectics of the revolutionary process. We are alluding here to her argument against Eduard Bernstein, against his revisionist fear of seizing power ‘too soon’, ‘prematurely’, before the so-called ‘objective conditions’ had ripened [...] they are too impatient, they want to hasten, to outrun the objective logic of historical development. Rosa Luxemburg’s answer is that the first seizures of power are necessarily ‘premature’: the only way for the working class to reach its ‘maturity’, to await the arrival of the ‘appropriate moment’ for the seizure of power, is to form itself, to educate itself for this act of seizure, the only possible way of achieving this education is precisely the ‘premature’ attempts. –Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology.

Isn’t it funny how every new idea was old in 1915?

Now is a better time than later for needed change.  Until we actually make the political push necessary (even if it really isn’t anything like the revolutionary matters contemplated by those early 20th century Marxists), it will not be possible to create the conditions where a majority of voters and citizens really do understand the needs and logic of equality.