Main Street in Los Angeles where when you you see a man sitting on a trumpet you go talk to him. He was on his way to play and had his music sheets in his lap. Nice man. Said he was passing through, but I hope to meet him again.
The photographer who complains about the blight of parking lots is missing something. The open lots of downtown Los Angeles provide the breaks that make views possible. These spaces, with their attendant islands of isolated AM radio luxury, are surprisingly beautiful.
The LAPD and Torrance Police Department are terrorized to the point of deadly incompetence by a single crazed gunman on a mission of revenge. Nut-jobs who write manifestos and go out to hunt police are quite rare and somewhat beside the real point. What we should all be extremely concerned about is the fact that the absolute finest that the LAPD has to offer – those who manage to get promoted into the detective ranks – apparently have such poor training, such poor instincts, and such callous disregard for life that they are willing to open fire on women delivering newspapers, simply because they happen to be driving a blue pick-up truck. Then, moments later, Torrance police open fire on another pickup truck just around the corner. This other pickup is black. So which is it, guys? Blue or black? Does your crazed gunman typically dress up as a woman and throw newspapers onto front lawns?
How many people are these assholes going to execute in their hunt for a lone Rambo wannabe?
Amazingly, the LAPD chief, Charlie Beck, considers this a ‘case of mistaken identity!’ Seriously, chief? What are you smoking today? This is an appalling case of dangerously stupid people who work for you shooting at innocent people for absolutely no reason. This is a case that should make a chief of police witheringly angry to the point of punching some cops’ teeth out onto the sidewalk, firing them, humiliating them in public, with criminal charges to follow. But that isn’t happening. Maybe the chief has a barbeque planned with these detectives. He wouldn’t want to miss that.
The problem here is that this deadly reflex to shoot at anything without understanding the target goes against any kind of training these people should have received. Firing your gun without knowing what you are shooting at is unacceptable. I don’t want to sound too reactionary, but cops who shoot innocent people really do deserve what’s coming to them. A newspaper woman is much better than a dangerous cop.
It goes without saying that I am horrified at the shocking violence and disregard for innocent life on display by the LAPD and Torrance police. An insane murderer’s rampage has somehow exposed our police force as an extremely dangerous organization.
This film by Jonas Normann is a very nice little glimpse into the neighborhood photo work of Brad Evans and Travis Jensen who spent a year photographing the people of San Francisco's Tenderloin District. The neighborhood often photographed purely for its seamier aspects, is here treated as a community of hard-working and creative people. The photographers produced a book with the material from their year of living respectfully.
Paperman is Disney's Oscar-nominated short animation for this year. Apparently animated with 3D software mimicking the hand-drawn look, it tells the story of an office worker trying to catch the attention of a woman by tossing paper airplanes from one New York skyscraper to another. The film is an example of that way Disney has always had of lending extreme curvature to all form and motion. Disney never moves things across a screen. They sweep them across. I enjoy hand-drawn styles even when they are not hand-drawn at all! Somehow it defeats the plastic look of so much computer animation. The story here is simple and sweet.
This film reminds me of a game I played near the top of a Wall Street building once back in the nineties. We opened a window and tried to hit a building one block away with various paper airplanes. There was a wind current making it possible to get very close to the other building, but invariably the little planes would veer off and go around the building without ever making the expected contact. So I sympathize with this cartoon character's seemingly useless efforts.
Ray Diaz made this machinima version of Ray Bradbury's 1952 short story about an automated house continuing on with its comfort duties for a nuclear family even after war has stripped the earth of all life. It's a simple and eerie little film. The soundtrack is provided by an NBC radio broadcast dramatization of the story.