One More Time

One of my favorite configurations in music is a great singer and a piano. The Tony Bennett and Bill Evans albums (and the recent release of the outtakes on the complete version) are special works of art, like the rarest jewels, never to be duplicated.

So here we are one more time with Teena Marie and a piano, running down one of her classics, If I Were a Bell. If you've ever been close to a great singer it's really something else, and I don't know how Donnie withstood this. She pulls out all the stops, and this particular rendition is not an easy song to sing -- there's some technique flowing here.  Stick around to the end which packs a punch and a good line by Donnie.

La Dona: Homegirl Teena Marie

The shocking news of Teena Marie leaving was a mule kick in the gut. Lady T was only 54.

An Angeleno all the way, I love how on her Wiki she spoke about rollin' down Crenshaw, bumpin' sounds. Like it or not, that's LA and we've made a cultural rite out of it.

Here's a joint from not too long ago. When it first aired I remember Fish and I watched it and were just digging her representin' LA at the Apollo, pimpin' ill at will. I think the fact that this is a recording of someone's TV while watching SatA would have just made her smile. Love you homegirl.

If I were a bell...

The Killing of a City Manager

Though I'm in Berkeley now, I know a bit about Bell, because I've driven through it, but it's like Maywood, its neighbor, which is just like all of the other little brown towns in LA. Like the one I was raised in.

Today that fat pig Robert Rizzo and some of his cronies from the Bell City Council were arrested; yeah, it's good cuz it looks like everyone from current state attorney general Jerry Brown on down to City Attorney Steve Cooley are gonna skin this fucker sideways. But it begs the question; with cities across the nation going belly up, one wonders if local reporters will have the wherewithal, let alone the support, to dig deeper. Hope so.

In the meantime, hat's off to my pop's old employer and reporters Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives.

========================================

THE STORY OF HOW THE BELL SCANDAL BROKE: AN ACCOUNT FROM LA TIMES REPORTER JEFF GOTTLIEB

by James Spencer
August 11, 2010

for Public CEO.com

The world of local government shook on July 15.

It was the day that two Los Angeles Times journalists, Jeff Gottlieb and Ruben Vives, broke the shocking story of corruption in the small city of Bell.

"Bell, one of the poorest cities in Los Angeles County, pays its top officials some of the highest salaries in the nation, including nearly $800,000 annually for its city manager, according to documents reviewed by The Times."

Each day following the initial report, more news dripped from the leaky faucet in Bell, flooding the media world.

The city was exposed. The public's reaction was impassioned. Local government officials everywhere were examined.

Seemingly each new day, Gottlieb and Vives continue to break another outrageous angle of the Bell story. Nearly a month after the initial report broke, Gottlieb says the story is, "nowhere near dead."

How exactly did the scandal in the city of Bell break?

The trail began in early July, when Bell's neighboring city of Maywood laid off all of its city employees and outsourced its services to Bell. Gottlieb and Vives wrote the story, and soon learned that the Los Angeles County District Attorney was investigating Bell for high salaries.

Gottlieb said that they were hearing things about Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo's salary being near $300,000 to $400,000. So, the two reporters headed to Bell's City Hall looking for hard numbers.

"We expected to see the contracts," Gottlieb said in a phone interview with PublicCEO. "We expected they would just give them to us."

But, for reasons that are now obvious, Bell wasn't so quick to hand out the information.

Rizzo wouldn't come out of his office. The reporters were forced to fill out a California Public Records Act request for the information. The city even charged a dollar for the Xerox copy.

Then came the waiting. The reporters waited 10 days before obtaining the information, calling Bell City Clerk, Rebecca Valdez, each day to check on the status of their request. Sometimes Valdez wouldn't return calls, other days she would simply say the city was working on it.

On the ninth day of waiting, Gottlieb and Vives got a call from the city of Bell. Rizzo wanted to talk.

"Rizzo came to the phone and said they had the documents but wanted to sit down and talk," Gottlieb said.

The meeting was - somewhat oddly - held in a conference room at a park in Bell the next day. Rizzo wasn't alone. With him was Assistant City Manager Angela Spaccia, Police Chief Randy Adams, City Councilman Luis Artiga, Mayor Oscar Hernandez and two lawyers.

"I knew something was up," Gottlieb said. "My first thought was, ‘why are two lawyers here?'"

The city officials delivered the documents with salary information. Neither reporter had looked at the documents when Gottlieb fired the obvious question towards Rizzo: "So, how much do you make?"

"He coughs out $700,000," Gottlieb said. "It was such an outrageous figure that I wasn't sure I heard him correctly. I said, ‘how much?' and he said it again. I turned to the police chief and asked the same question. He said $457,000. I then turned to Angela Spaccia and she said she didn't know. Rizzo said she made about $350,000."

Gottlieb said you could feel the tension in the room. He said it calmed down later and Rizzo was actually friendly. There was never a plea to the reporters not to write the story.

"He was utterly unrepentant," Gottlieb said.

At that point, Gottlieb told Rizzo that he must be the highest paid City Manager in Los Angeles County. Rizzo replied, "I am sure I am."

Talking with one another after the meeting, both reporters knew that Rizzo wasn't just the highest paid City Manager in the county, but also in the state - and probably in the country.

"Of all the stories I have written, this has brought the highest level of outrage," Gottlieb said.

With the outrage has come an outpouring of further tips and information to lead ongoing investigations into Bell and other cities. The result is a continuous stream of breaking news.

This past weekend, Gottlieb and Vives furthered the story by reporting that Rizzo received a package of benefits that increased his annual compensation to more than $1.5 million.

"From that story, we came up with five more stories," Gottlieb said.

The stories by Gottlieb and Vives have changed how local governments operate now and into the future. The impact of the Bell scandal is far-reaching, leading to transparency policies for local governments throughout California.

At a time when newspapers continue to take an economic pounding, caught between a loyalty to the print publication and a search for an online business model, the two L.A. Times journalists have proven the importance of keen journalism.

For that alone, Gottlieb and Vives are deserving of a Pulitzer.

James Spencer can be reached at jspencer@publicceo.com or on Twitter @PublicCEO

We don need no stinkin limits, or, JPMC: What Becomes a Super Predator Most?

You'd think in the midst of all the ill-feelings toward the mega-banks that they'd let up on the gas. Well, you and I would think. They don't think, they prey, and, fittingly enough, that preying doesn't involve them, but you and I and the rest of the plebes who've built this country on our knees.

No, in fact, mention to jerkoffs of this strata that they should "ease up" and instead they jerk up and cinch the noose a bit tighter. Think Eli Wallach's Tuco standing atop the grave marker - a crucifix - in Leone's The Good, the Bad & the Ugly. But the ending's different in the EM08 version; Clint doesn't mercifully shoot the noose in the end and thus free Tuco, nor does he leave any gold. He just takes it all and rides off.

Now, guess which character you are and which one JPMC (or Goldman or Wells or BofA..) is in that scenario?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alfred-gingold/chase-home-finance-rabid_b_664109.html

Alfred Gingold
Writer, actor
Posted: July 29, 2010 03:54 PM

CHASE HOME FINANCE: RABID WEASEL

Our mortgage bank says we have to pay our next door neighbor's water bill.

Last month, we got a letter from Chase Home Finance stating that we were delinquent in our payments. So Chase paid our neighbor's water bill and established an escrow account into which it plans to collect and store such money as it says we owe--at that moment, a cool $82.91, but increasing as Chase adds its "expenditures" towards our actual taxes and water bills, which we have already paid in what is referred to in mortgage circles as "timely fashion."

We were not surprised. This is the third time-the third time that we know of-that Chase has tried to make us pay our neighbor's water bill.

We refinanced with Chase in 2004 at a rate that was, and still is, pretty good, not to mention that it was and still is a fixed rate mortgage. Perhaps it's the fixed rate thing that gets under Chase's corporate skin, because unlike any of the eight other banks who've held our mortgages over the years, Chase keeps trying to make us pay it more money than we owe. The vehicle for this petty larceny is escrow for tax and insurance payments which are, to put it politely, enhanced.

At first, we had no problem with paying our taxes and insurance through Chase. We've had the arrangement with other banks and none of them ever tried to filch more than we owed, or at least not this obviously. My wife and I share bill-paying and check-writing duties, so neither of us noticed the creep of our escrow payments, nor did we connect it with the regular letters from Chase requiring notification of insurance, which we duly sent along. In 2006 we realized something was amiss; our monthly escrow payment was huge. There were phone calls, some of a highly emotional nature, with the affectless warriors of Chase Customer Care. Eventually a polite lady called to tell us in silvery tones that there'd been a mistake, can you imagine, something about unacknowledged notices of coverage, and that we'd shortly receive a check for $4000 and change-funds, we gathered, Chase had been hanging onto for our own good. We allowed as how we'd like Chase to waive our escrow requirement, so we could pay our taxes and premiums ourselves, and the lady told us we could do that.

What she didn't say was "if you dare." To Chase, a home loan with an escrow waiver is an unexploited resource, like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Since this is the third time in two years Chase has created tax delinquencies that don't exist, we know the drill: We faxed a note to Customer Care illuminating our "concerns," pointing out that our address is not the same as our neighbor's, the water account number is different, the houses are different, the mortgages are different-you know, we're different fucking people. We included copies of the receipts for all the timely tax payments we've made. We referred to, but did not include, the last letter we sent Chase about our neighbor's water bill, from December '09, but we didn't mention the one we sent on the same subject in October '08, as we didn't want to burden Customer Care with too much to think about, much less read. And we ended stirringly by requesting, insisting, demanding that this escrow grift cease immediately.

Reliably, Chase took our remonstrance in stride and ignored it. Our new payment coupon already has a healthy chunk of escrow added, for taxes we've already paid and which Chase claims to have paid too, or intends to pay.

The last time this happened, in 2008, we went through a telephone gauntlet, repeating the story endlessly, receiving assorted "work case numbers," which were never recognized by anyone we spoke with, and collecting the names of every Customer Care Representative we spoke to, which got confusing because they only offer first names. And we continue to pay our principle and interest on time. No response. Zilch.

Eventually we sent certified letters, return receipt requested, to assorted Chase departments-Customer Care, Tax, Escrow Removal-and personally to David B. Lowman, CEO of Chase Home Finance, and Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase, the mother ship. We made our case, included our documentation and declared that if we did not receive satisfaction we would file reports with the Attorney General's Office, the CAC, the Better Business Bureau and Santa.

Lowman's receipt didn't come back to us for three months, so we were not surprised to hear Dennis Kucinich snap at him for Chase's spectacular foot-dragging on mortgage modification. Yes, foot-dragging seems to be the Lowman Way, except last April, when he told Barney Frank of the House Financial Services Committee hearing that aggrieved Chase mortgage holders should come to him with their concerns, then hot-footed it the hell out of there when a group of them actually did.

Someone evidently read the one we sent to Dimon, because we got a call from an oberleutnant of the Executive Resolution Center (Orwellian, no?), who made it chillingly clear that the only way to get rid of the escrow was to pay it off. Could we find out if we're still paying for the neighbor's water? How about copies of the numerous delinquency alerts Chase claims to have sent us and we never received (maybe the neighbors did)? Not a chance.

Far be it from us to suggest that Mr. Dimon, a man the New York Times calls "a financial superstar" and Huffpo calls "The Most Dangerous Man in America," tells the troops to squeeze a few extra bucks out of non-risky mortgages. I mean, JP Morgan Chase controls 44% of the derivatives market, whatever that may be. $82.06 doesn't even qualify as chump change.

It's the principle of the thing, we suppose. Whether it's billions in dicey investments or just a few bucks of funny escrow, take a shot and if no one's the wiser, no one's the wiser.

It's very different from the attitude Matt Taibbi captured so brilliantly in his description of Goldman Sachs, the "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, etc." Chase Home Finance is less squid than weasel: a rabid weasel, wrapped around my house, pointy little claws relentlessly poking-behind the sofa cushions, in our wallets, next door on the neighbor's water meter-for any spare change or folding bills it can sweep into its fetid maw before someone shoos it away with a broom.

It is a busy weasel. We thought paying our neighbor's water bill was a mistake too stupid to be anything but honest, but it turns out Chase pulls this stuff all the time. At the ample Chase Home Finance section on the Complaints Board Website, there's a post from a guy Chase is escrowing for taxes on property he doesn't own. On the Chase Home Finance Sucks Facebook Page, we read of a man escrowed for taxes due (and paid) for the year before his mortgage was taken over by Chase.

The Los Angeles Better Business Bureau awards Chase Home Finance an F for reliability, which makes us think Chase really doesn't give a damn what anyone thinks of it--which is exactly the attitude we would recommend to Chase if we were its therapist or mother. Perhaps it shouldn't be surprising, but it somehow is, that the same banks and bankers that thought big enough to drive the whole economy over a cliff also think--and behave--really, really small.

To paraphrase Lady Bracknell: To swindle someone once may be regarded as a mistake; to swindle the same someone in the same way repeatedly looks like a business plan.

I'll be chronicling this episode of our ongoing struggle to pay Chase no more than we owe it on my blog, Joy Buzzer, where this is cross-posted. This time we're hoping to keep our postage expenditures down and to avoid hyperventilating on the phone. My prediction: they'll escrow us for David B. Lowman's water bill.

The Decline of Western Civilizaton

When I first heard of the ESPN special telecast, "The Decision," where LeBron was basically going to get a pr nozzle and make it into the Guinness Book of World Records by administering a mass enema to America, my first thought was, "bad move." My second; "What a fucknut." Oh, and I thought LeBron was lookin' bad too. (cue: rimshot)

Honestly, I can see how tiring it must be for Others to be subjected to the endless and constant stream of bullshit uncle scam spews. Whether spinning about wars in west Asia to just stupid talk about "recovery" I gotta hand it to unc scam; he's a marathoner in it for the long haul. To crowbar in another sports analogy, he's like the Bronx Bull, Lamotta; he can absorb any amount of punishment, but he won't go down.

But something did bring Jake down, and we all know it was the enemy within. (cue: intro, Beethoven's Fifth)

Now, the problems of the dispossessed in America are, in general, not on a scale to match the hell kids in Palestine or Congo or any other region that's been left out of the great "scale up on capitalism or die" race for a two-car garage and a lawn. But it is weird for those of us here in the belly of the beast who know better, sitting on the sidelines and watching this parade. Nero's fiddling has now been displaced by sheer mass, a population marching in lock-step toward the cliff, so engorged on delusion that the biggest threat to us is our own, steady as the sun rising diet of mis-direction. It is weird to watch; and exhausting.

So, here's the hilarious Matt Taibbi doing his thing, this time not about those other douchebags, Goldman Sachs or JPMC, but ESPN and LeBron. "King" James, indeed; King of douchery.

The Five Funniest Things About the "LeBron James: Global Superdouche" Broadcast
by Matt Taibbi
7/11/10
Rolling Stone
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/matt-taibbi/blogs/TaibbiData_May2010/179533/83512

"The Decision" was simultaneously the most painful and most hilarious television show I've seen in a long time. Its entertainment value rested almost entirely in its scope — the same way a person goes to the Niagara Falls or to the Grand Canyon for that take-your-breath-away moment when the heretofore unimaginable vastness of the vista is first perceived, I watched "The Decision" in breathless awe of the sheer scale of the narcissism involved.
By any measure it was a landmark moment in the history of human self-involvement, eclipsing previous peaks in the narcissism Himalayas (Nero's impromptu fiddle concert as Rome burned, the career of the prophet Mohammed, Kim Jong Il publishing "The Popularity of Kim Jong Il") mainly because it was a collective effort. You can understand the citizens of Tsaritsyn cheering the decision to rename their city; if they didn't like "Stalingrad," they were getting lined up and shot.
But what was our excuse? The weird thing about this LeBron story is that seven or eight years ago, he seemed like a nice kid. All he did was step into a media machinery designed to create, reward, nurture, and worship self-obsessed assholes. He was raw clay when he went in, and now he's everything we ever wanted him to be — a lost, attention-craving narcissistic monster who simultaneously despises and needs the slithering insect-mortals who by the millions are bent over licking his toes (represented in The Decision by the ball-less, drooling sycophant Jim Gray).
I'm sure there's a larger point to make in all of this about how the insane pathology behind the LeBron spectacle (read: a co-dependent need to worship insatiable media-attention hogs gone far off the rails of self-awareness) is what ultimately is going to destroy this country and leave us governed for all time by dingbat megalomaniacs like Sarah Palin. But for now I think it's important to just enjoy "The Decision" on a pure humor value basis, since we're unlikely to see anything that funny for a good long while. To me, the Top Five moments:
1. So here's LeBron James, sitting in a gymnasium full of children from the Boys and Girls Club, the charity that was to receive the proceeds from the event. Let's note the first thing: LeBron had a full hour to say anything he wanted, and might perhaps have used that time to talk about the Boys and Girls club, which was conceived for the express purpose of helping kids who don't have enough parental guidance — kids like LeBron, for instance (whose biological father was an ex-con who was never there). LeBron instead chooses to have a show entirely about himself filled with navel-gazing commentators raving over his highlights, followed by Gray and his idiotic questions about whether or not LeBron bites his nails. Then, when Gray finally gets to a question about whether it might be hard to share the spotlight with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh, LeBron answers, "It's not about sharing. You know, it's about everybody having they own spotlight." That's his message to the Boys and Girls of America: It's not about sharing! I exploded in laughter when he said this. Even funnier, nobody commented on it. I mean, what's the problem? The kids got the proceeds, didn't they?
2. The day after the show, I woke up and checked the Internet to see if "It's about everybody having they own spotlight" had already made Bartlett's quotations or something — it seemed primed to be turned into a famous line that encapsulates the mood of a country for a whole decade, sort of like "Tune in, turn on, drop out" or "Greed is good." But when I Googled it, I found less than a full page of hits. Why? Because ESPN not only spent the whole evening shamelessly deep-throating LeBron, they fixed his grammar post-factum. In the official transcript, LeBron sounds not like stammering, uneducated buffoon he sounded like on live TV, but just like any other ordinary, more or less literate mass-media dickhead. Some of his malaprop gems will survive ("I want to win into the future"), but otherwise... apparently, fame is now its own spell-checker. Obviously this isn't all LeBron's fault — the guy didn't go to college, after all, and he's not being paid to be a public speaker — but this is part of the story, the fact that sports stars don't need to go to school really at all anymore and can get to the pros by going to sham high schools that exist solely to crank out basketball players. But even that part of the story gets whitewashed.
3. Gray isn't visible during most of the interview — thank God — but about five minutes into their talk LeBron glances down slightly, and suddenly I was conscious of feeling Gray's off-camera eyes locked on LeBron's crotch during LeBron's answers. I burst out laughing. Overall, the whole scene was an uncanny replay of the Hot Tub Time Machine sequence in which the balding white Rob Corddry is forced to suck off black comedian Craig Robinson after losing a football bet. This has to have been the absolute low point in the whole history of the "interview," right? Charlie Gibson's 2008 Bush interview is a candidate, I guess, but this has to be the worst ever — especially when you throw in the fact that Gray was a) paid by LeBron to do the interview, and b) chosen because he has a "special sales relationship" with one of the sponsors, the University of Phoenix.
4. When Gray asks LeBron, "Was it always your plan to play with Dwyane Wade and Chris Bosh?" watch as he hedges for a second in between the words "Well," and "I mean," before answering, "Well, I mean, I'm looking forward to it. To say it was always in my plans, I can't say it was always in my plans because I never thought it was possible." In that one little hedging moment he starts, ever so slightly, to smile. And everybody knew what that smile meant: it meant, "What the fuck do you think? Of course, we've been planning this for years." So he smiles, giving the deal away completely, then instantly switches gears and just turbo-lies right into the camera. I thought: this is just like politics! A terrible, totally unskilled liar, telling a completely transparent lie, who then improbably gets let off the hook by the sycophantic moron interviewing him. What is it about this story we love so much?
5. The camerawork was spectacular. The slow zoom-in leading to the EXTREME LeBRON CLOSE-UP during the key question — You've had everybody else biting their nails. So I guess it's time for them to stop chewing. The answer to the question everybody wants to know: LeBron, what's your decision? — if you'd asked a great comic film director to spoof reality-show direction, that's what it would look like. But here's the question: was this a spoof of reality-show TV, was it reality-show TV, or was this a society that can no longer tell the difference? Several times during the ESPN broadcast I got the sense that the network itself had lost track of where "reality" was. Were we really supposed to believe that this thing wasn't decided ages ago, that Wade was seriously considering going to Chicago at one point, that the Knicks were ever in it, that LeBron was trying to convince Bosh to come to Cleveland? Of course not, it was all bullshit, designed to snare viewers, the grownups among us all know that. But the ESPN anchors looked like they were hanging desperately on every tweet, almost like they really believed this stuff. Poor Stuart Scott, he's been podded completely, if you chopped that dude's head off, nothing but little plastic balls containing digitized "Boo-yah" chips would fall out of his skull. It's the prototype for all future news coverage — one or two dominant news networks pushing sensational fairy-tale versions of reality in a race for ad revenue, competing with a few scattered hacks on the Internet covering the much less important parallel "real story," i.e. the truth. In order for the networks to push their version most effectively, they have to genuinely believe that what they're spinning is real. Which is why you see them starting to mistake fake drama for real drama from time to time — they're beginning to drown in their own bullshit.
Watch and see if that doesn't become the template for presidential campaign coverage in 2012. See if those reality-show zoom-ins don't start to creep into interviews with candidates. This is the beginning of our big Lost in Space journey together, where news and reality-show programming fuse completely and we all end up complete morons, voting strippers and X-games athletes into the White House. I'm psyched. Are you?

Cuts for Cooky: Jackie DeShannon

Jackie DeShannon in '68, in what the caption on NPR's site called the "notorious Laurel Canyon," situated a bit north of LA in the Hollywood Hills.

Jackie DeShannon was interviewed on NPR's "Fresh Air" hosted by Terry Gross, and I have to admit, I was pretty taken. Her legend precedes her, of course, and I can remember being a terribly young boy and thinking she was cute, in the way that the teen girls were then to a little boy; kinda grown up, but way more fun and unattainable simply cuz I was a kid.

There are some quibbles with technicalities on the comments of the "Fresh Air" page, but I kinda think certain of the audience were listening to or for other things than I was. DeShannon's story, making it as a writer as a teenage girl (!) and using it as an entry into performing, is incredible enough. But she's very candid about her place as a woman in that men's world of that time; that's the bigger message, I think, and one that I felt important for Renee to know about. DeShannon said something very poignant about this subject in a very succinct manner; listen for it.

It's always cool to turn Renee onto the icons of my generation. I happened to be driving and the interview came on and I pulled over to text her back in LA to listen up. I just had a feeling that she'd dig DeShannon. Sure enough, Daddy knows his girl.

There's an element, maybe it's depth - whatever that means but hopefully conveys - to DeShannon that reminds me of Karen Carpenter and Patsy Cline. I don't know exactly what it is, but there's weight, a dimension to their singing that I like. And too, I like the dichotomy; pop songs with that je ne sais qua. It reminds me of what Brando said one time about Garland singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow;" how it's utterly insipid - can it be any more puffy than little blue birds flying over a rainbow? - and yet, it brings tears to your eyes when you watch "Dorothy." I suppose some would also say it's analogous to soul and black singers, but I don't think so, because listening to Marvin Gaye, who for my money is soul embodied, produces a very different feeling for me. The life experiences, manifested in the different genres and feeling, no doubt have something to do with it.

Collaborating early on with Jimmy Page - whom she would date, break up with and allegedly be the inspiration for "Tangerine" on Zeppelin III - and Randy Newman, the first a certified legend and the latter a stellar writing and performing pro, it seems Jackie DeShannon is never mentioned when it comes to great musicians of that era. This week she's being inducted into the Songwriter's Hall of Fame, and I think her having roots in writing has something to do with having that depth.

Earlier today, I happened to come across a maker of preserves, June Taylor, here in Berkeley. She crafts everything by hand from organic ingredients culled from local growers as well as her own. During our conversation, she mentioned that she was in Santa Monica recently on a research mission, to a special collection of 16th century books on preserve making. This is something that's utterly lost on today's mechanized, bigger, stronger, faster, society - craftsmanship and knowing one's place in history, the mother of all subjects. (I recommend her: www.junetaylorjams.com)

I mention June Taylor because I think craftswomanship has something to do with Jackie DeShannon, because she has an obvious love and affection for historical influences. Plus, the act of crafting a song is a much different process than, say, performing it. I don't mean to diminish performers, because I have all the respect in the world for comedians, actors, singers, musicians, but I happen to be prejudiced; I think an artist of the caliber of a Ralph Ellison - even if he basically only produces one work - is, in general a far more profound artist. To make a crude analogy, writing implies thoughtfulness and a material process in time, while performing is not thinking but doing in the moment.

This is my favorite Jackie DeShannon song, one of her earliest, performed here on the happening show of the time, "Hullabaloo." One of the elements I appreciate on this song is its production which has a Phil Spector feel. I also love good riffs - Page has said that Zep was, if nothing else, a riff heavy band - and this is one, a simple arpeggio with panache. Watch for her miscue in the beginning as this is lip synched; it's pretty cute as she catches herself. In the NPR interview, it's interesting to hear her talk of the way she had to present herself, and to then watch her shimmy shamming here in light of that.

I do know this now after hearing her interview; it's easy to see why she's adored by musicians and fans alike.

And then there's hope

If EM08 is one of the more obvious manifestations of the evil side of humanity, where are the good stories? We know they exist, and here's one.

In a couple of recent posts I've used sports to talk about the way the world has changed toward "big is better" which is really just "big is better for oligarchical money interests." So of course, in perfect dialectical opposition, here's a story about how small is beautiful. Because if sports can bring out the ugly side of us, then it most surely can be a vehicle for us looking out for one another. In the case of the Marshall and Roncali players, it has nothing to do with money, and I suppose Jamie Dimon would think my being enamored of them is quaint.

Leave it to kids to show the way, because the adults and their adult ways such as politics and big, high falutin' financial markets sure aren't. The story of Marshall and Roncali high schools says a lot about what we, as a nation, and a world, need to get busy with.


IndyStar.com
Marshall softball players Antanai Coleman, left, and Taylor Stigger try on catching gear with the help of Roncalli junior varsity coach Jeff Traylor.

For love of the game

By Rick Reilly
ESPN.com

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5218228

We live in a world where Peyton Manning walks off the Super Bowl field without shaking anybody's hand. Where Tiger Woods leaves the Masters without a word of thanks to the fans or congratulations to the winner. Where NFL lineman Albert Haynesworth kicks a man's helmetless head without a thought.

So if you think sportsmanship is toast, this next story is an all-you-can-eat buffet to a starving man.

It happened at a junior varsity girls' softball game in Indianapolis this spring. After an inning and a half, Roncalli was womanhandling inner-city Marshall Community. Marshall pitchers had already walked nine Roncalli batters. The game could've been 50-0 with no problem.

It's no wonder. This was the first softball game in Marshall history. A middle school trying to move up to include grades 6 through 12, Marshall showed up to the game with five balls, two bats, no helmets, no sliding pads, no cleats, 16 players who'd never played before, and a coach who'd never even seen a game.

One Marshall player asked, "Which one is first base?" Another: "How do I hold this bat?" They didn't know where to stand in the batter's box. Their coaches had to be shown where the first- and third-base coaching boxes were.

That's when Roncalli did something crazy. It offered to forfeit.

Yes, a team that hadn't lost a game in 2½ years, a team that was going to win in a landslide purposely offered to declare defeat. Why? Because Roncalli wanted to spend the two hours teaching the Marshall girls how to get better, not how to get humiliated.

"The Marshall players did NOT want to quit," wrote Roncalli JV coach Jeff Traylor, in recalling the incident. "They were willing to lose 100 to 0 if it meant they finished their first game." But the Marshall players finally decided if Roncalli was willing to forfeit for them, they should do it for themselves. They decided that maybe -- this one time -- losing was actually winning.

That's about when the weirdest scene broke out all over the field: Roncalli kids teaching Marshall kids the right batting stance, throwing them soft-toss in the outfield, teaching them how to play catch. They showed them how to put on catching gear, how to pitch, and how to run the bases. Even the umps stuck around to watch.

"One at a time the Marshall girls would come in to hit off of the [Roncalli] pitchers," Traylor recalled. "As they hit the ball their faces LIT UP! They were high fiving and hugging the girls from Roncalli, thanking them for teaching to them the game."

This is the kind of thing that can backfire with teenagers -- the rich kids taking pity on the inner-city kids kind of thing. Traylor was afraid of it, too.

"One wrong attitude, one babying approach from our players would shut down the Marshall team, who already were down," wrote Traylor. "But our girls made me as proud as I have ever been. ... [By the end], you could tell they were having a blast. The change from the beginning of the game to the end of the practice was amazing."

Roncalli wasn't done. Traylor asked all the parents of his players and anybody else he knew for more help for Marshall -- used bats, gloves, helmets, money for cleats, gloves, sliders, socks and team shirts. They came up with $2,500 and worked with Marshall on the best way to help the program with that money. Roncalli also connected Marshall with former Bishop Chatard coach Kim Wright, who will advise the program.

"We probably got to some things 10 years quicker than we would have had without Roncalli," says Marshall principal Michael Sullivan.

And that was just the appetizer. A rep from Reebok called Sullivan and said, "What do you need? We'll get it for you." A man who owns an indoor batting cage facility has offered free time in the winter. The Cincinnati Reds are donating good dirt for the new field Marshall will play on.

"This could've been a thing where our kids had too much pride," says Sullivan. "You know, 'I'm not going to listen to anybody.' But our kids are really thirsty to learn."

And they are. Marshall never won a game, but actually had leads in its last three games. In fact, it went so well, the players and their parents asked if they could extend the season, so they're looking to play AAU summer softball.

Just a thought: Major League Baseball is pulling hamstrings trying to figure out how to bring baseball back to the inner city. Maybe it should put the Roncalli and Marshall girls in charge?

Anyway, it's not an important story, just one that squirts apple juice right in your face. And who knows? Maybe someday, Marshall will be beating Roncalli in the final inning, realize how far it has come, and forfeit again, just as a thank you.

A One Way Street Named Loyalty

I've been up in Berkeley for about 2 weeks now, and I must say, it's a welcome break from LA. One of the good things is I got to see my cousin Warren and his wife, Janet.

During our dinner, we got on the topic of sports, and being much older than me - sorry, cuz - Warren had all these great stories about his early support of the Raiders. There were some great anecdotes, but one of the most astounding was when he said that in the early days - this must have been the mid 60's - when they played in what sounded like a podunky kind of field (Youell Field...?) he said you could walk right up behind the bench and hear all of their chatter.

My god, can you imagine that?

This was a team whose rep preceded them by a country mile, and I have to admit, the Rams who I was loyal to for years but who ended up telling all of the LA fans to fuck off, paled in comparison. The Raiders, from the artistry of Fred Biletnikoff to the craziness of "The Mad Stork" Ted Hendricks to the beautiful aggressiveness of Jack Tatum (one of my favorite players because I played free safety) defined "bad" and backed it up in spades. I just can't imagine what it would have been like to have watched and listened to these legends of the game.

That being able to listen to the players, it's no small point, as Ed Sabol's NFL Films would show some years later, slowing down the game and making it heard so that its beauty could be greater appreciated. Today it's all about security and posses, let alone the crush of media. A kid's lucky if he even catches a glimpse of a player these days.

The other major point in Warren's reminiscences was his being an early season seat holder, for a mere few hundred bucks. When in 1992 the team - let's be honest, shall we? Al "I never saw a dollar I wouldn't run over my mom for" Davis - picked up and moved to LA, it was merely following in the footsteps of the Rams, who had done the same. Thus, money triumphs over loyalty, and in a mark of cruelty seen only by the likes of Stalin and that shithead priest who was preying on deaf kids, Davis would move the team back to Oakland. This, after having pocketed a cool $10 mil non-refundable deposit from LA's Irwindale after a failed bid, screwing the old Raider fans by making them put down a huge deposit much like what the Yanks did to Artie Lange and getting the city of Oakland to once again mistake bending over for opening one's arms in welcome.

~~~~~

It's a habit of old folks like us to romanticize "the good ole' days" but damn sometimes it's true. Later, while watching the Lakers and Jazz play, I was prompted by a commercial to tell Warren that I feel lucky in one regard to having come up before the mega-growth of sports. I have no memories whatsoever of one of the NBA legends and my boyhood hero Elgin Baylor acting like a jerkoff in some shitty, canned commercial for sugar water or a car that promises to get you any amount of women. Talking to Warren makes me think of the Little Richard quote I used for Ma's piece where he talks about the old time rock and roll as representing the joy, fun and happiness in music. That's how it was then, just a joy, awesome, really, to watch these magnificent athletes strutting like titans. All without a motherfuckin' posse and them feeling as if the universe was lucky to have them.

After hearing Warren's reminiscences the anger I had about pro sports today was slowly replaced with feeling awfully lucky to have come up when we did.

Me: "It ain't like the old days."

Warren looks down, slightly wistful, with a smile: "No, it sure isn't."

Finally...?

The CRAs are FINALLY going to be scrutinized beyond the dog and pony show that was put on over a year ago. BUT, just as Andy Cuomo was limp-wristed then, if you read this article you get a sense that they STILL don't know what to go after them for - or an even scarier scenario, won't. Even after having incriminating circumstantial evidence about that jerkoff Shin Yukawa - god, why does he have to be Japanese??? - they didn't take care of the basic problem of fraud as a result of the conflict of interest arrangement that is the way the CRAs are paid - by the banks themselves - that is at the heart of this entire disaster that is EM08.

And it's even money - at best - that they will nail them or the banks.

Any pretense to hope is long gone with this administration and for that matter, all of these politicians, who, day by day, are killing us, and not so softly anymore. My, if Enron, Andersen, Worldcom, Global Crossing... are ancient history, it's no wonder that no one remembers "Deep Throat"'s dictum of follow the money.

I'm also a bit surprised that Gretchen Morgenson, who contributed to this article and is one of the journalists/analysts I advocate reading, isn't harping on this, one of the most fundamental contributors of the escalation of the dark derivatives market.

Last, words are important; notice the title and the portion, "Prosecutors ask..." Excuse me??? Since what snowy day in hell did lawyers ask in opening a case, particularly prosecutors? They accuse and allege, yes, but... ask? What is this, Miss Manners?

"Excuse me, Mr. Blankfein, but did you pay for your ratings, and could you please pass the pate'?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/13/business/13street.html?hp

May 12, 2010
Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies
By LOUISE STORY
The New York attorney general has started an investigation of eight banks to determine whether they provided misleading information to rating agencies in order to inflate the grades of certain mortgage securities, according to two people with knowledge of the investigation.

The investigation parallels federal inquiries into the business practices of a broad range of financial companies in the years before the collapse of the housing market.

Where those investigations have focused on interactions between the banks and their clients who bought mortgage securities, this one expands the scope of scrutiny to the interplay between banks and the agencies that rate their securities.

The agencies themselves have been widely criticized for overstating the quality of many mortgage securities that ended up losing money once the housing market collapsed. The inquiry by the attorney general of New York, Andrew M. Cuomo, suggests that he thinks the agencies may have been duped by one or more of the targets of his investigation.

Those targets are Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank, Crédit Agricole and Merrill Lynch, which is now owned by Bank of America.

The companies that rated the mortgage deals are Standard & Poor’s, Fitch Ratings and Moody’s Investors Service. Investors used their ratings to decide whether to buy mortgage securities.

Mr. Cuomo’s investigation follows an article in The New York Times that described some of the techniques bankers used to get more positive evaluations from the rating agencies.

Mr. Cuomo is also interested in the revolving door of employees of the rating agencies who were hired by bank mortgage desks to help create mortgage deals that got better ratings than they deserved, said the people with knowledge of the investigation, who were not authorized to discuss it publicly.

Contacted after subpoenas were issued by Mr. Cuomo’s office late Wednesday night notifying the banks of his investigation, spokespeople for Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank declined to comment. Other banks did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In response to questions for the Times article in April, a Goldman Sachs spokesman, Samuel Robinson, said: “Any suggestion that Goldman Sachs improperly influenced rating agencies is without foundation. We relied on the independence of the ratings agencies’ processes and the ratings they assigned.”

Goldman, which is already under investigation by federal prosecutors, has been defending itself against civil fraud accusations made in a complaint last month by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The deal at the heart of that complaint — called Abacus 2007-AC1 — was devised in part by a former Fitch Ratings employee named Shin Yukawa, whom Goldman recruited in 2005.

At the height of the mortgage boom, companies like Goldman offered million-dollar pay packages to workers like Mr. Yukawa who had been working at much lower pay at the rating agencies, according to several former workers at the agencies.

Around the same time that Mr. Yukawa left Fitch, three other analysts in his unit also joined financial companies like Deutsche Bank.

In some cases, once these workers were at the banks, they had dealings with their former colleagues at the agencies. In the fall of 2007, when banks were hard-pressed to get mortgage deals done, the Fitch analyst on a Goldman deal was a friend of Mr. Yukawa, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.

Mr. Yukawa did not respond to requests for comment.

Wall Street played a crucial role in the mortgage market’s path to collapse. Investment banks bundled mortgage loans into securities and then often rebundled those securities one or two more times. Those securities were given high ratings and sold to investors, who have since lost billions of dollars on them.

Banks were put on notice last summer that investigators of all sorts were looking into their mortgage operations, when requests for information were sent out to all of the big Wall Street firms. The topics of interest included the way mortgage securities were created, marketed and rated and some banks’ own trading against the mortgage market.

The S.E.C.’s civil case against Goldman is the most prominent action so far. But other actions could be taken by the Justice Department, the F.B.I. or the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission — all of which are looking into the financial crisis. Criminal cases carry a higher burden of proof than civil cases. Under a New York state law, Mr. Cuomo can bring a criminal or civil case.

His office scrutinized the rating agencies back in 2008, just as the financial crisis was beginning. In a settlement, the agencies agreed to demand more information on mortgage bonds from banks.

Mr. Cuomo was also concerned about the agencies’ fee arrangements, which allowed banks to shop their deals among the agencies for the best rating. To end that inquiry, the agencies agreed to change their models so they would be paid for any work they did for banks, even if those banks did not select them to rate a given deal.

Mr. Cuomo’s current focus is on information the investment banks provided to the rating agencies and whether the bankers knew the ratings were overly positive, the people who know of the investigation said.

A Senate subcommittee found last month that Wall Street workers had been intimately involved in the rating process. In one series of e-mail messages the committee released, for instance, a Goldman worker tried to persuade Standard & Poor’s to allow Goldman to handle a deal in a way that the analyst found questionable.

The S.& P. employee, Chris Meyer, expressed his frustration in an e-mail message to a colleague in which he wrote, “I can’t tell you how upset I have been in reviewing these trades.”

“They’ve done something like 15 of these trades, all without a hitch. You can understand why they’d be upset,” Mr. Meyer added, “to have me come along and say they will need to make fundamental adjustments to the program.”

At Goldman, there was even a phrase for the way bankers put together mortgage securities. The practice was known as “ratings arbitrage,” according to former workers. The idea was to find ways to put the very worst bonds into a deal for a given rating. The cheaper the bonds, the greater the profit to the bank.

The rating agencies may have facilitated the banks’ actions by publishing their rating models on their corporate Web sites. The agencies argued that being open about their models offered transparency to investors.

But several former agency workers said the practice put too much power in the bankers’ hands. “The models were posted for bankers who develop C.D.O.’s to be able to reverse engineer C.D.O.’s to a certain rating,” one former rating agency employee said in an interview, referring to collateralized debt obligations.

A central concern of investors in these securities was the diversification of the deals’ loans. If a C.D.O. was based on mostly similar bonds — like those holding mortgages from one region — investors would view it as riskier than an instrument made up of more diversified assets. Mr. Cuomo’s office plans to investigate whether the bankers accurately portrayed the diversification of the mortgage loans to the rating agencies.

Gretchen Morgenson contributed reporting.

Cuts for Cooky: Etta James, Sugar on the Floor

I heard Miss Etta sing this not too long ago, and though she's lost a lot of technique and skill because of age - she sings exclusively sitting down these days - I remarked to Fish that she still brings it. That's due to the fact that she's lived, something that can't be taught, only experienced. And what a life, one that Beyonce's portrayal can only hint at.

This song, written by disco princess and sometime Elton John collaborator Kiki Dee, was prefaced when I heard her later version as being her mama's favorite song. This version's from back in the day as her afro attests to, and she here says it's her own favorite.

It Figures

No editorial here, as this speaks for itself.

Slick Operator: The BP I've known too well

Wednesday, May 5, 2010
by Greg Palast for Truthout.org
May 5, 2010

I've seen this movie before. In 1989, I was a fraud investigator hired to dig into the cause of the Exxon Valdez disaster. Despite Exxon's name on that boat, I found the party most to blame for the destruction was ... British Petroleum (BP).

That's important to know, because the way BP caused devastation in Alaska is exactly the way BP is now sliming the entire Gulf Coast.

Tankers run aground, wells blow out, pipes burst. It shouldn't happen, but it does. And when it does, the name of the game is containment. Both in Alaska, when the Exxon Valdez grounded, and in the Gulf last week, when the Deepwater Horizon platform blew, it was British Petroleum that was charged with carrying out the Oil Spill Response Plans (OSRP), which the company itself drafted and filed with the government.

What's so insane, when I look over that sickening slick moving toward the Delta, is that containing spilled oil is really quite simple and easy. And from my investigation, BP has figured out a very low-cost way to prepare for this task: BP lies. BP prevaricates, BP fabricates and BP obfuscates.

That's because responding to a spill may be easy and simple, but not at all cheap. And BP is cheap. Deadly cheap.

To contain a spill, the main thing you need is a lot of rubber, long skirts of it called a "boom." Quickly surround a spill, leak or burst, then pump it out into skimmers, or disperse it, sink it or burn it. Simple.

But there's one thing about the rubber skirts: you've got to have lots of them at the ready, with crews on standby in helicopters and on containment barges ready to roll. They have to be in place round the clock, all the time, just like a fire department, even when all is operating A-O.K. Because rapid response is the key. In Alaska, that was BP's job, as principal owner of the pipeline consortium Alyeska. It is, as well, BP's job in the Gulf, as principal lessee of the deepwater oil concession.

Before the Exxon Valdez grounding, BP's Alyeska group claimed it had these full-time, oil spill response crews. Alyeska had hired Alaskan natives, trained them to drop from helicopters into the freezing water and set booms in case of emergency. Alyeska also certified in writing that a containment barge with equipment was within five hours sailing of any point in the Prince William Sound. Alyeska also told the state and federal government it had plenty of boom and equipment cached on Bligh Island.

But it was all a lie. On that March night in 1989 when the Exxon Valdez hit Bligh Reef in the Prince William Sound, the BP group had, in fact, not a lick of boom there. And Alyeska had fired the natives who had manned the full-time response teams, replacing them with phantom crews, lists of untrained employees with no idea how to control a spill. And that containment barge at the ready was, in fact, laid up in a drydock in Cordova, locked under ice, 12 hours away.

As a result, the oil from the Exxon Valdez, which could have and should have been contained around the ship, spread out in a sludge tide that wrecked 1,200 miles of shoreline.

And here we go again. Valdez goes Cajun.

BP's CEO Tony Hayward reportedly asked, "What the hell did we do to deserve this?"

It's what you didn't do, Mr. Hayward. Where was BP's containment barge and response crew? Why was the containment boom laid so damn late, too late and too little? Why is it that the US Navy is hauling in 12 miles of rubber boom and fielding seven skimmers, instead of BP?

Last year, CEO Hayward boasted that, despite increased oil production in exotic deep waters, he had cut BP's costs by an extra one billion dollars a year. Now we know how he did it.

As chance would have it, I was meeting last week with Louisiana lawyer Daniel Becnel Jr. when word came in of the platform explosion. Daniel represents oil workers on those platforms; now, he'll represent their bereaved families. The Coast Guard called him. They had found the emergency evacuation capsule floating in the sea and were afraid to open it and disturb the cooked bodies.

I wonder if BP painted the capsule green, like they paint their gas stations.

Becnel, yesterday by phone from his office from the town of Reserve, Louisiana, said the spill response crews were told they weren't needed because the company had already sealed the well. Like everything else from BP mouthpieces, it was a lie.

In the end, this is bigger than BP and its policy of cheaping out and skiving the rules. This is about the anti-regulatory mania, which has infected the American body politic. While the tea baggers are simply its extreme expression, US politicians of all stripes love to attack "the little bureaucrat with the fat rule book." It began with Ronald Reagan and was promoted, most vociferously, by Bill Clinton and the head of Clinton's deregulation committee, one Al Gore.

Americans want government off our backs ... that is, until a folding crib crushes the skull of our baby, Toyota accelerators speed us to our death, banks blow our savings on gambling sprees and crude oil smothers the Mississippi.

Then, suddenly, it's, "Where was hell was the government? Why didn't the government do something to stop it?"

The answer is because government took you at your word they should get out of the way of business, that business could be trusted to police itself. It was only last month that BP, lobbying for new deepwater drilling, testified to Congress that additional equipment and inspection wasn't needed.

You should meet some of these little bureaucrats with the fat rule books. Like Dan Lawn, the inspector from the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation, who warned and warned and warned, before the Exxon Valdez grounding, that BP and Alyeska were courting disaster in their arrogant disregard of the rule book. In 2006, I printed his latest warnings about BP's culture of negligence. When the choice is between Lawn's rule book and a bag of tea, Lawn's my man.

This just in: Becnel tells me that one of the platform workers has informed him that the BP well was apparently deeper than the 18,000 feet depth reported. BP failed to communicate that additional depth to Halliburton crews, who, therefore, poured in too small a cement cap for the additional pressure caused by the extra depth. So, it blew.

Why didn't Halliburton check? "Gross negligence on everyone's part," said Becnel. Negligence driven by penny-pinching, bottom-line squeezing. BP says its worker is lying. Someone's lying here, man on the platform or the company that has practiced prevarication from Alaska to Louisiana.

Too Big to Bail.

There, I said it first

Yesterday You said Tomorrow

I'm out of the current music scene, but every once in a while come across someone that catches me; Christian Scott's one.

I heard him in an interview on NPR a while back, and he impressed me with his intelligence and poise. Then I heard his chops and kept him on my radar. Last Sunday, I saw him on his promo tour for his album. From his "Diz-angled" axe to his incorporation of other styles and influences - such as hip hop - this young man and his band - all young as well - can kill it.

Here's some footage from the gig - non-edited, because I'm lazy like that.

Pants on Fire

In the continuing disaster that is the mainstream media's EM08 reporting, no less than NPR's venerated "Marketplace" just fired off an interview with this jerkoff, Leonard Zumpano, who's an academic (U. of Alabama). This is yet another faction, the academics, who with rare exception - like William Black - add their pile of crap to the lawyers's pile, the accountants' pile, uncle scam's pile....

Chumpano today gave his cheerleading effort toward residential real estate. Don't take my word for it, give it a bit and go to their site, listen yourself to today's program:

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/episodes/show_rundown.php?show_id=14

[NOTE: As of 10/12/15 this segment has been archived here]

As I've said and let me be clear - now is NOT a good time to buy property. And people and businesses like Chumpano are setting up another battalion of fish who listen to drivel like this and put their futures at stake buying right now.

This should be a crime.

 Transcript follows below.

[NOTE: Edited 10/12/15

Coldwell extends homebuying tax credit

 Monday, April 26, 2010 - 19:01

• Transcript

TEXT OF INTERVIEW

Tess Vigeland: The government's $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit expires on Friday. If you haven't entered into a contract to buy a house by then -- you're not getting anything back from Uncle Sam. But you very well may get something back from one of the nation's biggest real-estate companies.

Coldwell Banker says it will make the credit an option for sellers participating in its "Buyer Bonus Sales Event." Homebuyers would have until July 31st to take advantage of the offer. For some insight we turn to Leonard Zumpano. He teaches finance at the University of Alabama. Good to have you with us.

Leonard Zumpano: My pleasure.

Vigeland: You know, before we get to what Coldwell Banker is doing, let's take a bit of a broader picture of the housing market. Did the homebuyer tax credit actually make people buy homes?

ZUMPANO: It has. The National Association of Realtors does an annual home buying and selling survey, and their numbers indicate that the tax credit was responsible for approximately 800,000 home sales. To put this in perspective, it includes the original $7,500 refundable tax credit, the $8,000 first-time homebuyer credit, and the extended credit that allows for credit for existing home sales.

Vigeland: Well, 800,000 people sounds like a lot.

ZUMPANO: It is a lot in absolute numbers. But during that same time period, there were five million homes sold. That's about 16 percent, which is not insignificant. Of all the reasons for purchasing a home, the tax credit was singled out by 16 percent of those homebuyers.

Vigeland: 800,000 people saying that the credit factored in, you know, the fact that it is now ending would presumably prompt a little bit of panic on the part of the realtors then.

ZUMPANO: One would expect that the availability of the credit and having a limited life expectancy ending at the end of the month put people that might have been sitting on the fence over the fence. So I think there will probably be a decline in future home sales in the next couple of months, assuming nothing else changes, like employment and mortgage rates. I think part of the most recent push from homebuyers who were watching interest rates beginning to rise.

Vigeland: Well, certainly for Coldwell Banker this is quite the unique marketing technique. Hey, you know, if Uncle Sam isn't going to help you out, we will.

ZUMPANO: Yeah, that's exactly right. But how profound is that going to be and what kind of incentive does it create? It's difficult to forecast because it may in fact cause other real-estate companies to do basically the same thing.

Vigeland: Right, that just means we're back in 2004-2005, right?

ZUMPANO: Right, exactly. There is evidence that the market is beginning to firm up. The most recent numbers I've seen for part of 2009 show that those states that suffer the worst in 2007, like California, are coming back. Buyers are being induced back into the market, and that's happening also in cities like Miami, which had a glut of condominiums just two years ago. With employment beginning to stabilize, the prospects for a housing market recovery are there. You're not going to see the kind of appreciation we saw between 2000-2005, but I don't ever want to see that again because that was simply unsustainable and everybody knew it.

Vigeland: Leonard Zumpano is a professor of finance with an emphasis on real estate at the University of Alabama. Thanks so much for chatting with us today.

ZUMPANO: My pleasure.

 

Featured in: Marketplace for Monday, April 26, 2010

Just Like Me

Huh. In one of those strange confluences of coincidence, Anthony Lane's review of Exit Through the Gift Shop references both Welles' F for Fake and Surrealism.(*) Although he ends up in a different place - he hates the flick, and I understand his feelings, but being from LA I found it pretty entertaining - what are the odds of both of us making the same arguments and supporting them with the same fairly obscure references?

In fact, I sympathize with his misgivings, but the part that I liked was its commentary on "the scene and scenesters." THAT is the true value of this flick, and having come up in LA and watching it evokes a feeling not unlike watching Spinal Tap. It's a joke - not necessarily satire - about a joke. The transparent commenting on co-modification is okay, though a well-worn re-tread, and yet, that's not his fault. It is, after all, the way the system works, trite as it is to point it out.

One other thing; I saw ETtGS with Renee and two of her friends. Afterwards I asked her friends if they thought it had significance that it took part mainly in LA. They didn't think so.

Back to Anthony Lane.

The Welles reference I get, as his thing, like mine, is movies. Still, even among movie heads, F for Fake is obscure.

The Surrealist reference is more improbable; the guy's 48, so Surrealism was for all intents and purposes a dead issue as a movement. Now, England did play a fairly major minor role back in the day, and they had an active coterie of English Surrealists who organized some pretty big shows with the participation of many of the French group, including Breton and Eluard. Fairly recently, I believe the Tate ran a show about a decade or so ago.

Smart dude, that Anthony Lane; haha, a transparent hat tip to myself, there. His excerpted review follows.

===========================

(*) The forever elegant Duchamp, though never formally a member, was a participant supporter and even curated some of their most famous shows, like the one where he glued coal sacks to the ceiling which created a weird and decidedly non-elegant setting to say the least.

Tzara, the Zurich dada boss before Surrealism was codified, was "awaited like the second coming" when the young, soon to be Surrealists courted him to Paris and they threw themselves into dada full force. It didn't last long; as the French group was steeped in the romantic tradition and interested in psychic explorations - this is Freud's time - dada's incessant nihilism wore on them. After the breach and formal organizing with the first Surrealist Manifesto in '24, Tzara - in a bit of weird symmetry - eventually re-joined them as a Surrealist. Thus, the father became the son.

The Current Cinema
Street Justice
“Kick-Ass” and “Exit Through the Gift Shop.”
by Anthony Lane

April 20, 2010

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/26/100426crci_cinema_lane#ixzz0lq6IZpTw

Who made “Exit Through the Gift Shop”? No writer or director is credited, but it describes itself as “A Banksy Film.” To those of you who keep up with developments in street art less eagerly than you should, it must be explained that Banksy is not a derogatory adjective but the alias of an unspecified British artist who has indeed put art on the streets. His paintings and stencillings have won him a fan base of fashionable ardor, unceasingly piqued by his anonymity.

As if in tribute to that eel-like elusiveness, only a portion of “Exit Through the Gift Shop” is about the man himself. We see a cowled and low-lit figure, who speaks with a West Country burr. (This is the most derided of English accents, associated in the public ear with a rustic slowness, and splendidly out of kilter with the braying of the art world.) Banksy tells us about a guy who was trying to make a documentary about him, whereupon—hey, presto!—the rest of the movie turns around and follows that guy. He is Thierry Guetta, though he pronounces his first name “Terry,” thus becoming one of the few Frenchmen in history to prefer his Anglicized self. Even his mustache betrays a Victorian luxuriance; “He looked like something out of the eighteen-sixties,” as Banksy says.

Guetta explains that, living in Los Angeles, with his wife and children, he became interested in, then addicted to, the hit-and-run world of street art. He made friends with a number of artists, whether they wanted befriending or not, and filmed them with a handheld video camera as they worked. Eventually, the road led to Banksy, for whom Guetta became a partner in crime—accompanying him to Disneyland, where Banksy placed an inflatable doll resembling a hooded inmate at Guantánamo next to a ride, causing Guetta to endure hours of unamused questioning by the authorities. Even this failed to sate him, and the latter half of the movie shows him deciding to cross over and become an artist himself, like a war reporter picking up a gun. The joke is that he has no discernible gift, save a knack for self-advertisement; the more depressing joke is that this crumb of talent turns out to be enough. He calls himself Mr. Brainwash, and fills an abandoned television studio with sub-Warholian dreck of his own devising. Art scavengers, lured by the smell of publicity, line up, open the jaws of their wallets, and feast.

“Exit Through the Gift Shop” could and should have been an excoriating work. It isn’t often that I wish a high-minded Marxist had been in charge of a motion picture, but who else would you trust with the spectacle of subversive activity being commandeered, and fetishized, by the capitalist machinery that it was meant to undermine? This doesn’t apply just to Guetta, who still believes, bless him, that rehashed images of Marilyn Monroe and Elvis retain the power to mock and shock, and who, long before the movie is done, dwindles from a doting eccentric into a tiring bore; it also applies to Banksy himself, or, at any rate, to the moment when his paintings found their way onto the walls of Sotheby’s. To forge a million pounds’ worth of fake British banknotes, with the Queen’s head replaced by that of Diana, Princess of Wales, is a definable feat of guerrilla art. But to have your print of Kate Moss sold by a London auction house for ninety-six thousand pounds of real money, whatever you choose to do with it, means that you have been press-ganged from the street where you roamed free.

As a study in prankhood, this Banksy film can’t touch “F for Fake,” Orson Welles’s 1974 movie about an art forger. Welles both conspired with his untrustworthy subject and held him at arm’s length, like a conjurer with his rabbit, and you came out dazzled by the sleight, whereas “Exit Through the Gift Shop” feels dangerously close to the promotion of a cult—almost, dare one say it, of a brand. Nothing by Banksy or his acolytes would have been remotely alarming to Marcel Duchamp, or to Tristan Tzara; what would have struck them was the means by which a Banksy image can be reproduced—the sudden velocity at which its impact can travel, whether online or through the eyes of a hundred cell phones. That is what binds “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” unexpectedly, to “Kick-Ass”: the sense, both arousing and disconcerting, that, whatever you want to be, whether it’s an artist, a superhero, or a mystery man, all you need is the nerve to exhibit that desire. Then hit Send.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2010/04/26/100426crci_cinema_lane?currentPage=all#ixzz0lqeg3x5w

A Corpse

Renee and I saw Banksy's Exit Through the Gift Shop yesterday and it was pretty funny. It was so appropriate that the crazy shit he talks about went down in LA, probably the goofiest place on earth.

One clarification; people seem to forget that there's history. In reading some of the reviews on ETtGS, you'd think that Shephard Fairey and Banksy had created street art. But I really don't like it when reviewers say things like this:

This self-conscious Post Modern sort of cinematic device--which, of course, reached new heights in the fiction-non-fiction films of Charlie Kaufman--works really well in this film and within the street art context. Street art itself turns reality into fantasy as its creators transform public places into unlikely and often illegal canvases and impromptu galleries. So, while narrators and voiceover are usually loathed devices in film, they seems to give Gift Shop an appropriately fable-esque magical sensibility.
-Shana Ting Lipton (in the HuffPo!)

First, Charlie Kaufman as "new heights in the fiction-non-fiction films" is as a kid compared to Welles' achievement.

Second, the great thing about Banksy is the taste of subversion that sometimes peeks its head up. When he hung up his own paintings in museums for instance, it was the act itself that eclipsed any artistic merit the painting itself might have had.

Aside from ignoring history in the form of the early hip hop graf crews and before them, LA's own king of the streets Robbie Conal and the barrios of East LA, today's generation takes subversion and makes it an in-joke. I get it, you're hipsters, okay?

As a young person I got lucky and hit the lottery in my discovery of Surrealism. Coming up as I did in the 60's/70's, I was at first attracted to the "far out" quality of their paintings. But I stuck with it, and because of my amateur sleuthing and fate, I discovered that Surrealism was a movement, moral in its philosophy, poetic in expression and subversive in tactics.


This is a picture of one of the titans of Surrealism, Benjamin Peret, insulting a priest. Coming up in a thoroughly Catholic environment I found this picture astounding; the spell was cast. These dudes had balls the size of which wouldn't be seen again until the 60's.

Subversion's cousin, scandal, was also an oft used Surrealist weapon. Their public hanging of Nobel Laureate Anatole France - the man of French letters - is legendary.

The first pamphlet, arranged largely by André Breton and Louis Aragon, appeared in response to the national funeral of Anatole France. France, the 1921 Nobel Laureate and best-selling author, who was then regarded as the quintessential man of French letters, proved to be an easy target for an incendiary tract. The pamphlet featured an essay called Anatole France, or Gilded Mediocrity that scathingly attacked the recently deceased author on a number of fronts. The pamphlet was an act of subversion, bringing into question accepted values and conventions, which Anatole France was seen as personifying.
--Wikipedia

Some of the details of the Wiki on "Un Cadavre" can be misleading, but I'll leave that for now.

Irony and humor were founding principles and strategies as well. When Surrealism's "Pope," Andre' Breton, performed what would become one of his customary excommunications from the ranks, his butt got bit on more than one occasion.


That's Breton in the pic, of course, the target of some of his victims.

All of this is to say that while I enjoy some of Banksy's stuff, I particularly relish when he's subversive. Trouble is, in this post-post-modern world full of hipsters, something's been lost. When Banksy hangs one of his pictures in a museum, it comes off as a self-conscious prank, a joke, as opposed to dadaists and Surrealists who would pass out pamphlets inviting the public to attend a theater performance. Upon showtime, the audience would be greeted by the young subversives reading off tracts, insulting and scandalizing everything from French politics to cookie-cutter morals. Perhaps it's a sign of the times that we live in an era when priests are fucking kids but the world looks away, and back in the day the Surrealists got right in their face and cursed them out.

The young Surrealists in the golden age of the Left Bank and their dada forefathers understood one thing; they'd just come out of devastation in the form of WWI, and being writers they knew what to do; get busy. Their logic was impeccable; if it was rationality that had shit out the war, then in true dialectical manner they deduced ir-rationality must have something worthwhile to combat it. As rationality was a necessary component of life their conclusion was a fusion and transcendence of a world that did its best to exclude "the marvelous" in life and reduce living to the mundane. "Where contradictions cease to exist - sur-reality."

That their golden age was framed by two miserable wars is not lost on students of the movement. Fast forward and Vietnam becomes the catalyst for the counter-culture of the 60's and 70's. Today, with two out of control and un-winnable wars raging away and EM08 relentlessly wood-chipping the world, the feeling is of utter hopelessness. As Bunuel, a Surrealist to the end, famously said; "Where is the kindness and intelligence that will save us?"

Meanwhile, Banksy makes bank and incites no one except to pull out their pocketbook, as he himself documents.

Last, the Surrealists loved Paris, famously documented in Aragon's classic Paris Peasant. They reveled in late night walks around their beloved city, thinking and planning ways to further scandalize what they saw as a lost society. So in parting, here's Richard Hawley's song that opens and closes the film, The Streets are Ours.