Burbank, California

Forgot about this:
 

 
They used to have stacks of remainders of these at the old Samuel French branch in Studio City. Which was right next door to a branch of Larry Edmunds.

Who knew the 90s would be the Good Old Days, or maybe even the last of them? They were pretty fun.
 
 
 
 

 
The accidents are horrendous.
 

The Burbank one that so many people are excited about will (unnecessarily) tunnel underneath a mountain range right over the San Andreas Fault.

But hey, you’ll be able to stow your bicycle on it so that you can ride around San Francisco when you get there.
 
 
 

 
How come Burbank and this area couldn’t have had a Buñuel, or a Truffaut?
 
 

 
 
That’s a lot of whatever. No winnowing down, eh?

We think about “animation” too the way we think about special effects. It better be necessary and it usually isn’t.
 
 
 
 

 
Lol, he is such a moron. That’s not how tariffs work.

Be proud, Republicans.
 
 

 
 
The only way this is going to end is if these world leaders and their countries militarily wrestle the United States into the ground with threats and ultimatums that people in Washington can’t help but take seriously enough to depose this guy by force.

And everyone around him. Enough is enough.
 
 
 
 
 

 
LA is an industry town and which would explain this, but even here most people don’t travel very far for anything. So he’s not all wrong.

He’s talking about most people. Most of the market.
 
 

 
Film fanatics into the tech and titles are like .05 percent of the population. A symphony concert would get a bigger draw than most of the obscure releases in town.

We’re glad the New Beverly exists, but it’s not the future of movies or movie distribution.

Also, who drives over the hill to see a movie these days? It’s not 1975 anymore. IMAX is down the street.

Does Westwood even still exist? What’s there now?
 
 
 
 

 
They’re not cheap and the portions aren’t big.

These will soon be coming to LA and the more affluent part of the Valley around the studios.
 
 

 
 
Food- and selection-wise with that variety this place reminds us of one of the Google cafeterias that are free to employees. If you can find someone who works there then you can easily join them for lunch or even dinner.

Each of their huge complexes has like four or five different cafes. You just take a plate and load up.
 
 
 
 
 

 
It used to be you’d go away to the mountains for a rest and not want to come back geared up for more anger and hostility in your work.

Whatever happened to mellowness, and the pursuit of like, maybe gentility and peace and things with meaning?
 
 

 
 
Ugly, angry, tacky films; ugly, angry, tacky souls. You’d have to be very much from the other side of the tracks and not know any better to want to be a part of this hostile crap.

Which is what, like, ninety percent of the industry. So what’s the solution?

And as a hopeful viewer, besides becoming an antiquarian wandering in the archives of the past, where do you go.
 
 
 
 

 
 
And see, this way he can sell them before he makes his decision to force regulators to tank the deal in favor of Paramount.

Makes perfect sense!
 
 
 
 

 
Rumor is the surrogates all worked in Glendale.
 
 
 
 

 
We came to the conclusion years ago that everything that involves an institution of any kind public or private will always end up leading to incompetency and absurdity. What more proof do we need than now, everywhere?

So it’s best to avoid them.
 
 
 
 

Since Burbank’s still a movie town we thought we’d post this recent worthy late-night outpouring from filmmaker Fred Camper on Facebook.

There’s a lot to digest and we agree/relate to all of it. He usefully gathers together what things have gotten to be about now art and media-wise…
 
 

NOW I SPEAK AS AN ARTIST IN A VERY LONG RANT WHICH YOU SHOULD FEEL FREE TO IGNORE

Lately I have let my sleep patterns fall into something I know to be unhealthy, becoming very irregular. It’s 3 AM. I fell asleep at my desk a few hours ago, a “skill” I have only acquired with age, and now I will resume work on editing one of my “little fillums” (length ranging from ten seconds to fifteen minutes), for another hour or so, and this particular hour of working seems to have been a good idea: I am discovering an appetite for what feels like a productive strangeness in my choices of the last shots and edits in this current project that I hadn’t found earlier. Maybe I should explain that my raw footage to final film ratio is something like 20 to 1, and for this film, more like 40 to 1.

In the editing process for this one, which for the record will be titled “Revisits 4 (9 10 11),” I wanted to check a single shot in a different completed and posted work from over two years ago, an “Interactions,” and once again became irrationally annoyed and even enraged by Vimeo, even though I am quite happy with most of its services. I could have checked this in my own files, of course, but Vimeo was a little quicker in this case for reasons I don’t need to go into.

When I joined Vimeo three years ago, finding the films I had posted was a matter of clicking on “My Library.” That seemed OK. But at some point they changed it, and now I have to click on “Team Library.”

I have increasingly noticed a totalitarianism, not of the prison-and-torture variety but very pernicious nonetheless, creeping into the world as presented to us by our tech overlords, Microsoft and Google and Facebook and even Vimeo. “Team” is part of their ideology. A friend who is almost as much of a loner as I am and who has worked for a large corporation for decades, but entirely from home since the pandemic, has told me that a common corporate mantra, the overly cute “There’s no ‘I’ in “team,'” is repeatedly featured in his company’s communications. This is presumably one of those business ideologies that managements want to impose on their subjects, but it doesn’t really apply to the way he works — and to the way they let him work. He doesn’t *have* to keep working, he could retire, and he has expected for years for them to “retire” him as they keep cutting jobs from his department, but they must value his work because they don’t, and yet he still has to be subjected to this nonsense.

In my case, I live alone. I have dear friends around the US, and in Europe and Brazil, who I stay in touch with by email. In recent years, I have visited almost all of them. That’s what I really want to do with friends. Their friendships have long helped keep me alive. In that sense, they have been my “team” for almost forever. Only four or so now live in my city, Chicago. Only about three times have I asked anyone to see and comment on one of my films while I was working on it. There are 39 films now, with more done or almost done but not yet released. It is part of my “method” that I make them in solitude. I sit alone at my desk, the same desk I have carried from apartment to apartment for fifty-four years, which consists of a large thick flat door stretched across two shelving units, in a small apartment that no one is invited to visit, partly by design and preference, also because the place is a cluttered mess, but also also because I find solitude to be highly productive. I choose my subjects without any consultation with others; my budget is zero since I own the needed equipment, though sometimes some plane fare and even hotel rooms are required. I shoot and edit myself. Thus, I never have to “pitch” anything, nor ever reveal my plans. I have never used a single shot filmed by someone else, though a few are refilmed by me from other imagery.

About four of these films include friends as subjects, and in those cases they do collaborate, but are asked to do so only by being themselves, not as part of any “team,” and have chosen to agree to this. A few friends who have refused to be filmed remain dear friends. I seek no advice in editing. There are methods I use in editing that I may eventually reveal, but have not chosen to do so in the three years since I began. I use no scripts. My films are all silent.

I fully recognize that in some ways my complaint is completely idiotic; so what if Vimeo wants to imply that my works were made by a “team.” In other ways it seems proper to me to consider having the word “team” imposed as a descriptor to be horrible, almost as bad as when the notifications Vimeo sends me that I have a new follower suggest that I post more “content,” or urge me to “continue to give the people what they want.” The consumerism of that last suggestion is apocalyptically disgusting.

No one has to agree with my reactions here, of course, but I report them as my true responses which suggest to me everything that is wrong with our current culture. None of the art that I most love, the transcendent masterpieces that over the course a lifetime have made me who I am, in classical music, painting, literature, architecture, and among the greatest of films, which for me include “Genroku Chushingura,” four by Peter Kubelka, “Eniaios,” Rossellini’s “India,” “Au Hasard Balthazar,” Brakhage’s “Arabics,” and Ford’s “The Sun Shines Bright,” have ever given me what I “want.” I never knew when I was brought to ecstasy by these monuments to human possibility that what they did to me would be what I “wanted,” because I had not begun to imagine what they would do. Instead of meeting or exceeding my “expectations” (to repeat another phrase too commonly used), they gave me something I had not previously dreamed of. That was their whole f****** meaning. Many were indeed made by “teams,” but even those sure as hell didn’t look like it.

I admit to being ludicrously over-sensitive about this, but on the other hand maybe I should be. It somehow feels right and even helpful that I feel outraged every time I have to click on “Team Library.” No one else has ever had my password. I do not have a “team.” I don’t object in the slightest that other artists will. There are no rules for how to make the best art, but I choose to work the way I always have since I finished editing my first film in 16mm in an all-nighter having just turned 19. Oh well, I feel better for having written this, and now it’s 4:50 in the morning, which seems like exactly the right time for this sort of extreme rant. And it feels good to rage against something other than T, while at the same time feeling that the near-terminal mental illness he has been imposing on the whole world is not totally unrelated to what I object so passionately to in my own small way.

If you read this through to the end, preferably at 5:20 AM, well, thank you very much.

 
Especially everything that has to do with what was once colorfully known as the “Establishment.” Which means everything that most people care about. These institutions are all part of the same disease and it doesn’t seem curable.

She didn’t just give him the medal, she said she was giving him “the award.”
 
 

 
 
Obviously nothing means anything anymore. Which suits us here just fine.

We’ve got our cave, we’ve got our stack of books. It doesn’t take much.
 
 
 
 

 
Not even a War of the World’s that we can see.

This is a pretty obvious list of movies that took none of these critics very much imagination to come up with. Or much of a reach back in time.

There are no surprises or discoveries there, and so what’s the point?

This kind of glib critical commentary below is also annoying because it’s so ignorant about LA. But its sort is everywhere on this list (mostly in tritely associating Los Angeles with crime and deterioration).**

As evidenced by this list, Paul Thomas Anderson is one of the preeminent Los Angeles filmmakers, but none of his movies are a more loving tribute to the bygone Valley of his youth than this one. Anderson re-created locations that have long since disappeared, like the Ventura haunt Tail o’ the Cock, and found the odd gems that were still standing.

His other movies are also loving tributes to the Valley?

Loving? She ever seen them?

Licorice Pizza is supposed to take place in 1973. Anderson was born in 1970. So the problem with the movie is that it’s very much about the “bygone Valley of his Youth…”

Which is the early-middle 1980s. Its ethos is very much unlike that of the early 1970s because there was a huge difference between those two eras. And it’s a pretty big flaw. It’s a good movie, but it’s not 1973.

Anyway, if you’re gonna do a list then make it a good, interesting one. And maybe a lot shorter too, which kind of goes with the ”good” idea.

** Which we never have, ever. Our LA times were fun and scenic and life-affirming. Oftentimes glowingly so.

More fun than angst, definitely. Much more a David Hockney version than David Lynch.

 
Lol.
 
 

 
The bathos, the mawkishness, the stupidity, the rank and low expectations of what life and art can offer.

When’s this going to end?
 
 
 
 

 
This was quite a drive.
 
 
 
 

 
Check their product.
 
 
 
 

 
Hilarious.
 
 

 
 
Three-year-olds are using hyphens now?

 
What a dumb cornball movie this is. It’s as if the people who made it never read Shakespeare or completely missed what it was that he and his times were about.

Surprise, surprise.

The fictitious plot alone is ridiculous. If you’re gonna make something up, why make up this?
 
 

This movie is what happens when people confuse fan fiction with literature because they have no idea what literature is. And arrogantly think they do.

We’re also back to the inherent shallowness of so much of biographical criticism. Didn’t we get over that limitation a hundred years ago with the arrival of the Modernists? Those old Browning Societies would fall apart in tears over his marriage to Elizabeth Barrett but completely miss what his own complex poetry was about.

Are these new movie bios ever any good though anyway? Screen biographies are always going to be problematical as hell in every department, being what they can be, but these new ones now are nothing but hackneyed soap operas lacing any sense of place or gravitas.

Their characters are always so ridiculously bathetic too, what with their plaintive emoting and blank-eyed sincerity act. It’s dress-up time with tears, always, sprinkled with a bunch of sudden anger and hostility moments for the obligatory action scenes to help speed up the pace.

You can charitably try to think of these movies as being like those fun but silly old biographicals from the 1940s except that they take themselves about 10,000 times more seriously. They’re not fun, they’re un-fun. Those Hollywood filmmakers in the olden days knew they were being absurdly silly, but the people who make these movies now really think they’re on to something rich and poetic and apparently so does most everyone else.

“Love, loss, and the power of art…” How mawkish and false. Who wants to see that anyway, especially the power of art part.

Art as self-expression and personal therapy, yuck. It’s such an unctuous, self-congratulatory, snowflake-y, narcissistic view of life.

The greatest artists write what they don’t necessarily know about, Hollywood. Try to capture that one and how it works. Shakespeare btw treated writing like a job and he stole from everywhere. And what was in him wasn’t deposited there from the outside.

The real story is always so much more interesting than what most movie makers know or want to capture. It doesn’t have to be this way, even in Hollywood.
 

Good review here, but they’re still a little too charitable:
 

https://www.the-independent.com/arts-entertainment/films/features/hamnet-overrated-jessie-buckley-golden-globes-b2898187.html#
 

This all goes without saying, but few are saying it.
 
 
 
 

 
Grandview’s interesting as well. It has Edna Purviance and Leo G. Carroll! Among other fun notables like Harry Langdon.
 
 
 
 

 
How long before this repeated behavior begins to loosen the inhibitions of the real police forces in this country?
 
 

 
 
There’s your “complete immunity” in action, people.

Without tight control soon they’ll all start doing it.
 
 
 
 

 
These kind will always be among us, enthusiastically taking advantage of the misfortunes of others.
 
 

Forty percent of these lots apparently are being scooped up by outside speculators in what are obviously distress sales. Looks like Hell will soon be getting much larger.

You should see how excited the local YIMBY fanatics are btw at the prospect of outside investors coming in and upzoning these lots so that they can build their huge mega-complexes.

Seriously. They think it’s outrageous for the rest of us that most of these Altadena and Pacific Palisades homeowners just want to return to their old lives the best they can.

We’re not making this up. It’s Opportunity Time galore for these arrogant YIMBY cultists and shills.
 
 
 
 

 
A completely incoherent and contradictory message to the crowd from these songwriters that was typical of the night’s events.

Like, being yourself and wanting to be in a tribe don’t go together. And who the hell wants to be part of a tribe anyway?

No real artist does. It’s deadly. Same with “teams.”
 

 
 
Female empowerment and strength, right, dressed like that. Exactly what kind?

And why do they look so white?
 
 

 
 
There were what, like 600 different nominees in all? Lol. And a lot of them were from TV and streaming all mixed together with real movies. Or, what now counts as real movies.

Those were some discriminating tastes there, yes.

These awards ceremonies have all turned into such an obvious joke, and this one led the way. They all look like the Golden Globes now.
 

 
It’s all about retaliation and punishment with these authoritarians. For dissenting.
 

His well-being. What assholes.

Beware. It can happen here.
 

 
Which could have been done during the recent remodel job on 5.
 
 

A serious omission, yes. Like why then bother if getting there is such a hassle.

There is that wacky hidden bridge on Providencia and Flower that nobody knows about and they kept intact, and which we only learned about when we accidentally discovered it on our way home years ago from an old auto mechanic on Victory. But it’s too far away to be practical.

You can also hike all the way to Verdugo but who wants to do that.

Here’s another suggestion: How about putting in a grade crossing for Verdugo at the train tracks so that people can travel straight up to downtown without having to go around?

We go so far back in Burbank that we remember when all of those streets on the Hill crossed the tracks straight through to the Flatlands! There were lots of traffic jams when the trains passed by. You should have seen what Alameda near Bill’s Ranch Market looked like when that happened.
 
 
 
 

 
Brad Bird we like. His King of the Hills from around that time are great too. He has brains and, even better, taste and judgement. You can even call it sophistication, a word you rarely hear any more because there’s so little of it around. You used to hear it all the time.

Naturally, this film bombed.
 
 
 
 

 
It’s like boasting about having the most number of McDonalds.
 
 

 
It always goes back and forth with Lincoln Square, which condition-wise makes Burbank look like a grand movie palace. (We so miss Lincoln Plaza right up the street, which not only showed much better movies but also felt like you were descending into the mid-1970s every time you went down their creaky escalator. The vibe and decor hadn’t changed.)

Us old-time Burbankers really want to know: Where are all these people coming from?

And how come the business it generates doesn’t spill over to the rest of the downtown merchants?
 

 
Oh boy.
 
 
 
 

 
This guy will never get prosecuted by the locals of course because the feds will just whisk him away and hide him out in some place like Greenland.
 
 

We’re serious about this question:

For those members of the BPD who are defending this guy, or the city council, is it the policy of the Burbank Police Department to have its officers hold in shooting position a gun in one hand and a cellphone in the other?

Or maybe just swap the two out when need be?

So what then are you defending?
 

 
As if we needed that. It was pretty obvious.

And, worse, he calls her a “bitch” right after he shoots her, which makes it a hate crime.
 

 
The right-wing news agency released this shooter’s phone footage (if it’s legit and not AI) because they think it gets him off the hook, but it does the exact opposite.

Also, BPD … are you trained to shoot a gun and cell-phone footage at the same time?

Is this also a Burbank Police Department tactic in training, or policy? Just like this ICE “officer”?

One hand on the gun, and one with your cellphone?

Didn’t think so. So no one on the Burbank force here be defending this murderer, OK?

Because we know that some of you are. We’ve heard about it.
 
 
 
 

 
Pretty cool.
 
 
 
 

 
And haven’t we seen much of this same list before, like, a few years ago?
 
 

 
 
Yeah, it’s just for after a wedding, but it’s still inexcusably conventional and unimaginative.

You know, age really is the great prover.

Btw, we used to sit outside this same hotel in Ojai on Ojai Ave on their patio and sip beers back when it had a different name before the remodel job and was a much cooler place. Ojai was much cooler then too. It was like somewhere neat you’d go when you were on the backroads.

The only thing worse than slick is slick + money. An eternal verity.

 
They were never really even talked about locally.
 

 
 
Some kids went, but it wasn’t a *thing*. We never even thought about it.

The show itself also seemed kind of dorky and inauthentic back then, like TV rock and roll. It comes off better now.
 
 
 
 

 
This is their country now. Not ours.
 
 

 
Lol. Such a world of economic magic they live in.

It’s all so easy!
 
 

We won’t even go into the details as to why this contention is absurd and that things never work out this way in the real world. Some anecdotal evidence given in one of the responses — one of the few negative replies in fact — is sufficient:

The problem is that the older apartments do rent comparisons of what the rates of a 2bd 2ba apt are going for across the city and price their units at the same rates as the newer units. Many of these are managed by property management companies that answer to landlords.

My friend manages a building that has a 2bd 1 bath apartment that has been empty for 8 months because it’s old and rent controlled. So they would rather let it sit empty, than rent it for less than $3800 a month. It doesn’t have parking, it’s tiny, dated, it doesn’t have laundry, it doesn’t have AC but the owner prices it close to the price as the nicer newer units on the street. Many other older buildings in my area also have this same rental price. The newer buildings are insanely expensive, so older building landlords feel justified keeping their units high too.

They’ll charge $4000 for a place that was $2200 a few years ago, and say it’s still less expensive than the $5000-$6000 the newer places are asking.

So the luxury market and newer buildings still inflates the older market. They keep them higher than they are worth, but just a little lower than the new buildings.

The idea too that there are all these rich people eagerly clamoring to live in an apartment in Burbank or even Glendale of all places is equally inane. And, when word gets out that there’s an increased supply of housing in a high-demand area no matter of what kind the demand doesn’t end up declining.

It grows. More supply = more demand flooding in. Think about that reality, you Randian nincompoops. Because that’s what happens. It would take a tremendous surplus to guarantee any result other than an increase in the area’s popularity.

These sorts of junior-high-level economic mythmakers will always be with us. The goal is to never let them run the show.

Good luck on that one, eh?
 

It was no surprise here — we’ve been all but misanthropic since the early 1980s. Learned hard and young.

We saw this all being written on the wall years ago. Most people are their own worst enemies in life and the best thing to do is to stay completely away. Tend your own garden and all that.
 
 
 
 

 
As far as we know the remains of these folk art figures from Burbank are still sitting there on that hillside in Woodland Hills, but they were totally covered up in plastic a few years ago and made inaccessible to the public by the school administration in apparent retaliation for their continued existence there.

It’s a great example of cultural bigotry and intolerance btw — 21st-century style — for anyone to be actually objecting to these things on moral grounds. It’s folk art, people. Get a grip.

Also, let’s try to get the joke too, ok, and how old historical memes and show-biz stereotypes were being deliberately played around with here. In obvious tongue in cheek, and even a poking fun at, humor…
 
 

 

Nothing about this malicious destruction would surprise you if you’ve seen what an aesthetic horrorshow that particular college campus has turned into over the last 20 years. One of the coolest and most architecturally attractive mid-century community colleges in the state has been completely destroyed over the last decade or two by several different mindless administrations and faculty advisory committees. **

You should see what Pierce looks like now if you remember what it was then. It’s a bunch of big, ugly concrete blocks scattered around the acreage. There’s no more low-slung, parklike country feeling to the place at all — Pierce College’s unique old urban/rural vibe has been completely ruined.

This below has got to be read to be believed. The censorious, holier-than-thou professor in particular is especially offensive:
 

Controversial statues remain at Pierce College

The professor righteously claims that these figures are “a part of Pierce’s racist past” (what racist past?), but the things have only been there for a few years after moving from the Burbank border (!)

Man, beyond proudly exhibiting his total ignorance of their very short history of existence at Pierce, what must this guy also think of TV shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke?

Ban them all no doubt. So where should we start?

** It was also incredibly stupid to trash this stuff in this barbaric a way too because genuine California folk art from the field is worth a fortune now. People steal it all the time, and so we’re wondering who in the Pierce administration ended up pilfering this stuff to as well.

Here’s what these pious, sanctimonious, uncomprehending institutional assholes gleefully destroyed in 2022 when no one was looking. And the school had taken the collection in with the assurance that it would be preserved!

From 2013:
 

 
For free.
 

 
Pluto has three separate 24/7 channels devoted to Star Trek shows. Good transfers and minimal commercials.

Let Netflix specialize in making movies now!
 
 
 
 

 
This isn’t really our idea of fun but it’s interesting that they were hanging around Eagle Rock and Glendale.
 

 
You know who else lived in Eagle Rock and Glendale and started his career there a few years later?

Woody Guthrie.

Why are some parts of the local past so much more vital and interesting than now? The people at least are.
 
 

 
We always like to remind people of the days when we could count at least a dozen different new and used bookstores in Burbank, and they were all in business at about the same time.

We get an admittedly morbid pleasure out of doing so. The change means something big.
 

 
There were four stamp and coin dealers too in Burbank at one time, along with several authentic hobby shops. And these were not the kind of faux hobby shops that specialize in the silly, junky, supposedly collectible crap that’s been cluttering the current zeitgeist up so horribly.

Now there’s only like one decent cool bookstore in town, which is Autobooks. But Burbank’s House of Hobbies is still over on Victory, thank goodness.

Once on Olive near Victory, this a real hobby store that specializes in real hobbies. You know, those quiet little private avocations that actually take a bit of time and thought and maybe even some handiwork skills.

Remember them? At times these interests could also involve what used to be known as a bit of “intellectual content.” Meaning like knowledge acquisition instead of ruthless strategizing and competition and the goal to dominate and become victorious. Such a lightweight, hostile bore most of this recreational stuff is now.

 
Which was not a sundown city no matter how much the local self-righteous scolds of today so want it to have been.

The thought that Burbank must have been a sundown city obviously makes many people now feel real good about themselves in comparison. Their false claim is uttered these days not just glibly, but almost gleefully.
 

 
A “sundown city” meant that there was an actual ordinance in place that required undesirables to be “in transit” or inside a home or business premises after the early evening.

It didn’t just mean a town that harassed Black people, and it also had nothing to do with homes that had restrictive covenants placed upon them by developers or real estate agents or owners.

If so, both of those sad realities would have meant that almost every city in the country was a “sundown city.”

Burbank was never an actual sundown city. Glendale was, but not Burbank. Homes in Burbank also never had very many restrictive covenants on their deeds.

The City of Burbank was always a working class town with lots of 24/7 factories which would have made such mass discrimination difficult to enforce. Glendale was primarily full of management employees and petit bourgeois business owners.

Big difference between the two. Oh, and Glendale was never a sundown town “until the late 70s…” More like the early 50s. Federal court rulings would have made this kind of automatic enforcement unlawful after that time period.

All these feel-good myths about the past. We’re so much better people now, yes…

 
And VistaVision, and the current new fetishism over dye imbibition prints, and the constant fanboy IMAX digital v film debates, and any kind of obsession/fetishizing of technology over content and means versus ends.
 
 

What need is there for this here? It’s boys and their toys, right?

Burbank is basically the world headquarters of 70mm filmmaking now but give us a good 16mm or 8mm print on a small screen of a great neorealist third-world film any day.

Black and white is even better — meaning real silver halide black and white, not some digital color-removal pushbutton emulation tactic.

Keep things frigging’ simple, ok film artists?

If that’s what they are. Based upon historical precedents and the knowledge of what’s possible we always have a big doubt.

 
 
Totally inappropriate and deliberately jingoistic. This country never used to engage in this kind of stupid crap.

Do the locals go for this?
 
 
 
 

 
This is great. There are also lots of American high schools participating.
 
 

 
 
Great costumes and colors and European folkloric-type acts and amateur historical re-enactment groups. Who knew this was a thing?

The Rose Parade people really need to sit themselves down and watch how much more vibrant this and the other local European MusikParades are by comparison. Their event this year was awful. They don’t even have a Monty Montana anymore.

Maybe it’s time to emigrate back to the home countries.

 
There’s another celebration.
 
 

Happy New Year from the past. To hell with this one.
 
 
 
 

These locally made Dhar Mann videos are admittedly about as subtle as a sledgehammer blow and that must be a huge part of their appeal, but you’d think there’d be at least one employee down there who’s gotta be snickering into their laptop all the time.
 

This one starts off as obviously funny social comment and then quickly veers into the realm of strained seriousness. Or does it?

Maybe it’s supposed to be a funny put-down all the way? Because it is that, but not we suspect for the kinds of reasons that the people who make these things are in control of. Or should be.

Like we’d choose the ice and snow over that indoor Christmas crowd all giving each other the high-fives. Where’s Sid Melton when you need him? We lived in Harlem for years and never saw any Black people as white as that welcoming bunch.

It’s an ancient question. Can something be a satire even if the people who are making it have no idea that that’s what it is?

Or is it just kitsch instead, and will be seen this way in 50 years?
 
 

 
The Toluca Lake community does this every year when they can winding up and down their streets with everyone joining in and we rarely hear a thing about it.
 
 

 
 
But every news camera in L.A. showed up at that dog funeral a few weeks ago. They were literally staking out the place.

We’ve noticed the last few years that good or cool ideas in this community get like zero attention. But every dumb, schlock interest attracts a crowd.
 
 
 
 

 
(This Power Pop great was banned by the BBC when it first came out because of its subject matter and no doubt it would be banned today too by everyone else as soon as they all figured out what it was about.)
 
 
 
 

 
 
Interesting how little reference there is to anything that was made before about the late 1990s.