Riverside

Earthquake Rattles Southern California
The New York Times - July 29, 2008

LOS ANGELES — A moderately strong earthquake shook Southern California on Tuesday, swaying buildings and tossing food off grocery store shelves for about 20 seconds. There were no immediate reports of major injuries or structural damage.

The quake, estimated at 5.4 magnitude (reduced from an initial estimate of 5.8), was centered 35 east of downtown Los Angeles in Chino Hills, just south of Pomona in San Bernardino county. It was felt as far east as Las Vegas and as far south as San Diego.

Cellphone lines were jammed throughout the region as people began to frantically make calls in the immediate moments after the powerful jolt. Some schools, office buildings, tourist attractions and other facilities were evacuated temporarily as people braced for aftershocks, which were numerous and in some cases were as strong as 3.8 magnitude, while the Los Angeles City Council stopped to regroup.

Residents adjusted to that eerie, off-putting sensation of having rolled from side to side on the rollers that are common in seismically engineered buildings, which can leave buildings swaying for several seconds after the quake.

The shake was strong enough to knock pictures off walls and rattle windows, but there appeared to be little damage near the earthquake’s epicenter.

In Riverside, two women suffered minor head injuries from climbing under tables.

Legend

In Memoriam: Bruce Conner (1933-2008)

By Steve Seid

Bruce Conner, the great, irascible and ever-evolving San Francisco–based artist known for his assemblages, films, drawings, and interdisciplinary works, passed away on July 7, 2008. The prototype for much of today’s repurposed art, Conner’s gauzy assemblages of salvaged materials, such as doll parts and nylon stockings, attracted much art-world attention in the late fifties. His landmark film, A Movie (1958), made from scraps of newsreels, soft-core porn, and B movies, augured the future of another form, the music video. Conner moved to the Bay Area in 1957 and quickly became a significant member of the lively Beat community, forming his own makeshift group of funk artists, the Rat Bastard Protective Association. In the ’60s, Conner could be found at the Avalon Ballroom designing light shows; when the ’70s punk scene emerged, Conner was there as well, capturing the dark vitality of the music in the photographs exhibited here. Throughout these countercultural trends, Conner continued to work in many media—drawings, photography, films, sculptural objects—creating powerful works summarized in an ambitious 1999 touring survey, 2000 BC: The Bruce Conner Story. To further highlight his crucial influence, A Movie was placed on the National Film Registry at the Library of Congress.

Bruce Conner’s association with BAM/PFA goes back many years. The museum’s collection contains numerous drawings, including the exquisite felt-pen renderings of the mid-‘60s and the much later inkblot drawings. His earliest work is represented by Untitled Collage with Hair Growing Out of It from 1960. Conner was also a MATRIX artist (number 102), displaying his otherworldly photograms, full-scale contact bodyprints on large rolls of photographic paper. Made with Edmund Shea, these towering works seem to capture the trace of one’s spirit. One of these, Angel, is in the BAM collection. Almost all of Conner’s seminal film works reside in the Pacific Film Archive collection, including America Is Waiting (1982), Looking for Mushrooms (1961–67), Marilyn Times Five (1968–73), Mongoloid (1978), Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1977), and Report (1963–67). The monumental Crossroads (1976), one of Conner’s most ambitious films, was the object of a PFA preservation project assisted closely by the artist. A pristine 35mm print of this uncanny ode to nuclear terror is now housed in PFA’s vault.

As you view the photographs in Mabuhay Gardens, please keep in mind Bruce Conner, a lively and truculent artistic force, bent on culling order from the loose ends of the everyday. We will miss him.

November

Anxious in America, New York Times, June 29, 2008
by Thomas L. Friedman

Just a few months ago, the consensus view was that Barack Obama would need to choose a hard-core national-security type as his vice presidential running mate to compensate for his lack of foreign policy experience and that John McCain would need a running mate who was young and sprightly to compensate for his age. Come August, though, I predict both men will be looking for a financial wizard as their running mates to help them steer America out of what could become a serious economic tailspin.

I do not believe nation-building in Iraq is going to be the issue come November — whether things get better there or worse. If they get better, we’ll ignore Iraq more; if they get worse, the next president will be under pressure to get out quicker. I think nation-building in America is going to be the issue.

It’s the state of America now that is the most gripping source of anxiety for Americans, not Al Qaeda or Iraq. Anyone who thinks they are going to win this election playing the Iraq or the terrorism card — one way or another — is, in my view, seriously deluded. Things have changed.

Up to now, the economic crisis we’ve been in has been largely a credit crisis in the capital markets, while consumer spending has kept reasonably steady, as have manufacturing and exports. But with banks still reluctant to lend even to healthy businesses, fuel and food prices soaring and home prices declining, this is starting to affect consumers, shrinking their wallets and crimping spending. Unemployment is already creeping up and manufacturing creeping down.

The straws in the wind are hard to ignore: If you visit any car dealership in America today you will see row after row of unsold S.U.V.’s. And if you own a gas guzzler already, good luck. On Thursday, The Palm Beach Post ran an article on your S.U.V. options: “Continue to spend upward of $100 for a fill-up. Sell or trade in the vehicle for a fraction of the original cost. Or hold out and park the truck in the driveway for occasional use in hopes the market will turn around.” Just be glad you don’t own a bus. Montgomery County, Md., where I live, just announced that more children were going to have to walk to school next year to save money on bus fuel.

On top of it all, our bank crisis is not over. Two weeks ago, Goldman Sachs analysts said that U.S. banks may need another $65 billion to cover more write-downs of bad mortgage-related instruments and potential new losses if consumer loans start to buckle. Since President Bush came to office, our national savings have gone from 6 percent of gross domestic product to 1 percent, and consumer debt has climbed from $8 trillion to $14 trillion.

My fellow Americans: We are a country in debt and in decline — not terminal, not irreversible, but in decline. Our political system seems incapable of producing long-range answers to big problems or big opportunities. We are the ones who need a better-functioning democracy — more than the Iraqis and Afghans. We are the ones in need of nation-building. It is our political system that is not working.

I continue to be appalled at the gap between what is clearly going to be the next great global industry — renewable energy and clean power — and the inability of Congress and the administration to put in place the bold policies we need to ensure that America leads that industry.

“America and its political leaders, after two decades of failing to come together to solve big problems, seem to have lost faith in their ability to do so,” Wall Street Journal columnist Gerald Seib noted last week. “A political system that expects failure doesn’t try very hard to produce anything else.”

We used to try harder and do better. After Sputnik, we came together as a nation and responded with a technology, infrastructure and education surge, notes Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International. After the 1973 oil crisis, we came together and made dramatic improvements in energy efficiency. After Social Security became imperiled in the early 1980s, we came together and fixed it for that moment. “But today,” added Hormats, “the political system seems incapable of producing a critical mass to support any kind of serious long-term reform.”

If the old saying — that “as General Motors goes, so goes America” — is true, then folks, we’re in a lot of trouble. General Motors’s stock-market value now stands at just $6.47 billion, compared with Toyota’s $162.6 billion. On top of it, G.M. shares sank to a 34-year low last week.

That’s us. We’re at a 34-year low. And digging out of this hole is what the next election has to be about and is going to be about — even if it is interrupted by a terrorist attack or an outbreak of war or peace in Iraq. We need nation-building at home, and we cannot wait another year to get started. Vote for the candidate who you think will do that best. Nothing else matters.

July 4, 2008

(Mr. Bush, Lead or Leave, New York Times, June 22, 2008)
By Thomas L. Friedman

Two years ago, President Bush declared that America was “addicted to oil,” and, by gosh, he was going to do something about it. Well, now he has. Now we have the new Bush energy plan: “Get more addicted to oil.”

Actually, it’s more sophisticated than that: Get Saudi Arabia, our chief oil pusher, to up our dosage for a little while and bring down the oil price just enough so the renewable energy alternatives can’t totally take off. Then try to strong arm Congress into lifting the ban on drilling offshore and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

It’s as if our addict-in-chief is saying to us: “C’mon guys, you know you want a little more of the good stuff. One more hit, baby. Just one more toke on the ole oil pipe. I promise, next year, we’ll all go straight. I’ll even put a wind turbine on my presidential library. But for now, give me one more pop from that drill, please, baby. Just one more transfusion of that sweet offshore crude.”

It is hard for me to find the words to express what a massive, fraudulent, pathetic excuse for an energy policy this is. But it gets better. The president actually had the gall to set a deadline for this drug deal:

“I know the Democratic leaders have opposed some of these policies in the past,” Mr. Bush said. “Now that their opposition has helped drive gas prices to record levels, I ask them to reconsider their positions. If Congressional leaders leave for the Fourth of July recess without taking action, they will need to explain why $4-a-gallon gasoline is not enough incentive for them to act.”

This from a president who for six years resisted any pressure on Detroit to seriously improve mileage standards on its gas guzzlers; this from a president who’s done nothing to encourage conservation; this from a president who has so neutered the Environmental Protection Agency that the head of the E.P.A. today seems to be in a witness-protection program. I bet there aren’t 12 readers of this newspaper who could tell you his name or identify him in a police lineup.

But, most of all, this deadline is from a president who hasn’t lifted a finger to broker passage of legislation that has been stuck in Congress for a year, which could actually impact America’s energy profile right now — unlike offshore oil that would take years to flow — and create good tech jobs to boot.

That bill is H.R. 6049 — “The Renewable Energy and Job Creation Act of 2008,” which extends for another eight years the investment tax credit for installing solar energy and extends for one year the production tax credit for producing wind power and for three years the credits for geothermal, wave energy and other renewables.

These critical tax credits for renewables are set to expire at the end of this fiscal year and, if they do, it will mean thousands of jobs lost and billions of dollars of investments not made. “Already clean energy projects in the U.S. are being put on hold,” said Rhone Resch, president of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

People forget, wind and solar power are here, they work, they can go on your roof tomorrow. What they need now is a big U.S. market where lots of manufacturers have an incentive to install solar panels and wind turbines — because the more they do, the more these technologies would move down the learning curve, become cheaper and be able to compete directly with coal, oil and nuclear, without subsidies.

That seems to be exactly what the Republican Party is trying to block, since the Senate Republicans — sorry to say, with the help of John McCain — have now managed to defeat the renewal of these tax credits six different times.

Of course, we’re going to need oil for years to come. That being the case, I’d prefer — for geopolitical reasons — that we get as much as possible from domestic wells. But our future is not in oil, and a real president wouldn’t be hectoring Congress about offshore drilling today. He’d be telling the country a much larger truth:

“Oil is poisoning our climate and our geopolitics, and here is how we’re going to break our addiction: We’re going to set a floor price of $4.50 a gallon for gasoline and $100 a barrel for oil. And that floor price is going to trigger massive investments in renewable energy — particularly wind, solar panels and solar thermal. And we’re also going to go on a crash program to dramatically increase energy efficiency, to drive conservation to a whole new level and to build more nuclear power. And I want every Democrat and every Republican to join me in this endeavor.”

That’s what a real president would do. He’d give us a big strategic plan to end our addiction to oil and build a bipartisan coalition to deliver it. He certainly wouldn’t be using his last days in office to threaten Congressional Democrats that if they don’t approve offshore drilling by the Fourth of July recess, they will be blamed for $4-a-gallon gas. That is so lame. That is an energy policy so unworthy of our Independence Day.

Archival (Not Disposable)

A thoughtful article on The Digital Bits about the love, culture and 10th anniversary of the demise of Laserdiscs. I bought my Pioneer CLD-D704 (I wanted to get the HLD-X9 but I didn't have the money to ship it from Japan) just to watch one disc: the Criterion release of Boogie Nights. That was in 2006. Since then my collection has grown over 150 discs and I love every one. It feels like my own archive with which I can host my own screenings and listen to rare interviews and commentaries that will never be available anywhere else. The Laserdisc Forever website is the best that I know of to research this format. And the LaserDisc Database has the most comprehensive directory of laserdiscs online.

Hollywood and Western

Trailers#12

For films to explore and revisit.

Tran Ahn Hung's Cyclo (1995)