No doubt I’m the last cat who should be writing about public space.  I mean here at home in Los Angeles I rarely think about public space and congregating in same.  That is, I do congregate occasionally, I just don’t go out of my way to do it.  Because mostly I’m in my car going to and fro – and when I get to my destination, it’s rarely to a park.  I have nothing against open spaces, I like open spaces and certainly L.A., particularly our urban areas of the city, that are green poor – though this is not the only way in which gathering spaces are manifested in this city.

Lord knows people have meetings, write screenplays or work on the Great American Novel on their laptops (or playing World of Warcraft with who knows who all else online) at many a Starbuck’s or Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf in this considerable town.  Maybe somebody has tracked this, but I’ve yet to see or hear about a sinewy barrista kicking somebody out for staying too long in their coffee shop.  But then, it seems these folks now and then buy a coffee, frappachino and/or bottle of water to keep the static down.

My gym, which the lovely and talented Dr. Pop pays for – as one has to have perks in this line of work – is an L.A. Fitness housed in a former Montgomery Ward department store in a mall on La Cienega near the 10 Freeway.  Okay, so already it’s not a public space, but bear with me a moment.  Given this is ethnically rich L.A. and the geography of where the gym is (located in between several distinct neighborhoods), this facility gets a cross section of its inhabitants from young sleek-muscled tatted ballers wearing just the right shoes for their hops to, what I presume to be, orthodox Jewish woman in sweat gear that includes long stretch skirts, sweat pants under that and coverings for their head.  Admittedly, you don’t generally find representatives of these two groups awaiting their respective turns at the preacher curl machine, gabbing about the latest episode of Rookie Blue.

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At nearly 139 square miles in size, Detroit is larger than Boston, Manhattan and San Francisco combined.  Home to some two million at one point, the population has shrunk to less than half at 800,000 and decreasing.  Motown, the once Motor City U.S.A., has seen hard times since either one of those appellations applied to a city that’s been struck with what my Uncle Norman would have called, “buzzard’s luck.”

Detroit has been riding a rough road for a long time.  Mayor Bing and wonks like Data Driven Detroit controversially seek to physically downsize the city. This past May, seven-year-old Aiyana Jones was killed by a policeman’s bullet in a tragic incident arising from a botched police raid.  Also in May, Kwame Kilpatrick, who once billed himself as the nation’s first hip-hop mayor of Detroit, was  sentenced from 18 months to five years for violating probation.  You might recall when in office the married Kilpatrick was busted for sexting the woman he was having an affair with, his chief of staff Christine Beatty.  Kilpatrick, whose administration was plagued by several scandals and charges of corruption, and who once had a license to practice law, was initially convicted of two counts of perjury.

Kilpatrick was sent to the former Jackson prison, which is now called the Charles Egler Reception and Guidance Center.  Jackson was once home to another Detroit native, the former pimp and junkie Donald Goines.  In 1969, being re- incarcerated at Jackson, Goines started reading the paperback original novels of another pimp and hustler, Robert Beck aka Iceberg Slim.  This and his mother bringing him a manual typewriter while in the joint inspired Goines to write and eventually publish such books as Never Die Alone (filmed in 2004 with rapper DMX as the criminal protagonist) and arguably his best book, Daddy Cool.

But it’s Detroit in the era of Goines and hit songs like “Only the Strong Survive and “It’s Your Thing,” where the city and places like Hamtramck and even Flint, 66 miles away, were on the boom due in no small measure to the car industry.  Ford, General Motors and Chrysler, were turning out cars and trucks like there was no tomorrow — where at the point of production, peoples’ lives changed materially and politically.

Recently Dr. Pop and I attended a screening (a fundraiser to help send young activists and organizers to the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit next week) at the Community Coalition in South L.A. of a 55-minute black and white documentary originally released in 1970 called Finally Got the News.  Made by Stewart Bird, Rene Lichtman and Peter Gessner, Finally dynamically captures a period in time when the League of Revolutionary Black Workers was on the move.  This was a group who arose from the shop floor of Detroit’s automakers who sought to not only confront the racism and unequal treatment inside the plants, but the complacency and cozy relationship of their union, the United Auto Workers, with management and the police. Read More…

Recently, mystery and thriller writer Christopher Rice posted a piece on the Daily Beast’s book section entitled Why Crime Novelists Don’t Get Woman.

You see, as Rice relates, he has a new book out, The Moonlit Earth.  When he was first contemplating the book, he knew he was going to have a female protagonist and wanted to give her more heft than how female characters are often portrayed in books by men. He singled out four types of women he wanted to see eliminated from the genre.  These are: the long-suffering cop’s wife who just doesn’t understand her husband’s call to duty (often, in the past at least, this was also the girlfriend of the private eye); the babe assassin (well, sorry Christopher, you simply can’t deny the appeal of foxy vampire slayers like Anita Blake, Jane Yellowrock or Damali Richards); the ice queen bureaucrat (agreed); the token lesbian cop (ditto).

Now given this is a belated Mother’s Day post by a mystery writer, and the aforementioned slayer chicks don’t have children – though I think they fool around with studly shirtless vampire beefcakes now and then, it’s appropriate to give a brief lowdown on mothers who sleuth.

For instance a particular favorite of Dr. Pop was a couple of books, Going Nowhere Fast and Bad News Travels Fast, by friend and fellow mystery scribe Gar Anthony Haywood.  Joe and Dottie Loudermilk are a retired couple (she a professor and he a cop) who like to travel with their Airstream trailer to various national landmarks. Their wanderlust was inspired in part to get away from the troublesome grown children though invariably their kids would get the parents involved in some damn mischief.

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This Saturday, April 17, in honor of Earth Day, there will be activities in South L.A. This is a good thing, of course, as all of us should be concerned about the fate of our environment and what we can do to not kill our world and us. Now I’m not going to enjoin the debate about whether climate change is happening or not, I mean, it seems to me the evidence is clear that Polar bears are losing their ice floes, but hey, I’m no expert.

For even the experts are divided…just look at the debate between climatologists who pretty much agree that global warming is happening versus meteorologists, some of whom are TV weather forecasters, who are skeptical. There’s a recent study done by George Mason University and the University of Texas on this divide, with something like a fourth of the weathercasters surveyed agreeing with the statement, “Global warming is a scam.”

But back to South L.A. I’m sure one of the aspects of the celebrations will be about green jobs and green job training. For as this Great Recession has affected the middle class and those with technical skills, it has devastated the job prospects for youth of color, particularly black and brown young folks. The jobless rate for whites in the United States in March was 8.8 percent. For blacks it was nearly double – 16.5 percent; and for Hispanics 12.6 percent. These unemployment rates increased for both minority groups from the previous month – while it stayed steady for whites.

There are efforts here in Los Angeles to create a wellspring of green jobs opportunities in new construction and in regards to retrofitting existing structures, and apprenticeship programs partnering with the building trades. Mindful too that the building trades has traditionally been a white male bastion of workers where it was somebody you knew or your brother or cousin who got you on the job. Though there has been work buy some of the forward thinkers in and outside of organized labor to break down that good ol’ boy system We even have Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa trying to push through his and Councilman Richard Alarcon’s Green Energy Compromise Plan. The plan relies on a one-time only rate increase, and setting aside certain earmarked monies for renewable energy.

Yet the City of Los Angeles is in the midst of one of the worst budget deficits in its history while simultaneously the state of California is damn near broke. On top of forced furloughs and layoffs abounding, there are at least 4,000 city jobs are on the chopping block or facing further curtailing of work hours. Added to that, the Department of Water and Power (DWP) is in a pissing contest with the City. The DWP didn’t turn over some of their surplus to the general fund because it didn’t get the rate increase it wanted from the City Council. As this matter gets wrestled out, notions like a green tax seem like an awfully big rock to push up the deficit hill and get cash-strapped, future uncertain voters or their elected to approve.

Let alone then where does the money come from to fund green jobs programs, particularly as this relates to inner city youth? Is all this green talk just feel good rhetoric? I don’t know, but in my next post, I’ll go looking for a few answers.

Until then, check out these L.A. efforts:

L.A. Apollo Alliance

Black Workers Center

Big time developer Ed Roski Jr. has plans to bring professional football, and by that I mean American smash mouth football, not soccer, back to the Los Angeles area.  He’s got a lot of, er, yardage to cover given the cost of such an endeavor (he says he can do it all with private monies), the players and owners may be locked in a money dispute come 2011 and other factors are at play.

Fans of Dr. Pop might not know this or care much, but the last team to wear with pride the title of “Los Angeles” in front of a franchise’s name was the former and current Oakland Raiders.  They played here in the Coliseum in South Central from 1982 to 1994.  Back then, the Raiders were actually a good team and had won Super Bowls 11, 15 and 18, the last one in L.A.  They suck mightily now, but such is not the point of this post.

Roski, CEO and chairman of Majestic Realty Company, a massive commercial developer and one of the individuals who had a hand in the building of the Staples Center, would like to construct his proposed Los Angeles Stadium (including retail shops and office space) on 600 some odd acres of land near the intersections of the Pomona (60) and Orange (57) Freeways in the City of Industry.

I’m not sure what Mr. Roski has promised the sons and daughters of Industry (for more about this interesting enclave southeast of downtown Los Angeles incorporated in 1957, read Victor Valle’s recent hard-hitting book, City of Industry: Genealogies of Power in Southern California) in terms of what he projects the stadium would generate insofar as taxes and local revenues are concerned.

For as detailed in books like Field of Schemes by Neil deMause and Joanna Cagan and Public Dollars, Private Stadiums by Kevin J. Delaney and Rick Eckstein, pro sports stadiums don’t exactly return what municipalities put into them in economic terms.  Certainly there’s some local employment in the concession and parking booths of the stadium, and there can be spill over to local restaurants and bars in an area, but it’s the players and owners getting the beaucoup bucks off the gate and swag like T-shirts and caps.

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As mentioned in my previous post – back to the future of dystopia – with an emphasis on re-zoning sci-fi style.

I can’t cite the direct literary root (or route), though this idea of a walled-off or secret city separate from hostile environs has threaded its way through various science fiction and fantasy novels and films over the years. Tarzan searched for and protected the Lost City of Opar in a few of his adventures. In Robert Heinlein’s novel, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, an entire planetoid, our moon, is populated with underground colonies containing, among others, criminals and political exiles.

Pissed off with their lot, some of these disparate forces band together for freedom against Earth rule and stage a revolt. Marvel Comics’ Black Panther is the super-hero, warrior king of the scientifically advanced hidden African kingdom of Wakanda. For centuries the one who wears the mantle of the panther has led the people to fight off everything from European colonizers to Dr. Doom.

The notion of the jewel of a city protected from the predatory outsiders is turned on its head in John Carpenter’s 1981 film Escape from New York. In this flick, due to runaway crime in the near future, Manhattan Island has been walled off and turned into a maximum security prison. Black helicopters patrol from the air, making sure no scofflaw climbs out.

Inside a kind of Lord of the Flies meets Clockwork Orange tableau has played out as various sub-cultures exist bumping up against each other amid the trash, crumbling buildings and warring gangs and tribes. It’s World War III between us, the Soviet Union and China, and the President of the United States’ plane is hijacked by revolutionaries, and crash lands in the prison-city. Ex-hero soldier turned bank robber Snake Plissken is sent in and has 24 hours to find the prez. The Duke of New York, leader of the latest gang, the Gypsies, is also on the hunt for the world leader. But the Duke lacks vision, he’s not out to unite the prisoners and fight for their freedom and sovereignty, he merely wants to use the president as a shield for an escape across one of the mined bridges. Read More…

James Cameron has a baseball cap with the letters HMFIC on its crown.  As this is a family-friendly site, I won’t spell out what those letters stand for, but just consider his film Avatar has made a sweet billion dollars worldwide, and I’m sure you can deduce their meaning.  Dr. Pop, aka Comrade Wife, our daughter Chelsea and I saw this wonder in glorious 3D at our damn near neighborhood theater in Culver City.

Like a lot of those who’ve seen the film, the special effects bowled me over from the ten-foot tall blue-skinned Na’vi to the bad ass, escapees from a Halo game, flying death machines of mass destruction the evil corporation wield as they wantonly try to subjugate the paradise planet Pandora.  I was enthralled.  Cameron has talked about having the idea for the film more than a decade ago, but had to wait for technology to catch up to tell the story the way he saw it in his head.  As a kid, he reportedly read a lot of science fiction traveling to school an hour each way in Chippawa, Ontario, Canada.  Well I’m betting he must have stumbled across some Edgar Rice Burroughs’ (of Tarzan fame) John Carter of Mars series of books in all that reading, eh?

In those books the Martians, who call the red planet Barsoom, are a mixed bunch of humanoids that include the ten (or maybe it’s twelve) foot tall green-skinned, four-armed fierce Tharks.  Carter, a former Confederate officer who may be immortal, is kind of magically transported to Mars and becomes a warrior-savior figure there — fighting for justice rather than slavery, so that’s an improvement.  Story elements from Burroughs to the Pocahontas bit are evidenced in Avatar.

I’m not hatin’ on Jim, but as a writer who wrestles with trying to inject originality in his stories, I do have to admit to envy given Cameron didn’t have to stretch when it came to the stock plot and characters in his film.  From the cranky but dedicated scientist, the damaged, conflicted hero, the gorgeous, strong princess, to the one-dimensional villains, we’ve seen them before many times over.  The not-so-subtle subtext of Avatar is essentially the noble natives winning over the expansionist imperialists.  This in turn, according to Patrick Goldstein in his Big Picture column in the January 5, 2010 Calendar section of L.A. Times (and for a big city newspaper, it’s getting awfully thin isn’t it?) has the teabaggers and Palinites all a-twitter.

This is a good thing as far as I’m concerned.  But this intersection of politics and sci-fi, of dystopian to hard-fought utopian visions of the future, are not the stuff solely of other recent big budget movies like 2012 and The Road.  There’s more, and we’ll get to them in my next post.

For those of you who like comics, check out this interview on Robot 6 about my new webcomic Bicycle Cop Dave, patrolling the underside of gentrification that I’m writing with Manoel Magalhães illustrating from Rio — for FourStory, the affordable housing/urban issues blog.

Maybe you’ll check out the story after reading the interview.

In some quarters, including the Colbert Report (though I must give props to brother Colbert for mentioning this on his show ‘cause otherwise I wouldn’t have known and thus have nothing to write about), it’s been reported that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld the copyright infringement of the lyrics ‘bow wow wow yippie yo, yippiee yeah’ by the Master of Cosmic Slop, George Clinton.

Thing is the P-Funk ringmaster isn’t the winner, but an entity called Bridgeport Music which brought suit against Universal Music Group. In contention was a 1998 song D.O.G. in Me by a Universal group called Public Announcement who lifted, er, sampled, (among many others including Snoop Dogg and Ice Cube) those aforementioned lyrics from the 1982 funk and R&B classic, Atomic Dog, performed by Dr. Funkenstein his damn self, George Clinton. The song was written by Clinton, David Spradley and Garry Shider.

At trial Spradley testified Clinton had been out partying hard the night he was to come in and record lyrics to the song in the studio. He and Shider had to help the good doctor stand at the mic on unsteady pins, and letting him riff until something good happened.

“I just had the word dog,” Clinton recalled on NPR in 2006. “That’s all I had in my mind. I had to ad lib a lot of it. The track was atomic. It’s a futuristic track. “I don’t still hear no tracks like that one.”

The ultimate irony here is some sources have stated Bridgeport “administers” Clinton’s music. Apparently that’s a 21st century euphemism for you as the writer won’t see squat. As Mr. Maggot Brain apparently twittered post the court’s decision, neither he nor the other writers of the song will see any of the $89,000 in damages Bridgeport was awarded for Atomic Dog’s unauthorized use by Public Announcement. Bridgeport filed some 476 cases of copyright suits in 2001, with two – this case and one against the late Notorious B.I.G. – making it to trail.

Clinton has had legal wranglings with Bridgeport, his former music publisher, over the rights to his work. In 2005 he won ownership of the master recordings to four albums he made with his group Funkadelic, One Nation Under a Groove, Hardcore Jollies, Uncle Jam Wants You and the Electric Spanking of War Babies. This gave him licensing and recording rights. But he doesn’t own the copyrights of the songs on those albums or others like the ones on Computer Games from which the Atomic Dog single arose.

In a tale too often repeated among musicians, as this was particularly an egregious situation among blues and rhythm and blues musicians, in 1983 a broke George Clinton signed away those copyrights for the $1 million advance he got from Bridgeport. In 2001 a judge upheld that contract as well as pointing out that even if Clinton did have those rights, he couldn’t profit from them, because he didn’t disclose them as possible income when he filed for bankruptcy in 1984.

I guess the lesson here is there’s a niche to be filled in offering financial literacy classes to musicians. That when you’re shelling out money for hoochies on the video, motherships to descend on stage, and indulging for who knows what vice among your entourage, you gotta budget.

In the words of Funkadelic, can you get to that?

As a freelance prose and comics writer, I sweat a lot about where my next paycheck is coming from. Half my day, and I’m being somewhat metaphorical here, is spent with my butt in the chair grinding out the words. The other half is spent partly with my butt in the chair “cold calling” editors or using the internet to market the stuff I’ve got coming out. At Comic-Con this past July – and y’all know Comic-Con is the mother of all comic book conventions, right? — freelance writers and artists converge to bask in the ambiance but more than anything, network, schmooze, and otherwise figure out how to get on the radar of respective editors at Marvel or DC.

There are plenty of other companies producing comic books, but except for the Big Two, no one pays a livable advance – that is a salary up front against earning royalties after ‘X’ amount of issues of that comic book sells. According to Diamond Comic Distributors, the largest distributors of comic books and graphic novels, Marvel had a 42.58% share of the market in July 2009, DC 34.14% and bringing in a distant third was Dark Horse at 4.06%. This still means on an annual basis DH earns millions in sales of comics, tchotchkes like character figurines and such, and movie option dough on properties like Sin City and Aliens vs. Predators. Read More…